For many legal operations leaders, year-end planning has become synonymous with last-minute strategy sessions and data scrambles. But forward-thinking departments are breaking that cycle. With LexisNexis®...
Editor's Note: For a comprehensive guide on contract lifecycle management, read Contract Lifecycle Management Overview . Review Enterprise Legal Management for Legal Departments to learn more about...
Corporate legal departments face rising demands while budgets stay flat. Manual invoice review consumes valuable time, invites billing errors and slows approvals. To address these challenges, LexisNexis®...
Editor's Note: For a thorough understanding of ELM software, review of Enterprise Legal Management for Corporate Law Departments and What Is ELM Software ? As a complement, review Contract Lifecycle...
Editor's Note: Become adept at the benefits of an enterprise legal management solution in your legal department. Learn more by reading Best Legal Spend Management Software Explained , 10 Essential...
* The views expressed in externally authored materials linked or published on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of LexisNexis Legal & Professional.
Legal departments require efficient workflow to ensure productive and streamlined work output. Which areas are positioned well for automation in a legal department? In this blog post, we explore several key steps in automating legal workflows and the role enterprise legal management plays in making efficient law departments.
Legal operations teams play a key role in identifying which areas of the legal department to automate into critical workflows. Appoint a legal operations professional to research, identify and analyze the repetitive, rules-based and time-consuming tasks. These can be pinpointed at the contract workflow to streamline tasks and repetitive processes associated with contract drafting and final execution.
If a manual process for contract execution requires input from three lawyers, department leadership and other business units one by one, look closely at how to automate that workflow to eliminate the manual steps and streamline how each interacts and approves with the document. The goal with this exercise is to prioritize processes that can offer immediate efficiency with automation.
Once a task is identified for automation, break the legal process down into smaller, singular steps. Add individual roles to the process, i.e., does the general counsel need to be involved? Look at the required inputs and expected outputs.
Secondly, key decision-points need the most attention, and this can be a turning point in conducting due diligence and discovery to mapping matter strategy. What are any dependencies that may impact workflow structure? And, finally, look at how a task is handed off from lawyer to lawyer to legal ops and back to the general counsel, for example.
In this key step in automating legal workflows, the right tools are critical. Legal operations professionals need to understand and consider enterprise legal management software, like LexisNexis CounselLink+, that can seamlessly integrate with existing systems.
Software should be evaluated based on the enterprise’s business goals and the goals of the law department. Look for tools that scale and include access to templates and clause libraries like LexisNexis® CounselLink+™ with LexisNexis Practical Guidance®. CounselLink+ provides access to the entire LexisNexis ecosystem. There are more than 200 contract templates and an approved clause library accessible to CounselLink+ users. Moreover, contracts integrate with matters from a single dashboard, permitting enhanced workflows and eliminating time to search for archived contracts.
Upon selecting the right software, one of the key steps in automating legal workflows, take the mapped and structured workflow and build it out within the chosen software. A legal operations professional can be tasked with this important step. They need to set up templates for document generation. We look at contract templates in this article because all contracts begin with the same basics and have similar clauses throughout. This type of process is ripe for automation.
Secondly, look at the rules needed for various document approvals and who is assigned to the respective tasks. Add actual names of individuals in the workflow, especially if tasks assigned are always theirs to complete.
Set up the automatic notifications and reminders for anyone involved in the workflow automation. Prior to customizing workflows, manual notifications based on a person’s accountability were the method used to inform others of tasks.
The most critical step in automating legal workflows is testing. The point person and a beta tester can collaborate on each key step developed to ensure accuracy, flow, response, timelines, and other factors that contribute to overall success of the automation. The testers look for errors or inefficient steps and also seek feedback from the beta test to improve the automation for future use.
Using workflows that benefit everyone, legal teams and legal ops teams alike, require communication, training and consistent checking on the status of the automation. Deploy the automation broadly across the legal department. Perhaps there is a new workflow for legal work intake. This requires other business units to be informed so everyone knows to use the automation.
Adoption is a critical step in automating legal workflows. If teams are unaware or decide not to use the workflow while others do, that creates bottlenecks and early chaos. Ensure that everyone critical to results and outcomes has access to the proper software, has adopted the software and it using it without errors. This ensures success down the road and adds to the value a legal department seeks.
The role of the “task master” in automating legal workflows is rarely completed, especially in the initial stages of introducing a new workflow in the law department. The legal operations professional appointed to the workflow creation needs to monitor progress and usage, maintain the quality and outcomes, ensure that goals are met with more timely workflow and refine the process if troubleshooting is required.
Performance metrics need to be set and reviewed. These may include error rates, time saved, project completion times, or other metrics. A feedback loop is a good way to evaluate the success of workflow automation because the people on the frontline using the new tool are the ones most critical of the technology.
Enterprise legal management software is critical to the law department. LexisNexis CounselLink+ is ELM software integrated with contract lifecycle management and other applications to manage matters, financials, vendors, work, and analytical reporting. Featuring AI-powered tools, CounselLink+ streamlines effective legal workflows with automated steps to promote collaboration, productivity, efficiency, and time management.
Customized dashboards enable users to design workflow automation, and legal operations professionals can also work with CounselLink Professional Services to design the custom dashboards. The analysts on the CounselLink Professional Services team can audit and identify areas for improvement and build the necessary software tools and scorecards to help with legal department tech maturity. These advancements also provide opportunity for more strategic decision making.
CounselLink+ legal department work automation is useful in contract management, matter management and billing systems and invoice review.
Learn more about how legal operations benefits from LexisNexis CounselLink+.
Implementing key steps in automating legal workflows requires various tasks, which include processes, structure, tools, configuration, testing, deployment, refinement, and maintenance.
A point person can be assigned to be accountable for the automation and to refine it with scalability and other tasks that need to be incorporated.
By following these steps, legal teams can streamline operations, reduce manual input, and achieve greater consistency and accuracy in legal service delivery.
Use of enterprise legal management software enables creation of automated legal workflow, consisting of refined steps featuring AI-powered software tools in LexisNexis CounselLink+.