This is for the lawyers, those in law firms, and those working in corporate legal teams. I don’t need to provide an introduction to alternative fee arrangements – you either feel the pressure already, or you work in a space where fee arrangements are settled. It’s sufficient to say that I’m writing about any fee not based on hourly rates.

Can we say that we don’t want fee arrangements to drive a race to the bottom? As Seth Godin observes, the problem with a race to the bottom is that you might win. If you’re stuck in a race to the bottom, please don’t buy a tool like Legito unless you also plan to change direction. Don’t automate broken business practises – the only thing that scales is the poor quality outcomes.

The oft-used phrase from lawyers, especially lawyers in corporate legal teams who cannot control workloads by submitting large invoices, is: “do more with less”. Doing “more” is obviously about getting more work done. Less obviously, “with less” means less time, because the current environment is not calling for downsizing in legal teams.

Doing more work in less time is necessary for lawyers’ mental health. Most of us don’t get paid more for working longer hours, and yet most of us have got into a habit of working longer hours to get the job done. For all our faults, most lawyers are completer-finishers and we don’t like letting clients down. Unfortunately, some organisations will bank that goodwill in the interests of higher profits per lawyer (law firms) or tighter control over legal budgets (corporate legal teams). Until lawyers burn out, or the quality of their work suffers – and then it’s too late.

Sadly, many lawyers experience new technology as a further burden on their already-stressed working life. Most legal tech works, and many vendors have improved the user experience, so the root cause is not poor software. The legacy of technology projects is too many solutions aimed at squeezing more out of lawyers, or controlling their work. The classic example is time capture software that seeks to convert every activity into something billable, in the quest for lawyers to reach a target number of ‘billable hours’. Another example is the imposition of systems to deal with the complexity of client engagements: engagement letters, money-laundering checks, KYC procedures, conflict of interest procedures.

It’s time to use technology to help practitioners do good work and leverage their expertise. Give them sharper saws, not just safety guards. Give everyone dual monitors, a comfortable chair and a decent keyboard. After the basics, think more deeply about using automation projects that recognise the human-in-the-loop. Instead of publishing policies and procedures with hundreds of pages, give people access to tools that make the right things happen by default. Don’t leave lawyers to find creative ways to make Office 365 carry their caseload – take time to configure software that makes it easy to store and retrieve what they need in a way that matches working methods. Worry less about automating expertise – you’re not trying to remove lawyers from the loop – worry more about lightening the load. Automate the things that are more frequent causes of human error. Human error is a sign that you’re asking humans to work in inhumane ways.

If a task is capable of being fully automated, great, do it. Such tasks are probably dull for lawyers and they won’t miss them, and clients don’t want to pay for them.

When you equip lawyers to do good work efficiently, and alternative fee arrangements are still undermining reasonable profits, it’s time to stop doing the work. Wait until the market is ready to value it appropriately, or change the fee arrangement to something that does work. Let someone else race to the bottom while you do work that is valued.

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No team works in a bubble. Every department in an organization is a gear in a machine, each working to drive a business towards success. Whether it is the Compliance, Finance, Human Resources, Legal, or Sales, each aspect depends on the other, and each is equally important to the overall success of an enterprise.

Communication is key for collaboration. Unfortunately, many organizations rely on archaic models which implement tools and software that are inherently siloed, and sacrifice flexibility for perceived security.

Automated Document / Contract Lifecycle Management software solutions factor in the importance of different teams sharing information securely but freely.

Automatic Population of Documents

Automation tools that allow automatically extract data to populate documents can help many different departments. For instance:

• Sales teams can pull data from customer relationship management systems (CRMs) to populate contracts.
• Compliance teams can pull information from your document automation database to run Know Your Customer (KYC) reports.
• Finance Teams extract data from sales and vendor contracts to populate company reports.

User Groups

Departments, teams, and working groups can all be assigned to User Groups with fixed permissions and access. For example,

• Legal may safely share confidential documents with other members of the legal team User Group, without worrying about adding extra security. 
• Any department may use Guest settings to grant temporary document access to an external party. Although flexible, the permissions and restrictions can be controlled closely, and rescinded at any time.

Document Sharing; Workflows & Approvals

After a document is created, it can be Shared with other users, User Groups, or even externally. Collaboration with other teams can be streamlined using automated Workflows which automatically send documents to users, or User Groups for Approval. For instance:

• Sales teams can submit contracts to the finance or product teams for approvals on fees or special use cases. 
• Legal teams may need to review and negotiate contracts submitted by a sales team, or may need to review Human Resources documents (e.g., employment contracts, redundancy notices, etc.).
• Finance departments can quickly and securely share quarterly and annual reports with company executives.
• Compliance and Audit teams may need to review and or revise company policies drafted by the Human Resources team, or confirm that new product specifications meet regulatory requirements.

Real-Time Conversations

Different individuals may find the need to collaborate on a document at the same time, and document conversations speed up review process by allowing different team members or teams to share information in real time.  

• Legal Teams can speed up negotiations by sharing drafting ideas quickly rather than emailing back and forth.
• Human Resources can work with the finance and compliance teams on the details of an employee offer to ensure that the offer meets company standards, and protections (e.g., accurate salary, ownership of IP).

This is only a sample of some automation features that help teams communicate and support one another in daily operations. An automated document management solution that increasing transparency and accessibility is guaranteed to increase efficiency and growth. 

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Not everyone at your organization necessarily requires full access. Although transparency is highly vaunted in many businesses, it is not always practical. For example, providing equal editing access to documents or templates may detract from your automated document management tool’s key features, such as Template Version Control. Furthermore, confidentiality requirements may obligate your organization to only share certain information on a need-to-know basis. For these situations, a set of strong but flexible permissions will provide security and ease of use, while boosting efficiency. 

Sharing

Internal and External Sharing is necessary for doing business. Secure document sharing within your automated document management tool ensures that all stakeholders have access to the correct version of a file. 

Drafting 

Permits users to draft, edit, or even share documents.  

Template Access 

Templates, and the documents which are generated from them may be categorized based on their regions, or placed in Template Categories. Access could be permissioned to users based standardized classifications.

Restricted Access

 Access to certain Document Records may be highly restricted, based on internal rules or confidentiality obligations, with only certain individuals or teams having access.

Workflows

 Workflows and Approvals are great tools for ensuring that documents are quickly sent to the correct people for efficient lifecycle management. Enforcing compliance to regulations and internal policies, it is clear that only certain individuals should have the ability to manipulate the Approvals process.

Customized Data Management – Certain users in your organization, may need to pull special information from documents and contracts, and may need to configure new ways to automatically extract data. Permissions to do this could be limited to those with need, or upon request.

User Groups

User Groups are a great way to organize users and apply permissions and access in a consistent manner based roles and responsibilities.  

Legal and Compliance Teams are probably best suited to have special drafting permissions, but not necessarily your sales or product teams.  

Internal Audit or Tax teams probably are the teams to be trusted with customized data management permissions. This permission can help these teams create new Template Tags to extract key information for reports and analytics, access to which could also be controlled if necessary.

Executives & Audit Teams may require special access to restricted confidential Document Records, as they would probably be permitted. 

Commercial Regions may need to be granted access to policy documents or contracts relevant only to them (e.g., LATAM; EMEA; ASIAPAC).

External parties with whom your business collaborates on a one-off or irregular basis may be suited for Guest roles, which by default provide limited access with options for enhanced access. 

Corporations, Organizations, Enterprises, Companies: cooperation and collaboration are inherent in these names. Whether it is an inhouse legal team securely negotiating contracts, or sensitive internal documents requiring review and approval, finding the balance between easy access and security is an important for promoting transparency and achieving success.

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