A common complaint amongst in-house legal teams is that too much time is wasted on low-value and/or repetitive tasks.
At the same time, these tasks may still be important to and/or high priority for the stakeholders concerned.
In such situations, it is well worth considering what options might exist for helping the business to self-serve.
A common complaint amongst in-house legal teams is that too much time is wasted on low-value and/or repetitive tasks.
At the same time, these tasks may still be important to and/or high priority for the stakeholders concerned.
In such situations, it is well worth considering what options might exist for helping the business to self-serve.
However, the concept of ‘self-service’ sits on a spectrum.
While a colleague may be able to complete some tasks totally unaided, there will be others where a degree of legal knowledge and guidance is still required.
So – how can you provide colleagues with the legal knowledge and guidance to support self-service, without relying on the legal team’s direct involvement?
There are two main elements: 1) capture and ‘codify’ the knowledge; 2) automate the delivery of that knowledge to those who need it.
Thanks to the advent of no-code tools, this is now something that in-house lawyers can comfortably do themselves, without any specialist knowledge or training.
Tabled’s no-code workflow builder enables legal teams to create their own rule-based workflows.
The builder is user-friendly and just requires the designer to create questions and design rules to determine which next step should apply based on the answer given (e.g. ask a further question / display some text / direct the user to a specified resource).
Based on the answers provided, the business user is given an answer, directed to an appropriate resource (e.g. a playbook, policy document or some FAQs), directed to a relevant template/precedent or – perhaps – prompted to escalate to the legal team.
Here is a simplified example (for illustration purposes only) of a flow chart setting out a process for providing GDPR guidance in relation to the use of customer data:
To turn this into an interactive process using Tabled’s no-code builder, there are three stages:
1) Create a new form.
2) Create your ‘fields’ – these will consist of: i) questions the user will be asked, and ii) responses that will be shown to the user based on their answers.
3) Create ‘rules’ which tell the system how to connect the fields together.
The images in the following carousel show what that process would look like to build out the first three rows of the process set out in the flow chart above:
As a flexible and user-friendly system, legal teams can design a very broad range of workflows to suit their needs.
This means there is a huge number of possible use cases for a no-code tool like this.
However, as food for thought, examples might include:
– Bringing policy and compliance guidance to life, helping users to find the information they need and guiding them to and through any required actions
– Creating interactive workflows for legal FAQs
– Helping users to negotiate legal agreements themselves via an interactive workflow which can guide them on things such as
negotiation strategies, fallback positions, escalation points and approval processes
– A ‘digital concierge’ that helps users to locate precedents, templates or other legal resources. For example, the workflow might ask the user a number of questions in order to identify the correct version of a template to use and then direct them to a document automation workflow that helps them to go ahead and populate the first draft
– To help with intake and triage of incoming legal requests. This might be to help users identify the correct legal intake form on the team’s legal front door or to triage their request in order to determine whether they should follow a self-service process instead.
– Reporting data breaches. An interactive workflow could help users to report a breach, access guidance and identify next steps.
Again, this is just a short list setting out a small number of potential workflows. If you have specific processes/workflows you’d like to explore, please do book a demo via the form below to see the system in action for yourself.
As seen above, Tabled’s no-code workflow builder is what is known as a ‘rule-based’ system.
This means that workflows are built based on ‘if-then’ type rules. For each input, the system checks the rules and performs the corresponding action.
The principal alternative to a rule-based system, is a ‘machine learning’ system whereby – instead of pre-defined rules – the system learns from data and makes its own predictions or decisions.
So, when might a rule-based system be the best option? Here are some typical features or benefits that might point to a rule-based system:
Highly Structured Processes
When the workflow requires a highly structured process, with clear and well-defined steps that need to be followed in a specific order.
Where it’s important that the approach/outcome is consistent across all uses of the system.
In some scenarios, the legal team may want to ensure that users have a limited set of options to choose from and that their answers are constrained to specific parameters.
Equally, while AI-powered chatbots are very easy to interact with, there is an extent to which such tools are only as good as the prompts you give them. This shifts the onus for ‘asking the right question’ onto the user. In some cases, it might be preferable to limit choices so that users have confidence they are providing the right input and getting the right answers.
If you want to learn more about how Tabled’s no-code workflow builder could help you to improve legal operations at your organisation please get in touch or request a demo using the sign up form below.