LawHawk Blog

An issue with getting a legal technology project approved in an organisation is proving the importance of the project and that there will be a good return on investment.

It can be easy to focus too narrowly on what the benefits will be.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Self-Service Legal Automation, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

In an earlier post, I suggested that customers should focus more on the relationship with their suppliers and less on the current technology features. Because requirements are changing so quickly, the supplier must be able to keep up.

A great relationship should not just be reactive. A good supplier will understand and care enough about the customer's business and changing requirements to proactively suggest improvements that the customer can adopt to get even better results.

Topics: Document Automation, Procurement, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Digital Signatures, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

One of the challenges in legal process automation projects is that it can be hard to figure out the current process and agree on what it ideally should be.

In many legal processes, there is no written process map at all.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Legal Automation, Email Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

A lot of technology is bought and sold based on how many features it has.

Vendors are certainly responsible for a lot of marketing, emphasising all their features while simultaneously claiming that their solution is incredibly simple and intuitive.

Buyers, especially those going through formal procurement processes with RFPs, massively overcomplicate things by including spreadsheets with tens, if not hundreds, of requirements.

At some point, everyone loses sight of two of the most important things:

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Compliance, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

The longer I've been working with legal technology, the more convinced I am that customers should be looking for relationships, not technology or particular solutions.

What do I mean?

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

There’s an ongoing debate about whether it’s better to have “point solutions” that only do one thing really well or a single platform that can do nearly everything.

There’s no obvious right answer but here's my thoughts.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Document autom, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations

Last week I had a call from a law firm that I first spoke to in June 2016, basically right after LawHawk launched.

The partner at that time told me “Yes, our firm is interested in the use of technology / automation etc in the profession. We have recently invested significant amounts of time (and some money) developing our own precedents and their automation using the Infinity system.”

Now, more than 5 years later, they don’t appear to have made any significant progress. Why not?

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, Document Assembly, legal practice, Law Firm Management, Legal Automation

Last week said I think there is too much focus on whether a new initiative is innovative, which stops people progressing worthwhile, low risk, and easy to implement improvements that would make things better.

I recommend focussing on the problems to be solved and the required outcomes, using well-proven solutions to minimise risks. Each small step you take provides quick wins while opening more opportunities for further improvement. Whether is it is "innovative" shouldn’t come into it.

As an example of this approach towards continuous improvement, accumulating smaller wins towards more significant outcomes, consider what the Air New Zealand legal team  - winners of the ILANZ 2021 In-house Legal Team of the Year Award - did recently.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Self-Service Legal Automation, Automated NDAs

Are we too focussed on whether something is innovative?

That might seem an unusual question for me to ask, you might think. After all, haven’t I been on the Advisory Board for the College of Law’s Centre for Legal Innovation for the last five years?

Isn't a large part of what LawHawk does looking at existing processes, how they can be re-engineered, and finding new ways to work for better results?

Given how little innovation has occurred in the legal profession, don’t we want to see much more of it?

Topics: Practise of Law, Future of Law, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, legal practice, Law Firm Management

It’s coming up to 5 years since LawHawk launched.

Back then, nobody was really doing legal automation. Cloud technology was only just starting to emerge and, quite fairly, most firms had little to no experience of successful automation to talk about.

In the next couple of years there were a lot of press releases about firms adopting one solution or another, but surprisingly little publication of any actual results that had come from the project. Either the firm never had a plan for broader roll-out beyond a small initial team of enthusiasts, or the realities of successful legal tech project management quickly stalled things.

So five years on, I feel there are still too many people talking about what other people should be doing, without any obvious experience of having done it themselves, or offering any insights into how others can do it too. Particularly how to get started and how to overcome the inevitable obstacles that arise.

Which is why I’m pleased to be participating in LawFest 2021 on 3 March, with a panel of people who have all got first hand experience of successful delivery of legal tech projects, and who can share insights that will help others to do the same.

Topics: Practise of Law, Future of Law, Legal Technology