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.

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.

We talk to a lot of organisations about document automation.  Many of them have problems that document automation can help with.  Some of them are literally drowning in paperwork, lacking sufficient experienced staff, and know they are exposed to undesirable levels of risk through inadvertent error or lost opportunities through delay.  The people on the front-line need a solution now!

Although it is something that they want to start using because they know the benefits it will provide them in terms of greater speed and quality of document creation, with reduced costs and risk of error, many of them already have some type of system that already has, or could have as an extra module, some sort of document generation capability which they are not using.  In a corporate context this could be a procurement system or an HR system, and in a law firm, it is often the firm’s practice management system.

Sensibly they want to look into that option further before they make a decision on how they will start to use document automation.  The problem is that we see a lot of people go into that process, but few come out the other side.  Months or years will pass without getting any of the benefits they know they need.  How can this problem be avoided?

If you are considering these types of issues, the following questions and thoughts based on our observations might help you and your team move through evaluation more quickly and effectively and avoid it becoming a black hole that devours your initiative before you get going:

You may have seen me talk about using legaltech to achieve great outcomes.  You may have nodded your head in agreement. After all, who wouldn’t agree that getting a great result is, well, great?  But what does this actually mean?  

There are a lot of legaltech options out there.  If you’ve tried one piece of legaltech, and been left feeling like the guy on the right, you’re not alone.  This happens all too often.  With so many providers (sometimes appearing to offer the same solution), you have to find one that can solve problems you have, in the way that suits you, in the way they said they would.  Don’t part with your money or your time, until you know this will be the case.

“Not surprisingly (in hindsight, at least), his first initiative was to implement document automation.  This was almost eight years ago!”

Over half a year on from leaving London, I ask myself:  what did I learn from my time in London?  Perhaps I can best answer this question by first asking myself: what did I expect?  Global market-leading bank, hundreds of years old, based in London - everything must go faster and run more efficiently than in little New Zealand, right?  Well, sort of.