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Change management is especially important in the legal industry, as lawyers can be particularly averse to change—and for good reason
– Bloomberg Law
For the risk-averse guardians of the law, legal change management is a daunting proposition – but it doesn’t have to be. Legal change management supports legal department and corporate counsel goals of modernizing and streamlining processes, whether that’s through legal tech, streamlining processes, or renewing business strategies. Top-level executives understand the goal of modernizing, yet it may be hard to help the entire organization embrace and adapt to new methods.
Explore these 4 helpful ways you can effectively shape your legal department by utilizing legal tech, streamlining processes, and ramping up your business strategies.
Understand Your Audience
Understanding how your legal department and organization will react to legal change proposals can help shape the overall strategy. Your strategy should be able to adapt to stakeholders’ interests and goals.
Legal tech service provider Clio says that “lawyers need to understand that the key thing their customers want is at every step of the journey versus them wanting a good result at the end”.
Develop Effective Legal Ops Strategies
The Association of Corporate Counsel has a handy legal ops maturity guide to identify and augment legal change management strategies. Whether you’re new to legal ops, or are veterans at utilizing legal ops, knowing how to leverage it can maximize the benefits your legal department can gain from legal tech, for example.
Leverage Rainmakers
Rainmakers “drive business, bring in new clients, and take proactive approaches,” says Bloomberg Law, going on to say that “they tend to be more empathetic, bigger risk takers, and more open to the idea of change”. Proposing legal change strategies to your internal rainmakers can positively affect the outcome. Rainmakers are the most in tune with the inside workings of your legal department and business, and can collaborate to streamline it for maximum efficiency for all involved.
Measure Success With Metrics
According to BusyLamp, identifying and measuring change management benefits is essential to its overall and continued success. Legal departments rely on statistics and results in order to measure the success and efficiency of a process such as change management. Metrics are an ideal way to consolidate legal change management effectiveness and findings and present them to stakeholders.
7 elements your metrics should offer:
- actionable insights
- well-balanced and unbiased data
- linked to objectives
- leading and lagging, indicators of performance
- limited to a relatively small number of metrics for each group
- controllable data sets
- measured relative to business targets
Want to ramp up your legal change management strategies?
