I n today’s ever-changing business environment, legal operations teams are constantly being asked to do more with less. In addition to managing the business’s basic legal needs, in-house lawyers are facing a complex web of regulations and compliance needs that varies in every jurisdiction, not to mention new and emerging challenges with information security, privacy, and crisis management. As Morrison and Forester explains,
“There’s plenty to keep a [General Counsel] up at night, whether it’s assessing and mitigating risk, ensuring compliance, managing a budget, or enabling the business to meet its goals.”
And all those new challenges keep coming even as legal teams are managing a wide range of business needs, disorganized workflows, and ad hoc questions and requests from every corner of the company that significantly reduces productivity and work quality.
These poor processes don’t just cause inefficiency. They can lead to mistakes, missed questions, and oversights that can put your company in jeopardy. ServiceNow’s Legal Service Delivery meets legal teams where they are, delivering solutions that make increased workloads manageable and allow attorneys to focus on the projects that matter most.
Today, technology solutions for legal operations are not a nice-to-have—they’re a must. Without them, keeping up with constantly evolving demands is nearly impossible. And according to The Legal 500’s discussion of the current evolution of General Counsel offices, “it’s the careful application of technology in shoring up departmental inefficiencies, freeing up internal lawyers to focus on more strategic and higher-value application of their skills, that will separate the top-tier GCs from the crowd.” ServiceNow’s Legal Service Delivery solution does all that and more.
Empowering Employees Across the Organization
By this point, study after study has shown us that multi-tasking just doesn’t work, especially in professions that require highly specific knowledge and critical thinking. Yet most companies expect legal departments to juggle their substantive work with answering questions, no matter how inconsequential, as they arise. ServiceNow’s Legal Self-Service eases that burden by providing 24x7 access to a self-service portal and virtual agents who can answer common questions, taking the interaction out of the legal team’s inbox entirely. It also allows the legal operations team to configure and deploy company-specific workflows for any legal situation that may arise, creating a precedent of consistency and quick service that will pay dividends for team.
ServiceNow’s solutions also allow you to create a knowledge base specific to your company so that you can help employees understand simple issues and how they relate to the business, which not only cuts down on inefficiencies but also reduces the risk of compliance issues or other legal problems.
Providing Process Management Solutions
One of the major pain points for legal operations teams is managing communications aross the company and ensuring they have all of the information they need from the start. ServiceNow’s solution allows your team to cut down on the back-and-forth by having employees fill out a legal process intake form whenever they need help. Instead of folders full of emails, you will have any easy-to-access central location for both requests and the details you need to fulfill them. And with mobile capabilities, employees can submit those requests anywhere, anytime.
With Legal Counsel Center, you can track work through automated workflows, allowing you to keep multiple projects moving through the pipeline with the ability to categorize and assign tasks. And with Legal Matter Management, you can easily set up templates for legal matters you frequently encounter, saving you from repetitive work and ensuring that internal processes are followed and progress is tracked accurately. And for tasks that need less customization, out-of-the-box templates for common matters and requests are available. In the context of remote work—due to COVID-19 or in the shift toward permanent remote business that is sure to follow—having systems in place to track tasks and deliverables helps to keep the team running smoothly without resorting to endless check-in calls. The time saved isn’t limited to organizational tasks, either—streamlined processes make it much easier to avoid mistakes, reducing the time that you’ll need to spend checking and revising your team’s work.
Reporting and Trend Forecasting
Forget scraping together lists or Excel documents at the end of the month or year—Legal Reporting and Dashboards allow you to track and report out your progress on-demand. Within the department, these reports allow for post-mortem project analyses, help identify areas of strength and opportunities for improvement, and allow the team to close out a project with all relevant information on file. As the team uses Legal Reporting and Dashboards more and more, you’ll be able to identify trends in service needs and better predict periods of heavy and light requests volumes, allowing you to plan ahead to smooth out the workload, preserving staff bandwidth and departmental capacity. And when it comes time to update the executive team on your department’s work, these reports will give you easy access to real-time data on key performance indicators that you can share to demonstrate your performance and make the case for the additional resources you may need. You won’t even need a computer—all that data is available whenever you need it on mobile.
Enabling the Legal Operations of the Future
No technology solution can replace the decades of experience and specialized knowledge that your department represents. But ServiceNow’s Legal Service Delivery can allow your team to put that knowledge to use on the problems that matter, rather than wasting time on administrative tasks. As demands on legal teams increase and become more complex, there’s no sense in burning out staff by expecting them to constantly reinvent the wheel. With automated workflows and easy access to key information, your team can stay organized and deliver top-quality service efficiently, increasing both employee satisfaction with your department and your reputation across the organization. And without the constant distraction of incoming requests and questions from across the company, you’ll be able to turn your full attention to the problems that are most pressing.