In-House Counsel

Modern General Counsel: Technology Is A Must

The days of a GC staying blissfully ignorant of technology are gone.

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“Imagine you just got a new job as a general counsel at an exciting, growing company. Besides your competence and years of experience, what one other skill would you most want to bring to the new job?” asks my fellow lawyer friend. 

“Easy. Fluency with technology is a must,” I blurt without hesitation. And thank God, she had assumed my competence, I thought. While leadership, experience, business acumen, EQ, and numerous other skills are a must, technology literacy is more important than ever to manage a company’s delivery of legal services. Below are some must-have technologies for every modern general counsel. 

Contract Management System

Every legal department needs a way to automate contracting. “You should consider contract management tools that allow real-time collaboration for contract management systems in a meaningful and easy-to-follow way,” says Lilian Caldeira, CEO and Co-Founder, Parley Pro. She explains, “If you can automate contract approval, manage contracts, capture insights, and empower all stakeholders from management down to individual contributors to participate, you will also find that the relationships with your co-workers and peers improve significantly. They will feel included and heard. And yes, your contract productivity will increase too.”

Stephanie Corey, the co-founder of UpLevel Ops and the co-founder of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) says “How far you’ll want to go with contracting tools depends on your needs and budget. We typically steer most legal departments away from the complex and often clunky contract lifecycle management tools in favor of more nimble SaaS-based contracting tools. They’re cheaper and easier to implement, and frankly, meet most of the team’s requirements without the bells and whistles.”  

“Contracts are really just another form of assets that need to be created and managed over their lifecycles,” says Roman Kisin, CTO and Co-Founder, Parley Pro. He adds, “If you improve visibility and control over your contracts with automation and workflow tools, you can substantially increase your effectiveness and efficiency. Automating routine tasks will also accelerate the contract cycle.” 

eBilling & Matter Management 

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According to Colin McCarthy, Legal Operations Analyst at Twitter, “Matter management and eBilling systems are a great benefit to a legal department and general counsel. Having a source of truth to capture data points for every matter invoice, a law firm essentially allows the general counsel to manage budgets, better manage risk and make hiring decisions.” Corey also observes, “eBilling will allow legal departments to capture metrics around all the work outside counsel is doing.”  

Automated Intake & Workflows

Corey says, “One of the most interesting trends I’m seeing is a move by legal departments towards self-help tools. Thanks to improvements in technology around automated intake, workflows, and even chatbots and RPA (robotic process automation), legal departments can now use easy technology to triage much of the work coming onto their plates.” 

She continues, “It allows for a couple of things: clients getting the information they need without picking up the phone or sending an email (such as training, templates, policies, FAQs, etc.), efficient routing of work (the right people focusing on the right tasks), reduction of unnecessary email traffic, and the ability to track and report on requests. It gets general counsels and legal ops professionals as close to internal matter management as possible without requiring attorneys to log internal matters or their time.”

Dashboard Reporting

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Now that so many departments have their foundational tools in place, their next task is to find ways to streamline reporting. McCarthy says, “Dashboard technology is another must for a general counsel. These dashboards are highly configurable and link up seamlessly with Matter Management and Contract Management systems along with analytics and other measurement tools.” He adds, “Reporting functions run deep and are accompanied by easy to interpret visuals that make it easy for the general counsel to make speedy and accurate decisions. Again, the dashboard works like a command center for the general counsel.”

Of course, you must test-drive dashboard reporting to make sure it meets your particular needs. Corey says, “Unfortunately, I haven’t found a lot of simple off-the-shelf options for consolidated dashboard reporting. So, we built our own dashboard reporting tool that connects all the legal department’s various systems.”

Olga V. Mack is an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor at Berkeley Law, and entrepreneur. Olga founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to serve on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. Olga also co-founded SunLawto prepare women in-house attorneys become general counsel and legal leaders and WISE to help women law firm partners become rainmakers. She embraces the current disruption to the legal profession. Olga loves this change and is dedicated to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and inclusive than before. You can email Olga at olga@olgamack.com or follow her on Twitter @olgavmack.

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