Bill Deckelman spent three months in early 2017 brainstorming with a group of about 20 people, looking for ways to save money for the soon-to-be-combined legal departments of Computer Sciences Corp. and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Most of the available solutions involved offshoring or one-off technology initiatives. How many lawyers would he need in India or the Philippines to handle contract work for the newly formed DXC Technology Co.?

“We got nowhere. It was one big circle,” Deckelman says. “We figured out we had to do something totally different.”

Much of what can be described as innovation in today's legal market revolves around specific solutions. Automated contract analysis. Document automation. Expert systems that can replicate a lawyer's structured way of thinking about a given problem.

But few general counsel have been bold enough to try what Deckelman committed to last year: a total re-imagination of the way his department worked, using automation, technology and a reconfiguration of the lawyers in his department.

Deckelman turned to UnitedLex, which is developing a specialty in outsourcing legal department functions in much the same way DXC outsources corporate IT departments. Through the partnership's first year, Deckelman has lowered his legal department's costs by a staggering 30 percent, with his outside counsel spend dropping by 20 percent.

Much of those savings, Deckelman says, came through “rebadging” 150 lawyers and professionals from DXC to UnitedLex while automating the flow of their transactional work. Deckelman calls it a “digital transformation” that is so far only scratching the surface of what he thinks future legal departments will look like.

“I say to GCs: 'You can look at digital transformation and be skeptical and say it's five years away,'” Deckelman says. “But the problem you have if you don't start focusing on it now is it's a lot more about the people, the culture, the processes than it is about the technology. So if you don't start getting your team to that mindset, you can't leapfrog with the technology.”

One of the most effective changes to DXC's legal department came through a contract management system UnitedLex developed called Contract Room. The system now handles $26 billion worth of DXC contracts. It is integrated with Salesforce.com, so when a new contract comes in to the company it is automatically assigned to a lawyer for review. If it isn't reviewed in a timely fashion, an alert goes out.

“That alone, within a global company, has been amazing,” Deckelman says. “Otherwise, it's a very manual, human process.”

Deckelman says the legal department has been able to show value to the business through this new alignment of work that had been impossible before. He says many of the changes he has adopted are things that other business units have been doing for years. But there is a new pressure on legal departments to evolve and prove their worth.

“There is a clear inflection point and change going on in the legal environment, and it's being led by people who are matching up their department with their business needs,” says Dan Reed, CEO of UnitedLex. “Guys like Bill Deckelman who are being pushed by their CEOs are really changing that. Bill has really transformed things.”