A 3-step plan to building your legal technology roadmap

Forward-thinking corporate legal departments often credit a purposeful use of technology as being a critical factor in increasing efficiency, reducing risk, and being more effective. Leveraging legal technology not only helps legal teams work smarter, but also helps them demonstrate value to the wider organization. 

The 2019 Thomson Reuters Legal Department Operations survey demonstrated that many corporate legal departments acknowledged the benefits of adopting legal technology: 70% of respondents identified the use of legal technology to simplify processes as a high priority, while 51% actually increased the quantity of legal technology tools used in the last 12 months.

Although there is strong appreciation for the importance and benefits of legal technology, in-house barriers to adoption still remain. For many organizations, adopting new legal technologies can be perplexing. However, adopting a legal technology roadmap can assist in addressing your department’s priorities in a strategic way, ensuring the benefits gained are lasting.

Typically, technology roadmaps outline the specifics on how technology can address legal department strategic needs and priorities over a 3-year period.  But how do you begin to build a roadmap?

1. Identify your priorities and challenges

First, map out the key strategic priorities for your legal department. The 2020 State of Corporate Law Departments: Effectiveness, Efficiency & Expanding the Guardian Role identified 3 strategic priorities that corporate law department leaders have cited and are focused on for the coming year:

• Improving functional effectiveness
• Increasing efficiency
• Safeguarding the company

Many companies often press their legal departments to do more with less, without compromising on quality. Workloads and demands for legal services are increasing, while resources are not. Of course, each organization and each corporate department is different, so work with your team and other stakeholders that regularly interact with legal to identify the biggest pain points and challenges.

2. Map your current processes

Once you have identified your strategic priorities and challenges, it’s time to analyze your current processes and determine how they can be improved, both through process optimization and smart use of technology. Remember, too, that technology is merely an enabler, not a solution in its own right. Technology applied to bad or inefficient process still results in a bad or inefficient process. 

Working with key stakeholders, start by listing out current systems and processes used by the legal department and identify the legal team’s responsibilities and most common business requests. Look specifically at processes and tasks that are high cost, difficult, time consuming, high volume, low value, or repetitive. Identifying these means identifying where process re-engineering or new technology may be required. 

As you go deeper and map processes that may indicate a need for new technology, it is critical that you record benchmarking metrics to better and more accurately define your requirements and measure success along the way.