How Legal Can Serve as a Strategic Business Partner

Legal teams adopt technology for a variety of reasons: increased efficiency, risk mitigation, deal acceleration, and/or just to preserve their sanity. However, the reason they pursue those positive business outcomes isn't simply to improve the business but to reframe the legal department as a strategic partner for the rest of the organization. Here's how you can leverage legal technology to become more than "just a cost center."

Operationalize with legal-specific task management

First-generation legal technology and legal operations processes were largely focused on eliminating paper and making it easier to file legal requests. Since legal was seen as a hindrance to many business initiatives, the thought was to make dealing with legal more accessible by making requests easier. It worked, but too well. 

Now an array of email inboxes, Slack channels, and sales contract software integrations makes it all too easy to flood the legal team with demands on their time. Instead of being a blocker because it was too hard to file a request, legal is now a blocker because requests take too long to address.

Other departments like IT, customer support, and procurement deal with similar problems via ticketing and task-management systems, each designed specifically for those departments' needs (Zendesk, Vendr, and Jira all manage request tickets and all work very differently for different stakeholders). 

Legal-specific task management can do the same for your legal team. All your requests funneled into one backlog, all triaged in one system, prioritization and processes automatically recorded and shared with stakeholders. Everyone knows when to expect feedback, and everyone in legal knows what to work on, in what order, and why.

Just like other centers of business excellence.

Start tracking and sharing legal KPIs

Once you've got a task-management software backbone for your legal operations, you can start tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) for your legal team – and sharing them with the rest of the business.

How long does the average legal request take to complete, and how has the number changed over time (or seasonally)? What is the total value of contracts the legal team has reviewed in the last quarter? How do these values break down by department (for example, does sales ask for a lot more legal work than HR, or vice versa?)? Has a shift in resources towards contract review resulted in a decrease in resources needed for litigation management? Has a decrease in time-to-close due to legal review correlated with an increase in bookings per sales rep?

Once you can quantify the legal team's contributions, legal's value becomes apparent and more sought-after.

Automate away the drudgery

Now that you can track where legal resources are being spent – and the value that spend delivers – you can identify areas where automation will do the most good. 

Is drafting contracts taking too long and leading to a growing backlog of requests? You probably need a contract lifecycle management (CLM) tool that can allow sales teams to safely generate standardized agreements without legal review. 

Are regular contract audits eating up your budget and your bandwidth? Maybe a cutting-edge AI-powered contract analysis tool can simplify this process and cut your overhead.

Is a crazy percentage of your request backlog just requests for signature by an authorized signer? Maybe you should integrate an e-sign application that makes these manual requests unnecessary.

And with the KPIs you're tracking, building an ROI case for any or all of these investments should be a snap. Once the automation is in place, you'll have even more time to devote to strategic business contributions.

But it all starts with adopting the right tools. Get a legal-specific task manager, start tracking performance KPIs, automate the legal grunt work, and then you'll not only have more resources to do your job but the value of your effort will be understood – and asked for – by the rest of the business.

If you're ready to start this tech-enabled journey to becoming a strategic business partner, contact LinkSquares today.