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.

The pandemic has shifted the ground under our feet. It has disrupted not just our industry, but all industries. And it is not just the pandemic; other tectonic shifts have left our world fundamentally changed.

There has been a global reckoning on racial and social justice which can no longer be ignored. The acceleration of climate change effects has seen Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) rise to a top investor and corporate priority. And privacy and cybersecurity have become the new imperatives to inspiring trust with customers and employees.

The picture is clear: We are living through a time of unprecedented change. And it is only human nature to be anxious when things change that much, that fast.  But remember: Legal operations has always been about change. As a community, we embrace disruption and turn it into opportunity. We do not need to fear this moment. We need to embrace it, to realize its incredible potential for positive transformation.

We are already living through some amazing shifts in our industry, our culture, our world. Suddenly, nothing seems out of reach. For so long, our industry clung to the past. This wave of disruption has swept away much of that resistance. And we meet this moment with more power and influence than ever. As a legal operations community, we have never had more of a voice. We have gone from playing at the margins of the industry to being true stakeholders.

We stand at a crossroads. For years, the way forward was blocked. Now, at long last, the road ahead is open. So where do we go now? As a legal operations community, what is the future we want for our industry?

For me, there are a few big areas where I want to see us focus. I can sum these up in three words: Ecosystem, Technology, and Humanity.

Ecosystem: We need to break down the silos that separate us

I believe it is time to get serious about connecting our fractured legal landscape.

Think about how far we have come in legal operations. In just a few years, we have made huge strides in modernizing and updating our mindset, approach, and practices. We are smarter and more effective in so, so many ways. And legal operations teams are not the only ones who have improved. Law firms, law schools, new types of service providers, have all invested heavily to add capabilities and new skills.

But here is the problem: Everyone is working on their own backyard, their own organization.

We have really strengthened and improved the nodes. No one is really working to connect all those nodes into a coherent, rational system. We are not thinking holistically or trying to solve problems collectively. Even the term “ecosystem” is misleading. The reality is that our industry often does not feel or behave like a real ecosystem. We are more defined by our disconnection than by our connection.

To bring in the next big wave of innovation and growth in Legal, we need to step out of our backyards and engage with the entire landscape. This means bridging huge gaps of culture, understanding, and practice with law firms, technology providers, and all the other parts of our industry.

This will not be easy! But it will be worth our time and investment. By forging stronger and more rational connections across the ecosystem, I believe we can bring new speed and value to our industry.

Technology: We need more connected and usable solutions

We need a fundamental shift in how we consider, adopt, and leverage technology. Not that long ago, we lacked basic technology capabilities and solutions. No more. Now, there are too many. And they rarely seem to work together.

The result? When it comes to legal tech these days, anything is possible… but nothing is easy. The capabilities are all there, but what is the actual experience of the human beings at the center of it all? Are they adopting it, are they using it? Do they have a unified view of the data?

We need platform solutions that give us new insight and operationalize our manual and lower-value tasks. Most critically of all, we need standardization, simplification, and seamless integration.

We have a big role to play here! We need to partner with technology providers and integrators to understand our needs, and to think holistically to create more user-centered, intuitive, solutions that drive business outcomes. And we need to provide clear common standards and expectations that focus on ease of use and unification.

If we fail to address this, the problem will only become even more daunting. It is time to push for and demand more elevated and holistic technology.

Humanity: We need to get better at supporting and serving our people

Finally: I want to talk about how we bring more humanity, inclusiveness, and purpose to our industry.

As a community, we have always seen, and addressed, some things clearly. We are operations people; we all understand the value of process, organization, technology, use of data and so on. And we are really good at taking on these things and finding ways to make them work better.

But what have we not addressed? We have innovated a lot of creative, smart things to help employees be more productive. What have we done to make sure they are satisfied, in balance, and aligned to the values of the organization? Far less.

Today, employees have different expectations and demands. They want to work for an organization that feels purpose-driven. To feel that their employer is committed to things that they believe in, to feel supported and heard. Employees are rising up to apply positive pressure to an industry that has let them down in some vital areas. From our dismal mental health record to slow progress on diversity and inclusion, they are no longer satisfied with empty promises.

We need to stop looking at our employees through a “manage and control” lens and embrace a new relationship. We need to listen and engage, understand and empower. This is new territory for many of us so you can be sure there will be some mistakes along the way. There are many pieces to this, but to me, it is ultimately about culture. We have to invest in defining and strengthening the culture within our teams and organizations.

This is not easy or obvious. But if we in CLOC bring the same level of creativity and focus to this new challenge as we have to the other parts of our mission, we can make a real difference in people’s lives.

Conclusion: The future is now

 For all the pain and hardship it has introduced, the pandemic has left us all with something priceless. It has reminded us that the most important things in our lives are the ties we share. Family, friends… and this community. Without you, our passionate and engaged members, this organization would be nothing.

You know, we used to talk about the future as if it were this abstract concept over a far horizon. No more. The future is now. It is happening all around us. We see it in the huge shifts across our industry and our world today.

And we have the voice, the power, and the determination as a community to influence that future for the better. That is the thrilling mission that we face now… together. I look forward to taking that journey with all of you!

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.

By Brian McGovern

It used to be that there were good – though not existential – business reasons to create a technology roadmap for the legal department. When developing such a roadmap, one criterion upon which legal operations evaluated legal tech products, in addition to their ROI performance, was their ability to deliver value for an extended duration. Still, developing a technology roadmap hardly seemed like a life-or-death concern. That was pre-COVID-19.  

Today, organizations find themselves with urgent, immediate reasons to put that roadmap in place. 

Why? Because technology is, of course, one of the three pillars of operational success, alongside people and process.  And people and processes have been disrupted during this pandemic. How the legal department/organization’s technology behaves in this new normal will either sustain or pose a risk to business continuity. Therefore, the legal tech stack’s ability to help support business continuity during periods of profound disruption is required. The legal ops team must build a legal tech stack that enables the legal department and the organization to adjust to predictable and unanticipated disruptions. 

When building a legal tech stack capable of delivering both bottom-line business value and resilience over the long term, keep these best practices in mind.

Avoid being reactive

It’s not easy: At a time like this, it’s very tempting to make technology decisions based on the immediate demands placed upon your department and organization. 

Last year, a study by Hyperion Global Partners found that 39% of tech investment decisions were strategic, with an eye on long-term value, and guided by understanding the need to integrate technology with operational requirements.  However, 35% of tech investment decisions were reactive, spurred by the arrival of new versions of legacy software, shiny new technologies, or other “perfunctory factors” like changes in the technology market. 

I’d suggest that 2020 legal tech stack purchase decisions run the risk of being very reactive due to the pandemic’s challenges, including most if not all employees working from home.  Rather than merely adopting “quick fixes,” though, you need to consider whether or not a solution has the flexibility and scalability to deliver value beyond the immediate circumstances.   

Put a data strategy in place first

According to bestselling author Bernard Marr, 

“Data is revolutionizing the way we all do business. Every business is now a data business and needs a robust Data Strategy. However, less than 0.5% of all data is ever analyzed and used, offering huge potential for organizations when trying to leverage this key strategic asset.” 

Legal departments possess a staggering amount of data. Still, it may be silo’ed or located in disparate locations – from emails to matter files to personal databases – so putting it to use can be difficult.  It’s crucial to develop a comprehensive data strategy that aligns with business objectives, resulting in meaningful legal metrics to drive better decision-making, better outcomes, and maximum business value.

Your legal tech stack should support that strategy and be built around collecting, managing, analyzing, and reporting the correct data to execute it. Don’t make a technology investment unless it supports that strategy.  The tail shouldn’t wag the dog, but that’s what’s happening if the technologies you’ve deployed are dictating your data strategy.  A lousy tech investment decision made because there was no data strategy in place can hang over your head – and drag on your KPIs – for a long time to come.

Accelerate your power to pivot

No matter how sophisticated a company’s tech stack may seem, it has to support efficient and agile processes to sustain business continuity during “normal” times and crises.  

Therefore, process automation must be a cornerstone technology for a legal tech stack.  It empowers legal ops teams to quickly and easily design, build, and deploy processes that are incredibly cost-effective and error-free, which are essential benefits even during “normalcy.” When disruptions strike, its ability to help you pivot immediately to implement new processes to cope with sudden impacts can be critical.   

For example: Some of the processes that were developed and deployed by providers and users during the early weeks of COVID-19 included workflows for vetting legal vendor continuity, tracking health checks, obtaining onsite visit request approvals, even for remote work management.

This ability to quickly react to a global pandemic’s challenges illustrates the day-to-day value of process automation to a legal tech stack.  Starting, you can address high-volume, immediate-need tasks. Your success in streamlining them builds your case for automating more and more processes, even outside of the legal department, which means “Legal” can lead the way toward organization-wide agility and resilience.  Another benefit?  To your internal reputation.  As Jeff Marple, Innovation Director for Liberty Mutual Insurance told us:

“Legal wasn’t originally a process or tech-forward organization within Liberty Mutual. Now we have developed several internal client-facing workflows that our clients just love, and that has changed the reputation.  Legal now leads the organization with process automation deployments.”

Drive legal staff adoption

A key measure of long term success for any legal tech stack?  Immediate and ongoing legal staff adoption.  So find ways to get users excited about the business value these new tools offer: 

• Improve client service by decreasing response times and client frustration
• Improve legal department efficiency and performance
• Reduce menial and mundane work, and increase time for substantive work 

What’s also important?  Who you involve in your initial adoption efforts.  Focus on people who will be impacted by new technology who represent different functional areas; target people who are always coming up with new ideas and are passionate about operational improvement.

To convert those who may be reluctant, here’s a tactic suggested by George Grawe, SVP and Deputy Chief Counsel at Allstate and a longtime pioneer in driving legal process innovation:

“(People) will say they have a more efficient way to do things…you need to get in the trenches with folks to see how they do their job. If you can find a way to have the technology complement the way they do their work, they become your change champions.”

By co-opting adopters who are enthusiastic about the technology, you’ll be able to manage early adoption issues better and make steady progress in improving the stack over time.  By enlisting them, you’re building a core of legal tech evangelists who’ll help you drive even broader adoption and make your tech stack “future-proof” in a very fundamental way: By making it invaluable to the entire organization.

—-

Brian McGovern is General Manager, Workflow Solutions at Mitratech, and led one of the largest global enterprise legal management software implementations ever at a global insurance provider. At Mitratech, he’s obsessed with helping clients navigate selecting and implementing legal technology so they can drive meaningful value that positively impacts their business.

Before remote work became encouraged or enforced due to COVID-19, General Counsel (GC) conducted their work with virtual systems and processes. Many legal departments were already comfortable with Cloud-based file storage, collaboration, and matter management systems. Think of the virtual legal teams working in multiple jurisdictions. They are experts in ‘following the sun’ and offering legal guidance to the business in various time zones. 

If you’re a GC reading this, you probably have your remote working conditions well established in your legal department, and things are ticking along nicely. But as we begin to move beyond the current circumstances, these four tips will help your legal department look forward to more strategic and better ways of doing business.

1. Protect client and vendor data 

The threat of an internal or external data breach is a liability for all organizations. Remote working conditions exacerbate the danger by introducing more variables into the work environment. Legal departments managing trade secrets and confidential client information have an ethical duty to secure this information from unauthorized and inadvertent exposure. The Director of Aon’s Cyber Solutions Group, Chris McLaughlin, spoke to Thomson Reuters recently, alerting GCs to virtual workplace risks. 

“We know that threat actors are actively targeting individuals at home. They target virtual private networks to try and get access to corporate systems, and some organizations have had their physical premises broken into,” said Chris. 

With sophisticated global cyber-attacks occurring regularly, here are two measures you’ll want to revisit, should a policy or operational process need updating: 

• Safe and secure file sharing: Basic email attachments are risky when sharing files and spreadsheets with sensitive or confidential information. Cloud-based collaboration platforms can help your organization implement best-practices and a more connected culture as they enable users, internal and external, to quickly and securely share vast amounts of information.
• Data breach response preparedness: Do you have a response plan if your legal team or someone in your organization reports a data breach? GCs must establish policies and procedures for their legal department to manage the situation as soon as a breach occurs and to mitigate additional data breaches in the aftermath. Be mindful of the organization’s legal responsibilities in your jurisdiction when a data breach occurs. For example, all 50 states have adopted data breach notification statutes, many with sector-specific provisions. Requirements vary widely, and there is no federal-level statute.

2. Generate advanced matter and spend analytics

COVID-19 has had an impact on legal spending in some regions more than others. The 2020 edition of the Legal Department Operations (LDO) Index from Thomson Reuters found a slight trend towards increasing budgets in the US, with 22% of respondents seeing a budget decrease and 32% reporting a budget increase in the last twelve months.

Legal departments are often seen as cost centers rather than strategic partners and are always under pressure to demonstrate their value to the broader organization, usually by focusing on efficiency. Suppose you’re looking to be more strategic on your legal spend for the business. In that case, the ability to report back to your stakeholders with advanced spend and matter management analytics is a must. 

If you don’t have a dedicated matter management platform, it may be time to build a business case for one. An effective matter management platform provides you with the transparency you need to control your department’s outside counsel legal spend and the clarity your executive team requires. Matter management analytics can drive better decisions and reduce your department’s overall costs.

3. Streamline contract creation and management 

Automating legal contracts and documents is a game-changer to those familiar with the innovative practice. A contract management system customized to your needs can connect your legal team with the rest of the business. This strategic technology can reduce the burden on your lawyers for guidance on minor matters so that they can spend more time on higher-level work. 

Platform solutions provide the building blocks to deliver multiple legal and business solutions in a unified user experience. They enable you to automate contract creation and approval, identify and manage risk, and monitor obligations and compliance through one central hub. And as the business grows and evolves, it’s easy to adapt and scale a platform to accommodate new processes.

4. Champion internal and external communication

As a strategic legal adviser to your organization, responsive communication is essential. Suppose you are a leader of your legal team, such as the GC or Legal Operations Director. In this case, a strategic move could foster an internal culture of knowledge-sharing and thought leadership. You can achieve this through platform solutions that offer a complete digital workplace for your organization, giving users a better way to collaborate, communicate, and connect with their team.

Championing innovative communication with your law firm advisers is beneficial, too. For example, if you have an urgent legal matter and need to call in external counsel for expert advice, you want to submit the brief to them effectively and fast. 

Seamless collaboration and communication are inherent in platform solutions. You can work on shared files and act fast on legal matters that require you and your adviser’s urgent attention. Look for an adviser that is just as innovative as you, so you can work together to handle complex legal issues that arise when needed. 

Features like these help gain stakeholder buy-in for legal technology because cloud-based platforms have dozens of use-cases not only for your legal team but also for marketing departments and human resources.

With these four strategic, in-house tips now on your radar, which one resonates with you? Find out more about how you can build your virtual workplace through a connected legal hub with Thomson Reuters.