The Legal Tech Leap: Face Your Fears and Fly in 2024

You may not believe it if you’ve seen one of my Cockpit Counsel episodes as the LinkSquares CLO who’s also a pilot, but I used to be a fairly nervous flier. My first job out of law school required me to do some decent travel, and I didn’t like feeling nervous every time I was in the air. I really hated enduring that feeling of nervousness with every flight and knew that I had to do something. I needed to face the issue head-on and decided I would take flight lessons until the fear and nervousness subsided. After a few lessons, as the nerves calmed and experience and conditioning began to take hold, I broke through to the other side to find an exciting new world now available to me in general aviation. I continued my training, eventually earning my license and a handful of advanced ratings. The learning process was long (and continues to this day), difficult, and tested me in ways I didn’t anticipate but later came to truly appreciate. Flying is now one of my favorite things to do and is a big part of my life. I also don’t mind getting on airliners anymore.  

I can draw parallels between my journey with aviation and the challenges in-house legal teams often feel about adopting legal technology. Much like the choice I made to address my anxiety around flying head-on, my challenge to legal teams is to tackle their uncertainty and skepticism of legal technology by acknowledging that legal tech adoption is an inevitability for any high-performing legal team in 2024, and your legal team doesn’t want to be left behind. Take the initiative, learn as much as you can, and embrace the benefits that successful adoption and implementation of essential legal tech can bring to your team. 

So where should you begin? Start by understanding the problems that legal tech is designed to solve. Identifying a tech solution is much easier if you recognize what you want to get out of the tech. The best legal tech is less about which bells, whistles and shiny, new tools a salesperson tells you the product has but is more about how that legal tech solves real problems that your team is facing.  With many teams, the problem isn’t doing the legal work, per se, but it’s managing how the work gets done to ensure consistent quality, process, and communication around the work your team is doing. The legal team touches all aspects of the business, and the best teams are designed to be able to handle and manage any legal matter that comes along and do so in a clear, consistent, and organized way.  Thinking about a tech solution, if your team’s work doesn’t stop at reviewing contracts, why should your tech stack stop at run-of-the-mill CLMs?

Legal technology that offers comprehensive solutions to handle the multitude of your team’s daily priorities will help you deliver across the business. Find something that doesn’t just streamline your contract management process but that is purpose-built for the full variety of work facing your team – and also that quantifies all your team’s contributions. An all-in-one CLM and legal project management platform like the LinkSquares Cloud meets all of these needs in a way that creates consistency throughout your team, your process, and your output. 

Take off with increased efficiency.

We know that increasing efficiency is top of mind this year for legal teams. When it comes to optimizing how your team handles work, one of the first considerations should be automating certain steps. While some tasks require expert scrutiny, not all manual tasks need to stay manual. 

If you find yourself spending hours chasing down updates on key projects, searching for contracts and other documents, switching between different systems, and worrying about missing important deadlines, it's time to explore implementing legal tech that can help you accomplish all this in a single solution. There's no need to waste precious time switching between disconnected systems and tools that keep legal matters segregated. This only leads to process breakdowns and an even worse experience.  

The LinkSquares Cloud technology platform is purpose-built for the in-house legal team. You'll be able to increase efficiency, gather and report on essential data showing your team’s performance, and allocate more time for strategic work, all the while running a more productive and organized department.

Consider LinkSquares Prioritize, which centralizes all your work in one place. Prioritize allows you and your team to create workflows for all of your legal work, establish consistent playbooks for a variety of legal matters, and report on everything that comes through your legal team.  As an added bonus, Prioritize integrates seamlessly with our contract lifecycle management (CLM) software, allowing you to get critical updates on key strategic contracts and move through agreement approval workflows without leaving the platform. 

Let a streamlined CLM help you dig into the details.

Legal teams encounter daily challenges, including navigating new regulations and handling complex issues and negotiations, that require the team members to really get into the weeds and be sure that your contracts are clear and consistent.  But here's the key – your contracting processes don't have to be complicated. When the flow from contract creation to review and signing is simple, transparent and well-communicated, it leads to fewer headaches for all stakeholders.

Without a streamlined process or a centralized place for executed agreements, things slow down and information is difficult to gather. Drafting and negotiating agreements takes longer, contracts get stuck, and closing deals becomes a time-consuming task. Moreover, without easy access to information in your existing contracts, your business may have outsized exposure that you are not immediately aware of. 

The best legal teams have technology that puts information right at their fingertips. They know where to quickly find contract data when needed, and have confidence in managing and executing different types of agreements to provide consistent results. They also know when and how to use technology to help automate tedious processes. Instead of getting overwhelmed with manual tasks, they’re empowered to work swiftly and ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Optimizing contract management processes involves leveraging data to your advantage, whether you need to justify additional resources, budget, or headcount. Your CLM must be able to quantify your workload, track critical timelines, and measure your team's impact on the broader business. By harnessing data, your team is able to strategically partner with internal stakeholders and clearly demonstrate the value they’re bringing to the organization. With dashboards throughout all of the products in the LinkSquares Cloud, users can track and report on valuable data and can customize the output based on organization-specific metrics.  Data is key, and your technology must provide it.  

Stay out of the clouds when it comes to data privacy and compliance.

The regulatory landscape is always evolving, with new data privacy laws emerging at what seems like a constant cadence. While at the federal level the U.S. lacks a comprehensive data privacy law, certain states are enacting their own – a trend that’s likely to continue over the next few years. In-house teams are forced to keep up, and it’s taking a lot of time and effort.

So, how can you stay proactive in the face of all this change? Delving into your contracts is a start. Regular contract audits are vital for monitoring risk levels and identifying agreements that require updating. But you don't have to dig through old filing cabinets or search through your disorganized shared drive. With LinkSquares CLM, you can automate manual tasks like identifying contracts that may be impacted by these privacy changes and detailing consequences of compliance shortcomings. Maintain a consistent approach to data privacy by utilizing predefined language in your agreement drafts and relying on AI to extract critical privacy clauses from signed contracts.

Leverage technology to monitor your contract repository so you can stay well-prepared for new regulations and won't be left scrambling when the next regulatory change comes. 

Reach new altitudes with AI.

By now we’ve seen some embarrassing stories of trial attorneys using AI to draft and submit briefs and being caught by the court, but don’t let that keep you on the sideline when it comes to AI. Keeping an open mind and embracing the potential ways AI can enhance how you do your work can save you precious time, money, and headaches down the road. The key is finding the right AI for your team.  

LinkSquares is the only unified AI-powered end-to-end enterprise legal management (ELM) platform in the market. LinkSquares AI is at the cutting edge of innovation, and LinkSquares is releasing streamlined automated generative AI redlining for your contracts in Finalize while Prioritize will feature AI-suggested playbooks and project subtasks for all of your non-contract legal work. With LinkSquares’ new generative AI tools coming in Q1, you can use AI to automate routine tasks so that you can focus on the high-value work that only you can deliver. 

As we usher in the New Year, I encourage you to face your fears, take the leap, and adopt the right legal tech – one that drives your business forward faster while freeing you up to be the strategic business partner you were meant to be. Don’t let the future pass you by, become a trailblazer and take your team to the next level.  

Ready to take flight? Schedule a demo today and see how LinkSquares can elevate your business.