Useful Technology: Choosing and Implementing Effective Tools

Ensuring that legal teams have access to the right tools requires understanding the business or lawyer user needs, assessment and planning, selection, investment, implementation and, in some cases, experimentation.

Fig. 9 Key technology elements for legal departments at the time of writing (Source: Elevate)

With the caveat that legal technologies continue to evolve rapidly, the current scope of a legal department’s technology framework typically includes the key elements shown in Fig. 9.

To assess the state of a legal department’s technology, we start with the technology dimension of the Legal Department Maturity Model to identify the opportunities. While we help GCs use a department-wide assessment to build a comprehensive technology “heat map,” we quickly dive into a more detailed technology assessment focused on a specific function or need. For example, if a legal team believes that their contract lifecycle management (CLM) tools need to be updated, they can use this methodology to focus specifically on the selection of a new CLM system:

• Define legal and business outputs or objectives

• Map those objectives to desired technologies, features and workflows

• Explore availability and assess functionality of existing tools, and identify

• Understand actual usage of current tools, barriers to adoption use or other limitations, and identify any training needs to better leverage the current investments

• Perform feature comparison and cost analysis of technology options

Build a business case, project plan and change management plan for new technology purchases, if necessary. Because the world of technology changes quickly, it is important to scan the horizon for new technologies as well as changes to existing tools, including new version releases, mergers and acquisitions of existing products, and, in some cases, “retirement” of existing tools.

Legal departments often rely on outside providers for the implementation of new technologies and training.

On the other hand, we also see some innovative legal departments experiment with technology, leading the adoption of new versions of existing products, as well as beta testing new tools and even collaborating to design new tools from scratch. This experimentation has ushered in an explosion of legal technologies such as electronic signatures, technology assisted review (“TAR”), auto-extraction of con­tract metadata, legal spend analysis, and centralized dashboards. Not surprisingly, legal departments that experiment or lead the use of new technology are in the minority; most prefer to let others work out the bugs first. However, the majority can still benefit by following what their experimentally-inclined peers are doing by listening to what they have to say at industry conferences, in articles and awards focused on innovation, and in groups like the Corporate Legal Operations Consor­tium (“CLOC”), a knowledge-sharing group. (More about CLOC in the following section and elsewhere in this book.)

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