One of the greatest challenges with contract automation and legal tech is to get everyone to change their way of working. Fact: legal departments with a woman as head of legal are more successful in achieving change than others. Not a little bit better; they outperform significantly.
What do our successful customers do, with a lady as captain? If we ask them, we get somewhat imprecise, vague answers. Even so, we have investigated how Weagree’s contract automation can be implemented successfully. We’ve also asked the help of experts on change management (here is a bestseller).
83 choices to adopting contract automation effectively
Our customers made some 83 successful choices, which we framed in a structure easy to remember and transpose to your own context. Female heads of legal and general counsel:
- Accept that resistance is often a lack of clarity. Establish an innovation vision and talk about it. Act accordingly: free up time for those responsible for implementing contract automation. Prioritise legal tech.
- Empathise with team members: find the feeling (engage). Make the change steps smaller (everyone is already busy enough). Build a growth mindset – many suffer from a fixed mindset (“not invented here” focusing on objections). Help everyone start with contract automation, if only try.
- Create an environment in which failure is acceptable. Anchor contract automation in the daily work (not stop it after a first trial). Shine a spotlight on early signs of success.
Click the links if you like to learn more – here is an executive summary of our framework.
5 practical steps to change behaviour
In practice, what our successful customers did to change behaviour, included:
- Dedicate one or two persons for the whole contract automation project.
- Make everyone responsible for a part of it (create individual ‘ownership’).
- Plan one or more days of walk-in hours with Weagree (it sets deadlines, allows everyone to be heard, it takes away unfamiliarity with the unknown, it secures continuity of your project).
- Implementing technology requires concentration: so free up time (it will repay immediately – because what looks like laziness is often exhaustion).
- People who resist, often lack clarity about what to do or how precisely. Shine a light on success stories.
What our successful customers then do
Our successful customers continue exploring how to further optimise their contracting processes: delegate contract creation to ‘the business’. Here, they arrive at the point where contract automation becomes collaborative, and successful in ways that could hardly be predicted.
Our statistics show that women are considerably more successful in having their team to adopt innovation. With 50 customers this might not be statistically reliable; it still is remarkable. And indeed, we also have very successful customers under leadership of a man.
