Choosing The Right Tool For Legal Project Management
Behind every competitive business lies a tireless (or sometimes very tired) legal team, managing countless company-wide requests on top of an already heavy workload. Sales needs legal to finalize a complex contract to close a deal, while HR depends on them for employee contracts, and the product team relies on them for data compliance insight… the list goes on.
Having a reliable tech stack and confidence in the systems your team uses daily can make or break your efficiency and ability to manage stakeholder requests in addition to your recurring tasks and strategic initiatives.
Chances are, you’ve used project management or productivity tools like Asana, Jira, Zendesk, Monday.com, and Excel in your career, though none of them are built for your specific needs as a legal team. Some of you may even be using all of these tools at once as you work cross-functionally with teams like marketing, product, and procurement.
In this guide, we’ll help you choose the perfect tool for your legal team. From basic to advanced, we’ll dive into what they offer an in-house legal team, so you can make an informed decision that’ll level up your work.
First up: Manual project management.
Manual Project Management
Manual project management is possible, though not advised. With a combination of disparate tools — email, post-it notes, whiteboard diagramming, etc. — legal can duct tape a project management experience together. Still, this won’t work well for growing teams that want to compete in the modern business landscape.
Manual project management makes it too easy for important tasks to fall through the cracks. That is, requests can get lost in your inbox, someone can accidentally erase the task list on your whiteboard, and there’s no way to get a data-based overview of how efficiently your team performs assigned tasks.
Excel / Google Sheets
Many legal teams depend on Excel for project and project management. Excel is one of the most versatile tools and can be jerry-rigged to fulfill all kinds of functions. While Excel can complete complicated calculations, enable data entry, and keep track of project schedules, it takes quite a bit of work to get it right if you’re not an Excel expert.
How Legal Can Use Excel/Google Sheets
Excel can get a lot done if you know how to use it. A jack of all trades, Excel can be used to create a list of tasks, prepare a budget, and track a project from start to finish. Teams comfortable with using Excel can create charts, graphs, and even Gantt charts to get an overview of project schedules.
While Excel is a powerful tool that has its place, it is not built to manage intake. Therefore, intake must be handled separately and often in a manual way. Requests that come in through email, Slack, or phone calls must be manually entered into Excel for tracking. Ultimately, Excel works best for extremely small teams who need a free tool without all the bells and whistles.
A step up from manual project management is an intake platform, such as the well-known Zendesk. Although these help manage requests from multiple sources, there are certain factors to consider before taking these on for your legal team.
Intake Platforms
Zendesk
A popular tool among support and IT teams, Zendesk helps businesses improve digital customer service by managing internal and external requests. Legal teams can reappropriate Zendesk within their processes to improve ticketing and collaboration.
How Legal Can Use Zendesk
Zendesk can help legal manage ticketing, intake, and requests. Since legal works with and delivers value to basically every department, legal has a major hand in providing exceptional customer experience to clients and internal collaborators. Zendesk gives legal the tools through its ticketing system to fulfill contract requests, document reviews, and compliance questions from other business functions.
Zendesk has routing capabilities that allow users to assign tasks to team members. The platform allows users to assign tasks and prioritize specific duties based on what the business needs.
Zendesk integrates with many apps for collaboration, reporting, and project management to help businesses get more done in less time. Users can also send Slack messages and emails within a ticket, allowing them to reference the context of any particular task or issue. That said, fully integrating Zendesk with your legal team’s contract lifecycle management (CLM) solution can be a lengthy project to take on. 6
Their pricing options cater to a range of team sizes and use cases. Zendesk offers a free trial for teams who want to take it out for a test drive.
Intake is just one piece of the puzzle. Even with an intake platform, legal teams often turn to another system to manage large scale projects, and yet another tool to draft and review contracts. If you’re looking for something with a bit more breadth than an intake platform, diving into the world of project management tools might be the best move. These allow you to manage projects at a high-level while also organizing the everyday minutia.
Project Management Tools
Monday.com
Monday.com is a popular project management tool that allows teams to build and customize workflows based on team structure and needs.
Monday.com is easy to use and like Zendesk, Monday.com has dashboards for reporting and analytics, integrates with various SaaS tools, and allows teams to streamline and prioritize incoming requests. The main difference is that Zendesk focuses on intake and customer service, whereas Monday.com is suited for internal project management.
How Legal Can Use Monday.com
Legal teams can use Monday.com to map and execute internal processes. Users can configure a form to receive requests, turn them into tasks, and automatically assign them. You can also use logic to build workflows and route tasks to the responsible stakeholder. Monday.com is useful for systematizing internal processes to keep a project running smoothly.
Monday.com comes with customizable workflow templates that can display different views for your projects right out of the box. You can be as high-level or granular as the project requires.
Dashboards show things like team performance metrics and status overviews and priorities, allowing legal project managers to see common issue types and bottlenecks, giving them all the data they need to make impactful process changes.
Asana
Asana is a project management and workflow automation tool most similar to Monday.com. The two products include similar features — including timelines, workflow automation, intake request forms, and task assignment.
How Legal Can Use Asana
The Goals feature in Asana can be useful for legal teams to track and report on different objectives for annual planning and maintaining organizational alignment. Asana allows users to ladder sub-goals back up to wider company goals and associate specific tasks with particular outcomes. Legal teams can set objectives, key results (OKRs), and important milestones and measure their progress in achieving them.
Asana can be used for internal collaboration but also has settings that allow you to share your boards with external stakeholders like outside counsel and alternative legal service providers (ALSPs). By sharing your boards, you remove the need to go back and forth between tools to manually keep projects and to-do list items on track.
Asana also allows legal to track team performance and manage workloads. Using this tool, you can build your workflows to automatically assign certain tasks to certain team members. Then, you can check in regularly to ensure you’re not overburdening your team and reassign tasks to balance out the workload when necessary. 9
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Jira
Part of the Atlassian suite of products, Jira was purpose-built for Agile software developers but can be used for legal intake and project management. As it was not built for legal, legal teams may need to make alternations to suit their needs.
How Legal Can Use Jira
Jira is built for the Agile methodology, a project management philosophy intended for software developers to break up their work into manageable phases.
Like some of the other tools, Jira allows teams to create roadmaps for long-term initiatives (called “Epics”) and the short-term projects that ladder up to them. Jira also has templates that help legal teams manage their internal processes — like budgeting, IP infringement, policy management, and others.
Even popular project management tools can fall short when it comes to legal’s specific needs. Something as simple as non-legal nomenclature as the standard in your typical project management software can cause an extra layer of frustration and inefficiency.
When project management tools just aren’t cutting it, it’s time to consider the crème de la crème of legal tools: legal project management.
Legal Project Management
While general project management tools weren’t built specifically for legal teams, they can do the job in a pinch. Legal project management, on the other hand, is built specifically to manage the legal workload.
With a legal project management tool, you can create repeatable workflows to take the manual effort out of time-consuming or recurring legal projects like litigation, corporate governance, or board management — all while ensuring a consistent quality of legal output.
LinkSquares Prioritize
LinkSquares Prioritize is purpose-built for legal intake and project management. It has everything you need to manage intake, contract requests, and all your legal priorities — all while staying connected to your CLM.
With contract creation and review being two of the most commonly requested legal tasks — and managing legal risk being one of the more time-consuming ones — having CLM and legal task management in one tool gives legal teams a leg up on productivity and efficiency.
How Legal can use LinkSquares Prioritize
LinkSquares Prioritize empowers legal teams to automate legal intake and track requests from across the business in real time for quick review. With a bird’s eye view of everything on your team’s plate, you can monitor workload, assign out work, and understand what is getting done and by whom.
Legal team members can add new items to their existing to dos and requests, assign them to the right team member, view related documents, and flag the high-priority work to keep things moving.
Since Prioritize is integrated with the LinkSquares CLM, contract tasks and approvals automatically push to Prioritize fast and efficient legal review.
And with dashboards and reporting in Prioritize, legal leaders can monitor workload and quickly visualize and report on their team’s impact to the business.
Which Tool Is Right for You?
While manual project management is a low-cost and familiar process for many legal teams, it is often not a scalable solution for the modern in-house legal team. As teams outgrow manual processes, implementing a general project management tool may seem easy at first due to its accessibility. Tools like Asana and Monday are often purchased on an enterprise level and used by teams across a business. But this presents a few challenges.
For one, general-purpose tools do not always meet the unique needs of a legal team. While they can help automate the intake process, teams can find themselves still working across multiple tools — managing agreement tasks in their CLM and others in their project management tool. Those with development resources may decide to integrate their project management tool with their CLM to streamline this process. However, this would entail extra expenses and allocation of resources.
An enterprise-wide tool can also come with permissions concerns for some legal teams, specifically that sensitive or privileged information could be accessed by other teams.
Unlike a typical project task management tool, LinkSquares Prioritize is built with legal in mind. It has everything you need to manage intake alongside your other projects and priorities all while staying connected to your CLM. Choosing the right tool is crucial for team efficiency and productivity. Centralizing legal project management and contract management ensures that your team has all the context it needs for any task at any time.
See how LinkSquares can give your company a competitive advantage. Request a demo today.