With so much to do and limited time, in-house legal teams can be at risk of slipping into reactive mode, where tasks are simply added to an already lengthy to-do list by default.
However, taking time to reflect on who should do the work, how to do it – or whether it’s even necessary – can help your team to reduce its workload and focus on the most impactful matters.
In this article, we explore five questions you can use to manage and prioritise their workloads more effectively.
With so much to do and limited time, in-house legal teams can be at risk of slipping into reactive mode, where tasks are simply added to an already lengthy to-do list by default.
However, taking time to reflect on who should do the work, how to do it – or whether it’s even necessary – can help your team to reduce its workload and focus on the most impactful matters.
In this article, we explore five questions you can use to manage and prioritise their workloads more effectively.
Where the work still needs to be done, but doesn’t merit the attention of the legal team – are there other stakeholders who can handle the work themselves?
In some cases, they may not need your help at all e.g. perhaps procurement can handle straightforward contracts for the purchase of goods/services below a certain value without help.
In others, you might need to provide some support in the form of self-help resources.
An example would be the creation of playbooks that set out guidance on how to negotiate certain company templates.
Another area to consider would be FAQs. This could be ‘classic’ FAQs e.g. a page on the intranet – or perhaps something more creative e.g. a series of short videos.
You can even automate the handling of complex queries with no/low-code tech by creating an interactive resource that guides users through questions and directs them to relevant information or next steps based on their answers (see Self-service technology: 3 ‘win-win’ use cases for in-house legal teams).
Law firms will happily take on as much work as you need if you’re happy to pay for it!
However, since this is typically an expensive option, it should be used deliberately rather than reactively, when the circumstances point towards a law firm as the best solution e.g.
jurisdiction: where expertise/resource is required in jurisdictions and your team lacks local resource/knowledge;
specialism: where specialist legal knowledge is required (and it’s not an area where training/hiring a specialist internally would produce a better ROI);
firepower: where the work simply requires a level of resource your team does not have the resource to provide.
For (typically) higher-volume, lower-value/complexity work, another option might be to outsource to an alternative service provider (ALSP). This can provide a cost-effective way to free up capacity for higher value/more strategic work.
For many, the first use case that comes to mind here will likely be document automation.
Indeed, benchmarking reports typically cite contract review and drafting as one of the most (and often the most) time-consuming activity for in-house legal teams.
If that’s your team, document automation can free up a significant amount of time and allow you to focus on work that is higher value (and potentially more interesting!).
It also offers the opportunity for other stakeholders to generate documents themselves removing legal from the equation altogether. (Read more about document automation).
Other use cases you might consider for automation could include:
– E-signatures – speed up signing process
– Workflow automation – automate routine processes
– Compliance monitoring – automate regulatory compliance monitoring
– Legal research – streamline legal research process
– Data analytics – analyse legal data more efficiently
– Knowledge management – automate information sharing process
Whatever work is being carried out, it makes sense to focus on the elements which add the most value and make the best use of your legal skills and expertise.
This means looking at your end-to-end workflow management process and asking questions to identify where your time is being absorbed by low-value/inefficient tasks e.g.
– do we have an efficient intake process?
– are we allocating work efficiently (and fairly) within the team?
– are we making use of technology to support effective communication and collaboration with other internal stakeholders?
– do we have a central system of record so that we’re not wasting time searching for information?
– do we have processes in place to streamline the way we work with outside counsel?
– are we collecting data to understand our workflows and identify how to remedy any bottlenecks?
A dedicated matter management and collaboration system like Tabled, designed with with the in-house legal team in mind can help you to answer ‘yes’ to all of these questions, while also helping you with outsourcing, self-service and automation as explored above.
To learn more about how Tabled can help, please get in touch or sign up for a demo using the form below.