Legal technology transformation in government agencies

Solving inefficiencies with next-generation legal technology

In the Thomson Reuters Institute State of the Government Legal Department Report, nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents said their departments have yet to decide how to address a lack of internal efficiency. Over half (58%) said they believe staff spend too much time on administrative tasks, and almost half of respondents (47%) feel they also devote too much time to these tasks and not enough to their legal practice.

These concerns boil down to efficiency — a perceived lack of it in government legal offices and a growing demand for it by users of government legal services.

A recent study by the Center for Digital Government found that 67% of surveyed citizens said they prefer to access government services online, compared to only 16% who prefer in-person. Further, government entities are lagging behind the private sector in terms of meeting online expectations — 80% of U.S. federal agencies scored poor or very poor on Forrester’s U.S. Federal Customer Experience Index, compared with 14% of brands in the private sector.

How do government legal teams get on the right side of this issue? Some of this divide is due to sector-unique factors. Government entities are constrained in their budgeting and face bureaucratic hurdles should they seek to improve their systems. It’s likely more difficult for a municipal legal department to launch a major tech upgrade than for a law firm that only answers its managing partners.

But the pressing need to upgrade legal technology won’t go away. The longer government legal departments put off the decision, the more getting up to speed becomes more difficult.

A rising need for better legal technology

Imagine a company that plans to open a new store in an unfamiliar location, a state or municipality where they’ve never done business before. Before deciding where to locate their store — and whether to build or acquire a structure — the company will likely have to contact various governmental legal departments, from the local to the state level. If they plan to buy and build on a property, the company needs to learn about applicable environmental and zoning issues. They’ll familiarize themselves with local or state tax codes and any types of employment law they’re unfamiliar with. Requesting and filling out forms, contracts, and permissions is likely necessary.

That’s a lot of requests and many moving parts for lawyers to keep track of. Government legal teams with limited technological capabilities may find this increasingly challenging. For the company trying to open a new store in an unfamiliar location, this could mean frustrating, lengthy delays and duplication of effort.

Current government legal department challenges

Outdated and overly time-consuming processing can hinder requests for government legal professionals. Some of this is due to the immense scale of government legal work. Government and public sector lawyers advise on a vast array of issues, fielding requests about business regulations, taxation, environmental law, employment law, and contract law. The need to respond to a diverse range of queries from people who have questions about child custody cases, reporters who want information from a specific government agency, and even questions about hunting and fishing regulations can quickly back up.

That’s why they need next-generation technology systems to enable them to do more efficient, non-duplicative legal intake. The technology should also:

• Let lawyers quickly and accurately assess their incoming tasks
• Assign the tasks to the correct professional
• Easily track the progress of each task
• Offer a better, more secure means of communication between government legal professionals, their clients, and any third parties who need to take part in the process
• Scale and adapt to meet diverse needs without extensive IT resources

What technology brings to the table

Government legal teams face a number of hurdles in achieving operational agility and impactful service delivery. There is a higher demand for timely, transparent processes. Needs are constantly changing amidst an evolving political landscape, and stakeholder expectations require agile and practical solutions. Multiple manual systems and workflows are also used for increasingly complex requests, which increases the risk of human error.

Next-generation legal technology makes a substantial difference in operations across the board by supporting public protection, effective service delivery, and the discharge of public functions.

Additionally, using legal tech that incorporates generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) will move legal departments to an entirely paperless environment. In doing so, government legal professionals and public advocates can vastly enhance their dealings with clients, citizens making requests, or opposing counsel.

The following are some benefits that legal technology can deliver:

• Improved visibility and responsiveness. A request to a government legal department can get lost in the weeds. Now, all requests are centralized, standardized, automatically tracked, and easily monitored. No one will have to ask the question, “Whatever happened to my request?” again.
• Automated document generation and tracking. Government lawyers say they spend too much time on administrative tasks. Automating many of these frees them to devote their working hours to more valuable and important items.
• Centralized matter management. It can be frustrating for lawyers to struggle to determine which document draft gets updated, along with which parties have or haven’t worked on it. Hosting all matter data in a central hub — with automated tracking of all edits made to documents and status updates — goes a long way to clearing up confusion.
• Secured information sharing. Giving your central database top-of-the-line security protocols means lawyers control access to documents and data within the system. This security enables collaboration with internal clients, counterparties, and citizens without fear of inadvertent disclosure.

Legal technology use cases: Addressing inefficiencies and administrative challenges

Intake and matter management

The challenge. Government lawyers, unlike their law firm counterparts, advise on a wide range of practice areas to multiple stakeholders with varying priorities. They are invested in the community and the rule of law in a unique way, working within complex governance and political structures. Like their colleagues in law firms, they also need to ensure client instructions are clear and comprehensive.

However, they still field requests from various channels, like email, phone calls, or mail, and such requests often aren’t specifically targeted. A resident may find an email address on a government website and use it for their query, even if the contact is a lawyer with no knowledge of that subject.

Because of the scattershot nature of these requests, it’s difficult for a government legal team to keep abreast of what requests are outstanding. Some requests might be stuck in a lawyer’s email folder. Others could be voicemails piled up in a virtual box. This confusion could lead to a duplication of effort — for example, if a colleague contacts another lawyer with the same request — and could mean deadlines get blown for lack of adequate matter tracking.

The solution. Greater standardization is the future. A system with next-generation matter intake processing begins by asking requesters to fill out an electronic form. These forms range from self-serve options for simple requests — in which a user can auto-generate any form they need — to customizable forms for specific matter types. Examples would be child custody forms or Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

Intake thus becomes more focused as users are prompted to provide exactly the type of information a legal team needs to fulfill their request. Automated workflows assign the request to the correct lawyer, send an acknowledgment of receipt email back to the requestor, and set up tasks based on the entry. Further, all the standardized forms are automatically logged into a database. This capability enables everyone in the government legal team to monitor the status of any request and give users real-time updates on where their request stands.

Contract lifecycle management

The challenge. Contracts are critical to the functioning of government. Yet, all too often, they aren’t managed efficiently, transparently, or collaboratively throughout their life cycle. A lack of transparency is a serious issue in government legal departments, as is collaboration. Government legal teams can struggle with having multiple parties working together on contract generation and revision. In some cases, lawyers could duplicate their efforts or labor to determine at what stage their collaborators are in the revising process.

Having to repurpose and edit the same documents and contracts repeatedly isn’t merely a waste of everyone’s time; it’s a surefire way to introduce errors into the process and create frustrating delays for all parties involved.

The solution. What would significantly improve the document, contract drafting, and revision process? Having a system with centralized collaboration and at-a-glance status management — a system that can automatically assign contractual work based on lawyer workload and specialization. One that enables users to easily generate contracts from templates, leverages AI-powered tools to extract contract insights, locates and corrects inconsistencies in contract creation, and reduces time spent on repetitive tasks.

Government legal departments would benefit from having a central repository for all documents — one that has tiered levels of security and enables lawyers to edit and exchange documents internally and with clients or other parties. Lawyers also benefit from next-generation search capabilities that provide the means to locate documents faster and with more accuracy, allowing them to drill down for specific clauses and easily classify documents by date, size, or function.

An automated audit and version history ensures lawyers have full transparency into who has been working on a document. All participants have confidence they are working on the most recent version of a contract. Strong permissions capability gives a government law department flexibility on who gets access to documents and to what degree, including individuals outside the department.

Public records requests, including FOIA

The challenge. Public records requests are the cornerstone of a government legal department’s perceived transparency. Government legal professionals need to process citizen requests for information from their agency or department. For instance, FOIA requires federal government agencies to disclose any information requested unless it falls under an exempt category, such as national security and law enforcement. Many states have similar policies in place.

However, existing systems and workflows are often unstructured, which causes delays and backlogs. These, in turn, create the risk of litigation and a loss of public confidence.

Complexity often determines how quickly a request gets fulfilled. Agencies can process simple requests — that is, a request targeted in scope and which seeks fewer pages of records — more efficiently than those seeking a larger volume of material with wide parameters. As FOIA’s website notes, “Agencies typically process requests in the order of receipt. The time it takes to respond to a request will vary depending on the complexity of the request and any backlog of requests already pending at the agency.”

But even simple requests can take many months to fulfill, as legal professionals first struggle to locate the information and then verify its accuracy and availability.

The solution. A central repository with automated data sorting, relevance prediction, and document redaction capabilities reduces delays and bottlenecks for public records requests. Government legal departments should consider using a system that generates automated performance metrics. Supervisors get a wider and more accurate sense of how many requests were received, as well as data about the legal department’s response record. The latter includes:

• How much data was collated
• How many pages of responses were required
• The proportion of timely responses and those that were late

Title IX incident reporting

The challenge. Title IX protects anyone in a government-funded educational institution, whether student, faculty, or staff, from sex-based discrimination. A Title IX incident is often a sensitive matter involving multiple parties, such as university administrators and underage students, and the parameters are often in flux. If handled inefficiently, the process could cause unnecessary distress to those claiming a Title IX violation. Further, time is often of the essence in a Title IX case — for example, if a student files a sexual harassment claim against their current professor.

When Title IX processes are wildly inefficient, this can have a snowball effect, resulting in a lack of effective incident management. If the incident is handled poorly, whether that means any notable errors in documentation or if the process has substantial delays, the longer-term implications can be harsh — creating greater risk for an institution, with negative effects on its reputation and funding sources.

The solution. An upgraded Title IX workflow tool enables government lawyers to more easily determine whether an educational institution has demonstrated compliance with Title IX, drawing upon the most up-to-date analyses of the current interpretation of the statute.

More automated intake also makes things easier for those claiming a Title IX violation. An easy-to-process electronic form allows claimants to clearly detail all aspects of the violation. They are prompted, when necessary, to include any vital details relevant to their cases, such as dates and locations. Further, these communications between client and government lawyers will be fully secure and accessible only to appropriate parties, giving the client more freedom to be specific about the violation in question.

Strategies for technology adoption and effective implementation

Assessment and planning

Start with what ails you. A government legal office should run an internal efficiency assessment and locate pain points. Do you have visibility into what the department is working on? Could you quickly produce an audit of matter types, volumes, and status? Where do holdups occur the most? Which kinds of requests typically take the longest to fulfill? How much duplication of effort is happening? Which lawyers in your department are overworked the most?

A detailed grasp of where and what your legal department’s shortcomings are is vital information. Think of it as providing a negative for you to develop into a plan of action. Knowing where your department is weakest is how to set clear, achievable objectives.

Having a set of concrete goals you’re looking to fulfill with a technology upgrade is also essential. All relevant stakeholders should know what’s achievable with legal technology and what an upgraded system is capable of. This knowledge helps inform when and how they should expect to reap the benefits and see a substantial return on the investment.

Stakeholder engagement

You’ll need to get your department’s biggest stakeholders on board before you make a major technology upgrade. You should get buy-ins from all levels of a government legal department, which means having a lot of conversations.

The office’s IT team will want to know how the system works, how they will integrate it into the department’s existing systems, and what potential issues integration could cause. Lawyers will want to know end-user logistics. How will this new system function? What will it replace that I currently use? How will it affect my day-to-day work?

The more specifically you can answer such questions, the more likely you’ll have highly engaged end users.

Getting stakeholder buy-in — and ultimately, high engagement — starts with powerful solutions.

Technology selection with HighQ

Thomson Reuters HighQ is a diverse platform that empowers the public sector to drive engagement, deliver innovative solutions, streamline processes, and enhance responsiveness. All while navigating a dynamic legal and economic landscape. Trusted by legal professionals around the globe, HighQ supports stakeholders across the sector to improve operations with scalable, innovative solutions.

Its matter management tools are crafted for ease of use, along with its collaborative and document-sharing tools. Its centralized platform, document repositories, and virtual workspaces are highly secure and easy for lawyers to access and manage. Overall, it provides government legal departments with a reliable means of achieving greater productivity.

According to recent survey data, 90% of respondents say HighQ allows them to respond to their organization’s needs faster than they could before. Process improvement ranks as the top benefit cited by customers, and 88% of users agree that HighQ allows them to free up time so they can focus on more valuable work.

Users also say they’ve achieved an average time-savings of 50% during new matter intake and 45% during document drafting, significantly impacting efficiency. This speed hasn’t meant any compromises with quality and reliability. In fact, 85% of users say HighQ has helped to reduce errors and improve accuracy in their operations.

Making the right technology choice

Government and public sector lawyers need to field and respond to constant requests from a wide array of parties. They need to do this in an increasingly digitized world — a world in which sticking to outdated systems is a recipe for inefficiency, error, delays, and confusion.

That’s why government lawyers need next-generation technology empowering them to better address clients' needs. They need stronger security, greater ease of use, better tracking capabilities, and a superior means of communicating with clients. The good news is that undertaking a technology upgrade can get them there. The best time to make this leap is today.