4 Do’s And Don’ts When Adopting A Legal Transaction Management Solution
Whether you are considering or have recently purchased an LTM solution to expedite and support your deal closing process, how can you ensure that the team will use the solution to realize the benefits?
If you are reading this, we certainly don’t need to tell you about the pressure law firms are facing to work more efficiently these days.
Replacing low-value work that clients don’t want to pay for with high-value work that they do is now integral to a law firm’s success.
While some firms are doubling down on tactics that worked in the past, other firms are finding innovative ways to leverage software to improve the efficiency of their service delivery.
At the same time, though, many celebrated legal technologies have had disappointing results after considerable investments in expensive implementations.
Legal transaction management (LTM) is a return to the basics of using software to augment human efforts.
It provides a structured workflow that lets transactional lawyers automate away mundane, error-prone tasks they currently do manually.
But even the best technology products require a coordinated rollout strategy to ensure they flourish.
In this white paper excerpt, our friends at iManage provide some do’s and don’ts for effectively rolling out new legal transaction management (LTM) software at your law firm, in order to recognize the value immediately
Read on for a few of these tips, and fill out the form below to download the full white paper, “A Complete Guide to Legal Transaction Management.”
DO – Get practitioners to try it on a live deal
LTM tools have a lot of features, and it can be tempting to dive in head first. By starting out with a simpler transaction, or even just using the tool to create a closing book for a deal that is already closed, lawyers can take time to learn the intricacies of the tool in a lower pressure environment.
Getting that first transaction under your belt is key. In a deal team context, it may also make sense to initially restrict interaction with the tool to junior lawyers, paralegals, or assistants so that they do the heavy lifting. This aligns nicely with the incentives as these parties stand to gain the greatest efficiency rewards from LTM.
DO – Support users with internal resources
When users do take the plunge and try LTM out, make sure you have internal support available for them. A lawyer may not feel comfortable calling up a vendor support line and asking questions that include details about the unique characteristics of their deal. Identify an internal champion who can become the expert.
They can provide training on demand and be an ad hoc resource for answering questions as they come up during live deals. In addition to this, take the time to establish an intranet page. Populate this with a quick tip sheet, some recorded internal training sessions, links to the vendor’s support resources, and key contacts in the firm for the project.
DON’T – Use mock deals to evaluate LTM
Legal transactions can be chaotic. Requirements can shift hour by hour, requiring the closing checklist to be substantially revised, documents to be redrafted and signature pages to be repackaged.
In order for LTM to be a viable solution for your deal teams, you have to prove that the software is flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing circumstances. If lawyers cannot use an LTM tool with a real closing they will not truly realize the value it creates.
Watching an LTM tool save 30 minutes creating signing packages in a simulated environment can give a less than impactful impression. Saving 30 minutes on the eve of a closing in a high stakes legal transaction is a completely different story. After a client thanks you for sending a closing book the day after closing, we bet you’ll never consider going back to the old way.
DON’T – Restrict usage to a handful of lawyers
We’ve found that, within the average law firm, only 10% of lawyers will be willing to take a risk on using a new technology for the first time. While some lawyers have a reputation for this, the people who are the most excited to try out LTM are often surprising.
The success of your rollout rides on these individuals, so it’s important that you find them. The best way to do this is to cast the net wide and see who comes out of the woodwork. Too often, a highly targeted rollout ends up failing on a mistaken assumption that a particular group has the time and interest to try out a new technology.
Demoing the application to the broadest group of users early on will quickly surface the most interested individuals, allowing you to then focus all your efforts on making them successful.
Fill out the form below to download the full white paper, “A Complete Guide to Legal Transaction Management.”
By filling out the form, you are opting in to receive communication from Above the Law and its Partners.
