Legal task management — also known as legal project management — is crucial for a well-oiled in-house legal team.
It’s more than tagging teammates in a spreadsheet. Task management is the process of reviewing everything on the team’s plate, then organizing, prioritizing, and assigning the work.
Without it, in-house lawyers struggle to keep pace with legal requests, projects fall to the side, and business-critical activities are delayed across the organization. But with a good process, legal teams more efficiently execute their day-to-day work and gain a much-needed productivity boost.
Some teams, despite their valiant efforts at task management, make common mistakes that deny them the productivity gains of a well-run system.
Streamlining legal project management can make legal teams more impactful, but common mistakes can block these goals.
Here are four common legal task management mistakes (and how to fix them).
When each department has its preferred tools and systems for submitting requests, crucial business data gets scattered all over the place. This means legal has to toggle between tools to get the full scope of data needed to complete their work.
Solve this problem by centralizing your task management tools. Use a single platform to collect requests, manage your ongoing legal projects, and access documents and approvals related to the work.
Without a standard process, questions and requests often come from all directions, overwhelming a legal team. Product may submit requests through Jira, while sales tags you in Salesforce, and marketing emails their requests. This makes tracking, executing, and reporting on your work unnecessarily difficult.
Instead of operating out of multiple systems, look for a task management tool that centralizes all your legal requests and projects. This doesn't mean your stakeholders have to learn an entirely new tool. It can be as simple as requiring all stakeholders to submit a single form that solves for multiple use cases. And to make sure everyone's on board, try embedding or linking the form in tools your team already uses, like Slack or your intranet.
When it comes to managing requests from other teams, getting all the information you need upfront can seem like a pipe dream. Often, stakeholders include the information they think is important — not what legal actually needs to know. This leads to back-and-forth information gathering in the early stages of legal task management. And this wastes everyone’s time.
Standardizing your intake process with a form can be your saving grace. Requiring stakeholders to include the information you need saves you both time and helps you to get them what they need faster. You can avoid customizing a form to your needs with a tool like LinkSquares Prioritize with a form built for legal workflows.
In an effort to save money or be a team player, legal might try to use an existing tool to serve your team’s needs, even if it wasn’t built with legal in mind. This could mean using an Excel spreadsheet to manage your work or a project management tool used across the organization. When these tools don’t reflect the legal team’s workflows or privacy needs, in-house teams can end up doing double work or spending extra time and money on custom integrations. Instead, look for a tool that’s designed for legal-specific workflows. LinkSquares Prioritize, for example, is natively integrated with LinkSquares CLM, allowing users to conform to set legal workflows.
Centralizing your work and related documents, standardizing intake processes, and using tools designed specifically for legal workflows can help in-house legal teams avoid common pitfalls and more effectively manage their work and prove its impact. Remember, a well-oiled legal machine isn't built overnight, but with the right strategies and tools in place, you can get there faster than you think.