How Technology Can Help In-House Counsels to Work Better

Legal Playbooks and Contract Drafting

Each corporation has their own unique commercial practices and legal requirements, yet a surprisingly low number of legal departments use Legal Playbooks. By building a suite of contract templates outlining the company’s differing stances for each clause based on preferred, worst-case and bottom-line, contracts can be processed without the reliance or even input of the legal team.

By pre-defining a set of parameters outlining decisions and processes, the legal team can develop custom templates. A document can then be generated through answering a set of pre-defined questions. It will reduce the reliance on the legal team as the business can do it themselves.

SaaS and Cloud Computing

Rather than the arduous task of putting a business case in to install a new solution, SaaS allows many of the solutions discussed in this article to be implemented by simply subscribing. With huge strides in the implementation of flexible working initiatives, productivity can be increased through greater accessibility.

This leads to a great paradigm shift in the legal profession, collaboration. The competitive nature of a career in the law has perhaps forced lawyers to work independently. With the dawn of the legal technology boom, collaboration has been at the forefront. Lawyers are now able to work with clients and colleagues across any time-zones with the advances in cloud based solutions, and of course video-conferencing technology.

The electronic signature is an ideal example of a cost-effective and easy to implement Software as a Service that can offer immediate returns. The time spent inscribing a mountain of documents, and that is only once they have all been collated in the first place, is wasted time. You can now sign documents on the way home on the train using your phone, and there is an audit trail if you need one.

Matter management and Legal Support

The development of cloud-based technology has resulted in innovative control panel solutions for in-house teams. It may be time for General Counsel to do away with the Excel spreadsheets.

Using a dashboard, one can manage their internal and external matters and keep abreast of their progress in real-time. The reporting capabilities are ideal for a General Counsel walking into an Executive meeting. You can now proudly present on key metrics and demonstrate the team’s value.

Matter Management tools offers functionality such as grading a matter on its complexity and also its strategic value. Using this information you can identify the low-level and the high-value work and make an informed decision on in-sourcing and outsourcing.

If you are faced with a huge volume of legal enquiries from the business, the ideal solution is to reduce the reliance on the legal team rather than buying a solution to manage it. Host a suite of documents and templates for the wider business to reference on an Intranet site, rather than them asking frequently asked questions of the legal team.

The key to technology is that it is scalable and affordable, there are in fact many freeware tools available. The opportunity to invest in Artificial Intelligence technology is out of reach for many an in-house team, at least until they commoditize it. With the emergence and recent acceptance that cloud technology is safe and secure, there are now sandboxes available to budding innovators to experiment and find a solution that works for them and their team.

In house lawyers are at the coalface of change within the legal profession. With different pressures placed on them compared to private practice the challenge is how to do more with less.That is where technology can play a significant role and where investment will be worth it in future-proofing the legal function.