In the fast-paced world of legal work, tasks are numerous, varied, and often complex. From reviewing marketing content to managing long-term litigation projects, your team has a lot on its plate.
In fact, research from the Thomson Reuters Institute found that while most corporate law departments are experiencing a higher volume of work, they’re working with flat, if not decreasing, budgets.
This is where a legal project management tool can be a game-changer. By centralizing and automating various tasks, these tools help your team manage requests from across the business, track recurring tasks, and oversee ongoing legal projects.
Managing legal intake and requests
While legal tech is widely considered a must-have for in-house teams, many teams’ task management processes remain painfully manual. They sift through emails, messages, and notebooks just to find and manage requests. To get that time back and focus more on strategic work, teams are beginning to adopt legal project management tools to intake and centralize requests from across a business. Some of the more frequently requested tasks include:
- Reviewing marketing and PR content: The legal team is often tasked with reviewing external materials like blog posts or ads for accuracy, proper use of IP, or the correct use of disclaimers. A legal project management tool can help centralize these requests and approvals, saving both legal and marketing teams precious time.
- Privacy, security, and compliance: Compliance and privacy responsibilities often fall on the shoulders of the in-house legal team, according to a 2023 ACC Survey of CLOs. Whether you’re reviewing data privacy agreements or ensuring marketing materials comply with relevant regulations, a task management tool can help centralize those requests, related documents, and approvals.
- Intellectual property (IP) questions: Many legal teams, especially those at tech and biotech companies, field requests for invention disclosure agreements and trademarks. A legal project management tool not only organizes tasks but can serve as a single source of truth to see what work was done and when.
- HR concerns: Legal input is often required when reviewing HR policies, employee disputes, or reasonable accommodation requests for employees. These requests are often highly sensitive, and using a tool the entire company can access opens up the risk of others stumbling across sensitive information. You can either handle these tasks outside of enterprise-wide tools or manage all tasks in a tool like Prioritize that’s only accessible by your team.
- Contract review and approval: For most in-house legal teams, contract work takes up a significant amount of time. Whether it’s a request to create a new contract, update an existing one, or review redlines from the counterparty, it’s easy for requests to pile up — especially at the end of the month or quarter. To avoid contract requests falling through the cracks, standardizing your contract review process is critical.
Streamlining contract review with Contract Lifecycle Management tools will only get you so far. Scraping by with tools like Excel and email to manage the rest of your work leaves documents and approvals scattered across systems.
For those looking to consolidate tools and vendors, a legal task management tool that’s connected to your CLM may be the right approach. It allows you to view and manage all types of tasks in one place.
Keeping track of recurring legal tasks
Legal teams do more than just field requests from other teams. A task management tool can help track recurring legal tasks like entity management, governance, and board meeting responsibilities.
- Corporate governance: A legal project management tool helps teams stay on top of ongoing work related to entity management, shareholder documents, SEC filings, and more. With LinkSquares Prioritize, you can link tasks together to keep related work in one place for easy access.
- Board management: While there are tools built specifically to manage board-related tasks, this comes at an additional cost. Using one tool to manage, track, and report on all tasks saves on costs and makes it easier to report on the work the legal team is doing.
Overseeing long-term legal projects
Long-term legal projects, such as litigation, require careful planning, coordination, and oversight.
- Dispute and litigation: Documentation is critical when managing disputes and litigation, and. legal project management tools like Prioritize consolidate that documentation. You can attach and download procedural documents, as well as link related tasks in Prioritize as tasks pile up within a larger project.
- Workload and performance reporting: As work piles up, remembering what you worked on last month isn’t always easy. Instead of manually counting requests in your inbox or tracking projects in a spreadsheet, let technology bear that burden. A legal task management tool like Prioritize can help your team quickly report on request volume and associated revenue to highlight the team’s impact to the business.
A legal project management tool isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have for any legal team. It brings efficiency, organization, and transparency to the myriad of tasks you have to juggle daily. So if you're looking to streamline your legal processes, consider investing in a robust legal project management tool.
See how LinkSquares Prioritize can help you manage intake and tasks – request a demo today.