The essential concerns for measuring your legal team’s technological maturity

This short article was initially published in Legal Dive.

As your corporate legal division navigates its way via this era of financial uncertainty, assessing your team’s technological maturity must be at the top rated of your priority list.

Sophisticated technologies can enable you lower expenses, make far better strategic choices, and drive worth for your organization when it is required the most.

But how do you measure if your division is technologically mature? It requires extra than just operating an inventory of your tools, assessing their age, and monitoring their use.

You want to dig in and analyze your solutions’ capabilities to see if they meet your wants. If not, it may possibly be time to come to be extra mature.

Right here are 4 concerns you may possibly not have believed to ask when measuring your legal team’s technological maturity.

How you answer these concerns will figure out your maturity level and enable you commence organizing the subsequent methods in your technologies journey.

1. Does your technologies enable you prioritize and tackle threat?

Each and every legal matter, no matter how straightforward or complicated, carries with it a degree of threat to your business enterprise.

Expense and price range overruns are considerable dangers that can severely effect your organization and your legal department’s standing inside the firm. You actually can not afford to go into matters blind.

You can mitigate this challenge by focusing your efforts on the largest places of threat to your business enterprise. Your technologies must be capable to enable.

Today’s legal tools can offer transparency so you can comprehend if the function becoming accomplished by your internal legal group and outdoors counsel is in proportion to exactly where threat lives in your matters.

This assists your law division defend your organization from excess or unnecessary expenses and show higher worth to your business enterprise.

two. Do you consistently solicit and assess feedback about your technology’s efficiency and evaluate it to your objectives?

Legal technologies must be a extended-term investment that grows and evolves with your organization’s wants.

If your technologies is not meeting these wants, it could be time to reassess its worth to your organization.

A single of the most effective strategies to gauge if your technologies investments are delivering worth is by consistently soliciting feedback from the people today who use the tools.

The technologies customers can inform you whether or not a remedy is performing nicely and meeting their wants or failing to enable them attain their objectives.

A very good rule of thumb is to execute these assessments annually.

Assessments must be viewed in the context of your business enterprise objectives and compared to your roadmap to make certain that your plans nonetheless make sense.

Assessments also permit you to address any lagging efficiency difficulties prior to they commence to drag your organization down.

three. Do you have a systematic and nicely-defined method to modify management?

How you deal with the introduction of new technologies in your legal division can make or break the technology’s adoption and effectiveness.

If customers are not comfy with the technologies prior to it is introduced or they fail to comprehend its positive aspects, usage will probably be low and your investment will not spend off.

The most technologically mature legal departments have systematic and nicely-defined approaches to managing technological modify.

They have a strategy in spot and anytime new tools are introduced, they execute that strategy to the letter, the exact same way each and every time.

They train customers on the technologies and ask for their feedback, communicate the positive aspects early and usually, and continue to enable group members come to be comfy with the tools extended just after the initial roll-out.

A modify management strategy signals that organizations comprehend how to handle and message modify. These organizations are extra probably to come across good results in adopting and gaining worth from new technologies.

four. Does your technologies track diversity information?

Functioning with diverse outdoors counsel brings fresh perspectives, suggestions, and far better final results. As a result, measuring the diversity of your law firms is important.

Sophisticated legal technologies includes diversity modules that automatically track the diversity information of legal service providers.

They make it simple to track if firms are assigning diverse teams to your matters, are diverse in their timekeeper roles, and if they are committed to advertising and hiring diverse employees.

With this information in hand, you can act and have proactive discussions with outdoors counsel to make certain that your law firms are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&ampI).

Concluding thoughts

As the winds of financial modify continue to blow, use this time as an chance to feel about exactly where your corporate legal division is on the technologies maturity scale and adjust as required.

The proper technologies can enable your group lower invest, achieve efficiency and drive far better business enterprise worth.