Legal's 2019 Tech Challenge: Getting Everyone on the Same Page

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A version of this article first appeared in the January print editions of Corporate Counsel and The American Lawyer under the title “Legal's 2019 Tech Challenge: Getting Everyone on the Same Page.” The Corporate Counsel version of the article has been published below.

Legal tech enthusiasts are likely to greet 2019 with a degree of excitement. After all, every new year brings yet another opportunity for new technology ­advancements.

But for many law firms and legal departments, the focus in 2019 will remain on tried and true technologies like workflow automation, collaborative tools and pricing analytics. These may not be as “flashy” or “disruptive” as emerging ­technologies like blockchain, but they are vital in helping the industry adapt to a market demanding tighter budgets and more transparency.

Overall, the continuous push by those in legal services to become more price-conscious and efficient will remain the driving force behind their legal tech investments this year. Still, many legal departments and law firms may continue to adopt technologies at different speeds, and ­sometimes with little forethought of integration. So like years past, 2019 will also be another test of whether law firms and their clients can work closer together than ever before.

The View from In-House

For many legal departments, the demands of 2019 will not be much different from recent years: Do more work with less resources.

“The scope of work in many legal functions has increased, and the amount of work various legal teams are tasked with [has increased], with not significant increases in their ­budgets or headcount,” says Sowmyan “Sam” Ranganathan, senior director of information governance and legal ops at pharmaceutical company AbbVie and chair of the ­Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) legal operations group.

Facing such belt-tightening, legal departments are striving to elicit efficiencies by learning skills like project management and, equally as important, leveraging legal technology.

Ranganathan says that for many this year, such technology will likely include contract management and workflow automation products. But there are other platforms corporate legal teams are eyeing to streamline their operations as well.

Melanie Margolin, general counsel at industrial manufacturing company Wabash National Corp., notes that her team is focused more on creating efficiencies by deploying collaboration platforms. She says her department is looking at investing in “Microsoft Teams or [a similar] product where we can have an ongoing conversation in one place instead of going back and forth in email.”

The department is also planning to move its document management system to a cloud-based platform to allow its lawyers to work more collectively. “We want to be able to edit and collaborate more freely,” Margolin says.

For Camden Hillas, senior corporate counsel at workflow automation company Nintex, the focus is on using technology to empower her team to keep up with current legal and regulatory knowledge. Her department is eyeing research platforms that can help it stay on top of specific practice areas such as intellectual property. The goal, she explains, is to “minimize the amount of work that an attorney has to do to sort of monitor certain trends.”

She adds that to stay on top of all relevant legal knowledge, legal departments “can either spend their own internal resources or spend it on outside counsel—neither of which are appealing from a cost perspective. But if there are ways to leverage technology to do that, that is really appealing.”

Tech for Survival

Replacing outside counsel with technology is never welcome news to law firms. But in 2019, there are ways firms are planning to use technology to respond to—and survive—corporate clients' hunt for efficiencies.

Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, for instance, has a history of developing its own proprietary legal tech, and is now hoping to be a technology provider to corporate legal departments looking to streamline their operations.

Kathryn DeBord, Bryan Cave's global chief innovation officer, says the firm's focus in 2019 is on enhancing its Crosslite platform, a customizable data management and analytics tool for clients. The platform is a key component of the firm's newly launched legal operations consultancy division, Cantilever.

Though originally developed around 15 years ago, Crosslite is constantly evolving to respond to new client needs. In 2019, DeBord says that Bryan Cave is specifically looking at integrating the platform with artificial intelligence technology from Kira, HighQ and Neota Logic.

In addition, the firm will also look to become a leaner operation itself. DeBord notes there is a particular focus on bringing in automated drafting tools and “technology that just on a very basic level allows us to have a seamless workflow and a highly collaborative process.”

Another firm with a history of tech investment, Baker Donelson, is taking a different track in 2019: It's looking to tech vendors to help make sense of the litigation data it holds, all with an aim of providing corporate clients with useful data analytics, says David Rueff, Baker Donelson's legal project manager.

He explains that the firm wants to “gather more information about outcomes” like how a particular judge will rule, or the type of strategies an opposing counsel will likely use, to help better inform clients' legal strategies.

Baker Donelson is also looking to provide more comprehensive legal spend information to clients over the coming months. Specifically, the firm is planning to integrate historical data into its budgeting systems so its attorneys can “compare the budgets they're developing to prior matters” to more accurately forecasts client fees, Rueff says.

This year, providing clients with more pricing information will similarly be a big focus for Miami-based litigation firm Mark Migdal & Hayden, which is looking at developing proprietary budgeting software.

Etan Mark, partner at Mark Migdal & Hayden, says such technology will help his firm stay competitive. “It is much more of a buyers' market right now for legal work … and fee predictability is a huge element of managing client expectations.”

What the Other Side Wants

Law firms' focus on budgeting solutions should come as music to their in-house clients' ears. But many want legal departments and their firms to go further and look to e-billing solutions as well in 2019.

Nintex's Hillas notes, “There are a number of ­improvements in billing software that makes the [invoice] process significantly easier. … One of our outside counsel, which is a smaller firm, went to a more automated platform, and frankly the experience is significantly better than ­receiving paper.”

In addition to billing, AbbVie's Ranganathan believes that legal departments will also want outside counsel to implement shared knowledge and document management in 2019. He says it can be challenging to “manage the knowledge between a legal department and the law firm that is working with you effectively. Emails are an inefficient way to share information back and forth.”

Wabash National's Margolin agrees, saying that in the coming months, her legal department will push outside counsel to be more collaborative. “We are going to ask our law firms to create intranet sites that we can share with them, or actually that they can share with us, so that all the projects, cases and matters we are working on with the outside firm are linked together.”

Coincidentally, such collaborative knowledge and ­document management is also what law firms want from their corporate clients. When asked what technology a legal ­department should have, Mark Migdal's Mark was ­unequivocal: “To me it's shared document management—the biggest nightmare for a small law firm is when their corporate counsel records are a disaster. That's not fun for us.”

“One of the things I love is when my corporate clients have a system where their documents are maintained,” a place where the documents can also be shared, he says.

To be sure, Baker Donelson's Rueff notes that many legal departments are getting up to speed in this area: “We are seeing more clients implement their own matter management systems that better enable them to track progress on their cases, track spend on their cases.”

But the same time, Rueff says Baker Donelson is also “trying to get our attorneys to do a better job of managing their cases using [the firm's] own case management system. So what happens in many cases is you have lawyer staff who are required to update two systems.”

What Rueff hopes to see more of in 2019 is better integration between client and law firm systems. He envisions a situation “where we are able to use our case management platform inside the firm to manage our cases, but then we provide the data [clients] need through a format that is similar to e-billing exchanges—where we provide them with a data file that is specified by their outside counsel guidelines.”

There is a good chance such integration across legal offices will come to fruition. Legal technology investments, after all, rarely happen in a vacuum. “It's not [about] technology for technology's sake, it's [about] how we can do our job better,” Rueff says. And in the coming months, many want the focus to be on using technology collectively, and in ways that complement each other, instead of creating more hours of rote data entry.

The only question is, will 2019 be the year it all comes together?