Legal Ticketing: 6 tips for success
With workloads continuing to grow while budgets and capacity are under strain, it is increasingly important that in-house legal teams have an efficient way to track, triage and deliver work coming into the team.
A good place to start is by introducing what is often called a ‘legal ticketing’ system.
Most fundamentally, this enables a business user to submit a request to the legal team in a way that generates some form of record or ‘ticket’ which can then be tracked by the legal team.
However, it’s also important to think about how ‘legal ticketing’ connects with other elements of an efficient and well-rounded workflow management process. With that in mind, here are 6 tips for success when thinking about how to make legal ticketing work in your organisation:
Capturing legal requests is not about reserving a place in a virtual queue. A well thought-out legal intake form should immediately make life better for lawyers and business users clients alike i.e.
A customisable intake form also offers the opportunity to collect useful data beyond that which is strictly necessary to create/respond to that specific ticket.
This might be data with a legal relevance (category of counterparty, jurisdiction, relevant contractual values) but might equally be more commercial/strategic in nature e.g. documenting which product/service lines the requests relate to.
Of course, this is only possible if the ticketing process is part of (or at least feeding into) a system that is capable of tracking and storing this information in a useful way.
Finally, even if your legal intake solution ticks all these boxes , a ‘no ticket, no support’ is neither desirable nor practical in an in-house legal environment.
As a result, any system or solution you put in place must also be able to accommodate requests arriving via other channels without adding friction / siloes back into the process.
At Tabled, this is handled via seamless integrations with channels such as Outlook, Gmail and Slack
As a minimum, a ‘legal ticketing system’ should include the ability to allocate responsibility for each incoming ticket to one or more individuals.
However, to do this optimally requires being able to answer (at least) two preliminary questions:
a) who has the necessary skills/knowledge? and
b) who has capacity?
Any system dealing with the allocation of work should also equip you to answer both questions.
For instance, Tabled brings together insights on your team members and their skills, a self-reporting capacity indicator and at-a-glance metrics on who is currently handling what.
No matter which lawyer(s) are allocated a new request, they will often need to collaborate with fellow team members, other stakeholders outside legal, or external counsel.
If those people cannot be given the access and tools (and with customisable permissions/controls) to view and work together on those matters your ticketing system will be more ‘to-do’ list than collaboration platform.
Legal requests should therefore ideally feed into a dynamic and interactive digital environment which brings all the relevant people, documents and functionality together in a way that supports efficient but secure collaboration and creates a robust audit trail.
Most in-house legal teams are rightly focussed on ensuring that they are working as – and seen as being – effective business partners.
A key element of that is ultimately visibility and accessibility.
In-house lawyers typically do a good job (perhaps too much so!) of making themselves available – whether that’s by email, in person or over the telephone.
However, past the point of that initial request, your internal clients may feel that they are in something of a ‘black box’ until they next hear from you.
This can then prompt multiple chasers, which only adds to your already busy workload.
As a result, your legal ticketing process must be part of a wider system that automates updates wherever possible, streamlines any ‘manual’ updates (e.g. lawyers using Tabled can update a matter’s status with a simple ‘drag and drop’) and takes the pain out of providing reports (e.g. Tabled provides business users with personalised dashboards listing all matters they are involved with and the current status of each).
On a related note, accurate but user-friendly tracking of how matters are progressing is vital if you want to produce KPIs around the efficiency of your legal workflows.
Done properly, legal ticketing should create a golden thread from intake and allocation right through to completion and unlock a world of previously unavailable data and insights for your legal team and the wider business.
We’ve touched on some examples above e.g. around intake (e.g. source, category and specifics of inbound requests); allocation (workload and capacity data); and creating/tracking KPIs.
You can read more about this in our separate post about becoming a more data-driven legal team.
Most in-house legal teams we encounter find themselves having to spend at least some of their time – and surprisingly often quite a lot of time – on relatively simple and/or repetitive tasks such as:
This isn’t a great use of time for lawyers that are already working at/beyond capacity and would typically rather be focussing on more important/interesting work.
Equally, it’s not necessarily the most efficient model for business users who may find themselves having to wait longer than they are happy with for these relatively simple jobs to be done.
However, tackling these issues in isolation can quickly create a fragmented mess of ‘solutions’ e.g. a ticketing system for requests, a shared folder for precedents, an intranet page for FAQs, a separate document automation system etc.
This creates friction, reduces efficiency and hinders adoption by users who might ultimately find it easier to revert to sending a ‘quick email’ or Slack/Teams message than juggle multiple systems.
That is why Tabled is built around the notion of a ‘legal front door’ which together legal intake, the service of templates/precedents, document automation and interactive self-service knowledge resources.
So, if you’re looking to introduce legal ticketing for your organisation and would like to explore how Tabled could help you do this in a joined-up and efficient way, please get in touch using the sign up form below and we’ll be in touch.