It's hard to believe this is happening the way it is, but one day, we see tariffs being imposed, the next day they’re not, and the day after that, they’re back on but only for some goods from some countries, and with different percentages! It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin, but this is just a snapshot of how quickly the business environment globally is changing and how challenging it is for legal teams and businesses to keep up.

As a recent World Commerce and Contracting Report (Managing Tariffs and Market Uncertainty: Business Strategies and Emerging Trends) noted, tariffs represent just one of many recent market disruptions, from the COVID-19 pandemic and inflationary pressures to geopolitical instability and raw material shortages.

In such a fickle and financially challenged environment, businesses are constantly restructuring. Key individuals may no longer be involved; they may have different roles, or their entire business units may have ceased to exist. It’s like trying to play musical chairs with the rules changing every minute.

So, what’s a legal team to do when helping their business carry out its goals while staying legally compliant?

Look into no-code software.

At the risk of over-disclosure, over the past 6 weeks, I have lost quite a lot of weight. There is a work related aspect to this post - I'll get to it! 

Despite being fairly active last year, I couldn’t shift the additional weight I’d picked up. No matter how much I ran, I couldn’t lose the weight.

Towards the end of last year, I bought a new suit in a larger size because my old suit no longer fit me and I couldn't see a way back to it. I just assumed that my metabolism had slowed down, and this was the new reality.

However, over Christmas, our son told us how he had slimmed down while building his strength using the MyFitnessPal app. Tell me more I said…

The 2025 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey contains some fascinating findings after surveying 772 participants across 20 industries and 48 countries. There is room for optimism, but a number of apparent inconsistencies and perhaps overall pointers to many legal teams repeating the same mistakes and getting similar outcomes for 2025.

Some of the key findings and my comments on them are set out below.

One of the things we regularly see legal teams grapple with is when to put their legal automation solution into live use.

Having done the hard yards of reviewing and refining their documents and the process, having it automated to a high standard, and having done a fair amount of testing within the legal team and with some key users, there is often a feeling that still more needs to be done before setting it live.

I’d encourage you to consider the benefits of putting it live earlier.

We got a new TV!

Last year we finally replaced our TV.

The previous TV was state of the art when we got it. It had a great picture – 3D! -and did the job well, until it didn’t. The change wasn’t immediate. The picture progressively degraded to the point where visible lines ran down the screen. We stopped noticing, but it would have stood out immediately to visitors. We were watching high-definition movies, but they looked like rubbish. The “smart” apps weren’t updated, and we had to use our phones and Apple TV to get to anything useful.

We could have replaced it at any time for little money, but we didn’t, and I can’t really explain why in logical terms.

When we did buy a new TV, it was all done within a day, for a fraction of what we previously paid. The new TV offers so many benefits in terms of connectivity with all the other apps we regularly use.

We really should have done it years earlier, but our mindset was that it was still going, so we’d keep using it until it literally died.

This happens in law firms and legal teams, too

Like many involved in legal automation, we initially started with a focus on document automation.

This was the particular pain point we had experienced as banking and corporate lawyers ourselves, and we were looking for a way to draft complex legal documents much more quickly and with fewer errors.

When we set up LawHawk eight years ago, there weren’t many options for broader workflow automation, so most initial projects were limited to document automation. Even so, it was common for our projects to deliver 75% or more time savings when drafting individual documents, and potentially much more when delivering packages of documents. This could often translate to several hours of time savings for drafters per matter.

If you are an ActionStep customer or are considering ActionStep as an option to replace your legacy practice management system, you will likely be very interested in a number of new options that are available for ActionStep customers to create the type of complex legal documents that law firms are going to need to be able to create in an era when anyone will be able to access some form of AI to create documents. Differentiation in this area will be increasingly valuable.

The ability to create more complex legal documents has been a key gap in most practice management systems we have looked at. While most practice management system providers market their solutions as having document automation, it falls far short of what we know is possible with specialist tools. Being able to merge names, addresses, and dates is not advanced document automation!

We can see that ActionStep now has at least three good new options, which should be a strong differentiating factor for firms considering a switch. Even if you’ve looked at ActionStep before and it wasn’t the right fit at that time, it may be time for a fresh look.

One of the most interesting things I got from the recent World Commerce & Contracting Summit in Sydney was the report and session run by Dr Sara Cullen of Cullen Group on my Contract Management Style profile. If you haven't done one before, I recommend it.

My results are above, showing how I compare to the average person.

I wasn't particularly surprised that I scored highly for my focus on the relationship development, problem-solving, entrepreneur and scanner categories. They are all things that we have had to focus on when looking to build and grow a new business that intersects complex legal and compliance workflows with fast-moving technological advances. The need to talk to people, understand their problems, and match them to technologies that can solve them is constant – and what I enjoy.

I did pause to think about my relatively low scores for Organizer and Protector and whether those are things that I need to score more highly on.

The 2024 World Commerce & Contracting APAC Summit on 12 and 13 August was a great reminder of the importance of contracts in everything we do and the need to create more value in our contracting.

Although HotDocs Advance has been out for around five years, I know many organisations have not yet migrated across from HotDocs Classic.

There are many reasons for this, including:

• not understanding HotDocs Advance's full potential to go further than Classic and create more valuable solutions. With the world's most powerful document automation solution, you can do better-quality work much faster. You can support more clients without the cost of adding more staff, and you can charge higher fees for less time.
• Accessing HotDocs Classic via an integration such as ActionStep, where an integration with HotDocs Advance has not, until recently, been easily available.

However, from what I have observed, many more practical issues hold firms back. I summarise these and options for dealing with them below. For firms that are using ActionStep and who would like to integrate with HotDocs Advance, I share an exciting update on that below as well.