Sound information governance practices within corporate legal departments (CLDs) offer strategic advantages from many standpoints, including corporate compliance, cybersecurity, litigation-readiness and departmental efficiency. For these reasons, many information governance solutions being used in law firms are finding their way to corporate servers or rather, cloud instances of corporate legal repositories.

There are unique challenges in deploying information governance tools traditionally designed for the law firm environment. With careful planning, keen design, an overall understanding of the process flow for the various constituencies within the CLD, effective communication and education campaigns, these challenges can be overcome to deliver efficient and effective information governance solutions in CLDs.

Over the past 18 months, I have been working almost exclusively with corporate legal departments, consulting with legal operations, IT teams and lawyers to deliver information governance solutions to Fortune 10 organizations. This article provides a summary of key observations that greatly impact the effectiveness of information governance implementations within CLD environments.

1. Client-matter hierarchy is often assumed for law firm technology. It's not in law departments. For law firms, the client-matter relationship is key, and firms with non-unique matter numbers require that the software support this parent-child hierarchy. Such a hierarchy is not always present in law departments. Design considerations are paramount to effectively managing this gap. Document and records management software applications offer configuration options to flatten this structure, but there is much downstream functionality that often assumes the hierarchy to be in place. Processes involving the software may be impacted and need to be carefully planned for, tested and documented.

2. Transactional volume can far exceed what law firms experience. Corporate lawyers can often be part of high-volume workflows and their tasks are part of a greater process where documents are routed, approved and published in volumes unseen inside law firms. High volumes can impact user interfaces that rely on a most recent used metaphor. For example, in a bank that processes commercial loans for small and mid-sized businesses, the number of daily transactions flowing into the database can far exceed the expectations of the original software design.

3. Corporate legal departments may or may not be the custodian of business documents; often, the business holds final records in their systems, and CLDs are frequently unaccustomed to maintaining documents that they interact with for record-keeping purposes. Retaining a record of the legal advice dispensed can provide enormous time savings should a transaction be questioned in the future. Additional operational efficiencies will also be realized, and information governance technologies often provide the foundation for further automation across the document and matter lifecycles.

4. Collaboration with outside counsel is inevitable and should be carefully mapped for optimal design. Traditionally, it was presumed that law departments transfer their documents electronically to their outside counsel for processing, review, whatever. However, in the cyber-climate of today, the best practice often is to have the law firm attorneys login via a portal or a connect to a cloud instance of the corporate document management system, so that the documents no longer leave the corporate repositories. In addition to providing a much more secure environment, CLDs run more efficiently because they do not have to transfer documents or traverse foreign applications on remote networks.

5. Lawyers need a compelling reason to change behaviors, and resolving the information governance gap present in many law departments today provides numerous advantages that resonate well when attorneys are informed of the why the CLD is making investments in technology, people and process. When users have a thorough understanding of the reasons for change being imposed, they are much more amenable to amending their workflows in support of new technology.

Sound information governance practices are critical to effective collaboration within and beyond the legal department. Legal departments have many constituencies, often serving all of the legal needs of the corporation beyond bet-the-farm litigation. To be most effective, each of these communities should be evaluated for unique workflows and other considerations during the design cycle of the project; further, each macro-constituency should be represented in a project oversight capacity. This will enable all communities within the legal department to be well represented and apprised of major project milestones.

Given historical norms, the transition to a governance compliant legal department requires significant education prior to any software training. Communication campaigns should accompany all phases of the information governance campaign; lawyers should be involved throughout the deployment cycle and effective education will be required throughout the project. Communication and education are foundational components to a successful solution and cannot be overlooked or tacked onto the end of the project. For the solution to succeed, the community must be well educated on the purpose, costs and benefits of the information governance campaign.

 

As a 30 year veteran of the legal information technology space, Liza Madden has served the industry in a variety of capacities. Currently, Liza is the founder and principal consultant at Implement-Inc, where she has been working to implement information governance solutions in corporate legal departments. Her passion is to build bridges between lawyers and the technology required to effectively manage the practice law.