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“Legal transformation requires an appropriate amount of vision, planning, budget and patience for success.”
-Tariq Hafeez
President & Co-Founder at LegalEase Solutions
The rise of legal hybrid work models redesigned the legal world. The legal function as we know it is changing at an accelerated rate, and legal transformation is the way forward. Legal technology is growing by leaps and bounds. It isn’t just growing in awareness, but also in the mind-blowing market share it’s taking over, and growing in! This includes the whopping $115 million in funding that a leading and award-winning legal tech service provider received.
A Forbes article notes that legal departments need to fit into the customer-focused aspects of their organizations. This is best approached by adopting legal tech to boost legal transformation. As legal departments quickly scramble to transform legal, it’s best done with a plan. Rushing to implement legal transformation without a phased and suitable plan could prematurely sink the project, or render it completely useless.
Planning Out a Legal Transformation Strategy
Tariq Hafeez of LegalEase Solutions shares in an article on legal transformation that adoption in planned and timed phases is key to legal departments’ legal transformation success.
The Early Days
According to a Gartner article, the COVID-19 pandemic aftermath caused 92% of legal departments to reduce their budgets. While legal departments look to solutions to meet their needs within their tight budgets, legal tech is a solution to most of their woes.
Legal departments that are new to digitization may have just started paperless office initiatives and started toying around with digital interfaces. In the early stage of adoption, legal departments may be utilizing older legal software or basic software such as Microsoft’s Office.
At this stage, stakeholders will need to
- stay up to date with trends in the legal tech market
- draft out a plan to phase out older software
- bring in new legal tech
- stay within their budget
Once this process is in place, and the legal tech they need has been integrated, they’re ready to move over to the intermediate stages.
The Intermediate Phase
Legal departments that have dipped their feet into the world of legal tech and have implemented legal technology can begin the next leg of their legal transformation journey. This stage also includes legal departments that have moved over to the intermediate phase from the early days stage mentioned above.
What are the goals that legal departments in the intermediate phase should look at?
- providing efficient and cost-effective services
- incorporating data-driven, predictable, and transparent features into their services
- the ability to provide affordable prices and to offer meaningful legal services and products to their organizations to achieve their business goals
Legal departments need to craft a winning strategy that brings different legal tech solutions they use into a single plan. The goal of the plan should be to use resources available, and to assist them in their workflows and output.
Advanced Stages
This is the almost the final, and certainly the most desirable stage of the legal transformation journey. The advanced stage is not the end, as the discerning legal department needs to continuously improve the legal services they provide their organizations and clients!
Alongside partnering with legal tech providers, legal departments should also look towards utilizing the solutions that alternative legal service providers (ALSPS) have to offer. These services are delivered by peer attorneys and for a fraction of the cost!
Legal Transformation Roadmap
Whether your legal department has established a network of handy legal tech tools, or if you’re just getting started with digital transformation, you’re at the right place.
Here are Hafeez’s 4 tips to remember, to create a winning legal transformation strategy:
- map out current processes
- try out tools that address gaps
- develop an overall strategy
- integrate more advanced innovations to take the legal department to the next level
Are you ready to transform your legal department with cutting-edge legal tech tools and software? We provide legal departments with the consulting services they need to transform legal!
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