“Be the future-proof legal department – automate legal processes where possible and embrace AI” sounds appealing as a vision for a legal department. Unfortunately, only 22.6% of lawyers worldwide agree that the legal-tech implementations they undertook upon such vision achieved its goal.
Where does it go wrong for over 77% of legal departments as they fail so disastrously in their legal tech aims? Gartner identified two mistakes that GCs make:
- GC take a big-bet approach to legal technology without meeting underlying readiness requirements.
- Most GC underinvest in maturing their legal ops required to make digital enablement successful.
Lacking ‘legal ops readiness’
True, a big-bet approach to implementing legal tech might succeed, as much as anyone who participates in the lottery can win the multi-million jackpot with their first lot. “Might succeed”… indeed, if all contracting steps from start to finish were simple, standard, clear for everyone, and easy to automate. And even after winning the lottery, such achievement requires maintenance.
With merely 23% of legal departments being digitally ‘ready’, implementing legal tech still requires an ongoing effort on no less than 12 legal ops competencies (of which the CLM solution is only one). Indeed, successfully implementing a CLM or contract automation demands that the organisation is sufficiently mature regarding:
- People
- Processes
- Data.
How-to: one best practice on data
An appealing vision works only if it is surrounded by clarity and specificity, from start to finish, for everyone involved, if every stakeholder in any of the contracting steps knows the concrete, specific steps that are necessary (or helpful for others) to take.
And it takes usage-data to understand who does what (or who does not what is necessary or helpful), to prevent investment in more people, to prevent more process monitoring, to prevent more differentiation in processes where simplification was possible.
AI should drive your ‘vision’
Moreover, being ready as a legal department is one success factor for legal tech adoption, but a future proof legal department will also:
- Prevent that ‘operational or business data’ may scatter across storage locations (or even remain in inboxes),
- Prevent that opportunities for AI-marketing, AI-sales and AI-customer support solutions to leverage data are missed.
A successful vision is all about data. By a mature ‘data management’, a legal department enables AI and contributes effectively to the organisation’s vision or mission.
