Streamlining the legal intake process and working smarter with technology

As businesses increasingly look to their legal teams to deliver more responsive and strategic legal services, inefficient processes often get in the way. As most legal departments know, it’s difficult to maximize value when you’re dealing with antiquated workflows and low-value tasks.

In response to these roadblocks, many forward-thinking legal departments are utilizing technology to clear the way for streamlined processes and a focus on more strategic work — and it all starts with intake.

If your legal department’s intake process is awash in inconsistent submissions, a lack of necessary detail, untracked data, and manual allocation, you’re likely dealing with slow response times, poor transparency, and a less-than-stellar reputation within your organization.

The right technology solution can transform the way your corporate law department works with colleagues in the organization and how it engages with external law firms. With streamlined legal workflows, simplified contract management, and smarter collaboration tools, your legal department can reduce the time and risk associated with manual tasks and disparate processes.

Harness the power of an intelligent legal work solution

With HighQ for legal intake and self-service, your legal department can standardize the service request process, analyze intake data, and enable business customers with self-service contract assembly and legal guidance.

This intelligent legal work solution enables you to seamlessly collaborate with others, automate manual task and legal processes, and manage complex projects and transactions. Here’s how.

Automate tasks and legal processes

HighQ offers a standardized legal intake process that utilizes custom forms to gather all relevant information. Configurable workflows then direct intake to the right resources and provide regular status updates to business users.

With this process in place, your legal team can empower business users to generate their own pre-approved, standard legal documents. And, by combining document automation with document management, electronic signatures, workflow, and other HighQ features, you can streamline virtually any document-creation process.

This is especially important when it comes to contract management. When all phases and stakeholders come together in HighQ’s centralized contract management ecosystem, your legal department has unprecedented control and visibility into all contracting activities, workflows, approvals, documents, and metrics. This speeds up transactions and delivers greater value to the business, while also improving accuracy and lowering risk.

In the event an exceptional legal matter arises that requires your undivided attention, automated safeguard workflows escalate it directly to your team. With HighQ, you can even create a centralized repository for legal document management and know-how — such as playbooks, checklists, guidance, and other knowledge assets — that is accessible to all business users.

Improve collaboration and engagement

With an integrated platform to work with colleagues and external law firms, HighQ enables your legal department to better collaborate on projects and engage with clients. Communicate with your team from the same workspace (without having to move between programs) and track the status of each project on a customized task management dashboard.

With automated workflow management, you can produce task lists, obtain feedback, send out reminders, and track your team’s progress — all without any intervention.

Manage complex projects and transactions

HighQ also enables you to use the data that surrounds your document automation process to analyze trends, interrogate deal specifics, and support due diligence. You can even visualize the data in dashboards to better manage complex projects and matters, assign work and tasks, collaborate on documents and data, and provide complete transparency.

When you analyze trends and legal demands, you better mitigate risk. HighQ offers the ability to create a complete record and audit trail of legal demand across your organization so you can track legal request metrics, spot risk and problem areas in the business in real time, and plan team resources accordingly.

Get a positive boost in reputation

Perhaps the most significant benefit, however, comes in the form of a reputational boost. When you improve your response and cycle times, you enhance the reputation of your legal department. Greater legal self-service with HighQ means you can change internal perceptions by delivering essential legal services quickly and efficiently, positioning your team as a valuable facilitator and not as an obstacle.

Couple these benefits with a renewed focus on high-value, strategic work and the true expertise of your legal department will shine through for the entire organization to see.

Ready to take the next step?

To learn more about how your legal department can perform intelligent work that allows you to streamline collaboration, legal service delivery, legal operations, client engagement, and much more, visit https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/c/data-driven-solutions-for-general-counsel.