Law Department Survey Finds Operations Improving but Progress Remains an Uphill Climb for the Effective Use of Technology

The findings of the Blickstein Group’s 2019 Law Department Operations Survey reveal a majority of legal teams are successfully improving how they operate. But much work remains to be done as they strive to overcome a variety of challenges for law department transformation. In addition, with 33 percent of the legal operations professionals being new to their roles within the last one to three years, this suggests considerable opportunity and room for maturity evolution.

Survey participants reported business process improvement, cost containment and savings, and management of the budget as top challenges, followed closely by concerns over the management and retention of department resources, staying abreast of technology, and managing outside counsel. I would say technology is one of the commonalities across all these issues.

Effective Use of Technology Rises but Contract and Document Management Trail Behind 

Survey participants reported improvements across the board in the effective use of technology, as compared with 2018 survey results. Notably electronic signatures and e-billing were both ranked as 8s on a 10-point scale for the first time in the 12-year history of the survey.

But contract management and document management, despite some improvements, continued to trail behind all other technologies for effective use. 

It’s not that they are less useful, but rather that they are not being utilized to the fullest. 

There can be any number of reasons to explain less than peak effective use, for example insufficient training or poor implementation (such as when a platform might be shoehorned into department processes). Process analysis and well-designed workflows are often critical to utilization success.

Technology can be underutilized too. For example, an e-billing system could be used simply to process invoices. But a more effective use would include spend analysis of the data to identify potential opportunities for process improvements or to determine whether additional in-house resources may be justified. Even small improvements can add up to significant departmental savings.

In fact, this seems to be what law departments are doing. 67 percent of survey participants reported tracking accruals or budgets in e-billing, up from 55 percent in 2018. That’s effective use!

Survey participants also overwhelmingly gave a thumbs up regarding their perception of the effective use of information that metrics can provide, an increase from about 45 percent in 2018 to nearly 72% in 2019 who had a positive view about the value of these metrics. 

Law departments seem to recognize that other technologies need to be equally well utilized. 

Nearly half of all survey participants said they are now planning on or actively developing a strategy to address how they integrate, evolve and replace existing systems in support of their legal department needs and processes. 

If we look at contract management specifically, half of departments report an intent to update, evaluate, or implement new systems over the next 12 months. Analyzing the data in these systems can be a great way to help determine the best course of action.

It will also be crucial to gain an understanding of how processes really work, and especially from the perspective of the people who will be using the technology, which can be a nice way to acknowledge the importance of the work they do. 

Overall the survey findings show that the trend for law department transformation is not transient. Legal teams are strongly committed to changing how law works and, where there is disagreement among legal operations professionals, it is usually about the degree of change.

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Heidi Rudolph is a Managing Director at Morae Global, the full-service, technology-enabled, integrated solution provider for the legal and compliance function around the world.