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A Tech Adoption Guide for Lawyers

in partnership with Legal Tech Publishing

Legal Operations, Member Content

How Legal Ops Should Leverage Existing Tech Tools During COVID-19

The coronavirus pandemic has forced companies, including legal departments and Legal Operations teams, to rapidly pivot to new ways of doing things that they hadn't contemplated previously. Or had not expected to arrive with such suddenness and global economic impact.

In a 1959 speech, John F. Kennedy gave us a quote that absolutely rings true today: “The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’  One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger – but recognize the opportunity.”

As developments have made abundantly clear, the coronavirus pandemic has forced companies, including legal departments and Legal Operations teams, to rapidly pivot to new ways of doing things that they hadn’t contemplated previously.  Or had not expected to arrive with such suddenness and global economic impact.

For some, that may drive them toward adopting new technologies to cope with those impacts. The data storage and the business communication systems sectors have been beneficiaries, for instance, as companies find they’ve got to empower collaboration among remote workforces.

But overcoming disruption, especially when it strikes so suddenly, is also a matter of recognizing opportunities.  One of those? It’s a chance for Legal Operations teams and legal departments to use their existing technologies in smart, innovative ways to respond to this crisis.

A forced evolution

As I heard one Business Transformation Manager at a recent online conference remark about the consequences of the pandemic, “our hand’s been forced” by the outbreak; his organization had suddenly developed “an increased appetite” for new solutions to overcome operational risks and obstacles.

That’s the thing about human nature in a crisis: It forces us to, even reluctantly, open ourselves up to options we hadn’t considered before…or had rejected, for whatever reasons.  As I mentioned, this might lead to new technology adoption.  But in the case of this particular client, the technology to solve their challenges was already in place; it was a matter of adapting an existing tool to meet the need and then evangelizing the solution to others across the organization.  Who were now far more open-minded about new alternatives and approaches.

For Legal Ops teams, there may be assets and technologies you may already have in place that can be marshaled to meet the demands of disruption. That, in fact, should be the very first step in developing tech-based solutions to these hurdles: Conduct a thorough inventory of your existing tech stack and data resources so you understand what arrows you already have in your quiver.  Once you’ve done that, you can begin brainstorming new ways to utilize them, before plugging any gaps with new tech acquisitions.

Putting data to work

As Legal Ops expert Brian McGovern regularly explains at industry conferences? Legal departments have, over the years, assembled an enormous trove of data that can be used for a wide variety of business purposes.  The problem, very often, isn’t about obtaining data; it’s understanding what you already own and then subjecting it to proper analysis.

What are a few of the benefits that analysis can help deliver? It can be used to optimize internal processes so they become more efficient and responsive at a time when it’s crucially important; it can help in assigning matters to those attorneys most experienced or most likely to achieve a successful outcome, and gauge the efficiency and performance of outside counsel and other service providers, especially when weighed against cost.

That’s only the start.  So identifying, organizing, and analyzing your existing data resources is a key means of putting existing assets to work in ways you might not have imagined previously or had recognized but shelved for later.  If this isn’t the moment to take that plunge, what is?

Reprogramming your processes

The processes and procedures that clicked along nicely during more settled times are probably not up to the task of dealing with newly remote staff and entirely electronic collaboration. Remember the Business Transformation Manager I quoted above whose organization had been forced to embrace new ideas? His team didn’t rush out and purchase a new addition to his stack. Instead, it developed fresh processes to solve immediate, COVID-19-related business problems using its existing workflow automation solution.

Workflow automation has seen a lot of adoption within corporate legal departments since it enables efficiency, accuracy, speed, and reduced costs even under ordinary conditions. The best solutions add another vital benefit: agility, thanks to their ease of use in designing and deploying new workflows that can be tailored to automate rote processes, enhance remote collaboration around more hands-on projects, provide secure approvals, and automatically archive processes for retrieval later.

If Legal Ops has already got one of these solutions in place, featuring the customizability and intuitiveness that permits this kind of agility, it’s in a good position to develop processes suited to the present dynamic and to maintaining business continuity at a time when that’s paramount.  Some legal workflow automation providers decided, early on, to supply their customers (and even non-customers) with workflow templates expressly designed to meet COVID-19 needs.

Manage the situation before it manages you

A legal department without an enterprise legal management (ELM) platform capable of supporting matter management, contract lifecycle management, intellectual property management, e-billing, and more?  Right now, they may feel they’re falling behind a curve – or more, properly, a tidal wave of change – that’s drawing further and further ahead to the point they’ll never catch up.

Contractual relationships alone are already generating a rush of work, as force majeure discussions are more frequent, and legal departments need to be able to quickly add, revise, and enforce clauses to account for performance impacts and liability limits that are being necessitated by the pandemic.

Thus, traditional ways of doing things have abruptly been left in the dust by COVID-19; paper-based processes are DOA, frankly, in the era of the work-from-home workforce.  Invoices, contracts, trademarks, discovery documents and more now must be managed using secure digital tools, and the work must be transparent to management and tracked and recorded diligently, never mind the fact the legal staff may be involuntarily scattered.

If your legal department has already adopted ELM, it’s now a matter of Legal Ops making the most of it, and shifting as much of those outmoded operations over to your platform ASAP.  If there are objections from some corners, then demonstrate the advantages of complete digitization in cost savings, speed, accountability and reporting, and, most of all? Remind them of the simple need to survive these very uncertain times, especially when the end isn’t yet in sight.


Steven O’Donnell is Mitratech’s Head of Product Marketing for Legal Operations.  Steven originally came from Progressive Insurance where he spent 15 years as a product and market analyst.  Steven joined Mitratech in 2011 and leads our company efforts around creating content for legal operations. A frequent speaker at Mitratech events, Steven spends considerable time researching the market and technology trends to understand how our products can address legal department challenges.