Demand is outstripping supply in today's corporate legal team. In-house lawyers are getting busier and working harder with the volume of legal work only increasing.

But while there is clearly more demand, there isn't necessarily more resource to service the growing legal requests. We are therefore in the midst of an in-house resource crunch.

The big challenge for general counsel and corporate legal teams will be to respond to these shifting trends but continue meeting their key objectives. Legal departments are looking to become leaner, more commercial and operationally focused, which is why we have seen a much greater focus on legal operations in recent years.

It's very clear that general counsels are now expected to run their legal function like a business and they expect technology resources to help them do that. This article outlines five technology expectations general counsel generally has a need for in their processes.

Creating a 'Legal Hub'

Adopting a platform strategy offers legal teams the opportunity to begin creating a “legal hub” of multiple tools, resources and solutions that help optimize the team's effectiveness, allowing in-house lawyers to focus on the right information in real time to ensure they are equipped to quickly respond to the needs of the business. Whether it's matter tracking, spend management, contract management, document management or legal intake, a legal hub should be a one-stop-shop that helps legal operations excellence.

These central legal hubs should not only be accessible to in-house lawyers. They should be collaborative platforms with dedicated workspaces for business users to engage with the legal function and access legal services and for external counsel to share information and collaborate with the legal team on key projects.

A legal hub should be seen as the operating system of the corporate legal team. It's the platform that redefines the way that the legal team, and its lawyers, work, manage and engage.

Matter Tracking and Collaboration

General counsel and their legal departments need detailed oversight of their matter portfolio—whether being serviced internally, or externally by outside counsel.

Currently, many legal teams remain too reliant on spreadsheets to manage and track matter lifecycles. Not only do lawyers need more immediate and transparent access to real-time matter information and documentation, they also need to be able to collaborate with all key matter stakeholders internally and externally.

Another essential part of matter collaboration is document management.

While reluctant to admit it, many lawyers keep key matter documents in emails or store them locally on their machines. This approach leads to confusion as to the location and current version of documents and raises significant security and version control issues.

For the legal team, it's therefore necessary to deploy solutions within their legal hub that deliver both matter management and matter collaboration. Many legal teams have begun to leverage automation features to intelligently manage matter processes within their legal hub, including automated workflows, tasks, updates, configurable notifications and documents.

External Counsel Portals for Planning and Reporting

A natural progression from the sharing of matter documents between the legal team and their external counsel is to the sharing of key matter information and legal project management reporting. External counsel are increasingly creating online portals that include matter planning and reporting tools such as project plans, timelines, agile task management, team lists, matter status and workstream reports, key issue logs, and project calendars.

These external counsel portals are driving more efficient, consistent and transparent delivery of legal matters for legal departments. Legal functions are also beginning to create their own external counsel portals, which allow them to maintain better control of the relationship and their data.

One crucial element of project management is financial planning and reporting. External counsel portals should be used for budgeting, invoice submission and approval, WIP reporting and analysis of spend against budget.

Data visualization dashboards can also be deployed to give a high-level insight and analysis of legal spend. A crucial benefit of handling structured spend data in an online portal is that the legal function can more easily enforce billing guidelines and approval processes to ensure external counsel to meet certain standards before submitting invoices.

Many legal departments within regulated organizations rely on their external counsel to keep them updated about regulatory and legislative changes so that they can take the necessary steps to mitigate risk to the business.

A legal department can utilize a portal for their external counsel to notify and submit emerging risk. The notification can be marked as relevant or non-relevant. If it's relevant then it can be allocated to a legal risk tracker, and business processes can be updated accordingly.

Consolidated Portals

Emerging risk portals are a good example of the trend toward legal teams creating consolidated portals for use by all their external counsel firms (rather than individual portals per firm). Legal teams often engage with, and rely on, each of their external counsel firms in similar ways, e.g. legal training and know-how, current awareness, seconder requests etc.

It makes sense to consolidate a lot of this activity in a single place because it enhances the user-experience of the legal department. The transparency between law firms also enhances engagement and performance. This trend is perhaps most acute in performance and financial reporting, where legal functions open up financial information and performance 'score cards' across all their external counsel firms.

Legal departments are seeing large costs savings and performance boosts from their external counsel due to the 'gamification' of relationship metrics. When law firms can see how they are performing against their peers (or not, as the case may be), they tend to up their game accordingly.

Contract, Asset and Risk Management Systems

Contracts are the legal function's bread and butter. They are at the heart of most transactions. However, a 2017 CLOC State of the Industry Survey shows that nearly half of legal operations professionals say that their department has no contract management system in place.

Legal departments should be creating end-to-end contract management solutions in their legal hub. These solutions should allow the legal team to manage the entire contract lifecycle transparently in one central location.

Contract workflows can also be automated, including review and approval processes, with a full audit trail kept for risk and compliance purposes. Notifications will be sent to business and legal users to keep them fully informed as to progress and risk.

While general counsels and legal departments are concerned with managing and mitigating risk, they also want to avoid risk all together. This is often difficult in a constantly changing regulatory environment. Legal teams should therefore also be utilizing solutions that help them audit, track and manage business processes to ensure regulatory and legislative compliance.

Summary

A legal hub, like the pilot's cockpit, can be the answer to staying in control of the legal function and charting the right course to deal with the shifting in-house landscape. GCs, legal operations professionals and legal teams that leverage a platform to build their legal hub will be able create a series of dedicated legal operations solutions that drive greater efficiency, effectiveness and value of the legal function.

The right approach to filling out a legal hub can help a department meet the current needs of clients in today's market. The end result is a highly efficient and effective legal team that is helping its organization succeed.

 

Rob MacAdam is director of legal solutions at HighQ.