Welcome back! We’re showing legal leaders how to boost their teams’ influence and reputation. These tips will help deliver the distinction they deserve. If you missed tip #1, check it out here. Let’s dive into our next tip: how to leverage data to influence change.
Identify data-driven improvement areas.
One advantage for legal teams is that they have a lot of data. But capturing and reviewing data isn’t enough–you must apply that data while making decisions.
According to Deloitte, the first step in embarking on a data-driven strategy is understanding what processes should leverage available data better. Legal teams can assess improvement opportunity areas through two lenses –
- Qualitatively, based on what stakeholders most often complain or ask about
- Quantitatively, based on what business activities multiply the workload
From there, legal leaders prioritize – deploying their work hours and investment towards areas of high impact, achievability (e.g., low-hanging fruit), and visibility.
Because many internal stakeholders misunderstand what legal does – and underestimate the risk management and business enablement balance – in-house lawyers need to prove their competency over and over.
“When stuff lands in the inboxes of legal, the sender is nearly always under stress,” shares Tim Parilla, Chief Legal Officer at LinkSquares. “Legal rarely gets the luxury of time – but if they don’t immediately deliver, the team is labeled disorganized. This is both hurtful and untrue.”
Legal teams can deconstruct this narrative while improving their influence and impact when they’re armed with data. Once you understand improvement areas, you can use the available tools to eliminate roadblocks and generate useful, actionable insights for teams.
For example, why not proactively deliver finance a dashboard of what revenue will be recognized in a quarter? Or set up procurement with self-service access to see what force majeure clauses look like for suppliers? Provisions like this reinforce legal’s usefulness and free up department hours for those unavoidable, house-on-fire requests that are sure to come up.
Come back next week for the third and final tip about leveraging technology to carve a path to success. Or, if you cannot wait any longer, you can grab the full guide here.
