When Intel onboarded Weagree (yep, they onboarded us, like we onboarded them), they had no fear and no hesitations. Intel is incredibly professional in how they innovate and how they work with startup innovators.
A few highlights:
- Intel appointed two internal project managers to guide us into Intel (indeed, and this is smarter than you may think).
- Intel obliged us to involve them in our beta-testing of new Weagree-functionalities (rethink, as this is incredibly smart).
- Security: before starting anything, we needed to pass five security assessment stages (they spent the right efforts, but piecemeal – achieving full-compliance, five green-flags, took us nine months).
Over the past 20 years, we have seen countless prospects knock off in fear. Their justification “because what happens if Willem Wiggers comes under the tram?” has surfaced in many of our conversations over the years. Countless are the organisations that preferred an acknowledged-inferior legal tech solution over their fearful answer to this question.
What Intel does, is focusing on the bright spots (selecting best-in-class solution) while mitigating collateral risks adequately. Their approach is a seminal example for large legal departments who aim at a win-win.
The right approach drives adoption
Capacity building. Appointing two project managers for onboarding us, creates a critical context for success:
- First-line internal support and optimised legal-tech onboarding of new team members, matching the differing needs of casual users and power users.
- Creating cross-departmental visibility to internal stakeholders (and legal-tech ears): internal top-of-mind available-tech-awareness for solving other use cases and bottlenecks, and ambassadorship further driving user adoption.
- Showing leadership (both to the legal team and to ‘the business’).
- Building a growth mindset (embracing technology and ongoing change becomes ‘human’ by having tech-dedicated people in the team).
- Solid admin support (functional maintenance, matching evolving needs).
To drive adoption adequately, building internal capacity is critical for every legal department of more than 8-12 in-house legal counsel. Weagree’s Legal Ops readiness assessment identifies some 47 parameters that are critical in driving adoption. Doing the assessment provides you deep insight into what every legal department needs (and how, with concrete action steps) to effectively enable full digital legal service delivery.
High IT security. Thanks to Intel’s five-stage security assessment, Weagree has all online doors well-shut. You will be unpleasantly surprised by how some legal tech providers rank on Security Scorecard (a score above 90% (“A”) is key – our Security Scorecard score is 98%).
Large or regulated corporates should not accept a score below 80% (less than “B“). Worse, a Security Scorecard score of “D” signals extraordinary sloppiness (suggesting that all IT-doors are wide open).
Of course, Intel’s IT security checks went much further than what is visible on Security Scorecard. What we implemented in 2018, was later on covered (and is annually audited) under our ISO 27017 certification.
Partnering with your legal tech vendor. Intel is not afraid of working with (very) small service providers, as it is their own lifeline to high performance innovation. Like you, they know that small companies sometimes lack capacity to deliver, despite immense passion and commitment.
Partnering with your legal tech vendor is a perfect way to:
- Providing the internal first-line support yourself.
- Understand your opportunities for improvement (as your vendor knows your unidentified problems sometimes better than you do, as they have to sell their solution).
- Understand how to respond internally to user excuses for avoiding legal tech (many measures that drive adoption are an existing part of the legal tech platform).
- Developing your own legal tech roadmap and benefit to a maximum extent from the legal tech platform,
- Optimising their features and functionalities to your ways of working, to your API-integration needs and to your useful automations, prioritising the vendor’s legal tech roadmap in the direction that you (and they) want.
Treating your legal tech vendor as a shopping mall of finished (OEM) products, underestimates the fact that legal tech is a service (services require ongoing alignment and periodical evaluation meetings). But sadly, it is true: some legal departments do not even evaluate their relationship with other key external suppliers (law firms).
A successful legal tech journey starts with ‘knowing yourself’ – understanding where your maturity gaps are as they are critical for successfully driving adoption internally:
Our readiness assessment might also work for legal tech solutions other than Weagree (provided that their solution technically meets your requirements).
