LawHawk Blog

One recurring challenge for legal teams in legal matter management is finding effective ways to train and inform the broader business on common issues.

The goal is to reduce the volume of enquiries and requests that flood the legal team, allowing the team to focus only on queries that truly require their expertise.

While certain legal matter management solutions offer functionality in this area, SharePoint stands out as a powerful tool for this purpose, given that it is already used by most legal teams and their business customers and has so many relevant features.

With its extensive range of features, SharePoint empowers legal teams to create flexible and intuitive resources, guiding the business towards the information they need when needed.

Topics: Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations

In legal matter management, few things are as vital as a well-designed intake process.

Without it, instructions can arrive from various channels like emails, phone calls, or in-person conversations (and often all of them!).

When there is no systematic method to capture this information, it often remains scattered across emails or locked away in people's minds. Consequently, it must be repeatedly entered into different documents or systems at different times.

This lack of organisation can lead to delays, necessitating clarifications and additional information requests. Moreover, it can spark disputes, with the business believing they provided instructions much earlier than the legal team believes is the case or with conflicting recollections about the requested information.

The absence of reliable data makes it more challenging for the legal team to actively manage matters, conduct reporting and analytics, and demonstrate their effective management of legal risks and opportunities for the business.

Topics: Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations

In the past few years, there’s been a tremendous increase in the adoption of legal matter management solutions.

Topics: Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations

Artificial Lawyer recently published an article by Karl Chapman, the CEO of Kim Technologies. The Democratization of Document Automation: We have Reached the Tipping Point.

I'm sure that Kim is an excellent piece of technology, and anything that can make it easier to create automated templates at lower cost is a good thing. But this article significantly oversimplifies the work required to get good outcomes from an automation project.

Topics: Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Document Assembly, Law Firm Management, Digital Signatures, Self-Service Legal Automation, Automated NDAs, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

A lot of the focus when procuring new technology is on the initial upfront costs and the ongoing software and support costs. Fair enough, these are important in evaluating the cost of the new solution.

What often seems to be overlooked are the costs of the current process and the costs of delay. This often comes up when someone in charge of the business process has determined that they have a problem they would like to fix. When a solution they would like is agreed upon, they then need broader support from other teams, such as IT or procurement.

This can result in months, sometimes years, of delay, perhaps while the IT team consider if it would cost less for them to build a solution themselves.

Topics: Practise of Law, Document Automation, Legal Technology, In-House Legal, Law Firm Management, Digital Signatures, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Contract Management

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment have just released an Advance Notice of their intention to re-tender the All of Government External Legal Services contract, which expires on 22 September 2023.

The revised fee structure caught my eye.

Topics: Future of Law, In-House Legal, Law Firm Management, Legal Automation, Matter Management, Legal Operations, Value Pricing

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

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