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In-house legal experts say getting other parts of the business to think highly of legal is the responsibility of legal ops, which must prioritize giving them what they need quickly, easily and without a lot of back-and-forth.

The consensus of panelists in a recent  webinar titled "Can the Business Love Legal?" is that other parts of the business won't measure legal's success or value solely through the prism of the quality of the legal work. They also will base their assessment on how well legal interacts with the business and its customers.

When legal streamlines its workflows, that frees up the law department to focus on identifying and solving big-picture problems, clearing the way for the leadership team and internal clients to enjoy greater success, panelists said.

Christine Nilsen, general counsel of Cognite, a Norwegian company that makes industrial Internet-of-Things software, said one of the first things she did on becoming its first legal employee in 2020 was ask herself, "What's the lowest hanging fruit?"

She said she identified several process bottlenecks. The salesperson would locate an agreement that would be sent to the customer on a drive folder. The agreement would be in a Word document that ran nearly 50 pages, including a section on terms and conditions. Negotiations to finalize language would drag on for months.

"What I did was to take the terms and conditions and rewrite them, put them on our website, and then establish order forms," she said.

She said the standardization allowed the business to reduce the time it took to complete the agreement by 80%.

"Once I showed that value, they started trusting me more," she said. 

Michael Grupp, CEO of Bryter, which organized the webinar and sells a platform that automates workflow and decision-making, said using technology to boost efficiency has the added benefit of freeing up staff to be more strategic.

"You have that strategic advisory element and that will not go away, especially for bespoke areas like transactions, consulting of the board—this is always a very manual relationship and a lot less impacted by technology," he said.

"But the second part is the scalability element," avoiding the scenario where "you have 10,000 people asking for something, and these 10,000 people want to close a deal at the end of the quarter and they're getting annoyed," Grupp said.

Thomas Baroty, a former group legal chief operating officer at UBS, said that as legal departments embrace technology, they'll naturally play a key role in data analytics.

"Mining data, analyzing data for the benefits of the firm and internal clients of the legal department is going to be one of the absolutely top topics over the next five to 10 years," he said.

Mark Cohen, CEO of Legal Mosaic, which helps legal departments boost their effectiveness, said data won't replace human judgment but will enhance it.

Mark Smolik, general counsel of the logistics company DHL, said legal departments that are ignoring data are putting themselves in a "dinosaur position."

At the same time, he acknowledged, "We have so much data in our collective legal departments and in some regards, it can be daunting."

He added: "I think the next generation of legal industry startups that are the most successful are going to figure out how best to help law departments and law firms organize their data in such a way that they can take away meaningful stories that they can then act on to mitigate and to identify risk."