As little as 15 years ago, the Internet and other digital technologies played a minor role in the operations of many corporate legal departments. Today practically all business processes in these departments involve the use of some sort of digital technology. The way attorneys work, both internally and with outside counsel, has moved almost entirely to digital from paper and fax. The best evidence of this is what happens when an office's Internet goes down and work in the department grinds to a halt.

However, the application of digital technologies in the Office of General Counsel has generally been in narrowly defined solutions that automate a previously manual task, providing a faster version of business as usual. Spend management, for example, automates bill reconciliation and delivers clarity and cost savings to a previously manual process. But it does not really transform the day-to-day legal work being done by corporate lawyers, or how these lawyers deliver value to their company. Very few corporate legal departments have considered how to strategically leverage digital technologies to transform how they work and collaborate. Such true digital transformation uses technology to:

• Better understand and service internal “clients”, gathering and analyzing their interactions to better understand their needs, enhance services and enable new, more efficient ways of working with them, such as self-service applications
• Transform how work is done internally, enhancing productivity through powerful search and analytics, and by deploying smarter software that integrates many tasks into a seamless “flow” that can change as business needs change
• Collaborate securely and effectively with others inside and outside the company from anywhere and any device—so counsel can be out in the business and still fully productive all day

Digital leaders in industries such as retail (Amazon), entertainment (Netflix) and advertising (Google) have shown that the strategic use of digital technologies can both make them more efficient and dramatically improve how they interact with their clients. Your peers in other departments are also engaged in digital transformation. For example, marketing departments are using digital dashboards to detect changes in consumer preferences in close to real time, while finance departments are using advanced analytics to develop new hedging strategies to protect against currency or commodity volatility.

Legal departments should move beyond automating billing and begin developing digital transformation strategies designed to intelligently digitize their work product and processes. Work product and communications in the form of documents and email have gone completely digital, yet the systems to manage them are often still fragmented, complex and outdated, minimizing their effectiveness and reducing user adoption of these technologies. However, new modern approaches and software for document and email management can streamline legal tasks and improve lawyers' ability to deliver great work. These technologies are “consumer-grade” when it comes to ease-of-use (like Facebook or Google), but “professional-grade” when it comes to legal-specific capabilities and security. Often able to be deployed on the cloud, these platforms enable legal departments to take full advantage of the transformative capabilities of new digital technologies to transform how they work.

At their core, these systems are modern, integrated platforms to streamline document management, external counsel collaboration, employee and management collaboration and other workflows. Their knowledge management and intelligent search capabilities serve as productivity accelerators that allow lawyers and employees to discover content across disparate enterprise systems and identify internal experts and resources hidden in their companies, resulting in improved attorney productivity and higher-quality decisions.

By integrating analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) with document and email management, these platforms enable corporate legal departments to automate cognitive tasks, analyze contracts and other legal documents, and leverage the information contained in documents for analytics and compliance. With a comprehensive digital transformation strategy, corporate legal departments can secure a better understanding and knowledge of how AI can be applied, allowing them to more intelligently shop for legal services that rely on AI, and only purchase practical solutions that actually solve their real-world problems. This knowledge can also help departments become stronger partners with forward-thinking technology law firms that are utilizing artificial intelligence-powered services to reduce costs and craft innovative fee arrangements.

However, the most important aspect of any digital transformation strategy is not the digital technologies themselves, but the transformation—the real-world change management and adoption planning that makes such transformation possible. For a successful digital transformation, legal departments need to foster a culture of collaboration—an environment that allows faster experimentation and rewards employees for using these new digital technologies rather than the old manual alternatives. For a digital transformation strategy to be successful, it is important that changes are focused on helping people transform.

By combining the right technology platform with smart change management practices, corporate legal departments, like finance, human resources and many other business departments, can use new digital technologies to dramatically transform how their departments operate. In doing so, such digital transformation strategies enable corporate legal departments to reduce operating costs, increase productivity and deliver enhanced and new services to their company.

Dan Carmel is chief marketing officer at iManage. In his role as CMO, Dan is responsible for go-to-market ad product strategies at iManage. He originally joined iManage in 2001 and returned to the company under HP in 2011. Before rejoining the iManage business at HP, Dan was CEO of SpringCM a leader in Saas ECM.