“Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower” – Steve Jobs.

The legal profession has always been thought of as being traditional, slow to change, and guided by precedent as opposed to innovation. In recent years however, and more recently due to Covid, the scope, pace and reach of innovation and technology in the legal industry has made significant strides.

In house legal teams across the globe are under tremendous pressure to deliver more with less – more legal services but with less resources, less budget and less time spent. All this whilst also remaining relevant, managing business risk, staying commercially savvy and being increasingly more efficient.

The result is that in house lawyers are rapidly changing the way they deliver their legal advice and are disrupting the traditional methods of delivery by using innovation and technology. As someone with an insatiable appetite for innovation and technology, this disruption is a welcome change. As innovation professionals, we embody the lawyer of the future and I firmly believe that from processes to technology, from culture to spend, every aspect of the legal department must evolve to succeed.

So what does this change look like? First lets focus on the challenges and pain points of in house lawyers:

· Meeting the demands of the business;

· Undertaking the work in time;

· Workload and team issues;

· Lack of document trail when legal documents are handled by business teams;

· Streamlining the approval and signature process for signing documents and making it error proof; and

· Proving the value that the legal team brings to the business using hard facts and data.

To address these issues, in house teams have started to invest in and implement changes in technology that can drive key processes for in house legal teams. These include contract management and automation, knowledge management, document management and, where appropriate, self-service approaches to low risk matters using safe and compliant systems that boost productivity and deliver valuable insights.

Matter Management Software

Matter management software gives in house lawyers (and external counsel if you choose) complete visibility into who’s involved with a particular matter, the status, relevant documents and notes, value of the transaction, whether a high priority or low priority matter and more. With key information stored centrally in a matter management system, knowledge share and collaboration comes naturally. It’s also a valuable resource that offers teams insight into the volume of work received, split of work across lawyers and the type of transactions worked on most frequently. This can be a useful resource for any GC when having conversations with senior management around team resourcing backed up by hard facts and data.

Document Management Systems

Information shared in documents is the lifeblood of law and any successful in house team. I always speak of how important institutional memory is. Without managed files and institutional memory the in house legal team can easily become a chaotic, obtrusive, and risky burden to the business. Enter the Document Management System (DMS).

A DMS helps you keep your contracts, emails and correspondence stored, managed, and protected —

and reduces paper. A DMS is capable of keeping a record of the various versions created and modified by different users. Say goodbye to saving your documents on your desktop or company server. From all the latest legal innovations, I am most excited about this one as I truly believe it will revolutionize how you work and how you work with your teams. The best advantage of this system is that you can now access your documents from the cloud, anywhere and at any time. No need to be in the office, using on premise company communication systems to access your work.

Contract Automation

Adopting contract lifecycle management technologies will speed up contracting – documents can be created in minutes instead of days. It’s so simple you could even entrust low risk agreements to your business team to create. Document automation software abstracts users from the underlying legal language of a document template and instead presents them with a questionnaire that collects relevant data and guides them through the document creation process. This allows the business to begin the process and only brings lawyers into the fold when the contract is new or different. It will free up your time to work on much more creative and higher value-add matters. Automation greatly benefits businesses that routinely create, negotiate and execute contracts. Using the traditional, manual, paper-based methods of creating such contracts can result in confusion, inefficiency and mistakes – especially if someone along the way has tampered with the “template”. It also slows the pace of doing business, increases risk, and causes frustration in customers and employees.

E-Signing Software

Many companies have not adopted an e-signature process as they worry about the legality of the digital signatures. In other words, the companies don’t trust computer signature. The fact of the matter is that electronic signatures are completely legal. The companies that offer online digital signature services conform to the requirements of any electronic transaction laws. Digital signatures also result in great cost savings for a company. It will streamline the operations of the company and reduce your storage costs. The cost savings from getting rid of paper documents can be substantial. What’s more adopting digital technology saves cost, effort, and time required in processing manual documents. Its also effortless – think of the time you will save your CEO in having to initial and sign contracts on a daily/weekly basis. The document can be signed easily using an online PDF editor software. Using the online PDF writer, a person can sign the documents within a matter of seconds.

As an in house lawyer, do not fear legal innovation. Email changed communication and replaced writing letters. Did it reduce the volume of our communications? No, it has increased them because it has made communicating easier. Technology does not decrease the need for legal advice but opens up new possibilities and allows providing legal advice to be more efficient.

Yes, the fears around technology are understandable. By using bigger, better tools, there will be even more important, strategic decisions for us to make to further maximize our impact as in house lawyers. Technology presents opportunities for us to have a greater impact and engage in more exciting work that we enjoy doing together.

Let technology be your friend. If you are thoughtful in how you make use of it, technology will transform your team. Don’t let fear of the future get in the way of innovation now!