Technology and data
As in-house leaders enhance and diversify the capabilities within their function, they look to simplify and rationalise legal processes to drive greater efficiency.
With the legal technology landscape continuing to evolve, in-house leaders are looking to harness opportunities presented by technology and data analytics to solve legal problems in new ways. Examples of technologies being used to drive efficiency include contract lifecycle management tools, e-billing, document repositories and legal risk management tools.
Yet our research, which can be downloaded HERE, also finds in-house leaders are overwhelmed by the proliferation of technologies in development, and often struggle to gain traction among their colleagues for new or untested approaches.
One of the in-house leaders interviewed for our report, An innovation playbook for the 'future-fit' legal function, says that a top priority for them is smarter data integration, bringing together multiple information sources to provide greater legal insights. In choosing to focus on this area, they see an opportunity to have greatest transformative impact with limited resources.
“Legal technology is one thing in a law firm where it’s core to the business, and it’s another thing in big institutions like ours where we are a small team compared with the organisation’s total headcount,” they say. “It is important, therefore, that we focus efforts on adopting a small number of game-changing technologies than to always chase after the newest technology.”
The lessons related to this stage of innovation are
- Lesson 6 - Analyse current activity to diagnose the most frequent pain points
- Lesson 7 - Focus efforts on process standardisation to create real efficiency gains
- Lesson 8 - Build a credible use case for technology investment to secure investment and adoption
Innovation playbook for the ‘future-fit’ legal function
Download the playbook to find out how General Counsel and other leaders responsible for in-house legal services are approaching innovation-based change.