How does AI shape the legal landscape of your legal services delivery? Well, AI is advanced stage legal operations: for legal departments and law firms that are beyond the intermediate stage of Legal Ops. What does advanced mean? …and what intermediate?
In defining your vision on the future of your legal department (or law firm), you probably think of the scope and extent of legal tech that automates your (internal) demand for legal services. And rightfully so. But to be successful, much more is needed.
Implementing legal tech in your legal ops will fail if you diagnose your current legal affairs too optimistically.
Legal Ops Maturity Model
Legal Ops experts committee of ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) identify 14 disciplines of Legal Operations and measure them in terms of maturity stage (early, intermediate or advanced stage). In upgrading your Legal Ops, it makes little sense to ‘mature’ in one discipline while still being ‘early stage’ in one or more others, because the 14 disciplines are highly intertwined.
You need to be honest about your legal department’s (or law firm’s) maturity – your being early stage, intermediate or advanced – in each of 14 Legal Ops disciplines:
- Change management and communication
- Strategic planning and Legal Ops leadership
- Project and process management
- Information governance (records management)
- Metrics and analytics (also of your organisation)
- Knowledge management
- Innovation management
- Technology management
The above listing are only 8 of the 14 Legal Ops disciplines (and I clustered those that are closely related). All 14 need to be well-matured (well into the intermediary stage) before the non-listed discipline of Contract management can be truly successful in an enterprise-grade, advanced stage of Legal Ops maturity.
For each of the 14 disciplines, the ACC Legal Ops experts committee defined a number of maturity characteristics. As a side note, to incentivise you, an advanced stage of maturity is also likely to make a legal department more of a revenue driver (as opposed to a cost centre) for the organisation.
Change management framework
That the 14 disciplines are so intertwined becomes clear if, for example, we zoom in on the discipline of change management. To be successful in implementing legal tech into your legal operations, and turn legal services delivery into a revenue driver embraced by everyone in the legal team, Weagree has developed a diagnosis framework.
To successfully reach an advanced maturity level of Legal Ops, our framework’s three dimensions (each of which has three aspects, so, nine parameters) are in order. More about this change management diagnosis framework.
The framework has three dimensions:
- Rational aspects (e.g. a vision)
- Emotional aspects (e.g. modern leadership, growth mindset)
- Context and circumstances for change
It is nice and appealing to introduce AI (AI-automated contract review, AI-driven tasks extraction, CLM-data extraction, AI-contract summary), supported by various Copilots. And yes, Weagree equips you with all of this at an advanced stage-level.
For example (indeed, Weagree AI entails much more), watch Weagree’s AI-driven tasks extraction (which is essentially an AI-supported contract handover) yourself:
Start maturing your Legal Ops and take into account those 14 disciplines that (at least in part) constitute a prerequisite for successfully deploying AI and for turning your legal department (or law firm) into a revenue driver.
In undertaking your journey to successful Legal Ops, diagnose your change management capabilities for those three dimensions. Otherwise, your AI will be destined to remain a nice gadget, for your self-vision of being a great would-be innovator. You don’t want to be ‘would be’. I hope you want to be successful (And you probably want to boost AI and Copilots (asap)).
