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Is your legal team set up for success in 2024? Let’s face it – expectations for your role aren’t the same as they were a decade ago; the scope of your job is steadily expanding, especially if you’re working in house. You're not just providing legal know-how, offering advice, or drafting contracts. Your team is an integral, strategic partner for your organization, with a focus on problem-solving and process improvement. 

Despite legal’s crucial role in decision-making, it’s usually one of the departments that’s most under-resourced. You’ve probably heard the term “do more with less” dozens of times in the past year. It can feel harder than ever to keep up when you’re working with tools and budgets that don’t cut it. Your to-do list isn't getting any shorter, and you face a constantly changing regulatory landscape. Staying compliant with new laws, navigating the world of artificial intelligence (AI), helping the business achieve lofty goals, and managing a myriad of other responsibilities – it’s not for the faint of heart. 

So, how will top-notch legal teams adapt and thrive in this changing landscape? We set out to find out. LinkSquares surveyed 387 legal professionals to discover their top priorities, challenges, and focus areas heading into 2024. 

In this forecast, we’re uncovering the common trends we saw and delving into the issues that will impact legal teams in 2024 and beyond. We’re taking a deep dive into what’s top of mind for legal professionals, their priorities, and the technology they’ll need to stay ahead of the curve.  

Key takeaways

1. Legal teams’ top priorities heading into 2024 range from cutting costs to scaling a team, implementing legal technology, fine-tuning legal reporting, and more. Increasing efficiency and optimizing contract management processes emerged as major focus areas to address these issues.

2. One in 4 legal professionals said data privacy and compliance is the topic they’re most interested in learning more about. Keeping up with evolving state regulations around data privacy is a chief concern, and legal teams are consistently seeking education around how to maintain compliance. 

3. Legal professionals are eager to learn how they can most effectively adopt AI, the potential risks of AI, and how it will impact their work. 

Legal Landscape: Delving into legal teams’ top priorities

Driving efficiency

One legal operations manager at a healthcare company said it best when asked for her legal team’s top priorities: “Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency.” It’s a common refrain we heard from countless legal leaders. They’re striving to optimize processes and accomplish more with limited resources. 

Streamlining workflows is a goal across the board – from CLOs to legal ops specialists and all the legal roles in between. When it comes to daily responsibilities like navigating tight contract deadlines, managing outside counsel, and fielding ad-hoc requests from the business, your legal team can’t afford to waste time. 

As a senior legal director at a 4,000-person company said, “We have challenges as the business has grown quickly and our processes have not kept up. We need more efficient ways of working.” But this need to develop more effective workflows isn’t limited to large companies. A general counsel at a 200-person company echoed this sentiment, saying his top priority was to “Decrease spend and increase efficiency.”

Whether you’re a legal department of three or 30, you need processes that eliminate cross-functional bottlenecks – especially when you’re working with a tight budget and only 24 hours in a day. 

Legal tech that can keep up

When you’re looking to optimize your team’s workflow, one of the first things to consider is which steps can be automated. Some tasks constitute strategic legal work and need to be combed through by an expert. On the other hand, not all manual tasks have to be manual. 

If you’re spending hours tracking down documents, navigating between disparate systems, and worrying that important renewal dates will fall through the cracks, it’s time to consider implementing legal technology to help. Doing more with less can be an uphill battle without the right tools. 

Technology that seamlessly fits into your team’s day-to-day work can help you perform faster without sacrificing quality. Switching between disconnected systems can waste precious time, and tools that keep legal siloed lead to process breakdowns. A one-size-fits-all solution may not work for your team in 2024.

With technology that’s purpose-built for legal, you’re able to move faster, make more time for strategic work, and avoid the hassle of forcing a general tool to fit your team’s unique needs.  

The days of the legal team being siloed from the rest of the business are over. For easy collaboration with other departments, invest in a legal tech stack that fosters this kind of cross-functional harmony. 

Efficiency essentials

Optimizing contract management

Optimizing contract management also emerged as a popular theme when legal teams were asked to describe their top priorities.  

Survey respondents emphasized the importance of a seamless and consistent contract management workflow and called out the need for quick contract execution, agreement organization, and a way to streamline internal contracting processes. Many legal teams are looking to speed up contract turnaround time, including one corporate counsel who described her team’s main priority as “Getting contracts executed quickly.” We also noted legal professionals looking to implement new workflows entirely, like a senior contracts manager who is working to “Revamp the contracting process.”

Contract workflows that work smarter, not harder

Internal playbooks that serve as a single source of truth are a must-have for legal teams in 2024. Legal professionals navigate complicated daily roadblocks, ranging from new regulatory changes to difficult negotiations. Your contracting processes don’t have to be as complex. When the flow from contract creation to review and ultimately signature is simple and communicated well, that means fewer headaches for stakeholders. 

When there’s no streamlined process or centralized place for executed agreements, things slow down. Drafting and negotiating takes longer, contracts get stuck, and you’re not able to quickly close deals. Besides, without easy visibility into what’s in your contracts, you leave your business at risk. Say a client has a data breach – you need to be able to access key contract information without spending hours poring through hundreds of agreements.      

A productive legal team is one that’s on the same page – they know where to access contract data when they need it, and they feel confident in the process of executing various types of agreements. Instead of getting bogged down with manual tasks, they’re empowered to work quickly and know nothing is falling through the cracks. 

Harnessing the actionable data in your CLM 

A key step towards optimizing contract management processes is using data to your advantage. In 2024, virtually any legal team that wants additional headcount, budget, or resources will need to internally justify that spend. Having actionable data at your fingertips is key to conveying your impact to the business and effectively advocating for your team. 

Your CLM is a treasure trove of metrics that can help you describe and improve the work you do. You’re able to quantify your workload, understand how quickly contracts are being executed, and report on the quantitative impact of your team. 

Not only that, these metrics are crucial to identify areas for improvement and help your team become more effective. You can identify overworked team members by analyzing the number of requests per person or use your total number of executed agreements to justify a new hire. 

Legal teams that use strategic key performance indicators (KPIs) in 2024 will have a competitive edge. Harnessing data makes the legal department a more strategic business partner for internal stakeholders and is key to a seat at the executive table. 

Contract management resources

2024 Roadmap: Legal’s path forward

Data privacy and compliance

Staying up to date on data privacy and compliance is crucial for legal teams in the next year. Of the legal professionals surveyed, 1 in 4 indicated it’s the topic they’re most interested in learning more about. And it’s no wonder why – the regulatory landscape is constantly evolving, with new data privacy laws being enacted each year. 

While the U.S. doesn’t have a comprehensive data privacy law, five states will have data privacy laws by the end of 2023: California, Virginia, Colorado, Utah, and Connecticut. This trend shows no signs of stopping in the next few years. Between 2024 and 2026, Indiana, Washington, Montana, and Tennessee will join the ranks with their own data privacy laws.  These new and increasingly strict regulations are enough to keep any in-house team on their toes. 

Staying ahead of the game

When asked for his legal team’s top priorities, one senior counsel at a software company said “Too many to name, but I’ll say that compliance is always top of mind.” 

How can you act now so you’re ready to react when laws change? Digging into your contracts is a great first step. Regular contract audits are key to keep an eye on your level of risk and identify agreements that need updates to ensure compliance. 

This doesn’t have to mean shuffling through old filing cabinets or searching through your inbox. Your CLM can automate manual activities like managing specific privacy clauses and identifying at-risk contracts. You can easily maintain a set of data-privacy specific language to keep your team consistent when they’re drafting new agreements. Plus, you can rely on AI to extract critical privacy language from signed contracts for you. 

Using technology to keep your finger on the pulse of your contract repository ensures you’re ready when new regulations are enacted. And it gives you peace of mind knowing you won’t be left scrambling. When the next regulatory change comes around, you’ll be able to surface and update agreements at the click of a mouse. 

Compliance is a team sport

It truly takes a village to ensure regulatory compliance. Before standing up a compliance program, meeting with internal stakeholders to understand how they approach situations like collecting user data is a best practice. These may include teams like IT, finance, engineering, product, and more. Each industry has unique regulations and best practices, but staying compliant in the rapidly-changing regulatory landscape requires cross-functional collaboration and alignment. 

Your compliance toolkit

Implications of AI

AI surfaced as another hot topic among respondents, who are eager to understand the most effective ways to use AI in accelerating and streamlining legal workflows. 

But it doesn’t end there – legal teams are also looking to delve into the potential business risks and ethical issues surrounding AI. Many are specifically looking to explore Generative AI more, including its incorporation into tasks like contract redlining and how advancements will more broadly impact the legal profession. 

Beyond the buzzwords

With so many emerging AI advancements and applications, it can be hard to cut through media sensationalism. There’s no lack of coverage around AI, but legal teams are still working to understand the long-term impact of AI on their profession. One senior counsel said she’s looking to learn more about “AI in the legal field – the ethics of it especially.”

The far-reaching effect of AI remains to be seen. But for now, those harnessing AI to accelerate their productivity and make time for more strategic work are emerging ahead of the curve. Staying curious and open-minded about how AI can fit into your processes may save you time, money, and headaches in the long run. 

Uncovering the risks of AI

The rapid advancement of AI brings up ethical and legal concerns including biases, potential copyright and privacy violations, and criminal use of AI. Generative AI in particular brings to light intellectual property questions as well as the potential for misinformation through false responses. That’s not to mention the emerging cybersecurity threats that come with AI and machine learning. 

These issues are (with good cause) top of mind for legal professionals going into 2024 as new proposed regulations emerge to combat them. The industry is just scratching the surface on the ways AI can go awry as well as the ways AI can make their lives easier.    

AI must-haves

Conclusion 

With constantly evolving regulations and technological advancements, your team has a lot on their plate heading into 2024. And there’s no extra time or resources to waste with inefficient workflows and bottlenecks. 

Top legal teams will constantly optimize processes so they can move their businesses forward faster. Being proactive is the name of the game, especially when it comes to ever-changing data privacy regulations and other laws. 

As sought after strategic business partners on top of everything else, you need technology that lets you work fast and make data-driven decisions. Harnessing AI built specifically for legal teams delivers the visibility and information you need to work smarter. And a legal tech stack that works for your unique needs and achieves a fast time to value is the path to long-term success. 

LinkSquares – your legal team’s secret weapon

If your team is working to drive efficiency, optimize contract management processes, streamline compliance, or harness AI this year, LinkSquares could be the game changer you need. With AI-powered technology that’s purpose-built for legal, LinkSquares can help you ditch manual processes and make time for more strategic legal work. 

End-to-end CLM and legal project management enables you to perform, manage, and quantify all your work in one place – connecting every corner of your business and freeing you up to be the strategic partners your company needs. 

Instead of operating across a patchwork of tools, you can seamlessly execute contracts, manage your workload, and report on your impact. AI-powered insights give you the data you need to make strategic decisions, and it’s easy to maintain language that keeps you compliant. 

But don’t just take our word for it – schedule a demo today to see firsthand how LinkSquares can level up your legal work.