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As businesses adjust to whatever is the "new normal" during uncertain times, law firms have a unique opportunity to create technology-enhanced business services for clients that extend well beyond legal advice. For the most part, the components they need to accomplish this are already in place, including advanced applications, troves of data and knowledge capital accumulated over years of providing high-quality legal services to corporate clients.

The current challenge, however, is figuring out how to bring these components together to enable more effective, cross-functional collaboration—both within firms and between firms and their clients.

Bundling Legal and Business Services

The current trend toward bundling legal counsel with business services is very much client-driven. Corporate clients want the legal expertise of firms to be more closely aligned with their strategic business goals. Clients' increasing insistence on transparency, accountability and service continuity is prompting firms to rethink existing approaches to client service delivery. The goal is to help clients solve challenging and complex business problems, in addition to offering legal advice.

Contract management is a good example. The role of the firm is no longer just to review the next contract, but rather to manage the entire contract lifecycle. This includes not only drafting, negotiation and approval processes, but also applying analytics across multiple contracts to identify patterns and enable continual data-driven process improvements, risk reduction, compliance and improved governance.

Many law firms already have the necessary expertise (both legal and operational) to accomplish this. Although, the fragmented nature of their IT infrastructure and difficulties in integrating workflows across systems may impact their ability to deliver end-to-end contract management for clients seamlessly and efficiently.

Assembly Provides the Best Value

Reflexive investment in new applications is not the solution to this problem. Instead, firms need better ways to connect work management and service delivery capabilities more seamlessly so they can respond quickly, nimbly and effectively to client demands.

That's why we're seeing firms explore digital platform strategies that can help them unite disparate technologies and services. Leveraging and linking existing capabilities minimizes disruption and makes change management easier. Instead of replacing existing tools, workflows, processes and know-how, firms need to be able to develop customized collaborative workspaces where these components are integrated and complement each other.

Case lifecycle management or multi-matter management is another instructive example. This is a business challenge firms can solve by adopting an "assembly" approach—connecting and storing the data that resides in discovery tools, practice management systems, file management systems and case management systems, as well as emails and spreadsheets. Bringing all of this together into a single portal and workspace enables real-time collaboration and ongoing data analytics. Instead of sending clients emails and spreadsheets, firms invite clients to log into a secure portal to view data points across multiple cases, isolate trends and insights, and make better-informed decisions about case strategy, budget priorities, practice management, resource allocation and more.

The Increasing Importance of Speed and Agility

Innovative law firms are embracing new business models and investing in solutions that enable them to move quickly to address new opportunities and competition. To compete, firms will have to be able to develop new technology-enhanced services with speed and agility. "Rip and replace" development strategies are costly, time-intensive and disruptive. Instead, firms need to deploy flexible, adaptable and reusable components that can be quickly customized and deployed in new ways.

Firms that adopt a low-code assembly approach to development will be in a much better position to "template" best practices across multiple business challenges and opportunities that are similar. For instance, with flexible, agile development tools and processes, a firm could build an incident management system with the requisite processes from scratch in a matter of hours.

The system would be designed to manage incidents from start to finish, integrating governance procedures, tasks, deadlines and compliance requirements. All of this could be managed collaboratively from a portal that keeps the client up to date on any incident and enables efficient project management from a single interface. The portal would facilitate secure, real-time collaboration between clients and the firm's legal and operational experts, and it could also be used to share key information with regulators. Then, once such a system is set up, it can be saved as a template that forms the basis for managing new incidents and projects, and even for new clients. With the template established, it can be set up and customized in a matter of minutes.

Law firms have built up tremendous value within their practices, people and processes, but these capabilities tend to be poorly integrated due in large part to a fragmented legal technology landscape. As firms look to remain competitive and deliver transformative services to clients, simply investing in new applications will no longer suffice. They will need flexible platforms that allow for the rapid assembly of tools, processes, workflows and data into customized collaborative workspaces that are readily adaptable and replicable.

 

Graham Smith-Bernal is CEO of Opus 2.