eBook

5 Ways to Achieve Peak Productivity

Your team may be busy, but are you truly productive? Productivity is less about crossing tasks off your to-do list and more about efficiently achieving outcomes for the business. A productive team gets more done in less time without sacrificing quality. Learn five ways legal can increase productivity despite dwindling resources.

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Your team may be busy, but are you truly productive? Productivity is less about crossing tasks off your to-do list and more about efficiently achieving outcomes for the business. A productive team gets more done in less time without sacrificing quality. This is why changing individual behavior (e.g. practicing time management, working longer hours, and creating one-off kanban boards) doesn’t give you the productivity gains you were hoping for. To transform your entire team from busy to productive, be strategic about your time and optimize your processes — automate repeatable tasks, track your progress on internal matters, and use data to inform your decisions. Avoid the culture of busyness and set up your team for maximum impact. 5 Ways to Achieve Peak Productivity 2 www.linksquares.com Here are five ways legal can increase productivity despite dwindling resources.
Legal teams have always been busy, but whether or not they were productive is anyone’s guess. Without tracking your activity, it’s a constant struggle to report on the volume and value of your work. Tracking legal matters helps highlight areas of focus for your team and provides insight into overall performance, giving you a baseline for improving productivity. TRACK WHERE YOU’RE SPENDING TIME NUMBER 01 Doing this can also help you answer these four questions: Are you spending time in the right places? A huge component of productivity is wisely investing your time. Tracking legal matters helps you identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies, and whether the time spent on a matter is proportional to the value it drives. For example, does your team spend more time on admin tasks than contract review? Are you drafting contracts from scratch for every deal? How quickly do you address internal requests? This tells you if you’re spending your time on the high-value, strategic work or stuck in the minutia. Use dashboards to quickly visualize where your team is spending time. How is work spread across the team? Tracking how work is distributed across the team can help you curb burnout and equitably divide work. With a birds-eye view of each team member’s plate, you can better report on their performance and ensure the workload is evenly distributed across the team. This also provides insight into whether or not you need additional headcount and what kind of talent best supplements your team.
Where can you improve processes? Good processes are a staple of productive teams. For example, what legal tasks take the most time? Which ones take longer than they should? By now, you have a good idea of what work has the biggest impact and what inefficiencies may be slowing it down. Tracking how your team spends their time allows you to identify bottlenecks in your processes, determine the best way to address them, and consider how workflow automation tools can help.
While tracking legal matters tells you what issues have your team’s attention, setting and tracking performance goals shows how effectively they execute them. Setting goals can increase productivity by 25%, and writing them down makes you 42% more likely to achieve them. Establishing objective and key results (OKRs) for both the legal department and individual members enables in-house lawyers to be more intentional about how they use their time. Productivity metrics allow you to track your team’s workload, develop productivity standards, and measure how well you perform against your goals. Key productivity metrics Productivity metrics provide high-level and granular insight into your team’s productivity. Measuring productivity on both a team and individual level helps you identify what your team is doing well and what — or who — is struggling. Productivity metrics can show you how well your team members manage their workload, how long each person takes to finish specific tasks, and whether or not you need to increase headcount. SET AND TRACK PERFORMANCE GOALS NUMBER 02 Some key productivity metrics to track: How many agreements were finalized vs. executed each quarter? It’s important to know how many contracts the legal team works on during a given period of time. Compare that with the number of agreements executed and you’ll see the return on legal’s time investment and what that means for business revenue.
How many requests did your team receive? Your team is managing more than just contracts. How many requests does your legal team field within a quarter? This metric quantifies your team’s overall workload. You can drill down further to learn what types of requests are most popular, which teams make the most requests, and how long the requests take to fulfill. With this data, you can optimize your intake process to reflect the needs of your collaborators. How long did each request take to fulfill? Teams that experience a high volume of requests typically also experience high turnaround times. Having a solid benchmark for how long requests typically take to fulfill gives legal a strong starting point for shortening those turnaround times. How many projects did each team member manage? By knowing how many requests and projects each team member manages, you can closely monitor individual teammates’ work volume. Not only does this let you maintain even distribution across the team, but it also helps you to quickly identify when someone may be overworked. What part of the process took the longest? In addition to measuring how long it takes to manage requests and projects, legal teams should dig into which part of the process takes the longest. This helps you pinpoint bottlenecks within the process, brainstorm ways to remove them, and increase productivity. Protip: Track this metric team-wide as well as per lawyer.
For legal teams, cross-functional collaboration is essential to productivity. Studies have shown that “knowledge employees” (like finance, HR, and legal teams) can spend almost three hours a day gathering the data they need. When departments work in silos, legal spends valuable time requesting access to the data they need to make informed decisions. And if other teams don’t share legal’s standards for formatting and updating data, then legal has to spend even more time searching for relevant information and formatting it to fit within your systems. In addition to co-building processes and opening up communication channels, legal teams can drive productivity by collaborating with other functions in centralized tools. By sharing and integrating tools, businesses can build a single source of truth that gives each department access to the other’s data. This increases trust in data quality, reduces back and forth, and limits duplicate work that wastes time. COLLABORATE IN CENTRALIZED TOOLS NUMBER 03 Reduce back-and-forth For example, integrating legal’s CLM with sales’ CRM gives both teams centralized access to customer and deal data. Legal won’t need to check with sales to know what the deal terms are, and sales won’t need to bug legal for contract data to update Salesforce. Less back-and-forth means faster close times for business transactions.
Limit manual data entry Though each team has its preferred tools, make sure they’re working from the same data. Instead of entering the same data into multiple tools, integrate your software so an input in one system automatically updates across the integration ecosystem. This reduces the toll of manual data entry, saves precious time, and limits the risk of manual error. Build a single source of truth Integrating tools and key data sources empowers a single source of truth. By uniting crucial customer data from all stages of the funnel — including before and after the deal closes — each function and its leaders have immediate access to accurate numbers and can quickly and confidently make data-driven decisions. A collaborative environment can help teams to accomplish more with less effort. Sharing tools is a good way to foster collaboration and improve overall efficiency.
Managing contracts, legal intake, and compliance are all business-critical activities for the legal team. They also tend to be some of the most time-intensive and least effective processes within a business. Thankfully, legal teams have access to tools that automate tedious tasks. For example, CLM allows teams to streamline the contracting process. And AI can read, sort, and identify trends within large volumes of text. By introducing automation into your processes, you can create seamless workflows, eliminate repetitive tasks, and put time back in your day. According to Harvard Business Review, around 90% of workers agree that automation helps drive productivity, enables faster decision-making, and improves their accuracy. AUTOMATE MANUAL TASKS NUMBER 04 Legal intake and project management Manual legal intake and project management wastes your time and makes it easy for requests to fall through the cracks. Instead of allowing teams to make requests through multiple channels — email, Slack, Google Doc tag, etc. — consolidate all requests in a single tool. Using a single tool for legal intake and project management reduces the risk of requests falling through the cracks so you can work faster and get more done. Plus, it makes it easier to track your work and report on performance. Even better — adopt a legal project management tool that’s connected to your CLM. This way, you have all the context you need to complete all your tasks, from content review to agreement tasks and approvals.
Contract creation Creating a contract from scratch every time you need one is counterproductive. Spending just as much time on low-value contracts as you do on those generating revenue means your business is losing money and legal’s time isn’t optimally spent. Using templates to automate contract creation for standard and low-dollar agreements gives you more time to spend on more strategic initiatives. Contract review Contract review is the quintessential example of a crucial task that can take forever. AI helps improve legal’s productivity by taking the first pass at contract review. AI can identify trends and flag inconsistencies, pointing legal to the exact area that needs your attention. This frees up your time for more impactful work. Automating legal processes increases your team’s capacity. It delivers a much-needed productivity boost by allocating their time to work that drives revenue. A comprehensive tech stack helps make this happen.
With the right tools, legal teams can execute tasks more accurately and in half the time. Good technology supplements legal’s efforts, making you more productive even with a lower headcount. An ideal tech stack includes tools that integrate well with others so legal departments can collaborate and access data across functions. This gives you access to all the data you need to move through your tasks with ease. While CLM tools are often the first step a legal team takes when building out their tech stack, in-house legal teams are working on more than just contracts. What about all the rest of the work you do every day? This is where legal project management tools come in. An essential part of the modern legal team’s tech stack, legal project management tools help you centralize intake, associate tasks with contracts, automate workflows, and track metrics. CREATE A TECH STACK THAT HELPS YOU GET MORE DONE NUMBER 05 Centralize your workload While a one-size-fits-all project management tool generally helps teams get organized, it can have the opposite effect if it isn’t connected to other systems the legal team is using. To be effective, task management tools need to provide proper context — e.g what contracts and other legal matters are associated with a given task. This reduces the chances of crucial tasks falling through the cracks.
Automate intake A good project management tool should also help automate your intake process. Instead of sifting through emails, messages, and notebooks to find requests, take that manual work off your plate and let business stakeholders submit requests through a form for your team to review and process in real-time. LinkSquares Prioritize is built specifically for legal teams so you can spend less time customizing tools to your workflows. Tasks are categorized into common legal use cases like compliance, contracts, and IP, and requesters can submit information like impacted revenue to help you prioritize requests.
TAKEAWAYS Achieving productivity can seem like a pipe dream, but with the right tools, processes, and people in place, your team can get more done with less. The key is to start paying attention to what legal matters come through your department, how quickly you address them, how your tools enable collaboration, and how you measure success. LinkSquares Prioritize is an intake and project management solution built to centralize an in-house legal team’s workload — empowering you to create, manage, and track all tasks in one place. See how LinkSquares Prioritize can help you boost your team’s productivity – request a demo today.