Whether you are helping to grow a startup or a part of revamping a traditional enterprise, legal digital transformation involves more than employing enterprise software or experimenting with algorithms. It requires rearchitecting operating models altogether. It’s about a journey from being ‘digitally ready’ to effectively providing technology, solutions, and whole new paradigms.
But first, organizations and legal departments need to devise a transformation model of their very own. And they must emphasize one critical facet: ‘transformation delivery.’
What is key at this early stage is not merely waiting for a system to be ready before ‘going live’. It’s also not about delivering solutions all at once. Instead, it is important to ponder an incremental transformation philosophy – and a more agile deployment. Combined, these elements ensure that you do not delay the technology implementation by even one minute. They allow you to seek out improvements while you think seriously about your individual use case.
Further, delivering legal technology as a project leader requires four significant steps: procuring the right platform that helps you obtain your critical business outcomes, developing an implementation plan, embedding the legal design and engineering methodology, as well as digitizing your legal data in its entirety. These are all a part of a proven transformational model that leads to quantifiable success.
- Procure the Right Technology Platform
Once you have a complete understanding of your legal departments’ needs, consider yourself equipped to tackle any transformation delivery. However, the configurability of platforms is important, too; you should be able to adjust virtually any system to suit your own needs.
Far too many lawyers are drawn toward deeply-customized solutions when they could choose out-of-the-box (OOTB) ones instead. Such custom-coded projects can delay projects, adds costs, and even increases the risk of failure. OOTB digital products, on the other hand, serve users’ needs without bringing on extra deployment time, expenses – and yes, all of those headaches.
While implementing a digital transformation platform, some of the best practices include:
* Assessing your technical requirements
* Performing full-system installation and integration with the assistance of technical teams
* Logging and tracking issues right through to resolution, using project management tools
* Supporting artificial intelligence and machine learning (if required)
* Understanding the “gap” between your current and future process, and providing creative ways to resolve it
- Develop an Implementation Plan
The next step of transformation delivery is simply thinking – and working – in an agile manner. Being overly focused on getting your legal department into a ‘perfect digital state’ can result in the implementation of systems that backfire in the end.
With respect to change management, alterations to traditional legal functions should be made rather progressively, too. With a step-by-step approach, valuable lessons can be learned along the way, and the organization – as a whole – can have time to adapt to new legal technology. So, no employee is left behind by transforming your legal functions. In fact, employees are vital to the success of digital transformation projects, making sure technological changes firmly take root.
Typically speaking, implementations should start with discovery interviews over a one- to two-week period; system configurations ought to occur within the first six weeks; and system quality assurance and testing should take place between weeks seven and 10. This is followed by ‘go-live dates’ and full onsite training, which are offered during weeks 11 and 12:
* First three weeks – Prerequisite information gathering
* Second and ninth weeks – Environment setup
* Third and sixth weeks – Account setup
* Seventh and 11th weeks – Testing and release
* 11th and 12th weeks – Feedback
* 13th and 14th weeks – Configuration
- Embed Legal Design and Engineering Methodology
Once you fully understand your individual use case, you can begin to draw out process maps and charts. By comprehending your legal departments’ current system and process, you can ensure that they are not disturbed to a great degree throughout. And by looking carefully at how they will transform eventually, you can better prepare for the changes that lie ahead. That all means peering into your organization’s past as much as its future:
* Define current processes: Document how they are currently executed and who is involved in approvals – along with company policies and guidelines – before discussing any and all expectations.
* Map out the future vision: Imagine the final destination of your digital transformation journey, envisioning automated systems and processes perfectly in place.
* Think about an individual use case solution: Conduct gap analyses based on your current needs and desired digital state – and proceed to bridge that gap!
* Begin developing a delivery plan
- Digitize Your Legal DataThe last crucial step of transformation delivery is migrating your existing and historical data onto the new system. This may seem like a step that needs no mention. However, your migration needs to be explicitly articulated at this point.
And to ensure that migration tools are deployed efficiently and effectively, make certain that you have a sound implementation plan in the first place. When it comes to migrating your legal documents, for instance, also consider the expertise level of the individuals handling private and confidential data. Ideally, they will have legal backgrounds, or understand legal operations and the critical nature of files.
So, do you consider yourself, your legal department, and your organization ‘digitally ready?’ If legal digital transformation is not just for future consideration, remember that technology is not at all monolithic. Rather, legal digital transformation is the totality of digital innovations working closely together. Technology, onto itself, is not a panacea either. Instead of being a sole agent of transformation projects, it is merely a facilitator of the same.
You would also do well to start working on projects with the help of reliable partners. Transforming legal requires the dedication of technology vendors and legal engineers, after all. These consultants are concerned about the implementation, integration, and deployment of solutions as much as its impact on legal departments. They embody a holistic approach to modernizing legal operations altogether.
When working in tandem with these experts on your journey, your organization can better transit through digital transformation readiness, delivery – and, ultimately, success.
Matt Gould is the interim Head of Legal Transformation at ContractPodAi. He brings over 20 years experience as a general counsel leading global in-house legal teams in the telecommunications and tech sectors. Read his executive bio here.
