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Attempts to drive innovation inside of corporate legal departments have often been hampered by an underlying resistance to change among key stakeholders. Still, the financial hardships many companies are facing due to a COVID-19 economy present a compelling argument to implement tech and other innovative procedures that can help grow efficiencies and defray costs—but will it be effective?

The answer may depend largely on the legal department in question. David Holme, founder and CEO at the legal technology provider Exigent Group, pointed out that many in-house legal teams failed to seize on the opportunity presented by the financial crisis of 2008 to argue for more corporate investment in data-driven practices in technologies. Others may have tried, but failed to create a compelling enough investment story to warrant interest from decision-makers.

"Some of it is genuinely an inability to interact with the modern boardroom. And the modern boardroom requires you to be inventive, excited, creative around what the returns are not telling people that there might be less downside but only if the following caveats apply," Holme said.

Indeed, the way that a change or new initiative is positioned with a legal department or corporation may continue to matter a great deal, whether in the boardroom or at the employee level. Bobbi Basile, managing director in the legal transformation and innovation practice at HBR Consulting, believes that law department innovation initiatives can be more effective in a post-pandemic world, just so long as the word "innovation" isn't bandied about too heavily.

Instead, she pitched that the introduction of tools such as Microsoft Teams be centered around an employee need in the vein of long-distance working. "Even if in the back of our heads pre-pandemic we would have called this an innovation initiative, we're innovating without the title. And in some ways without the shadow side of that innovation title, which in some ways invokes the resistance to change," Basile said.

That resistance, even among minute segments of employees, can be deadly to a burgeoning innovation endeavor. During a webinar held last month by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, panelist Jae Um noted that an uneven level of investment among employees can hamper the overall effectiveness of a new initiative.

"When you have pockets of excellence and only pockets of excellence, that gets more intense over time because of some of the hardships, the emotional labor that goes into functioning with a different mindset or a different approach than everyone else in your ecosystem," Um, who is also director of pricing strategy at Baker McKenzie, said.

Creating a more ubiquitous level of investment among employees post-COVID-19 may require legal operations professionals to consider not only the language of their pitch but the context as well. For example, many organizations might be tempted to structure innovation-based initiatives around cost-cutting.

But Frank Gillman, a principal at Vertex Advisors Group, suggested that it may ultimately be more constructive to frame such efforts in the context of generating new revenue rather than eliminating budget lines. "That is not going to stimulate your business. If anything, it's going to potentially negatively affect your culture, because you are going to be asking more people to do more with less sometimes," Gillman said.

However the message is delivered, legal's ability to drive change post-COVID-19 may ultimately be limited to its own department. Holme at Exigent Group argued that in-house teams are ultimately too siloed from the rest of an organization to chart the course for innovation.

"Things like finance and fintech will drive those changes and legal will be swept along. I don't think legal will drive anything," Holme said.