Today's legal technology landscape might best be described like as an engineer might consider a complex math equation. It's fun, expansive, intricate and overwhelming all at the same time. Certainly, it has fundamentally changed how we view risk management and altered the way most legal professionals work.

But perhaps, most significantly, technology is a transformative driver within the legal service industry.

These fundamental changes are daunting for many attorneys. After all, they are lawyers, not technologists. So, in layperson's terms, what are some helpful frameworks for applying technology to legal matters to best serve in-house legal departments?

One approach might be to think back to our college years, when many of us studied marketing. To be successful a service must meet customer needs and expectations. Assuming we accept this premise, what priorities do we need to address to meet the needs of corporate legal departments?

Corporate legal departments are not in the business of implementing technology for technology's sake. Innovations like Blockchain, artificial intelligence or big data are hopefully not the top priority of legal departments in the standalone sense. Those technologies might be the engine empowering an end product, but not the stated client need.

It is apparent that in-house counsel's priorities when they procure legal services are not that different from one's priorities when seeking to hire any type of professional. We seek cost certainty, value, expertise, risk mitigation, quality work and exceptional client service. Well, not surprisingly, so do in-house counsel.

Considerable legal market research exists identifying in-house counsel's imperatives. For example, the Altman Weil 2018 Chief Legal Officer Survey highlights the importance in-house counsel associate with creating budgets, but also cites noteworthy opportunities for improvement in areas including ongoing budget reviews. The same survey also highlights the surprising paucity of corporate law departments providing feedback to outside counsel.

The 11th Annual Law Department Operations Survey produced by the Blickstein Group in cooperation with Consilio highlights several key performance indicators (KPI's). These KPI's reinforce the importance of managing outside counsel spend while emphasizing productivity and the importance of client feedback to strengthen the relationship between in-house and outside counsel.

The primary message, regardless of whether one uses the research available in the marketplace or their own research, is that what is important to in-house counsel is readily apparent. The true challenge is designing technology-based processes and approaches to best meet these priorities.

Let us examine a number of the more common “wants and needs” and how legal technology can be applied to each.

Cost Certainty During the Matter Lifecycle

The financial management of outside counsel spend is a top priority of in-house counsel, and the best place to start. The Altman Weil survey addresses numerous aspects of legal spend. Budgeting, and the relative certainty it provides to corporate finance, is an important place to begin to address how technology can improve the quality of data and the client-counsel relationship.  In the ideal world, counsel, working together, will be able to provide a dynamic projection based on real-time data, not only an initial point-in-time budget estimate.

The availability of real time data  throughout the lifecycle of a matter conveyed via collaboration software and reporting, provides critically important information to counsel. Analysis of this data, using established ABA codes or other metrics, permits early and ongoing assessments of the complexity of a matter and its likely litigation trajectory and the need, or not, for budget reevaluation.

Matter classification is another advanced analytical tool a law firm can employ to more accurately predict costs. As a matter is defended or prosecuted, the number of data points grows. To illustrate, data about specific products involved, alleged defects, modes of alleged injury, related parties, damage claims and the like is shared with and by outside counsel. Skilled counsel can amalgamate the hard data and interpret it based on their experience to better classify a matter, perhaps with the end-goal of identifying trends that may suggest a small problem may morph into a larger problem, identifying high risk cases or issues that impact broader corporate issues beyond a single matter.

Lastly, other data associated with matters, including legal fees and costs and settlement history that may be analyzed utilizing a host of filters allows corporate counsel to apply technology to accurately forecast costs, trends and assess the efficiency of their counsel.

Process Improvement

Legal industry studies approach the relative importance of business process improvements vis-a-vis mainstream outside counsel initiatives in different ways. While some focus on cost control, that is not the only area of interest. One recent study that highlighted the emphasis corporate law departments place on using technology to simplify workflow and manual processes was the Legal Executive Institute's 2018 State of Corporate Law Department Report. This report categorized this topic as the second highest overall priority for legal departments.

The mere fact that law firms use technology does not mean they are working in an optimal manner. Automating a bad process wastes time and resources. Shifting a bad or redundant process to lower cost personnel is just as bad. How might technology be used to improve workflow and reduce costs?

Consider using collaboration technologies or portals to connect disparate parties. Improved information flow and frequent communication based on real time data almost always helps teams be more productive. Periodically stepping back and evaluating the utility of various tasks is generally productive. Oftentimes, work process analysis shines a bright light on tasks that are duplicative or no longer add value. Once bottlenecks or inefficiencies are identified, designing workflow-based systems to improve and automate a process is usually a big win.

Among the low hanging fruit that technology can address are the scheduling of depositions, whether local or nationwide, collaborative approaches to the development of discovery responses, making available product information to a wide variety of stakeholders, consolidating expert information into a single repository and implementing technology to automate the process of creating standard documents Including discovery responses.

Value/Cost Analytics

This is an area where there is general agreement. Virtually everyone asked agreed that CLO's increasingly require more value from their external legal teams. But how is value demonstrated and analyzed?

How can law firms demonstrate the efficiency of their work processes? The key is using empirical data in place of the typical lawyer speak narrative explanations. The collection and analysis of data including timekeeper entries enables the types of sophisticated analysis in-house counsel seek. Actual data provides the fuel for the engine that permits the development of metrics that reflect efficient handling, or not. Data mining and reporting may validate a law firm's effectiveness as it relates to repetitive work and its selection of appropriate resources for each task.

Among the data that might be analyzed to assess efficiency is timekeeper class (partner, associate, paralegal) utilized, on aggregate, to handle different types of tasks. Analyzing the amount of time required to execute common tasks (e.g., certain types of answers to complaints or interrogatory questions) is another area where efficiency can be assessed. Another area at which corporate counsel might look is the work completed by phase (case assessment, pre-trial, discovery, trial prep and trial, appeal) to understand spending trends within the matter management cycle to identify cost savings opportunities and develop alternative fee proposals.

Lastly, statistical analysis of data, like settlement amounts or trial results plotted against key matter fields is another tool in the arsenal allowing clients and law firms to work better together to project costs, identify opportunities for cost reduction and achieve better outcomes.

Risk Management

 We do not need studies or surveys to understand the criticality of security. Legal service providers are stewards of client data. The application of technology to protect the interests of a client is paramount.

Law firms should apply multiple levels of technologies to protect clients. Securing the perimeter of a network with firewalls and antivirus software is important, adding other types of advanced malware and endpoint protection is better still. Deploying technologies including security assertion markup language (SAML), single sign-on (SSO) or multifactor authentication (MFA) to guard against unauthorized application access has become the norm rather than the exception. Awareness efforts including the training of employees on internet security is a strong practice. Constructing internal walls based on “need-to-know” models and using data loss protection technologies is recommended. And lastly, frequent scanning of a network to guard against penetration and vulnerabilities is a must.

Although it seems obvious, this is all highly relevant within the matter management process because law firms are charged with protecting a wide array of confidential data. Trade secrets, personal information, marketing strategies, intellectual property, medical data, is all in play and all needs to be secured.

Wrap-Up

Most importantly, remember to use the ideal prism to view the expansive world of legal technology. Technology is indeed fun, but law firms need to keep their eye on the ball. At the end of the day, a law firm's core mission in the computing sense is that of a service organization whose goal is meeting and servicing client needs, not the technology itself. Focusing on business priorities, improving service and implementing data-based reporting enhances the partnership between outside counsel and their clients allowing each to benefit from everything technology offers.

Kenneth Jones is chief technologist of Tanenbaum Keale, a boutique litigation law firm and chief operating officer of the Xerdict Group, a SaaS legal collaboration software company. Xerdict is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tanenbaum Keale.