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The hurdles facing in-house legal teams
LawVu’s chief legal evangelist details common problems that inhibit in-house legal teams from effective functioning and discusses how to meet these issues.
Jess Feyder
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Recently on the Corporate Counsel Show, LawVu chief legal evangelist Shaun Plant (pictured) discussed common problems arising for in-house legal teams, and strategies that allow for the creation of more meaningful work for businesses and organisations.
Businesses want legal teams to manage risk and protect the business, but they also need them to be empowering to help them achieve the successes the business needs, explained Mr Plant.
“Businesses want their legal teams to be enabling; they want them to be empowering,” he said, and legal teams often have the same aspirations — they want to connect with the work they’re doing and add high-value work.
Yet problems arise that inhibit in-house teams from functioning in the most meaningful and effective way, Mr Plant illuminated.
A 2022 research survey of in-house legal teams surveyed over 500 legal professionals found that most reported they spent a significant amount of time on manual, low-value tasks, which often took their time and effort away from working on larger business strategies that they wanted to be involved in.
“Around 40 per cent were spending three hours or more switching between systems and processes, just to try and keep track of where things are at, or to find advice or legal outputs they’d created,” Mr Plant noted.
“I can understand that because I was in that same situation myself.
“You don’t really notice it, but if you’re living your life in Outlook trying to manage all of your work, then it is a time suck in terms of how you’re working.
“You’re just trying to churn through the day-to-day stuff, and you’re not really focusing on the high-value work that you should be doing.
“It becomes hard to pull yourself out of that place to focus on making improvements around how you’re working because you’re just swamped by the volume of demands from the business.”
This way of working “isn’t really adding value to the business, and you’re not really doing the high-value work”, he said.
It can play a detrimental role to the connection of legal teams and to legal teams’ connection with the broader business, he continued.
“If the team’s really busy, they stop talking to each other. They’re too focused on doing, and you end up creating a silo situation,” he explained, “you stop connecting with the team, and then you stop connecting with the business”.
“Then, you’ve started to lose connection with the outcomes of the business because you’re in that churn of doing the daily operational low-value volumes work.”
This problem invokes a need to increase genuine productivity, Mr Plant illuminated, “and being productive isn’t the same as churning through a high volume of work”.
Mr Plant and LawVu confront such issues by looking at eliminating “legal waste” for in-house teams — essentially, finding ways to optimise processes to get rid of effort that is put in that doesn’t need to be.
In finding a method of prioritising the most important work, automation is key; he posited, “there are many different ways to speed up processes, or documents being created, while getting rid of effort that is low value — self-service is also a big way”.
“If we can help the business to find the answers to many things themselves without having to ask legal, then it’s best for the business, and it frees us up to do the other work that we want to do,” he explained.
“Once you’ve created more time, you can then start to focus on the second step, which is being more engaged with the business.
“A legal workspace is right at the heart of a really productive team, but one which is integrated with those other tools that the organisation uses.”
“Then, we can get into the business and we can start to be more proactive,” Mr Plant noted. “It’s very much about getting involved early with issues as they arise.”
