Designing a Meaningful Data-Driven Equity, Inclusion & Diversity (EID) Program

Kaiser partnered with Digitory Legal to undertake a two-phase project including designing of workflows to ensure diversity data is consistently tagged within the company’s billing system. This initiative also required detailed staffing and budget plans be provided to promote “mindful” work allocation and equitable distribution of career advancing roles to diverse attorneys.

Experiential Student/Client Business Challenge

LiteLab created a program to educate future lawyers on how to address the challenge of “doing more with less” by working directly with inhouse teams to solve a discrete business challenge by learning and applying legal design thinking, business model canvas, agile methodology and computational thinking, using low/no code platforms to build PoC solutions that can be easily maintained.

We, the legal operators, love working with you, GCs, and we are impressed every day by how quickly you get to the heart of complicated problems that are presented to you from across the company regularly and frequently. We admire you for mastering the art of building up your arguments to present compelling cases. And we experience you to be modest, humble, and humorous. 

Thank you for offering us a seat at the legal leadership table and for thoughtfully, intelligently, and supportively sponsoring our initiatives to reimagine the delivery of legal services. We have done well together and came far. Amongst other things, we figured out outside counsel collaboration, eDiscovery, contract automation, and litigation management. We have also made considerable progress in enticing our colleagues – the legal function – to move from consultation to collaboration, which has led to more tangible results and given greater purpose to our lawyers. 

As we have increased the functional maturity of legal teams, we are now ready to address the fact that not every piece of legal work requires tailored attention and a perfect solution. In fact, half of the work that we do should be looked at from a perspective of operational excellence to help our business partners obtain faster, more consistent, and simpler legal solutions. We are convinced that this is a logical next step, and in pockets, for example in contracting, we are well on the way to doing this already – it is about harmonizing, simplifying, and automating these services. The questions that we need to address are: 

“How do we lead a legal function that will cover workstyles that range from providing a commodity service to the extraordinarily complex and bespoke nature of developing a litigation or acquisition strategy?” 

“How do we do justice to our people that want and need to be developed on these extreme ends of the spectrum?” 

 As always we come prepared with three archetypical options: 

• Focus on core legal activities and delegate everything else to business partners 
• Split the legal function and have an independent legal solutions team manage the day-to-day operational activities 
• Broaden the legal leadership approach to accommodate both groups, those that work to support the day-to-day business and those that take care of the extraordinary matters that companies face a couple of times a year. 

 All options will lead to spectacular outcomes, happy business partners, and satisfied and engaged legal professionals on both ends of the complexity spectrum. 

Author: Maurus Schreyvogel, Chief Legal Innovation Officer at Novartis International AG.

A couple of weeks ago, I met with twelve outstanding #LegalOperationsProfessionals as part of the #CLOC Mentorship Monday program. Thank you Betsi Roach, Janice Carroll, and Nicole Zafian for considering me and for the perfect orchestration of that day. 
 
The day went by very quickly and was an incredibly enriching experience! I was impressed by how well the participants were prepared for the sessions and surprised to conclude that all twelve discussions were quintessentially around the same three questions: 
 
(1)   How can I become an effective #ChangeAgent 
(2) How much risk shall I take driving driving #change? 
(3)   Why is the person who hired me [GC / CLO] not supporting me more? 
 
For those who are returning from #CGI2022 Las Vegas these questions likely sound familiar. Especially to those who were strong enough, and there were many, to attend the excellent closing session moderated by Jason Barnwell and with the fabulous Aine Lyons, Laura Richardson, and Wendy Rubas. 
 
So here my learning from the mentorship sessions: When I became the operations person for #Novartis, I was so happy that I finally got the position that I always wanted, that stopped taking any risks. I was afraid that I could lose the position that I fought for so hard. Needless to say, that this did not work out well. Ideas, processes, and systems that I implemented were broadly ignored by the legal professionals that I tried to serve. An effective change agent needs to be bold, needs to inspire, needs to feel comfortable being wrong. And all that takes courage and at times it is risky. But hey, what is the worst that can happen? As long as you’ve prepared diligently, and gave it your best, I suggest not that much. That at least is my conclusion after being a #LegalOperator for over fifteen years. And yes, I started taking risks eventually and the reward has been spectacular. A big shout out to Shannon Thyme Klinger who taught me so much about leading change and who always encouraged me to be curious and bold, and who motivated me to be the best version of myself every day. 
 
And what do we do with our GCs and CLOs that are not always supporting us? Remember, they hired us to improve and reimagine how legal services are provided, likely because they acknowledge that this is out of their comfort zone. So, it is on us to inspire them, educate them, and help them to be the convincing sponsor that we need on our side to be an effective change agent. 
 
Thank you, dear mentees from the bottom of my heart for helping me to see clearer on the highly relevant topics that you raised during our sessions! Continue to be curious and bold…, and be kind. Then always remember, we are bringing new ideas and change to one of the oldest profession in the world, and there has been very little change for the last 2000 years about how we work. Change can be hard for those who are asked to adjust the way they work. 

Author: Maurus Schreyvogel, Chief Legal Innovation Officer at Novartis International AG.

Like much of the rest of the world, I have been Wordling. Every. Day. Today, they said I was Splendid! Beyond the quick endorphin shot that gave me, I’ve been spending more time lately thinking about the magic formula behind this simple word game. What is it that makes it so engaging, and how can we make the technology we use every day in our professional lives this easy and fun?  

Here are my top takeaways on what makes Wordle such a delightful product experience and what inspiration the LegalTech community can take from those insights. First, the three things that really make Wordle connect with users:   
 

1. Wordle aces Time to Value – it gives users value back within seconds (in this case, value being fun). It doesn’t require a huge learning curve, implementation time or onboarding time. The onboarding instruction guide is 85 words long and took me 40 seconds to read. 

2. Wordle avoids the Build Trap – it only has a few capabilities, and it makes those features work really well. Plus, it only lets you play once a day – meaning you can’t binge it and then get bored. It makes you want to come back again and again. It just works by doing a few things really well.  

3. Wordle is Agile –  Wordle was recently acquired by The New York Times, and some small hiccups ensued. We learned we weren’t all solving the same puzzle with our friends and families and speculation started growing that the acquisition would ruin the thing we all loved.  The brand needed an intentional, well thought-through approach to making the integration successful, protecting the essence of all that is good about Wordle. But the team recovered quickly! Our lesson is to listen, iterate and make improvements fast! 

So how can we take the essence of what Wordle does so well and apply it to the much more complex LegalTech space? We can start by bringing some joy into the equation. 

We all know the last two years have not been kind to corporate legal departments. A perfect storm of record M&A volume, a slew of new regulatory and compliance challenges – including a rapidly growing list of environmental, social, and governance (ESG)-related issues – and a pandemic that disrupted traditional workflows and created widespread staffing shortages, has left many corporate legal departments feeling exhausted. 

I’ve seen the phenomenon first-hand. As chief product officer for LegalTech at Thomson Reuters, I help create technology to help legal teams confront their challenges. As those challenges have grown considerably over the past few years, I’ve felt a very real urgency to address the existential question: Can technology really help improve the experience of our people? 

As I’ve continued to talk with clients – one of whom started a call by apologizing for looking disheveled because he hadn’t slept in 48 hours – We’ve landed on three key criteria to inform LegalTech product development experience from the customer’s perspective.   

1. LegalTech needs to be Smart – The LegalTech industry needs to ensure we are truly saving people time, not asking them to spend more time monitoring and second-guessing the technology. That’s a really big deal when it comes to leveraging AI for things like automated contract review and spend management analytics. It means the technology must understand the language and nuance of each industry to inform the next best actions – and explain those recommendations by showing the logic. It means we need to be able to trust that the AI is fair, representative, and accurate. We need a human-centered approach to AI that instills trust and confidence.  

2. Proprietary platforms need to be Open – The way we work and collaborate has changed in the last few years, with cats and alien eyes joining us on virtual meetings. We must bring technology to where people are already working. For decades, tech companies have built software on their own proprietary platforms hoping to win clients over to their product universe. In fact, it is a far more effective strategy to build an open platform that can work seamlessly through existing platforms, which legal departments are already using to collaborate, both with their in-house colleagues as well as outside counsel.  
    

3. Technology is all about staying Connected – Over 50% of large legal departments use more than nine legal technologies, often disconnected from each other. This leads to a fragmented and inconsistent experience, and the effect is the opposite of what  we all want – needing technology to just work, seamlessly. Law departments have a role to play – asking for industry standards like LEDES and SALI, asking for open APIs, asking for ownership of their data. Raise the issue with software providers, asking for your suite of solutions to cooperate with and complement one another. And tech companies need to listen, learn and innovate. 

Tying this all together, tech providers need to think like partners. For some product development that means rolling, iterative software development schedules make incremental refinements and improvements every day or every week, allowing end-users to learn and absorb new product enhancements gradually as part of their workflow. 

The world has changed. The way people work has changed. In LegalTech, this means we need to be smarter, with human-centered AI capabilities, open, with the ability to meet people where they work, and connected, intersecting the choice of technology with the integration of technology.   

LegalTech can not only be better, but it can also be – dare I say – Splendid! 

Author: Kriti Sharma is Chief Product Officer, LegalTech at Thomson Reuters.

We all know what legal ops is by now. There is sales ops, there is marketing ops, so of course, we deserve our own ops team, too. Legal ops is the engine that modernizes the legal department – with the right support, processes, and tech. They get praise from their colleagues for managing projects, taking care of the budget, managing hiring processes, securing sophisticated tech, and more. 

And rightly so.  

But what is their purpose? What is the tangible, emotional reason for pushing the needle in this often-old-fashioned game?

Having seen legal operations around the world being really impactful, I have a proposition: Legal ops make colleagues outside of the legal department fall in love with legal. Yes, love! Why? Stay with me here.  

People camp outside an Apple store, not because they get something for free – but because they are fans, not just customers. CEOs may love their sales teams. The sales teams may love their SDRs. But when was the last time you heard a sales manager say, “I can’t wait to meet with the legal department on this!” Never, right?  

Folks need us, but do they love us? Sure, we are often seen as the bottleneck preventing the business from getting things done quickly, but that is for a good reason. Review takes time. Decisions take research. Drafting is complex.  

So how do we make legal more loveable?  

Effective legal operations managers help the legal team to catch up to the speed of the business and deliver guidance more efficiently — how, when, and where it’s needed — delighting internal clients. 

In that way, legal operations is the Cupid of the legal department, helping the entire legal team to feel the love from the rest of the business. And while love is not necessarily a KPI that any legal ops managers are concerned with, a better reputation with the business leads to tangible benefits like better engagement with the legal department, better alignment with business priorities, and therefore reduced legal risk for all involved. 

So, with that in mind, let’s look at how legal operations can help the legal department feel the love from the rest of the business. 

What is legal operations to general counsel?

Let’s define the relationship between legal ops and general counsel. Legal operations has a job to improve the legal department from within, and then improve its partnership with other departments across the business. 

Traditionally, general counsel has worked as a consultant, advising the CEO and top management on all strategic matters. But the role of the modern GC has expanded.  

Today, general counsel run big units, which are tasked with servicing the entire business. They now have a two-fold role: To continue being a strategic partner and to start being an efficient legal service center. And more importantly – make these two parts work in sync.  

This is no easy task and in fact, only 52% of general counsel say that their day-to-day department work is aligned with the broader business strategy (EY Law Survey 2021). And the rest are caught up in servicing tasks (2022 In-House Legal Technology and Automation Report by the Lawyer and BRYTER).  

So how can these two parts of GC’s role be aligned and how can legal ops help? The answer is in 2 of the CLOC Core 12 functions of legal ops: Technology and Service Delivery Models.  

Scaling legal services with technology

Just like any other business area in the organization, legal needs to scale — to deliver more guidance to more business users, without sacrificing the quality of that guidance.

In the context of legal, and especially this new servicing nature of in-house counsel, there are tasks such as NDAs, employment contracts, and policy questions that will grow as the company grows. These are business-essential, but without legal ops, these tasks need to be done one by one. But as the volume grows, the one-by-one approach becomes inefficient and laborious. 

So, the role of legal ops is to bring in modern technology and digital approaches — like legal workflow automation — and to aid in the adoption of those approaches within legal. That way, they help the department to scale successfully and smoothly — and internal clients get their requests answered more quickly, and in a scalable, affordable, and low-risk way.  

When legal works quickly, the rest of the business notices — because everyone works more quickly. Removing legal as a bottleneck to other business workflows is one of the best ways legal ops can improve the reputation of the department across the business. 

Improving service delivery models by going digital

Making legal services faster will surely lead to the department being more well-liked by others. But to go from like to love, you must improve how those services are delivered. 

Let’s look at the current service delivery experience for most legal teams, from the perspective of a user in a different department: 

1. The user realizes there is a legal issue at play on their own (this is a lucky situation). 
2. The user contacts someone in the legal department. 
3. They might have contacted the wrong person, so they are manually routed to the right specialist on the legal team. 
4. The user is expecting a clear, quick answer, but often gets “It depends…” and so begins the longest step, the back and forth of clarifying questions and research. 
5. Finally, after days or even weeks, the user is provided with an answer and can proceed with their project. 

 
Of course, this process is motivated by diligence and responsibility on the part of the legal team. There is rarely a quick and clear answer to a legal question, but there are ways to scale knowledge so that similar, repetitive issues don’t have to be solved on a case-by-case basis.  

Now let’s look at a digitized service delivery experience, with legal workflow automation in play: 

1. The user takes an action on a native environment – like Salesforce, MS Teams, or SharePoint — that triggers an automated notification that a legal issue may be at play. 
2. A legal intake tool pops up in that same environment, where the user is asked clarifying questions based on conditional logic pre-defined by the legal team. 
3. Depending on the nature of the request, as these questions are answered, a risk score is automatically calculated, a contract is generated, or guidance is provided. 
4. In cases where manual intervention is needed, the case is escalated and delivered directly to the right legal expert, with all the contextual information needed to proceed. 
5. The entire interaction is automatically documented and stored in a way that can be easily accessed by the legal team. 

A modern legal service delivery model provides guidance where internal clients want it (their current native environments, including mobile devices), when they want it (on-demand), and how they want it (digitally). 

The love starts from within legal 

Sourcing love for the legal team is simple when it’s approached in the right way. It’s about giving the business what they need quickly, easily, and without tons of back-and-forth.  

When legal teams are relieved of manual work and repetitive tasks, and equipped with the right tools, they’re able to do the strategic work they went to law school for. They’re happier and empowered to be more of a strategic partner to their colleagues in other departments, rather than a barrier to fast wins.  

Author: Michael Grupp, CEO of BRYTER 
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-grupp/ 

Elevate’s mission is to help law organisations with practical ways to improve efficiency, quality, and business outcomes. Today’s legal operations teams take a strategic business approach to their work with law department teams. Lately, the challenge to do ‘more with less’ has intensified, increasing the opportunity for law department heads and legal operations teams to achieve greater efficiency through innovation. 

The findings of recent reports [1] from multiple law industry experts drive home the point. Although many law departments’ headcounts are rising, particularly for legal operations teams, law department professionals must contend with greater workloads, especially around compliance. In addition, law departments find it ever more challenging to secure and retain talent, and law department lawyers spend much of their time on non-complex, rote work and automatable tasks. Many law department leaders don’t have the ability to obtain real-time, actionable data on outside counsel activity, performance, and costs. 

To capitalise on the opportunities that will positively impact their organisations and the industry at large, general counsels’ collective goals include: 

• Ensure the highest and best use of their lawyers 
• Gain better control of legal spend (rather than simply slashing it) 
• Leverage data and AI to analyse law department and outside counsel activity and performance to achieve strategic business advantages  
• Manage and prepare for emerging data-related risks  
• Evolve legal operations’ strategic capabilities. 

Pursuing these goals occurs in the context of a law department’s level of operational maturity, as measured by the “CLOC Core 12” functional areas. Some organisations are still at the emerging stage, with a few defined legal operations processes or templates, limited use of technology, and only starting to develop formal metrics and institute reporting. Other law departments are further along, with a defined operational strategy linked to overall business goals, well-defined processes, standardised templates, basic tools, and nascent reporting capabilities. A few law departments have evolved into the highest level of maturity: they have strategies that include short – and long-term initiatives; they have created and use embedded processes, automation, simplified templates; they pursue continuous improvement through updating playbooks, refining processes, and adopting new technology; they have deployed enterprise-wide tools that leverage systems integrations to facilitate collaboration, and they use reporting and enforce metrics that incorporate business intelligence to drive optimal results. 

During this workshop and subsequent breakout sessions, our panelists and the session attendees will highlight their respective maturity stages, the challenges faced, the decision process in selecting a solution, how and what to measure for success, and the positive impact that solution has had to date. Workshop attendees will exchange their stories and lessons learned. These stories will be anonymised and available on our website.  

Increasing a law department’s functional maturity begins with understanding its goals, challenges, and needs. Those factors form the basis for a sensible, effective strategy and dictate how best to customise solutions for a given organisation to ensure an innovative path forward. Helping law departments with all of those activities is what Elevate’s consulting, services, and technology are all about. 

[1] See, for example, “Vertically integrated Legal Service” (Neville Eisenberg and Richard Susskind in The Practice – Vol. 7 Issue 4 May/June 2021); Alternative Legal Service Providers: 2021 Report (Thomson Reuters Institute, the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford); 2022 Report on the State of the Legal Market (The Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and the Thomson Reuters Institute). 

One of the most frequent (and frustrating) charges for a legal department is to find work that can “create business value” across the broader organization. With a goal that nebulous in definition and scope,  it’s easy to see how initiatives to create value are difficult to get off the ground. Even projects that seem likely to provide clear benefits across multiple teams can be delayed or left unfunded without a direct line to track revenue impact. Legal operations teams are the ideal driver for these legal-led initiatives, as they are uniquely positioned to help define, align and track cross-functional value.

Overseeing the adoption of a digital contracting process and platform, is a legal-driven initiative that will provide significant company-wide benefits. But to make a compelling business case for a digital transformation of this scale, legal operations professionals need to draw a clear line between contracts, the data that can be tracked from them, and profitability. In some cases, legal operations will need to translate existing processes into dollars and cents so they can illustrate improvement. In others, they need to track new data points in order to illustrate financial impact.

In this post, we’ll highlight a few ways that a better agreement process can directly create business value and align to larger enterprise goals. It’s part of a bigger conversation about why legal teams (and legal operations in particular) should drive contract transformation. At the core of this discussion is a law department that is empowered with data about the way contracts are searched, created, negotiated, executed and managed throughout the entire organization. As you read through, consider the data your department currently has access to and the additional data you would need to collect to make your case and how you can easily digest and report on that data.

Cost reduction

An extremely straightforward way to increase business value is to find and eliminate unnecessary cost. Every dollar of eliminated waste is a dollar of business value. With a modern contract management platform that serves as a searchable repository for storing agreements in one place, it’s easier than ever for legal operations to give the business more visibility into obligations, unwanted auto-renewals, help consolidate duplicate contracts and flag rogue cost centers.

With robust search and analytics functions built into the repository, contracting teams can also pinpoint specific contract language that leads to penalties, litigation and disputes. By highlighting these problem areas, legal operations and contracting teams can make adjustments that minimize similar costs going forward, and can also lead to reduced outside counsel spend.

Data-based workflow decisions

Digital systems do far more than just create consolidated data about the content of contracts, they track data about and uplevel the contracting process itself. Now, central contracting teams can look at the agreement process from end to end and begin collecting data about contract turnaround time, error rate, volume by geography, hours spent servicing each line of business, etc. For key questions about how dollars are spent or saved in documenting the terms of business agreements, legal contracting teams can use the workflow data generated to find a metrics-based answer.

Integration of your CLM tool and processes with other critical business systems further amplify the value of data generated from an agreement platform. Linking data from other systems—customer or vendor management, payment, compliance, HR, etc.—helps legal understand their own workflows better and uncover areas for business partners where handoffs can be simplified.

Increased speed

Time is money. The faster and simpler you make it for your business to complete contracts, the faster you can achieve desired business objectives and the faster you can generate revenue from those activities. An easy way to increase speed is to replace manual handoffs with automation. Rather than relying on a contract creator to route an agreement to the correct internal approvers, a well-designed digital system can automatically send the document to the next responsible party and alert them to their tasks in the systems where they do their work.

Integration with other systems plays a vital role in increasing the speed of contracting as well. When a sales user can pull contract data and pre-approved clauses directly from their CRM and self-service clause library, legal teams can spend less time on correcting errors during the review process. When changes and alerts can be delivered directly through Slack, teams will spend less time searching email for the latest version of an agreement. And when this time savings are scaled to hundreds of contracts per month, it’s easy to see how deals get done more quickly, directly contributing to the bottom line.

Better forecasting

Earnings forecasts have a lot of financial ripple effects through an organization. Legal teams have an opportunity to create business value by contributing to these forecasts with high-confidence data on terms contained in both completed contracts and agreements currently under negotiation. With a clear understanding of the content of those agreements, dollar value and obligations therein legal teams can create accurate predictions of both revenues and costs related to contract fulfillment, leaving far less gray area in the overall forecast.

This is just one example of how a digital contracting platform can help legal operations teams align to the larger goals of the enterprise and set up metrics to track progress. Using real-time data about the company’s contracts, the legal team can create a powerful recommendation engine to help leadership respond to the current business conditions.

Employee resource efficiency

Using traditional methods of contract management, legal team members spend far too much time on repetitive tasks that don’t take advantage of their unique skills. A modern contracting system supported by AI can eliminate much of that busywork, by reducing hours spent searching for the correct contract language, enhancing reporting, decreasing immediacy biases, and making negotiation suggestions based on predetermined risk levels. In the same way that spell check and track changes have become a routine part of contract creation and revision, intelligent contracting analytics can become ubiquitous for legal teams that manage far-reaching contract ecosystems.

With redundant work significantly reduced, legal operations professionals can help create more effective legal teams that have the ability to focus on new projects or further develop their special skills. More effective use of internal resources could also mean less reliance on outside counsel, which is a significant cost savings, as discussed above.

To learn more about how legal teams can create business value with better contracting practices, meet with us at CLOC’s Global Institute in Las Vegas May 9-12! You can visit us at Booth 401 or attend our interactive workshop on “How Simple Can Contracting Get” at 10:30am on May 11th in Monet 3 & 4. 

In the meantime, please check out our quick guide to contract management best practices.

In 2020, a worldwide pandemic forced legal operations teams to get creative, find new technology solutions for remote work and identify ways to maximize efficiency without increasing headcount or risk. Now, with the worst business impacts of the pandemic hopefully behind us, forward-thinking legal operations teams continue to build on this evolution, accelerating transformation to help their organizations grow stronger than ever. 

What trends are having the most significant impact on corporate legal operations?  

This blog post, which highlights findings from our latest whitepaper, compiles current data, metrics and trends from leading legal operations reports into one comprehensive guide. It also maps each trend to the CLOC Core 12. From bigger budgets to prioritizing diversity and inclusion, closing compliance gaps and beyond, it illustrates how legal operations will take action to solve today’s (and tomorrow’s) most pressing challenges. 

1. The Win-Win of AFAs (CLOC Core 12: Financial Management) 

Alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) have often been branded as complicated, and that’s likely due to many legal departments fearing they may pay more with an AFA than an hourly fee. However, the tide is slowly changing as the average AFA revenue across AmLaw 200 firms has consistently increased since 2018. 

However, AFAs – which offer benefits for spend management over traditional billable hours — can be incredibly advantageous for clients, legal operations teams and law firms. They provide more control over spend, more reliable billing and a greater capacity for companies to remain on budget. 

Generally, the more flexible an AFA, the more appealing it is. Utilizing spend management software to analyze current AFAs and compare vendor rates can help make enterprise-changing decisions. 

2. Championing Diversity and Inclusion (CLOC Core 12: Organization Optimization & Health) 

Not only do diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives contribute to more robust work quality and skyrocket a competitive edge, they simply encapsulate the right thing to do. Still, despite an American Bar Association (ABA) ‘s Model Diversity Survey determining a marked leap in diversity among in-house counsel senior leadership, only 11.5% of GCs at Fortune 1000 companies were ethnic or racial minorities. 

There is good news, though: post-pandemic, legal operations professionals cite their number-one priority as implementing a D&I program. 

Bloomberg’s 2021 Legal Operations Survey concluded that diversity is bolstered by both tracking metrics and introducing new processes, such as internal diversity training, more remote work opportunities and forward-thinking recruiting patterns. Also imperative? Holding vendors, namely law firms, responsible for the same standards of diversity and inclusion. 

Three trailblazing companies that have elevated D&I are Intel, Uber and Novartis AG. Corporate legal departments can start by asking their current law firms to complete the ABA Model Diversity Survey and combining that data with D&I information from RFPs in a centralized legal solution. 

3. Navigating Data-Driven Vendor Processes (CLOC Core 12: Firm & Vendor Management) 

According to a survey of GCs, vendor management is their top priority. This is even though CLOC’s State of the Industry Report revealed only 27% of legal department respondents formally reviewed law firm performance. In such an absence of vendor evaluation guidelines, how can return on investment (ROI) be determined? 

This is where legal technology software shines. By assisting legal operations teams in orchestrating a formal vendor performance review process, it can also track vendor metrics, billing compliance, accruals and spend totals, shifting to a data-driven strategy and the most cost-effective business resolutions. 

For an example of how a company built its own vendor management app to standardize vendor approval, automate engagement letter creation and execution and streamline the RFP process, see here.  

4. Bigger Legal Tech Budgets (CLOC Core 12: Technology) 

Corporate legal departments are projected to triple their legal technology budgets by 2025, according to Gartner’s 2021 Legal Planning & Budgeting report. Additionally, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s (CLOC) 2021 State of the Industry Report revealed that technology implementation is increasing, a triumph in efficiency for legal operations professionals who often tend to handle as many as five different business areas. 

Not surprisingly, efficiency is the principal motivator encouraging general counsel (GC) and chief legal officers (CLOs) in $1B+ organizations to purchase new tech. With legal operations teams seeking to streamline and automate workflows, these purchases prove more than the sum of their parts. They are an integral part of “a defined and actionable legal systems roadmap,” the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) 2021 Legal Technology Report for In-House Counsel says.  

In fact, 32 percent of respondents in Deloitte’s 2021 State of Legal Operations Survey believe that procuring state-of-the-art e-signature, e-billing and contact management tools have supplied them with the ability to “provide actionable KPIs and reporting without significant manual effort,” maximizing time, energy and expenses saved. 

5. Bridging Cybersecurity and Compliance Gaps (CLOC Core 12: Information Governance) 

With data breaches on the inevitable rise and the average cost of a breach $4.24 million, it’s no wonder that 57% of the respondents in an ACC survey noted the urgency of having a “comprehensive data management strategy to ensure compliance, defensibility and security.” 

Legal operations are an essential puzzle piece in comprehensive cybersecurity. Law.com stresses that organizations collaborate with IT to conduct data security and privacy measure audits focusing on consumer protection. The American Bar Association revealed that only 43% of those surveyed use encryption, and only 39% execute multi-factor authentication. Because remote work protocols dramatically augment technical vulnerabilities and cost over $1M more per breach, investing in a secure multi-factor authentication tool is fundamental for risk management. 

6. Capturing the Power of AI (CLOC Core 12: Technology, Practice Operations)  

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer merely a visionary trick in sci-fi flicks: its tech has helped lawyers and legal operations professionals analyze data patterns and generate business insights. 

AI has proven especially vital in legal contract review software by reviewing thousands of contracts simultaneously, migrating legacy contracts and exporting data in under five seconds. Studies show that its functional aptitude for performing first-pass reviews makes even the newest users more than 51% productive and 34% efficient. 

Those percentages provide a compelling argument for AI when extrapolated across a legal department. Whereas an average company has 55 lawyers who review a total of 9,526 contracts annually, AI can propel the same legal team to process 4,906 more each year. That’s analogous to hiring 28 additional lawyers! 

Another bonus? Saving in-house counsel countless hours while circumventing the 9.2% average value “leakage.” 

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Whether it’s accelerating staff, budget or technology, each of these legal operations trends shares one element: in today’s rapidly metamorphosing world, they are becoming more critical by the day. Embracing change and advancing unrivaled growth with enterprise legal management software, contract management and transformational vendor and diversity programs will revolutionize legal operations in 2022—and long into the future. 

Read more about these trends in our latest industry white paper: Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends For 2022.