As technology continues to evolve beyond many of our wildest expectations, legal teams are running leaner than ever. Burnout is at an all-time high, with Lexology reporting that “Legal staff are much more likely to say they’re affected by understaffing or lack of resources” in 2023 compared to previous years. More than 54% of legal staff ranked “understaffing or lack of resources” as a top contributing factor to their stress in the past year, even surpassing the notorious, more expected “demand or pressure from clients” category. To top it all off, privacy concerns, constant regulatory changes, and no streamlined way to manage various requests from teams across the business add extra layers of stress and strain on legal.
Juggling limited headcount, resources, and regulatory upkeep is aggravated by the lack of a centralized process, impactful task management options, and a single source of truth. Without the right tools – like contract lifecycle management (CLM) and legal task management solutions – modern-day legal teams suffer further. They lose hundreds of hours to time-consuming manual processes, lack of visibility, clunky reporting, and an overwhelming number of requests from others.
Non-contract-related requests flood legal’s inbox on a daily basis. IT and data security teams, HR teams, and marketing departments are no strangers to leaning on legal teams. Inefficient visibility into both your tasks and those that your team is working on is a slippery slope, often leading to even less efficient tracking methods (like paper to-do lists and spreadsheets), becoming a full-time job to manage disparate systems with no sense of task management and prioritization.
One scalable solution to manage all legal’s needs is the way of the future, ideally combining CLM and centralized task management all in one place. But not all legal tech solutions are created equal – and few are built specifically based on the language and needs of legal teams.
In this guide, we’ll cover the four pillars of sustainable and centralized legal work to keep in mind when consolidating all legal’s projects in one place with the help of contract lifecycle management and centralized task management built for legal. Identifying your pain points and focusing on these pillars will help you create a strong, lasting foundation and set you on the road to reclaiming your time.
Pillar #1: Customize and automate
According to Gartner, general counsels will spend 100% more time in 2023 managing business disruptions going forward than they did pre-pandemic. They recommend “disruption response services,” which involve identifying a disruption and deciding whether or not to allocate already limited resources to it.
Putting out fires is arduous enough. Add inefficient workflows, disparate systems, and inconsistent contract language, and you have a recipe for even more time lost…not to mention severe compliance risk and issues. It’s common for must-do daily tasks like contract review and task intake to get lost in the shuffle. The time it takes to draft, review, and negotiate contracts without a streamlined process and centralized repository not only monopolizes your time – it’s the antithesis of closing deals faster.
Similarly, manually tracking assignments from business stakeholders leads to a host of issues. Consider the following series of requests in just one day for a small legal team:
8 AM: The marketing department sends you a Slack message asking for your review of the language they’re using to promote a raffle with some top-dollar prizes.
11 AM: You receive an email with questions from the finance team about payment terms with a specific vendor.
12:30 PM: You and your colleague realize you’ve been fielding the same requests all morning, but separately. Because you each had your own way of tracking these projects, you spend the next 45 minutes combining your spreadsheets into one, kind of accurate, incredibly manual task tracker.
2 PM: You’ve forgotten to eat lunch, jump on an emergency call for the next hour with HR about a personnel problem, and wonder if you’ll ever be able to focus on high-value, strategic work ever again.
4:30 PM: Your current position is a puddle of despair, draped along your desk in your home office. You spend the next four hours trying to organize all the other tasks you’ve missed, the time-sensitive contracts that need review, and keep refreshing your inbox hoping the four-digit number will miraculously decrease. Somehow.
Without the right technology in place, even basic task management and searches within contracts become laborious assignments. Look for solutions with industry-best advanced optical character recognition (OCR) capabilities that comb through and accurately convert scanned PDFs to searchable text, as well as homegrown, custom-built artificial intelligence (AI) trained to support legal teams’ specific needs and free them up from manual tasks so they can focus on more complex, strategic work. Even better, look for a solution with a human-in-the-loop (HITL) QA process – because machines are only so accurate, as we well know.
Beware of cookie-cutter CLM options with limited customization capabilities. It’s important to work closely with a designated customer success manager (CSM) to ensure any future customizations you need can be developed as you further streamline your processes. Ideally, you’ll want to explore task management tools that integrate along with a CLM, avoiding any future data discrepancies or reporting limitations.
Pillar #2: Remove data silos
As Sherlock Holmes famously said, “Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay.”
What Holmes’ quote doesn’t reflect is that even with successfully made bricks, cross-functional teams may be building houses differently if they’re not working from the same blueprint.
Legal teams work across all aspects of the business, often impacting sales, finance/procurement, customer success, and the C-suite. While data is certainly king, examining cross-functional teams’ silos is a frequently skipped but crucial step. Without a unified approach – often thanks to multiple sources and disparate systems – different teams may be collecting inconsistent, duplicated, or incorrectly analyzed data.
Even if each department is using the same system, they may be operating under non-standardized collection practices. Finance may have a different method than legal, and sales may have no method to speak of. It becomes increasingly difficult to track overall company progress when each team is operating in an echo chamber of its own analysis.
Lack of communication and unification about how each department collects data leads to data analysis flaws and opens up the floodgates to interpersonal issues and misunderstandings, too. Sometimes, visibility into other teams’ methods is so limited it leads to financial risks for the organization, including stalled and lost deals.
Within your own legal team, the opposite problem can occur when it comes to tracking daily tasks. Without a task management tool natively integrated into CLM, the opportunity for the dreaded “system-hopping” leaves even more room for manual tracking, time wasted, and errors.
While a unified CLM system will naturally help streamline data collection across an organization, the biggest benefit is arguably communication-based. A significant risk of data silos is the missed opportunity for legal to grow, innovate, and improve alongside other teams. Look for a tool with extensive reporting capabilities that fits the needs of all stakeholders involved, with your own legal team’s needs at the top of that list.
Pillar #3: Put legal in the driver’s seat
Legal teams are in the trenches when it comes to contracts. Their tasks are amplified by requests across the organization from internal departments, external clients, and regulatory bodies. A heavy workload combined with constant new legal intake requests leads to delayed responses and even organization-wide slowdown in extreme cases.
Having disparate and/or manual storage and reporting methods is a common issue, with many teams still relying on spreadsheets, emails, one-off Slack messages, and even physical filing cabinets. Many contracts are decades old, with no search capabilities and sometimes extreme illegibility. Would-be simple tasks like developing and using a standard naming convention or even seeing who has the pen quickly deteriorate into chaos (and sometimes even finger-pointing.)
Putting legal in the driver’s seat means giving them tools that were built for their specific storage, language, and process needs. Purpose-built technology that mitigates tasks like tracking renewals, payment schedules, and auditing language to maintain regulatory compliance is the best way to ensure streamlined and accurate work and visibility into the status and ability to search requests.
With so many other pressing matters and increased demands of legal teams throughout the country, it’s crucial to implement a solution built with legal teams in mind. Most importantly, make sure you find a solution that combines the best AI technology that is specifically trained to understand the many nuanced needs and language requirements of legal.
Pillar #4: Work where you want
Just as carpenters, artisans, and craftsmen have tools they love, so do legal professionals. With such valuable time and so little of it, legal teams need the flexibility to work within the tools they know and trust to get the job done, which includes tools that help them prioritize the breadth of their tasks and responsibilities throughout the organization.
But let’s face it, other departments want to work where they want, too. Adding a new, shiny addition to your tech stack is all well and good, but if there’s no user adoption from other teams, legal is left at the altar once again. In fact, limiting or eliminating access to favorites like Microsoft Word, Slack, and Salesforce can lead to organization-wide frustration and lost productivity – not to mention increased and ultimately wasted training costs and time on other departments.
An effective CLM solution and task management platform for modern legal teams should focus on putting legal in the driver's seat while also allowing everyone else to work where they want. Finding systems that integrate together is a must while keeping in mind that you should be able to connect virtually any system without compromising functionality or familiarity.
Takeaways
Understanding the four main pillars of centralized legal work is a good first step to finding a single source of truth. A centralized legal operation and holistic view of legal's responsibilities is not just about managing resources and headcount more efficiently but also removing the manual tasks that bog down a legal team’s productivity. With a comprehensive solution purpose-built for legal teams, legal organizations can arm themselves with industry-best technology, time-saving automation capabilities, and better ways to prioritize their daily tasks for more efficient overall processes.
Don’t accept “good enough” solutions. Look for solutions like LinkSquares that empower your team and grant a seamless user experience and centralized platform. Forrester Consulting identifies LinkSquares as a “smart investment,” with LinkSquares customers experiencing a 352% ROI over three years. AI-powered, end-to-end contract lifecycle management combined with a better way to manage day-to-day tasks is key to helping legal teams manage the breadth of their responsibilities in one place and thrive – not just survive. To learn more about how LinkSquares can help build a strong foundation for your legal operations and organizational success, request a demo today.
About LinkSquares
LinkSquares helps legal department leaders drive innovation, reduce backlog, lower costs, increase revenue, and minimize loss. If you're ready to adopt the most effective solutions for the legal function –and harness cutting-edge artificial intelligence to improve every aspect of your department – contact LinkSquares today.