It’s 2021, and AI is ready. Are you using it?

The last two years have been a doozy with an unprecedented curveball, within a tornado, within a hurricane for businesses. Survival depended on adapting to the new norms COVID presented, supply chain disruptions, regulatory changes (and then invalidations), and customers’ changing expectations. 

What’s in store for 2022? 2023? 2030? I have no idea, but as a co-founder and EVP of Evisort I’m going to prepare my business and team to be as agile and streamlined as possible, so we have the best chance of tackling any challenge that comes our way.  

Intelligence and adaptability are critical. Businesses will either be left behind by digital transformation or embrace it to keep their competitive advantage.

Business intelligence is critical to adaptability. Unfortunately, many businesses have a massive intelligence blind spot – their existing contracts. Existing contracts are the most important intelligence source in a business – contracts are data and data is the lifeline of a business.

The blind spot is getting bigger and feeding a long-term problem: when companies digitize their Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) processes for generating new contracts they replicate their existing workflows without fundamentally improving them. This means sub-standard terms, pricing, and other trends get replicated in every single new contract. Pouring salt in the wound, businesses waste time and money negotiating the same clauses over and over because they didn’t analyze their historical contracts and learn from past negotiations. 

Change is here and it’s due time that Legal, Legal Ops, and any team that works with contracts demand more from contract management technology.

Contracts are data. And because it’s 2021, your company has either started or has already transformed most of the business to be digital and data-driven. 

Except. For. Contracts. 

In-house legal departments have historically been viewed as a cost center and legal and contract management tech have lagged behind software for profit centers like sales or product. 

Not. Any. More.

Legal and Legal Ops should expect to survive and thrive on the data buried in their contracts – instead of resorting to one-off anecdotes. Contracting teams should have access to analytics and insights in real-time. It should be as simple as uploading contracts to the cloud and using out-of-the-box dashboards that instantly break down your contract components and allow you to filter and drill down into vital information business leaders need, such as: what percentage of our contracts have a termination for convenience and when do they renew? Which of our contracts have non-standard negotiated language we should be aware of? Can we put their logo on our website?

Even more importantly you should be able to easily show the value added by teams drafting and reviewing contracts by automatically measuring and reporting on backlog trends, aging contract drafts, and transaction cycle times.

We need a new standard. That standard is Contract Intelligence.

For too long, AI has been a buzzword in legal tech – or any tech company for that matter. You’d be fired from marketing at a contract management software company if it wasn’t on your website. Vendors are vague and oversell clients who buy platforms only to find that they had to train AI algorithms themselves with frustratingly low levels of success.

AI has not been well defined in this industry for a decade, so let me be very clear.

In 2021 you should be able to upload any document to your contract management system and automatically track clauses, dates, fields, and metadata that can be easily searched and visualized in seconds – without lifting a finger. Furthermore, you should be able to access and analyze all your contracts and data – be it third-party paper or terms unique to your business allowing you to optimize future negotiations for efficient execution – learning and improving from the data-point derived wisdom in your historical documents.

We all need to start demanding Contract Intelligence from our legal tech vendors. It has three critical capabilities:

• Intelligent Contract Lifecycle Management – streamlined, data-driven deal-making tools and workflow processes that make contract request, generation, redlining, and approval workflows transparent, efficient, and optimized for execution    
• AI-based Contract Analytics – answers to your most important contract questions and ability to visualize and report on vital contract info and key performance metrics without manual data entry, data migration, or IT involvement    
• Central and Secure Contract Repository – a single source of truth for all contracts that works with your existing systems, without migration or IT involvement

Contract Intelligence enables businesses to learn from the past to improve the future. Legal, Legal Ops, Sales, Procurement, Finance, and IT teams can now instantly turn contracts into searchable data, answer any question about existing contracts, and optimize new agreements for negotiation and execution so you can make better, faster, less risky deals.

This isn’t pie in the sky thinking.      

Businesses are transforming their contracting with AI today. When COVID-19 hit, NetApp, a provider of data management and solutions for the cloud, was challenged with hardware and supply bottlenecks. To respond to these unforeseen challenges, NetApp quickly needed to understand which customers would accept partial shipments and what recourse it had with key suppliers across most of its product and service lines across the globe. Agreements weren’t historically tagged with “partial delivery” terms and there were tens of thousands of contracts. Fortunately, NetApp transformed their contracting processes with AI and was able to search across all agreements to quickly locate specific provisions, enabling      them to invoice for partial shipments while maintaining customer satisfaction. Within a week, NetApp was able to run a search on partial shipments across their entire contract repository—cutting 24,000 contracts down to 600, with 90 different variations of partial shipment provisions.    

Okay, but what about creating and optimizing new contracts?       

McKinsey estimates that AI technologies could potentially deliver up to $1 trillion of additional value      annually for banks.^[1] Bank of New York Mellon, the bank of banks, uses AI to review new custodial agreements based on their internal rules, guidelines, and processes. They then use AI technology to automatically create customized initial contracts and digitally coordinate with the necessary internal stakeholders for approval of special terms. BNY Mellon then takes it to another level and uses AI to automatically flag non-standard language and alert the necessary legal team members to automate the decision-making process, allowing attorneys to focus on more strategic tasks. 

Now is the time to transform and gain a competitive advantage

Law is changing, capabilities are available today that no one could fathom even five years ago. Today it’s exciting to use these tools, but tomorrow, it will be negligent not to. You need to go beyond digitizing your contracts and processes, you need to datatize them.

^[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/ai-bank-of-the-future-can-banks-meet-the-ai-challenge#

Advice on building an organization that can adapt to new challenges

Two popular sayings in the legal world are 1) people, process, technology, and data are what make a firm unique, and 2) change is constant. So how do those two elements work together? How can you ensure that you have the right people, processes, technology, and data for today’s constantly changing world?

Shearman & Sterling, a 150-year-old law firm, recently asked themselves this question as they undertook a massive data analytics project, as shared in a recent Ask the Experts session for CLOC. The firm had one billion documents, only 4% of which were in their document management system (DMS), that they needed to quickly get into ship shape to meet new compliance standards. By the end of the 18-month project, not only were all documents in an easily searchable cloud repository, but the firm was also able to roll out features that are beneficial to the client like partner dashboards, more accurate forecasting, and revenue models for value-based pricing.

Here’s a look at their pillars of people, process, technology, and data, that empowered their success as a data-driven firm.

People

“The people aspect cannot be underestimated,” said Meredith Williams-Range, Chief Knowledge and Client Value Officer at Shearman & Sterling. “You have to bring your people along in your [change] journey. Your processes won’t matter. People are your culture and culture will trump your strategy any day of the week.” In the Shearman & Sterling’s case, that meant truly making the initiative firm-wide, as opposed to the responsibility of a certain team, with top-down support from the C-level executives.

Part of the success of the people aspect can be attributed to hiring and involving the right people. Lawrence Baxter, Shearman & Sterling’s Chief Technology Officer, touts the strategy of balancing IQ, EQ, and AQ — that is, intelligence, emotional intelligence, and adaptability — in new hires. (A former marketing executive, he has seen his share of companies go under because they are unable to adapt). He also likes to create teams with equal proportions of, 1) veterans with strong institutional knowledge, 2) tenured employees who are willing to learn new skills, and 3) newer employees, especially those from other industries, who can bring in fresh new ideas.

The success of the project also depended on a fundamental understanding that this effort was not about replacing people with machines. As Williams-Range explained, “It’s simply about adapting the processes that we have and enhancing those processes because the amount of information and the amount of data coming at us as lawyers is growing each day. The technology holds the hand of the lawyer.”

Process

In terms of process, Williams-Range believes there’s no one right place to start — the important thing is to simply start. For Shearman & Sterling, the beginning point was understanding clients and regulations at a global scale. Baxter also recommended asking clients what’s working and what isn’t, and using those answers to drive internal change, since what the client wants carries weight. Of course, unforeseen circumstances can also drive change — Baxter said he has seen years of innovation in the past few months.

The team agreed there are no shortcuts when it comes to process improvement. As Glenn LaForce, Global Director of Knowledge & Research at Shearman & Sterling put it, “You can’t shortchange the pre-work that goes into getting to what we call the sexy stuff, all the cool analytics projects. You have to go through, you have to look at your data and be sure it’s clean and in order, make sure you have the right governance behind it and make sure you have the right policies behind it, and that takes time.”

A whole-firm initiative also meant involving the whole firm. The company created a multidisciplinary data steering committee to get an understanding of how each part of the organization was using data and the downstream effects of making any changes. How will a change to a process in HR affect the DMS in eDiscovery? How should workflows be adjusted for the unique needs of finance and the research team? How do you ensure there’s an audit trail?

For Jeff Saper, Global Director, Enterprise Architecture & Delivery Services at Shearman & Sterling, a lot of the process work comes down to reducing complexity. “We create complex environments and at the end of the day, they need to be simplified,” he said. However, this process of simplifying and streamlining cannot compromise compliance, regulatory processes, or confidence in your work.

Saper and LaForce also stressed that failure is an important part of the process and should not be viewed as a negative — if it happens within a development environment. Finding processes that do not deliver value is just as important as finding ones that do. The important thing, they agree, is learning how to adapt and move forward.

Technology and Data

Again, when evaluating which technology to use, the question ultimately comes back to what benefit will the client receive. For example, Shearman & Sterling decided to move their DMS to the cloud. However, as Saper pointed out, “It’s not about cloud. It’s the agility of what we can do to make things work faster or leaner and hopefully have a better return for our firm.” People wanted to be able to access data anywhere, on any device — a desire that was certainly fast-tracked by the COVID-19 pandemic — and the cloud enabled that.

Similarly, the firm found success in using established technology in new and different ways. For example, the firm used DISCO eDiscovery to sort through and classify emails. Using the platform’s artificial intelligence capabilities, the team was able to classify some 30 million emails in 12 days.

The team developed a clear strategy around who they would partner with to find the right technology. “We’re never going to be a firm that builds technology,” said Williams-Range. “We have talented lawyers and that’s our sweet spot, but we need to provide the right technology and the right system to our people to be as efficient as possible to deliver the best value to our clients. What we do is we look for those partnerships that are going to really work with us.” 

As someone who spent 16 years on the technology vendor side and has seen a lot of finger-pointing, LaForce emphasized the importance of looking for partners as invested in the success of the project as the internal team is, who have governance procedures and skin in the game. “Otherwise, they’re just selling us a product,” he said.

Baxter also noted that the legal landscape has become complicated. A service provider you are in a joint partnership with on one proposal could be a competitor pitching against you in another matter. Cultivating a friendly relationship throughout these complicated dynamics is an art form that will serve law firms well.

Parting Words of Advice

Ultimately, the work of digital transformation is never done, but with the right people, processes, technology, and data in place, the Shearman & Sterling team feel confident they can tackle new challenges that come their way. Their advice to others looking to make the leap? “Just start somewhere,” said Williams-Range. “It can be overwhelming, but just start.”

“Change is not the devil,” added Saper. “It’s ok to continue on a journey as long as you do it safely and securely within compliance. We’re in a different world and law firms have to adjust to it.”

The legal field’s talent shortage is expected to intensify as law firms and legal departments pivot from adjusting to challenges brought on by the pandemic and changing the way they operate and deliver legal services to planning for long-term growth, including team expansion. 

With hiring returning to or even exceeding pre-pandemic levels, it’s important that legal leaders re-examine their recruiting and retention strategies, including benefits and compensation packages and remote work arrangements, to remain competitive. According to recent Robert Half research:

• 34% of employees currently working remotely said they won’t stay with companies that don’t allow remote work
• 75% of workers want to work remotely at least part of the time
• 66% of companies will offer flexible scheduling after pandemic restrictions are universally lifted
• 78% of hiring managers said they are open to recruiting outside their geographical area

What other factors should managers take into consideration when planning to hire? Here are several key insights into current trends:  

Pandemic realities boost demand for practice area, legal operations expertise

One of the greatest challenges is the lack of available talent as law firms and legal departments directly compete for skilled legal professionals. Midlevel lawyers and paralegals with three-plus years’ experience are especially in strong demand. 

As companies adopt measures to minimize risk and ensure business continuity, they seek advice from in-house legal teams regarding contractual agreements, corporate transactions, mergers and acquisitions, and compliance. The need for legal services is increasing in labor and employment law, insurance defense, healthcare, eDiscovery, and data privacy and security.

The pandemic spurred a critical and expanded partnership between general counsel and legal operations managers. Tasked with optimizing legal resources to increase productivity and revenues while mitigating risks and lowering costs, legal operations professionals play an important role in helping in-house legal teams strategically focus on the business of law. Legal operations managers, typically non-lawyers, with specialized knowledge (e.g., expertise with project management, information governance and financial management practices) are sought by hiring managers and the need for skilled legal professionals should remain acute in the months ahead.

Competitive salaries and perks: Essential to attracting top talent

In today’s candidate-driven market, it’s not surprising that salaries continue to rise for most positions. Job seekers with sought-after skill sets and practice area expertise know what salaries they can command – and aren’t afraid to ask or negotiate for them. Many are receiving signing bonuses and counteroffers. Hiring managers can ensure they are offering competitive compensation by consulting industry resources.

Here are average starting salaries at the national level for several in-house roles. The salaries are from the 2022 Salary Guide from Robert Half, which contains average starting salaries for nearly 50 positions in the legal field.

The salaries are listed by percentile: 50^th percentile for candidates with average experience and most of the necessary skills; 75^th percentile for candidates with above-average experience and all the needed skills. Bonuses, benefits and other forms of compensation as well as practice area expertise, special skills and certifications are not taken into account. Hiring managers can use the Robert Half 2022 Salary Calculator to benchmark average salaries locally.   

In addition to competitive salaries, job seekers evaluate the perks an organization offers as a way of gauging company culture. Increasingly, benefits such as flextime, remote work, health insurance, retirement savings plans, paid parental leave, and wellness programs can significantly impact a company’s ability to attract and retain top talent.

Other important trends to know in today’s hiring environment

1. Digital skills are essential

The pandemic transformed the legal landscape, with depositions and hearings continuing to be held virtually. However, the need for legal professionals to be tech savvy long predates the pandemic, and job candidates should demonstrate proficiency in the latest digital tools and industry software, such as litigation and practice management. The most sought-after legal professionals will also have ideas on how to leverage technology to improve client services.

Digital expertise is a priority as legal leaders focus on freeing up lawyers to concentrate on legal work. Strategic deployment of tech solutions is a fundamental and integral factor in effective legal operations practices. 

2. Legal teams expand in-house skills with contract professionals 

To meet rising workloads, legal departments may need to hire on a contract basis – legal professionals who can fill gaps and make immediate contributions and specialists who can offer expertise unavailable in-house. 

3. Tech savvy legal support staff in demand

Midlevel paralegals and legal assistants who can conduct case research, manage online calendars, draft legal documents and assist multiple attorneys are highly marketable. These professionals also are needed to assist with video meetings and virtual depositions and court hearings.

4. Growing emphasis on strong interpersonal competencies

Beyond legal experience and knowledge, interpersonal skills are more important than ever. Legal hiring managers are seeking candidates who possess critical capabilities, including:

Increasingly, a key attribute for professionals in any legal role is adaptability. The legal field has gone through profound changes over the past two years, and 2022 could be just as unpredictable. Prepare for hiring by understanding the trends that will significantly impact the legal job market. Doing so now will allow you to fortify your in-house teams and ensure the success of your organization.

Jamy Sullivan is executive director of the legal practice at Robert Half, a premier provider of talent and consulting solutions for a wide range of initiatives in the legal field, including compliance, contract management, data privacy, litigation support and more. Visit RobertHalf.com.

Digital transformation has been rapidly changing the way legal operations professionals do business. Organizations that want to boost efficiency and remain competitive need to be devoting time to transformation initiatives that will implement meaningful change sooner, rather than later. The question that many companies have is how to implement digital transformation quickly and effectively.  

While digital transformation doesn’t happen immediately, the right approach and technology choices can minimize delay and help you see improved efficiencies quickly. At BT Group plc, we know firsthand the efforts required to make a significant digital transformation. We were able to replace manual and disconnected processes and management tools with centralized automation and help our legal operations department manage workload and matters across teams from inception to closure. Better yet, the team behind this transformation was able to complete this in under a year. 

Case Study: BT’s Digital Transformation Journey 

For BT, the sign that we needed to start implementing digital transformation came when we realized we had  processes that weren’t backed up by technology to help them be achievable. Our starting point was to implement a technology that would serve as the backbone for greater transformation across the organization – something that would help us establish effective work management and integration of processes and data flow through our departments and the business as a whole. 

When we started, everything was piecemeal. We were using different technologies, portals, spreadsheets and workflows. Then we implemented a business automation and workflow platform to power our transformation. Using the platform, we were able to build the apps we needed to help manage matters and documents. Within three months, the new system was live for matter management and real-time reporting, empowering the legal department to engage in trend analysis and analytics across work done by the enterprise team. 

Within a year, we had successfully implemented a cutting-edge platform that eliminated manual work and disconnected processes and enabled oversight of workload and matter management across teams from inception to closure. For every hour automation returns to our lawyers, they can reinvest that time back into helping the company grow and succeed. 

Three Tips for Successful Digital Transformation 

If you’re like many corporate legal departments today and you’re considering embarking on a digital transformation journey, there are a few things to keep in mind to make the process go more smoothly. 

1. It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint 

At BT, much of our success is attributable to our team’s overriding mantra: Look for progress, not perfection. Remember, this is a journey, and digital transformation doesn’t happen overnight. When you start thinking about digital transformation, realize that you’re not embarking on a quick fix, but real change in the way you do business. That said, there are ways to eliminate delays and make the process go faster. 

It might be tempting to try to roll your new solutions out to everyone at once, but that’s usually a mistake. Instead, start smaller, rolling out changes to departments or discrete units who can benefit the most or who currently have the greatest inefficiencies. The first users to be immersed in your changes can not only give you valuable feedback but can also help you achieve wider success and adoption across other departments. 

2. Be Prepared to Pivot and Adapt 

It’s natural to think you should plan every bit of your transformation out through every step, but even the best-laid plans will go astray along the way. Successful digital transformation requires the ability to shift, adapt and scale at a moment’s notice. The long-range plan you might think you need right now will likely look very different when implementation is done. 

First, you’ll probably try to deliver too much too quickly. Again, start with a smaller rollout and gradually build. Second, by the time you get to the later steps of your plan, they’ll likely be out of date because the world keeps changing. Fewer things change more rapidly than technology, and that’s particularly true as we continue to respond to novel challenges and business demands. Striving for small, incremental deliveries to the business addresses both of these concerns and will put you on the path to successful digital transformation. 

3. The Right Technology Is Key 

It may seem obvious, but you need to make sure you’re investing in the right software to help your transformation succeed. There are a lot of options in the market today, and they’re not all created equal. 

It can seem appealing to buy out-of-the-box software that you implement straight off the shelf, but when you do that, you have to fit within the confines of that box. A crucial part of BT’s successful transformation was relying on an actual toolkit that we can continue to use to build and grow. Our box can change shape and morph into what we need it to be, and that will be one of the keys to our success going forward. 

Results  

The hard work of everyone working on this digital transformation project at BT paid off. We reduced the number of systems running our matters by 75%, so that we now manage our matters in one place. We’ve brought together business, outsourcing and lawyers on a single platform to ensure accurate data capture and a connected workflow to manage the department’s caseload. Our GC and legal directors have a massive amount of data in a digestible format where they previously had spreadsheets, not a tool that offered real insight into their workload and teams. 

We even received industry validation of our efforts. In June, BT was honored to be awarded a prestigious Legal Innovation Award in the category of Future of Legal Services Innovation – In-House Legal Operations. This award recognizes the transformative legal technology implementation that enabled our legal department to bring together business, outsourcing and lawyers on a single platform. Even more recently, in July 2021, BT and Onit were named as finalists for the Legalweek Leaders in Tech Law Awards 2021 in the category of Legal Operations, in recognition of innovation in the legal technology sector and precedent-setting, game-changing projects and initiatives. 

Going forward, we plan to continue building and deploying custom solutions to automate legal operations and compliance processes and better collaborate with business users across the organization. 

If you’d like to hear more about this transformation, tune in to our recent podcast.  

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to digital transformation, but with the right approach and technology, you’ll start to see the results you want more quickly and be able to implement lasting change. 

As workloads continue to increase while budget and resources plateau or decrease, legal operations teams are tasked with finding more efficient ways of delivering the same services. Using digital solutions to automate routine work is one way to boost efficiency—and doing so without requiring time and resource from IT is even better. No-code development platforms empower legal ops teams to get the right tools as needed, without any programming knowledge.

The Pain of Repetition

In-house legal experts face numerous requests, each slightly different from the other, taking time away from strategic work. While legal counsel and compliance managers deal with many bespoke tasks, a big part of the daily “business-as-usual” work is repetitive and relatively easy to assist with software—if the right software is available. Whether the responsibilities of legal ops are managed with a specialized role or by in-house counsel, the goal is typically to streamline as many of these processes as possible.

Digital applications bring an immediately visible, enormous value to legal teams by allowing the automation of low-complexity, repetitive tasks, enabling legal professionals to focus on the more complex, bespoke work. With software tools, legal ops can build and improve business process management, smart spreadsheets, data visualization, workflow automation, web and mobile applications, as well as chatbots and digital assistance tools, and a virtually unlimited number of other use cases.

Typical examples are compliance requests based on gift and hospitality guidelines, or responsibilities based on signature guidelines. Those requests are similar and can easily be sorted, streamlined and answered with digital technology today. 

However, digital resources are scarce: Well-financed legal operations teams in need of software tools might work with either their company’s IT team or external IT agencies to code custom solutions—but this requires waiting for the developers to write and test the code for the application, plus other challenges that accompany trying to explain project needs to an outside team.

The No-Code Promise: Faster, Cheaper, Easier

This is where no-code can make all the difference. Essentially, no-code technology is just what it sounds like: a way to create applications without having to code anything or use IT’s assistance. In operational terms, no-code uses building blocks and forms to design the logic behind the application, creating visual representations of business processes and application flows using logical decision trees.

Compared to traditional manual programming, using no-code to develop digital solutions is much faster. The core idea is similar to constructing ready-made houses: instead of writing custom code from scratch, users only configure, through user-friendly, visual interfaces. Using no-code solutions is so fast, in fact, that the first no-code applications were used by developers themselves to accelerate their work where applications were similar. It also provides a number of other benefits.

3 Key Benefits of No-Code

1. Save time by quickly creating digital solutions that were previously out of reach

While utilizing IT is an option for some, most legal operations teams don’t have enough budget to do so; projects rarely present a sufficient “business case” to win resources from IT. It can take months (or even years) to get a project off the ground because the needs of legal operations are often deprioritized compared with revenue-generating areas of the business.

For legal ops teams that want to adopt digital solutions but lack the time or resources, no-code makes application development fast and affordable. This is why, for many, switching to no-code solutions also means using applications as part of a workflow for the first time, and benefitting from time savings as a result.

If the status quo for writing a contract involves manually entering key information throughout the document, for example, then using a digital tool with form-fills that automatically generates completed contracts will be significantly faster. For Tech Data, one of the world’s largest IT distributors, automating their entire decisioning workflow and using document automation saved the team 95% of their time that was previously spent on manual work.

At ING, Germany’s third-largest bank, the legal ops team used no-code to build self-service applications that saved not only their own time, but also that of their commercial partners—savings that translate directly into higher productivity, improved bottom line and more time to build meaningful relationships with partners.

The virtuous cycle of fast app development also leads to greater adoption of better digital tools. GEA, one of the world’s largest system suppliers for the food, beverage and pharmaceutical sectors, adopted no-code to automate repetitive tasks that were taking up too much time and energy, e.g. amending standard documents for a specific purpose. Since adopting no-code, they have built over 20 applications in one year, including document automation and applications for corporate housekeeping documents.

2. Empower the legal team

No-code technology empowers those with subject matter expertise to build up-to-date apps themselves, quickly and within the approved budget, democratizing access to application development in the same way that WordPress brought web development to all.

Software developers who build traditional tools are typically experts in programming rather than law and will not intuitively understand the goals of the finished product, resulting in back-and-forth and development delays. Legal teams are better equipped to know what they want to get out of the tools they are trying to make.

Being able to create tools immediately—without having to communicate the specifications or wait for software products to be delivered—gives power and control back to the legal team. Change management is also significantly easier when the legal team owns the tool and can instantly edit, re-use and update it to respond to dynamic business needs.

3. Reduce the risk of project failure

The beauty of no-code solutions is that they are quick and easy to implement and use, which means new applications built with them can be finished before they have a chance to be derailed by competing priorities. Large-scale, homegrown IT projects are slow, often delayed, and can be upended by a key person leaving the company—and even after substantial resource investment, they aren’t guaranteed to work.

No-code, in contrast, is built incrementally around an agile core, meaning value is delivered right away. A simple no-code application can be built to achieve one goal first, with verifiable success, and additional functionalities can be added on later without impacting the other capabilities. The speed of no-code development reduces time to value and mitigates risk.

Power to the people – Power to your Legal Ops team

Legal ops professionals are already making use of no-code technology in a variety of ways and achieving immediate and long-term benefits, from time-savings to better risk management. For many organizations, no-code can be a key part of technology and process support, enabling legal experts to transform their expertise into custom-made apps.

As we shifted from traditional office roles to COVID-induced remote work being the norm, businesses across most industries adjusted and adopted new policies and tools to stay afloat and, in some cases, succeed. Now, as lockdowns ease and restrictions change, 2021 finds us watching as more businesses move into a hybrid workplace.

A myriad of questions face organizations. Some of the major ones are concerns across the board, regardless of where in the world you’re located. Will your staff be willing and allowed to work in the physical office? How many companies will remain flexible about remote work? With findings showing that remote workers are more productive than they were in the office, most will likely offer the opportunity in the long run.

In fact, according to a report by Owl Labs, respondents felt that if they were no longer allowed to work remotely post-pandemic, 66% would stay but be less happy, 54% would stay in their roles, but be less willing to go the extra mile, and 44% would expect a salary increase.

A new strategy is needed

As more questions materialize, it’s time to formulate and implement a strategy for how best to support and manage employees to succeed in the new hybrid workplace. You dealt with the shift to remote work – can it really be that much more difficult? Short answer: yes.

“In a lot of ways it’s going to be more disruptive than when we went all remote,” said Brian Kropp, vice president of research at Gartner, to The Washington Post.  In short, Legal Ops plays a huge role in helping the rest of the organization address the issues that a hybrid workplace may face, from business continuity challenges to implementing effective automation at a time of confusion.

Legal Operations needs to prioritize building a legal tech stack that can securely and productively unite an ecosystem of in-house teams, outside counsel, and service providers. What are the essential technologies that can get you started on this path?

Legal Workflow and Process Automation

If your Legal Operations employees are disseminated across various locations and scenarios, it’s paramount to ensure that your work processes are efficient, collaborative, and trackable (in case of a future audit). This means it falls to legal ops to implement the right technology – i.e., workflow and process automation to unite the hybrid workforce around optimized, digitized processes.

An end-to-end automation solution that spans your organization and covers all of its needs is ideal, particularly one with legal and operational best practices and security measures embedded within it. The effectiveness of your hybrid workforce greatly depends on workflow automation. Your technology solution should offer flexibility, ease of use, and transparency.

Enterprise Legal Management

Efficiency has taken on a whole new level of importance post-pandemic, and it’s crucial to cast an eye over your daily operations and reevaluate each one, especially through the lens of information governance. An effective ELM solution should support an array of corporate legal needs, ranging from matter management to spend management and much more.

An ELM should provide a centralized matter management capability. This is of paramount importance in managing multiple matters being handled by far-flung staff.  Also, your ELM should also be your single source of truth for all your legal matters. In this new hybrid environment, all your Legal Ops team members need equal and immediate access to materials, documents, status updates, and so on. Having disconnected systems for information retrieval will result in wasted time, effort, and money.

That’s why your ELM should also enable a complete audit trail of all changes made to information assets or documents, mitigating compliance and security risks.

Expanded Integration Capabilities

As work-from-anywhere becomes the norm, collaboration tools have experienced a surge in popularity. You would be hard-pressed to find an organization that doesn’t currently use Slack, Microsoft Teams, or a similar platform for internal and/or external communications.

As the number of collaboration tools and platforms increases, it’s crucial that your solution offers expanded integration capabilities to let it work seamlessly with them – particularly in the case of workflow automation.  Not only does this help ensure efficiency across the board, it gives greater functionality to your legal tech stack since the right workflow automation solution will connect and accelerate other solutions, even legacy platforms.

Addressing the needs of hybrid Legal Ops

There are three major “must-haves” that Legal Ops needs to consider as it assesses technologies to support hybrid working environments. The first is flexibility– your technology solution should be able to easily accommodate different scenarios as they arise, especially ones as unique as we have experienced in the past year. Second, your solution should be agile and able to pivot quickly to address these scenarios. Finally, your Legal Operations team should ensure that any solution adopted supports business continuity. Whatever operational or organizational changes may happen, or disruptions occur, your tech tools should always enable you to keep fulfilling the legal objectives and strategy of your enterprise.

The three technologies we’ve covered are crucial, but they’re just the tip of the iceberg. Watch our sponsor session, “Justin Time! The Legal Ops Ecosystem of Today and Tomorrow” at CLOC Global Institute on Wednesday, May 12th at 9:00 AM-10:00 AM PT. The virtual session will address the cornerstone technologies that make sense for legal ops to adopt to meet near-term needs, and future solutions that incorporate collaboration tools, big data, and machine learning for the long haul.

The role of the modern Legal Operations professional is evolving rapidly. Not that long ago, agreements were stored in shared folders or worse, in physical filing cabinets, and signatures were inked with actual pens further delaying the process. Today, however, the demands placed on Legal Ops have necessitated change. Because Legal Ops touches every department, from Procurement to Sales, these professionals look to technology as a way to keep up with the growing expectation placed on them to do more with less. Where once Legal was more cautious to embrace technology, today they are embracing it with ever-increasing enthusiasm to bridge the gap across their organization and reduce repetitive, time-consuming tasks that are better suited for automation.

Jumping into the Deep End of the Pool

It can be tempting to jump in to a new technology solution straight away when you want to introduce automation. However, you should start by thoroughly understanding the current processes you want to automate and what you want your future processes to look like. Just as you wouldn’t put on a bathing suit and jump into the deep end of a pool without knowing how to swim, in the same way, you need to begin by identifying what you need to streamline and automate before you can actually do so.

Where to Begin

Here are some practical points to consider when building out your technology requirements.

• Ask yourself where things can be streamlined and improved.
• Identify what entities and departments truly need to be involved in these processes.
• Determine if a new system is needed or an existing one can help.
• Consider what integrations you want with your existing business systems. Keeping users connected to the technology they already love will help ease change management strain and increase user adoption rates.

Templates, Templates Everywhere

A significant area of automation focus for many Legal teams right now is contract management. The number and type of agreements within your organization is likely increasing, and it’s common for business teams within your company to struggle knowing which template they should be using when requesting a contract. A CLM solution can help. Auto-template selection can streamline the contract request experience using a few key data fields that are linked to the correct contract template, and then route it to the appropriate approvers. This type of contract automation can relieve the burden placed on Legal to get involved in every single agreement and free up their time to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Speeding the Signature Process

Signature is another area that can get slow things down. Even with e-signature, the process doesn’t always go smoothly. Especially in a large organization depending on factors like region, entity, department, or contract value, agreements require different signatories. Routing agreements to the right individuals can be time-consuming and potentially fraught with error. By automating the signatory hierarchy in your contract management solution, you can ensure that the correct person is signing each agreement every time, building efficiency into the process and providing compliance peace of mind.

One CLM to Rule Them All

As you consider which CLM solution will help to streamline your contract processes, it may seem impossible that you can find one to work for every part of your organization. However, there are ways to find one solution.

• Involve stakeholders early and often, even bordering on overcommunication when choosing a solution. Solicit feedback using surveys to make sure the product is meeting user needs.
• Keep all   requirements in mind. Be sure to identify what stakeholders need, such as who needs to be notified and when. This will help you navigate involving each party in agreement workflows and not bothering them when unnecessary.
• Select a solution that is flexible enough to be configured to meet the needs of various use cases. Ultimately, the more flexible the solution is, the easier it will be to keep your stakeholders happy.
• Provide plenty of training as it will help in overcoming resistance to change. People learn in different ways, so give them a variety of outlets to help them get accustomed to the new solution (e.g. user guides, training videos, and office hours).

Looking Ahead – Metrics Rule!

Once you have contract automation in place,  you’re ready to measure  success and see where additional efficiencies might be needed. Helpful metrics include:

• How often you are using your own paper versus third-party paper?
• How many people route signatures through your CLM?
• How long is your average cycle time?
• How many contracts need Legal involvement and how many do not?
• How many times are you using standard language instead of non-standard?
• Is your contract volume changing month-to-month?

Automatic reporting on these key performance indicators (KPIs) can help determine where improvements are needed. And let’s not forget that having these KPIs often helps you justify additional spend or resources as you grow.

About Malbek

Malbek is today’s most modern, cutting-edge, and AI-infused CLM solution that empowers Legal Ops professionals to do more with less. By supporting the growing contracting demands of your entire enterprise, including Sales, Finance, Procurement and other critical business units, Malbek’s CLM solution delights every user. Malbek provides end-to-end contract management with out-of-the-box integration to popular business applications, like Salesforce, Coupa, Workday, Slack and others, allowing your contract data to flow seamlessly while dramatically reducing cycle times. That’s contracts reimagined! To learn more visit www.malbek.io.

If there is one thing that no legal professional wants to hear as they endeavor to ‘return to normal’ from COVID-19s, it is that there will likely be another contagion — or calamity — that requires legal teams to shift their legal operations altogether. However, it is our job — as legal, risk and compliance professionals — to consistently prepare for changes in the marketplace and the rest of the world.  Ask yourself, then, if you started to think seriously about legal digital transformation in preparation for that next large-scale crisis. 

When the so-called ‘coronacrisis’ hit, I was the in-house general counsel (GC) for a New York City-based multinational technology company, which provides artificial intelligence, cognitive, and autonomic solutions to other global businesses. One key element in the organization’s survival was the successful adoption and implementation of an advanced, end-to-end contract management system (CMS). It  did not have anything closely resembling a CMS, which prioritizes the needs of the corporate legal team, when I joined the company in 2015.  

A CMS makes contracts and related documents readily accessible, no matter where you are — so long as you have internet access, of course. It allows in-house corporate attorneys to remain productive pretty much anywhere in the world, at any given time. It prevents the office-bound issues that inflict misery on companies — being perpetually stuck in manual contracting mode or using herky-jerky legal technology! 

But how do legal departments and operations begin their digital transformation journey and encourage user adoption in the first place? During my time as a GC — with more than a modicum of tech savvy — I have used best practices to improve contract management processes and methodologies, increase overall productivity, and ensure business continuity during times of crisis. Here are four critical success factors: 

Realizing the Legal Team’s Role 

The role of legal teams in selecting, implementing, and customizing a contract management solution can never be understated. When legal is not involved in the selection and rollout, the project is most likely doomed. The importance of legal professionals embracing the solution wholeheartedly cannot be stressed enough either. If they are not comfortable using the system, the rest of the company will not be either.  

Naturally, legal teams do not have to handle every single step, but they do need to have a hand in creating the company’s vision for the CMS. They can then assign others, who have proverbial ‘skin in the game,’ to handle other parts of the digital transformation project. 

Valuing the Engagement Manager 

Although legal teams must be invested in the decision-making around a new CMS, engagement managers’ involvement is vital as well. For the most part, engagement managers are people who can say confidently, “Here is what I want to see happening.” They show business teams how to configure what they truly want out of their new software and facilitate communications between each. It is not nearly enough for a paralegal, for example, to merely run with it as is. Companies, whether medium- or large-sized, require sound expertise and ongoing technical support. They also need users who can test — and retest — the new solution to see if it meets the business use cases. 

A word of warning, though: the legal team must continue to have a stake in the project. That is because a fully configured application must work for lawyers, first and foremost, while supporting other users in sales, finance, or IT when necessary. With an effectively implemented contract management platform, basically, “you adapt to it, or it adapts to you.” 

Defining CMS Needs 

It is true, though, that most GCs and legal executives will say they just “don’t have the time” to define what they need at the outset of a digital transformation project. But they will end up getting “whatever works” if they do not. Accordingly, they should invest some of their time in the software selection process. After all, they will not have nearly as much of it when they have to constantly adjust the software to mirror their business processes.  

The question then becomes whether GCs and legal executives should be involved in decisions around users’ experience, digital workflows, and other lovely technical details. My answer to that is, “yes — 100 percent!” Even if they do not describe themselves as a technologist, they need to help define the look and feel, capabilities, and other aspects of the CMS. They need to get to the point where there is project buy-in from stakeholders. 

Alternatively, if they allow a technology vendor to do all of the above instead, they will get the kind of general practices that work across many other companies. This is perfectly fine, of course, if they ask the vendor to recommend best practices. However, general practices and vendor recommendations do not always reflect companies’ unique business processes. GCs and legal executives should be involved in communicating their wants, needs, and individual practices, accordingly. 

Getting Even More Involved 

In the context of selecting and implementing a CMS, ‘getting involved’ really means being an active project participant from the very beginning to the end. This significantly improves the chances that a legal digital transformation will be successful for legal and other teams. Participants’ questions for vendors should revolve around software capabilities — not only from a corporate legal perspective, but also from those of their business colleagues. Their close working relationships with customer success managers should not only be established, but also maintained. 

When they are engaged fully and ask the right questions, it helps deliver the results that legal departments and operations demand and deserve.  

Starting Your Legal Digital Transformation Journey 

Ultimately, deploying a contract management solution makes contracting easier at just about every level. The further along you are in your legal digital transformation, the less human intervention is needed for contract assembly, review, and analysis, as well as other functions. What this translates into is increased efficiency, enhanced agility, and — better yet — improved business continuity. It prevents legal professionals from falling way behind. Say, for example, in the middle of a global pandemic.  

With these implementation best practices in mind — and a powerful digital tool in hand — GCs and legal executives can begin to increase the value they bring to the table and take on some of the biggest organizational challenges, both today and in the future. They can aspire to use a framework like CLOC’s 12 core competencies for legal operations, reaching new levels of optimization and maturity.  

Learn More from ContractPodAi 

Do you want to find out how legal digital transformation can help you to be more flexible, both operationally and commercially? At the CLOC 2021 Global Institute, ContractPodAi was joined by Steve Rigler, Inmarsat’s Director of Contract Operations. Together, we discussed how Inmarsat went about streamlining and simplifying its day-to-day contract management.  

If you didn’t catch it during the live event, make sure to watch the discussion on-demand. To find out more about ContractPodAi and legal document management platforms, please contact us.  

The current environment has triggered uncertainty and has accelerated change in law departments in struggling and thriving industries. To best manage an ever-changing environment and, at the same time, advance their evolution, law departments must embrace three critical characteristics: they must be agile, value-centric, and tech-enabled. The foundation for this future state is a mature and data-driven legal operations program.

Agile: Nimble, Responsive, and Proactive

Only one thing is evident during the pandemic: everything you think you know will change—and probably more than once. Returning to the office is just one example of that uncertainty: in roundtables over the last several months, HBR asked law department leaders what percentage of their employees they expect to return to the office in 2021. Over the previous quarter, an increasing number of law department leaders anticipate less than half of their department members return to the office in 2021.

To respond to the ever-shifting environment and clients’ ever-changing needs, law departments must be agile and responsive, continually flexing to meet emerging areas of need. The ability to be responsive to emerging client needs requires effectively allocating and empowering resources in an organizational framework.

Alignment with client needs. While the practice of law is often reactive, there is now a heightened need for structured, proactive alignment with client priorities. Business needs to address a variety of new or urgent priorities quickly.

Leverage model. With the appropriate mix of experience within their attorney ranks and the proper allocation of non-attorney resources, law departments can easily assign work to the right resource level. With the right mix doing the appropriate work, productivity will increase, costs will be lower, and employees will be more engaged.

Organization structure. Concentrating repetitive work such as contracts or research into centralized resource groups (centers of excellence) can allow other resources to flex to areas of need that require more nuanced support.

Resource empowerment. Agile law departments have a culture that empowers individuals and teams to make decisions and react quickly in a fluid environment. Ongoing professional development and cross-training will give team members the skills and knowledge to be confident. In the current climate, creative and continued employee engagement is also critical.

Value Centric: Emphasizing Value While Managing Cost

Value-centric means ensuring that a department’s resources, internal and external, are focused on the highest value tasks and activities. Value centric law departments analyze the work to be done, optimize the processes for performing it, rationalize external spend on law firms and other service providers, and monitor their performance.

In the current environment, cost is a significant value consideration for law departments. Our roundtable polls indicate that law department operations leaders’ priorities have shifted since the onset of the pandemic. In April, talent-related issues were top of mind, as departments scrambled to adjust to the work-from-home environment. By June, the top priority was cost management, even in industries less adversely affected by the pandemic.

Internal value. With new work and personal issues drawing on people’s time, law departments need to maximize their leverage models’ effectiveness, finding new ways of working, and focusing on the highest value activities and tasks. Increasingly, forward-looking departments are working to track and monitor team activity to ensure the department focuses on the highest value work.

External value. To maximize the value received from outside counsel, law departments tighten their partnerships with existing preferred panel firms and rationalize which firms they choose to use based on the alignment between cost and the value received. When reviewing RFPs, leading law departments look for differentiating value—external providers’ opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of client needs.

Tech Enabled: Supporting Agility, Value Centricity and More

The current environment has brought technology to the forefront – technology tools have helped some departments thrive while others have recognized their deficiencies. Technology can drive efficiency, improve decision making, and consistency in delivering legal support and services, including providing underlying support and measurement for departments’ efforts to be agile and value-centric. But with the proliferation of available technology tools and cost management pressures, it is essential for law departments to ensure that their legal tech stack is (a) aligned with their strategic objectives and (b) adopted by end-users to provide its intended value.

Alignment with strategic objectives. Law departments should continually recalibrate their legal technology strategy, aligning technology strategy with the department’s overall strategy. In the current environment, that alignment includes taking into account the “new normal,” such as working from home and enforcing controls more effectively. Still, it is crucial not to lose sight of longer-term strategic goals.

Enabling technology tools should be right-sized for their intended purpose and support efficient processes, consistent tracking, and robust reporting. Generally, a law department’s operational model should leverage an enterprise legal management (ELM) system as one of its central tools, supported by additional tools to address practice area-specific needs. For example, while transactional functions have sometimes felt underserved by traditional, litigation-focused technology, leading law departments are now leveraging workflow and contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to serve transactional functions better. HBR’s roundtable discussions indicate that law departments are currently prioritizing analytics tools and workflow tools instead of more nascent technology such as AI. Analytic tools can facilitate decision-making regarding spending, resource allocation, and more, and workflow tools can help a department more agilely, timely, and equitably respond to client needs.

Maximizing investment through adoption.

Based on HBR’s roundtable discussions, we find that most law departments focus on maximizing their existing investments—completing implementations and working to ensure adoption by end-users to justify the investment. Most roundtable participants are currently seeing a significant or moderate uptick in user adoption (necessity can drive use), but much of the information they gather is anecdotal or based solely on log-ins. To understand the actual level of adoption, law departments must measure actual usage and monitor relevance. As a result, HBR and others are developing new tools to help law departments better track how users are interacting with legal technology.

Conclusion  

To continue to evolve, law departments must be proactive in shaping their future, taking a strategic, forward-looking view. The concepts presented here are not new, but the current environment offers a unique opportunity to accelerate the evolution towards becoming agile, value-centric, and tech-enabled law departments of the future. Simply reacting to the pandemic’s challenges and its fallout is not enough—seize the moment because the future is now.