Many Legal Ops managers fear getting locked-in on the wrong technology. And, as McKinsey concluded: “Leaders … have often been sceptical of opportunities for tech-enabled performance improvement after years of automation and analytics projects that have not generated expected value.”
This fear is why Legal Ops managers deploy carefully, step-by-step and postpone seemingly complex API-integrations. Unfortunately, because the research by McKinsey also reveals (among other factors) that crucial automation benefits are being missed due to:
- A failing holistic approach
- Lack of top-level commitment
- No clear path to move to systemwide adoption
McKinsey observes that “partial solutions … fail to generate significant value because they never reach the minimum threshold for impact”.
Small steps vs. a holistic approach
Deploying technology carefully, step-by-step, is crucial: changing a way-of-working can only be effective when undertaken in small steps. After all, the implementation effort usually comes in addition to an already loaded agenda. (Best practice is to shrink the change steps.)
Some users onboard only once more benefits are in reach. A few weeks ago, we highlighted this when announcing our DMS: the 11 annoyances of transaction management.
So, to automate successfully, an implementation of legal tech must be part of a holistic approach: many contracting-relating steps are too small to automate individually. An end-to-end solution solves this: while automating each individual step may be impractical, automating all contracting steps with only one or two applications (well-integrated) would even bring exponential benefits.
Your fear for a lock-in
Over the past five years, Weagree has developed its full-fledged SharePoint-integration plugin into a complete DMS (document management solution). Weagree’s SharePoint-integration prevents a lock-in: all contracts and contract related files are stored on SharePoint. Weagree makes it easy for you to go to a competitor (we think that you should not want you, but we are consistent in helping our customers, end-to-end.)
In other words, if you were to terminate your Weagree licence, at least the migration of all contract files can be avoided. The export of Weagree contract metadata would contain the links to all SharePoint-locations. Weagree’s SharePoint-integration is such that all contract files will be there where you want them to be, in folders and on folder-paths that you defined. Not a big bunch of thousands of little-structured files which makes a migration a nightmare.
We see the lock-in causing awkward failures at a few of our competitors: getting a proper export-package is costly, the poorly structure of data and files essentially locking in for a forced migration from version 4.0 to 5.0. And neither version having been tested for interaction design or user-friendliness.
Implementing our SharePoint-integration is easy
Setting up Weagree’s SharePoint-integration can easily be configured for enterprise-wide deployment, and yet takes only a few minutes from the IT department (80% of that time goes into explaining why the integration is safe) and an hour or so from the Legal Ops leader (for the various templates).
To reduce your lock-in into Weagree takes 5 steps only:
- Activate the SharePoint-integration on your admin page
- Create a ‘Weagree Application’ in Microsoft Azure
- Configure the default fall-back SharePoint sites and folder paths
- Indicate, per contract template, the default SharePoint sites and folder paths
- In Weagree’s user management, per user profile, allow or prevent the users’ freedom to select a SharePoint site or SharePoint folder path for a specific contract
