As an in-house lawyer or lawyer in a firm, you may have heard about the benefits of using technology to improve your legal processes and get better outcomes. You may have seen some impressive demos or testimonials from vendors who claim to have the perfect solution for your needs.

But how do you decide which technology or approach is the best for your situation?

How do you navigate the overwhelming amount of information and noise in the market?

The truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all answer to this question. Different technologies and approaches have different strengths and weaknesses, depending on your goals, constraints, preferences, and context.

What works for one legal team may not work for another. And what works today may not work tomorrow.

So, how can you simplify your thinking and make progress in evaluating LegalTech?

Here are five suggestions that may help you:

An area where improvements might easily be made to overall contracting speed is in the approvals process.

I found the latest podcast by Ron Baker and Ed Kless in The Soul of Enterprise (The Time Tax: The Crime of Stealing Customers’ Time) very thought provoking. I recommend it highly.

It is based on an article by B Joseph Pine II and James H Gilmore – Competing for Customer Time.

While there is ongoing discussion about the hourly billing model and lawyers charging for their time, the focus in the podcast and article is on the value of the client’s time and how to avoid wasting it.

Pine and Gilmore come out strongly:

"While not crimes against humanity, time-wasters are certainly offences against human customers. The worst thing you can do is waste your customers’ time – yet companies do it all the time.”

They go on to say:

“Companies can create value for customers by eliminating activities that waste their time; saving their time when so desired; offering experiences where time is valued; and even helping customers to wisely invest their time.”

and

“No company should impose wasted time on customers. The primary strategic choices today focus on time well saved and time well spent.”

This made me think about how this applies to our business, LawHawk, and the legal automation solutions we design, build and support. I have set out my thoughts below.

Estate planning, particularly the creation of wills and enduring powers of attorney (EPAs), is an underappreciated field requiring a lot of expertise.

Lawyers and legal executives often invest extensive hours researching, verifying, and customising clauses for wills, all while managing the heavy administrative load of gathering and inputting data into multiple documents for various individuals.

It doesn't have to be this hard, though.

Embracing technological advancements has transformed the process of will and EPA creation for modern firms wanting to adopt the most efficient processes and provide the best outcomes for their clients.

In this post, we delve into why leading industry players are now turning to software solutions for the streamlined creation of even the most intricate documents, specifically focusing on wills and EPA documents.

This article focuses on specific document automation software, not the basic functionality you get in practice management systems, which is often marketed as if it has the same capabilities.

Thinking back over many of the projects we have been involved with over the years, one thing that stands out is the importance of, and key dependency on, the legal team's relationship with their IT team.

What happens without a good relationship?

When I’m asked for the best resources to improve overall contracting processes and outcomes, there are two that I can recommend knowing they will provide excellent insights and return on investment.

While particularly relevant for in-house legal teams and contract managers (who can get immediate benefits), they offer significant value to commercial lawyers in law firms who want to understand how they can really add the most value to their clients’ businesses.

Looking ahead to the coming year, I think (maybe with a bit of hope thrown in) several themes will be key. This is what we will be focussing on helping our customers with, and in our own business.

When evaluating new technology, a proof of concept can be a very helpful way of ensuring you get what you think you are getting while avoiding unnecessary costs.

However, we sometimes see proof-of-concept projects that go off the rails, don’t achieve the expected outcomes, and cost a lot of money.

There is one particular mistake that we frequently see people make.

If an organisation is a collection of contracts that cover everything the organisation buys and sells, then contract data is the new oil. But there can be a lot of data!

Utilising document automation to generate contracts provides the advantage of transforming every question in the questionnaire into valuable data that can be input into a contract database. Additionally, the capabilities of the document automation solution enable the creation of various additional data points through complex calculations on the initial data. However, when confronted with a multitude of data columns in a document library, it can be challenging for users to leverage this wealth of information effectively.

Fortunately, there are several options available to enhance the usefulness of contract views in SharePoint:

While Cognito Forms has proven to be a valuable solution for moderately complex documents and streamlined contract requests and can be a better option than many CLMs offer (as shown in this earlier post), there may be better choices for some use cases.

When faced with more complex documents or the need to generate multiple documents simultaneously, as well as the requirement for seamless data integration from other systems, alternative solutions become necessary. That’s where specialist document automation software, such as HotDocs, shines.

HotDocs offers robust capabilities to handle even the most intricate and complex documents we’ve encountered. With its strong APIs, it can seamlessly integrate with other systems (including SharePoint lists), bridging gaps in document generation wherever needed.

Knowing when a simple document automation solution within a broader CLM solution will suffice and when a more powerful solution is required is not easy and requires extensive experience in the field. If you don’t live in this space, it’s easy to screw it up. When working with the wrong solution, and trying to push it to do things it wasn't designed to do, you can easily find yourself in a situation where you're 90% done, 90% to go.