How Lean Legal Departments Can Make a Massive Impact

When the business underestimates your tiny legal team, you’re called in too late on key initiatives, your insight is overlooked or ignored, and you end up cramming your process into a small window of time. This makes you look like the bottleneck, when, in reality, you just haven’t been set up for success. Now, you’re left with the burden of proving your value.

But legal technology can help.

Showcase your impact by leveraging legal tech to analyze contract data, automate your workflows, and improve service delivery. This way, you can enable efficiency, deliver on value, and become a trusted business advisor in strategic conversations. With legal tech like contract lifecycle management (CLM), you can track and report on metrics, and automate tedious tasks to expand your team’s bandwidth.

Here’s how your lean legal team can make a massive impact on your business. 

Take advantage of contract data.

Contract repositories are rich sources of contract data. Save hours of searching for critical info with data around your obligations, important dates, and risky clauses all at your fingertips. A contract repository also allows teams to centralize their agreements and analyze contract data for business insight. You can harness a contract repository to generate reports on key dates, specific terms, and employee performance, and visualize the data to enable the C-suite to make business decisions – making you a trusted advisor with the leadership team.

Eliminate unnecessary human intervention.

Software will probably never be able to autonomously complete 100% of legal’s work – not even AI. Technology is a much better assistant than leader. Still, too much human intervention in a process can cause delays and introduce more risk than it mitigates.

CLM can help small legal teams make a big impact by automating workflows and common processes, enabling self-service workflows, and standardizing low-value, low-urgency processes. This means your collaborators will see a faster turnaround time, and you spend less time on tedious, time-intensive tasks.

Improve service delivery.

At its core, legal is a service team. Modern legal departments touch every facet of the business, causing you to spend a lot of time reviewing collateral, collaborating on policies, and managing all the contracts. Improving service delivery is another way small legal teams can make a big impact.

With legal technology like CLM and legal project management, legal teams can improve service delivery to internal and external stakeholders. A legal project management solution like LinkSquares Prioritize, integrated with our CLM, allows you to provide visibility into your processes, quantify results using data, and communicate expectations along the way. 

Takeaways

Your in-house legal team may be small, but it can also be mighty. With less people to carry increasingly heavier workloads, there’s more riding on your ability to follow through on your processes. 

Legal technology like CLM can stand in the gap and help your team have an outsized impact. By taking care of the small stuff and tracking data that’s crucial to business strategy, legal technology expands your bandwidth and enables you to do more with less.