Self-service technology: 3 'win-win' use cases for in-house legal teams
A broader variety of work is often cited as one of the primary attractions of working in-house. And yet, many in-house lawyers still spend a lot of time responding repeatedly to the same questions and requests. This can be frustrating for the lawyers and add significantly to already-heavy workloads.
At the same time, their internal clients may also find themselves waiting longer than they might expect for an answer to what they see as a relatively straightforward question or request.
Enter self-service.
Introducing self-service tools which allow business users to get the result they need quickly and without needing to involve the legal team can be a win-win. In this article, we look at 3 ways most in-house legal teams could use self-service technology to relieve pressure on their teams and empower the business.
A broader variety of work is often cited as one of the primary attractions of working in-house.
And yet, many in-house lawyers still spend a lot of time responding repeatedly to the same questions and requests.
This can be frustrating for the lawyers and add significantly to already-heavy workloads.
At the same time, their internal clients may also find themselves waiting longer than they might expect for an answer to what they see as a relatively straightforward question or request.
Enter self-service.
Introducing self-service tools which allow business users to get the result they need quickly and without needing to involve the legal team can be a win-win.
In this article, we look at 3 ways most in-house legal teams could use self-service technology to relieve pressure on their teams and empower the business.
A simple but very common example we hear from in-house legal teams is dealing with requests to find documents. This might be a template/precedent or a previously executed agreement for instance.
In this case, the legal team is just acting as a post-box, finding and emailing out documents.
A ‘quick fix’ is to create/identify a shared digital space where the most requested documents can be made accessible directly to the business users.
However, an over-simplistic approach can also raise some risks which need to be borne in mind e.g.
– the end user might select the wrong document;
– the end user might inadvertently change or delete a document;
– the end user might take a ‘short-cut’ e.g. using a (now out of date) document they had on their laptop / in their email;
– the legal team has no visibility of who has downloaded / used which documents.
In our view, the ‘sweet spot’ (and the solution we offer for teams using Tabled) is for legal to remain the custodians of the documents themselves but to automate the process of sending out requested documents, while still maintaining an audit trail for the legal team, including who requested which document(s) and when and any useful contextual data about the intended purpose of the document.
Not all drafting will require the skills of a lawyer.
Some more straightforward contracts e.g. NDAs or other relatively simple documents often used by other teams such as procurement, sales, and HR may be suitable for self-service.
Equipping business users to draft such documents themselves not only relieves pressure on the legal team but also helps business colleagues to achieve their desired outcomes more quickly.
A good start is to ensure you have clear and robust templates in place which make it as straightforward as possible for someone outside the legal team to produce a first draft. Any steps you can take to minimize the risk of human error (e.g. locking down certain sections of the document) are also a good idea.
These may need to be accompanied by playbooks, which help to identify the company’s preferred stance on all relevant clauses/issues and sets out any permissible fallback options.
It’s also a good idea to set out clearly who needs to be consulted for any escalations. Don’t always assume this has to be the legal team – certain provisions might be more sensibly owned by other teams such as finance, HR or procurement for example.
Finally, you can also consider document automation. Using technology to automate the drafting process not only saves a lot of time, it also helps to ensure consistency and reduce the risk of human error that might otherwise occur with manual drafting / copying & pasting etc.
For a deeper dive into document automation please see our related blog posts:
What is contract automation and what are the benefits?
There are two main categories of question to consider here.
First is the (sometimes mislabelled!) ‘quick question’.
Ad hoc queries are a fact of life for in-house teams and in many cases a quick email or call will be the best approach to answering these.
However, where the same question is coming up repeatedly, it makes sense to consider creating a self-service resource that enables colleagues to find the answer themselves.
For instance, in-house legal teams using Tabled are able to create and maintain banks of FAQs within the platform and then publish these on the same legal front door that is used to capture new legal requests.
For some topics, other formats may be helpful e.g. short explainer videos.
The second category involves questions that have a few moving parts. By this, we mean that answering the initial query will typically involve having to first ask a few questions in return, in order to understand the context and identify the right advice, resource or next step.
Automating this process for self-service requires technology which can apply conditional logic based on rules designed by the legal team, to take internal clients through the correct sequence of questions in a user-friendly way and then direct them to the appropriate answer, resource, or next step.
Of course, any solution must also be sufficiently straightforward and user-friendly from the point of viewpoint of the lawyer(s) creating the relevant workflow.
With this in mind, Tabled created a no-code self-service toolkit which makes it simple for legal teams to design these workflows themselves without needing any technical knowledge or support.
Using Tabled’s no-code toolkit, in-house legal teams can build fully customised self-service workflows to suit their needs.
The builder is user-friendly and just requires the designer to create questions and choose which next step should apply based on the answer given (e.g. ask next question / display some text / direct the user to a specified resource).
The output is a user-friendly multiple choice form which business users can access from the legal team’s digital front door.
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.
A simple example is shown below. In this example, colleagues from the marketing team in a financial institution can use the self-service tool to identify the correct disclaimer wording to use in any financial promotions based on the target audience and type of financial product.
To explore a potential use case for your business please contact us or sign up for a demo using the form below.