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In a recent blog post, we discussed what is legal intake in the corporate law department. In today’s article, we look more closely at the benefits of legal intake for the legal team and legal operations professionals. Legal teams, generally, manage a variety of work. This includes contract negotiations and contract breaches (something manageable with contract lifecycle management); lawsuits from internal employees; patent infringement; copyrights and trademarks; engagement with vendors; and much more. Essentially, having an automated legal support system helps business stakeholders and the legal department be more efficient and productive. It also eliminates requests for legal support coming at in-house lawyers from all angles.
In this era of digital communications, there are likely five different ways someone can request help from an in-house lawyer, and none of them are consistently trackable. Companies use Teams, Slack, email, SMS, and hallway conversations to communicate. These communication methods put the legal team at risk of being unable to recall or record necessary conversations.
Before we go further, organizations have their vocabulary for digitized legal support. Some call it legal intake, while others describe it as work intake or legal work intake. Regardless, the process is the same – a system to field requests for legal support from business stakeholders. What are the benefits of legal intake that law departments can realize? Let’s explore 12 benefits of legal intake you should consider:
The goal of a cost center is to reduce costs. Costs, as every legal department knows, center around legal spend. Internal expenses like time management, administrative time and legal support for business units also show up as deductions against the cost center budget. Putting legal intake into play helps the legal operations team create a lean process. Lawyers’ time is reduced, and this helps the department save on costs in delivering services across the enterprise.
Selecting which metrics are valuable in measuring efficiency, productivity and performance in a legal department falls on analytics and reporting, which can be done well with an enterprise legal management solution. (The enterprise legal management platform enables dashboard customization, scorecards and advanced analytical reporting.)
Tracking legal support queries provides a breadth of measurement opportunities that include: • Knowledge of the type of issue• Total time to resolve an issue or matter• Whether an issue becomes a full matter• Which lawyer manages the highest number and type of support tickets• Which department generates the highest number of legal support requests• Whether outside counsel was hired and the associated budget• Cost per query ratio including a variety of factors and the effect on the budget
While everyone is human and can make mistakes, no one wants errors in the legal department, especially with legal intake requests. An automated system for queries from business stakeholders for legal support helps reduce the risk of errors and contributes to more accuracy in overall management of the issue or matter.
While bottlenecks may not be a formal obstruction to workflow, they are real. Various people can bottleneck a process, and until they are flagged to get additional support from the team, everyone suffers time intensity and lagging workflow. A manual intake process creates more bottlenecks in the legal department, while an automated legal intake process benefits the whole team with a streamlined workflow. An automated legal intake process helps with how and to whom work is assigned, and this benefits the entire in-house legal team by creating smoother communication, collaboration and efficiency.
Law departments functioning with enterprise legal management give business stakeholders the opportunity to self-serve legal support. The types of inbound queries to the legal team may not require management by a lawyer after all. As an example of a query perfect for self-serve support, those asking for a copy of the company’s NDA do not need a lawyer to provide it. Perhaps the NDA is accessible on the intranet, or it is compiled in the company’s policies and procedures. Those who inquire about simple legal questions can self-serve with AI legal assistants directing people to the source for their document requests. Based on the frequency and type of legal queries, the legal team can develop legal guides, ebooks and other suitable materials that help provide simple answers to legal questions.
Can anyone measure the hours it takes to communicate with a business stakeholder about their request for legal support? If there is confusion about the legal issue, additional time is needed to dissect the situation. If more legal expertise is needed, more lawyers must be assigned to issue resolution or outside counsel must be hired. Once the initial analysis is complete, only then can a lawyer jump in to resolve the issue. An automated legal intake system eliminates confusion upfront, allowing the lawyer to immediately resolve the issue or send it further into the queue as a matter.
It may seem far-fetched that the benefits of legal intake include talent recruitment but think of it this way: expediting legal support resolution may require fewer lawyers to resolve an issue. On the other hand, the data surrounding legal work intake may uncover that a certain business unit has more needs for legal support than before. This means more legal talent is needed in anticipation of future support. None of these strategic decisions are possible without data to drive them. Referencing the metrics above as a gauge, legal department leadership can utilize the data resulting from legal intake to make actionable decisions to scale the future of the law department.
A basic and important benefit of legal intake is to manage all requests through a single funnel that flows into a centralized intake system. This provides legal teams with the ability to manage intake requests more efficiently. Moreover, any request is trackable, and their status is more easily communicated. Some legal departments assign someone to triage requests, gauge importance and escalate an issue, should the need arise. Other teams configure a work intake system to designated legal team members.
Work intake automation delivers efficiencies around improved task management, more productivity and greater collaboration and communication. Law departments can save valuable time by utilizing a digital tracking system for inbound legal support queries. The advantages of an automated system over manual tracking of legal support queries are non-negotiable.
Without a legal intake system, the person managing inbound legal requests would need more time to collaborate with an in-house lawyer. A digitally automated intake system automatically transfers a request to an assigned lawyer for their management. Essentially, this removes a triage step and perhaps even a middle person.
Of course, faster communication with the in-house legal team delivers faster response times in managing a legal support query. Lawyers can track the status of the legal intake issue so that others in the department know where it is in the legal management queue. Delays in response time can also be reduced.
The law department gains elevated visibility with better measurement, data and analytics around the legal intake process. Analytical reporting can be created by the enterprise legal management dashboard and shared with legal department leadership. Where before, measurement of a manual intake process was inconceivable, now legal request automation makes a variety and depth of reporting possible.
To summarize, the many benefits of a legal intake system are valuable for the legal department, leadership and employees throughout the organization. Although general counsel may believe the legal department should be accessible to the organization (to build relationships) and may not wish to implement a work intake process, the benefits of legal intake should be considered and explored. Speak with a LexisNexis CounselLink representative about how your organization can realize the value of automated work intake.