Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as the famous science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke noted. The transformation of the legal function depends heavily on technology. However, it depends on how well Legal’s operational strategy is implemented, including how people, procedures, technology, and data will all contribute to its success. Legal functions increasingly recognise the vast amount of under or untapped data they possess and are aware that using technology is the only way to gain insightful knowledge.
Benefits of Using Technology for Legal Operations
The apparent advantages of technology for legal and business include, but go beyond, better risk management, increased efficiency due to cost and time savings, a decrease in human error, and the avoidance of fines and penalties by adhering to filing and licence requirements deadlines. Compliance with regulatory requirements is traceable, trackable, and auditable to show a strong compliance framework. The primary goal of legal is to detect and manage major legal issues, therefore technology also frees up resources that may be put to use in this regard.
1. Leveraging Data
Legal departments have a lot of data for their perusal. Technology may transform the perspective of legal from a cost centre to a business partner by organising data sets, enhancing their visibility, and sharing them across the enterprise. While analytics carried out in contract management tooling enable Legal to review contract clauses, manage the renewal of contracts with harmonised clauses that optimise the performance of the contract for the organisation, and eliminate expired contracts, insights derived from an entity management solution, for example, may offer the opportunity to streamline the corporate structure. By managing it digitally, legal is also better able to protect, administer, and profit from the company’s intellectual property.
2. Transparency in Operations
Technology increases transparency into Legal’s operations by enabling key performance indicator (KPI) reporting to the C-suite and facilitating the extraction of valuable business insights from the data at hand, such as by using AI-derived insights to determine what factors result in contracts that perform best from a business perspective. Legal can provide sound advice at the outset of the process rather than just formalising the contract, responding when things go wrong, or erecting barriers as a way of reducing risks thanks to its capacity to be sufficiently close to operations to comprehend business objectives. The effectiveness of the organization’s contracts and risk management are maximised in this way.
3. Value Addition
In order to deliver high-quality strategic advice, whether it relates to a contract, M&A transaction, or litigation, lawyers must understand the outputs of a process, offer strategy counsel, and uncover nuances. It is possible to concentrate on higher-value strategic and creative work, such as legal risk management, for which in-house lawyers are skilled and which, for the foreseeable future, cannot be performed by a computer, by reducing low-value chores that in the past took up to 80% of their time. Technology enables these attorneys to be more responsive to operational changes as they arise, ensuring that Legal is constantly in line with the objectives of their internal clients.
Conclusion
Through dashboards and heat maps, technology gives the organisation visibility into the services being offered, demonstrating the value that Legal is bringing and doing away with subjective judgement. With the help of this information, Legal can identify and enhance areas that need improvement as well as provide the C-suite with objective KPIs that show how the department is doing. The enhanced personalization of legal solutions that are pertinent to the organisation is encouraged by this quantitative performance.