“Even the smallest change is viewed by some employees with suspicion. A transformation initiative won’t succeed if those impacted don’t understand the change and how it will affect them. [Legal Ops managers] must follow six steps to increase the chances of successful change.”
It is Gartner’s best practice advice to leaders responsible for implementing legal technology successfully:
If those who fail to automate their contracts and thereby limit the organisation to manage, monitor and report on contracts beyond essentials, your organisation will:
- not achieve productivity improvements or response time reductions to the fullest potential.
- remain unable to elevate contract management to advanced levels (so, not beyond monitoring of contract expiry dates and change-of-control clauses).
- remain vulnerable to human errors in commodity work.
- be limited in the extent to which AI can be implemented in its contracting processes (or even fail to adopt AI-contracting at all).
Conversely, if everyone involved in contracting processes successfully adopts contract automation and (therefore) if an enterprise-grade CLM can be established, the relevance of ‘Legal’ will increase significantly. This is because firstly, contracts (and a contracts portfolio) will become a solid, reliable basis for data analysis, and secondly, business risks can be identified and managed more adequately.
There are a few internal communications-related reasons why change management fails to succeed to its fullest extent. According to Gartner’s research:
- Too often, internal communications miss the right details to prevent that everyone has an adequate perception of the change impact: because psychologically, humans ‘magnify the unfamiliar’, the impact of a planned change is perceived as (too) extensive.
- Legal tech implementation fails due to inconsistent or ad hoc messaging, leading to a reduced appreciation and ‘buy-in’.
- Communications is too often appealing to only part of the team, and fail to speak to the mind of everyone else, which disconnects them from participating (effectively) in the change journey.
Several years ago, Weagree developed a change management framework of three dimensions, each dimension subdivided in three parameters. Three of these nine parameters heavily build on communication. Now we can elaborate our framework.
Gartner identified six steps to boost communications and help every team member adopt contract automation and CLM. The six steps can be summarised as follows:
- Use the right language.
- Explain the change and why (Gartner recommends using a so-called ‘from/to/because model’).
- Translate the message and use peer advocates.
- Embrace and address rumours the right way.
- Meet team members and contract-stakeholders where they are.
- Be open to changing the story.
We are adjusting our customer onboarding procedures and implementation roadmap templates to include the above research findings and recommendations.
We are happy that we can also tap into the underlying data and consult with 400 experts. Needless to say, our customers will benefit from this.
