These are the nine capabilities to consider when evaluating legal technology.

1. Better manage inbound requests from the business (automated advice, triage)

You need to provide the business a one stop shop for accessing legal support with the ability to provide automated advice (e.g., checklist of information to gather before engaging legal) and automated triage/matter creation to the right lawyer based on matter/contract type. Ideally you wish to do this while giving the business visibility into the status of their matter/contract without them having to (repeatedly) contact legal.

2. Provide the business with the ability to self-serve contract creation and execution

You need to allow the business to create and execute (via eSignature) their own contracts by automating your templates: 

• You want simple template population for standard, rarely negotiated contracts; and

• You want complex document automation that can build many (a few to hundreds) different versions of an agreement with intelligent workflows that automatically triage higher risk agreements to the appropriate lawyer for review.

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3. Improve handling of third-party paper 

You need a way to better manage counterparty contract review and negotiation that allows for quick comparison of third-party contracts against your standards and to negotiate, manage and track them as if they were your own.


4. Matter management tools to improve lawyer productivity

You need a way to manage your legal work across contracts and legal issues including tracking and reporting on types, volumes, timelines and status of legal work across the business, quick location of historical or active issues and tracking of all internal and external communications and documents associated with an issue.

5. Automated contract and delegation workflows and approvals

You need a way to (manually and/or automatically) route and obtain approvals and signatures within legal (and from the business) with an audit trail to allow for faster, online approvals, execution and improved governance.

6. Negotiation support

You need a platform that allows you to collaborate on documents and automatically track versions with both internal and external parties with a full history/audit trail and automated document comparison.

7. Contract life cycle management

You need fully searchable storage and tracking of all contracts (automated, lawyer drafted, counterparty), and associated meta-data (e.g. contract value, contract type, counterparty, dates, versions, approvals, timelines and supporting documentation with automated alerts for key milestones e.g. end dates).

8. Reporting and analytics

You need to be able to report on all aspects of legal, matters, contracts and transactions; 

• What are your lawyers spending their time on? Are these the right things? How can you empower the business to work faster without legal support? How can you reallocate lawyer time to bigger risks? 

• What are the average turn-around times from legal and with approvers in the business? Where are things getting stuck? Are there clauses, processes, delegations of authority limits slowing down the business unnecessarily? 

• What’s the volume of various kinds of legal work/issues? What should we be automating? 

• Which contracts contain language that will be affected by an upcoming regulatory change? An acquisition? What active contracts do you have with supplier x? Which contracts are expiring in the next three months?

9. Knowledge management

You need a central repository to store policies, precedents, templates, delegations of authority, guides, etc.

So, what next? 

Once prioritised, break the capabilities into phases and build a roadmap, an investment plan and a business case for the adoption of legal technology across the business. That roadmap may end with two or more required capabilities, but often this is a multi-year plan to gradually roll out legal technology and automation, building on realised business cases and success.

Transformation is a journey, after all.   

If you need just one capability and don’t see yourself needing to tackle others down the road, buying a one-off tool (e.g. matter management system, document storage system, eSignature, etc) could be an option, but there’s the potential for long-term pain with this approach.

If you need more than one capability, find a platform with a robust roadmap that allows you to start small and grow such that you can tackle all your use cases and challenges in the future.   

Rick Junnier is the chief commercial officer at Legal Gateway.