The crucial inquiries for measuring your legal team’s technological maturity
This write-up was initially published in Legal Dive.
As your corporate legal division navigates its way via this era of financial uncertainty, assessing your team’s technological maturity should really be at the major of your priority list.
Sophisticated technologies can assist you lessen expenses, make improved strategic choices, and drive worth for your organization when it is required the most.
But how do you measure if your division is technologically mature? It requires much more than just operating an inventory of your tools, assessing their age, and monitoring their use.
You need to have to dig in and analyze your solutions’ capabilities to see if they meet your requirements. If not, it might be time to grow to be much more mature.
Right here are 4 inquiries you might not have believed to ask when measuring your legal team’s technological maturity.
How you answer these inquiries will ascertain your maturity level and assist you get started preparing the subsequent measures in your technologies journey.
1. Does your technologies assist you prioritize and tackle threat?
Every single legal matter, no matter how straightforward or complicated, carries with it a degree of threat to your organization.
Price and price range overruns are substantial dangers that can severely effect your organization and your legal department’s standing inside the organization. You actually can’t afford to go into matters blind.
You can mitigate this challenge by focusing your efforts on the most significant regions of threat to your organization. Your technologies should really be in a position to assist.
Today’s legal tools can present transparency so you can fully grasp if the operate getting carried out by your internal legal group and outdoors counsel is in proportion to exactly where threat lives in your matters.
This aids your law division defend your organization from excess or unnecessary expenses and show higher worth to your organization.
two. Do you on a regular basis solicit and assess feedback about your technology’s overall performance and examine it to your objectives?
Legal technologies should really be a extended-term investment that grows and evolves with your organization’s requirements.
If your technologies is not meeting these requirements, it could be time to reassess its worth to your organization.
A single of the very best approaches to gauge if your technologies investments are delivering worth is by on a regular basis soliciting feedback from the people today who use the tools.
The technologies customers can inform you no matter whether a answer is performing effectively and meeting their requirements or failing to assist them attain their objectives.
A excellent rule of thumb is to carry out these assessments annually.
Assessments should really be viewed in the context of your organization objectives and compared to your roadmap to make sure that your plans nonetheless make sense.
Assessments also enable you to address any lagging overall performance challenges ahead of they get started to drag your organization down.
three. Do you have a systematic and effectively-defined method to transform management?
How you manage the introduction of new technologies in your legal division can make or break the technology’s adoption and effectiveness.
If customers are not comfy with the technologies ahead of it is introduced or they fail to fully grasp its advantages, usage will probably be low and your investment will not spend off.
The most technologically mature legal departments have systematic and effectively-defined approaches to managing technological transform.
They have a program in location and anytime new tools are introduced, they execute that program to the letter, the similar way just about every time.
They train customers on the technologies and ask for their feedback, communicate the advantages early and generally, and continue to assist group members grow to be comfy with the tools extended right after the initial roll-out.
A transform management program signals that organizations fully grasp how to handle and message transform. These organizations are much more probably to discover good results in adopting and gaining worth from new technologies.
four. Does your technologies track diversity information?
Functioning with diverse outdoors counsel brings fresh perspectives, concepts, and improved outcomes. Hence, measuring the diversity of your law firms is vital.
Sophisticated legal technologies includes diversity modules that automatically track the diversity information of legal service providers.
They make it uncomplicated to track if firms are assigning diverse teams to your matters, are diverse in their timekeeper roles, and if they are committed to advertising and hiring diverse employees.
With this information in hand, you can act and have proactive discussions with outdoors counsel to make sure that your law firms are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&I).
Concluding thoughts
As the winds of financial transform continue to blow, use this time as an chance to feel about exactly where your corporate legal division is on the technologies maturity scale and adjust as essential.
The appropriate technologies can assist your group lessen devote, acquire efficiency and drive improved organization worth.
