Expanding Legal Operations to Connect People, Processes

Janet Vito |

Back in the Old Days…

I’m going to rewind the clock a bit and take you back to the 1950’s, before the idea of legal operations even existed. At that time, if you wanted to send a written communication to anyone – another employee, a team, another company, a customer, etc. – the process worked something like this:

  1. You phoned up the typing pool
  2. They sent someone to your office
  3. You dictated the communication
  4. The person from the typing pool took that back down and typed up the communication
  5. They came back to you with what was typed
  6. You made edits to the document
  7. They went back down to the typing pool and made the changes
  8. They delivered the final version to you (or other recipients)

Now, if all goes well, this process would take  less than 24 hours. And that was if all goes well. Today, it would be crazy to think about running our businesses  like this. It would be inefficient, and quite frankly, impossible.

Driving Change in Legal Operations Today

Let’s fast forward to today. With email, we don’t even need to give communications between departments a second thought. We simply type the email and hit send. The use of technology enables us to easily and quickly send communication 50, 100, 200+ times a day. (Some may think that this is not such a good thing, but no one can deny the impact it’s had on business systems and legal operations teams overall.)

Let’s take this analogy to our business processes – particularly to driving change within our company. Driving change in your organization today can actually feel more like the typing pool scenario of the 1950’s.

Today, if you identify a need for change and you want to use a new technology to drive that change, most people have to put in an IT request. If the request actually gets approved, it gets put on a list of projects. All of these projects are competing – competing with other departments, other priorities. And maybe, if you’re lucky enough, in six months to 12 months, the project will make its way to the top of that list and you’ll be able to respond to the business need that drove the change in your organization.

No offense to IT departments, there are tons of competing priorities and most IT teams do the best they can with what they have. But there is really no excuse. Business doesn’t allow for this – our business is constantly changing. We have new competitors in the market, new regulatory requirements we have to meet, new growth targets for the business, etc. These changes dictate that we, as legal operations teams, need to be responsive to these changes and support the business.

We can’t wait 12 months for the technology that we need to enable us to drive change in the business. Best case, we’ll miss a great opportunity. Worst case, we put the business at great risk. With the right technology, you can drive change quickly – you don’t have to wait 12 months. You can make change today.

Mitratech + ThinkSmart = Legal Transformation Starts Today

Mitratech’s acquisition of ThinkSmart enables you to do just that. Using ThinkSmart’s TAP automated workflow solution, your legal operations team can easily create workflow process without any involvement from IT. From contract automation processes, to self-service NDA requests, to outside counsel onboarding, TAP accelerates the delivery of internal and external stakeholder collaboration and workflow capabilities across legal operations, compliance and risk.

And, when integrated with Mitratech’s TeamConnect enterprise legal management platform, you can extend your legal operations team’s single source of truth throughout the organization. Your legal management solution can now bring people, processes and information together like never before, by leveraging TAP’s easy-to-use workflow automation engine to extend your legal management across the entire enterprise.

Today, you can’t afford to hold onto outdated technology that limits your ability to drive change. You can’t keep waiting for the proverbial typing pool to empower your business. As legal operations professionals, we need to lead the change we want to see. The year of legal transformation starts now.

Find out how you can transform your legal operations to better connect people and processes today. Connect with us.