Legal Teams: Why You Need to Get Your Hands Dirty with Process – Part 2

In Part One of this blog series, we debunked the bina­ry way in which lawyers — and the busi­ness users they serve – view process. Spoil­er alert: the real issue isn’t too much or too lit­tle process, it’s a lack of process where it’s need­ed most. And that’s often the result of mis­align­ments in expec­ta­tions, respon­si­bil­i­ties, and atti­tudes to risk, which leaves legal teams jug­gling rou­tine tasks instead of tack­ling high-val­ue work. 

Now, in Part Two, we’re rolling up our sleeves and get­ting into the nit­ty-grit­ty: how to get the right process­es in the right places and over­come the inevitable chal­lenges along the way. 

Under­stand­ing the pur­pose of processes 

Or find your ​“why” to find your way 

It’s tempt­ing to jump head­first into fix­ing a process: under­stand­ing the prob­lem and list­ing out require­ments. But what about the most impor­tant ques­tion of all: why? 

With­out a clear pur­pose, how do you know what you are aim­ing for? You need to know the pur­pose of your voy­age before you pick a des­ti­na­tion or plot your course. 

Oth­er­wise, you are just going to add com­plex­i­ty with­out streamlining. 

Here is what we sug­gest doing first: 

• Under­stand the pur­pose: What are you try­ing to achieve? Your goal might be to speed up con­tract­ing, but to what end? Is it to meet a grow­ing sales pipeline? Or to reduce cost? Or to impress new cus­tomers? Or to free up lawyer time to pre­vent attri­tion and burnout? It is crit­i­cal for the suc­cess of your project to artic­u­late this from the outset.

• Under­stand users: Who will use this process? What are their needs? Process­es need to work not just for the legal team but for every­one involved — sales, pro­cure­ment, prospec­tive cus­tomers, audi­tors, and exter­nal stake­hold­ers — who scru­ti­nise the busi­ness. If your process doesn’t work for your users, it will fail.

• Diag­nose the prob­lem: Spend time map­ping out the cur­rent process and doc­u­ments and diag­nos­ing where things are going wrong. Where are the delays? Where does fric­tion occur? What do your users think? With­out a bru­tal­ly hon­est diag­no­sis, you won’t be able to get to the root of the issue.

Let’s say your legal team han­dles con­tract reviews, and get­ting a clear report out to the busi­ness is tak­ing too long. You might be tempt­ed to inves­ti­gate an AI review tool or throw more resources at the prob­lem. But let’s imag­ine you’ve done the process groundwork: 

• artic­u­lat­ed a pur­pose: to be more strate­gic and to empow­er the business 

• under­stood that your key users include Finance and the account lead on the oth­er side 

• mapped the process, and realised that legal turn-around is fast, but approval of high-risk fall-backs bounce between the busi­ness and finance in a nev­er-end­ing loop.

This might lead you to new insights. Like, what if you allow the busi­ness to progress the low­er-risk top­ics with the account lead straight away? Instead of all that chas­ing, what if the lawyers invest­ed their ener­gy into agree­ing a sim­ple deci­sion matrix with finance? 

The right foun­da­tion­al work will reveal solu­tions that are oth­er­wise hid­den from view. 

Bal­anc­ing the need for new process­es — with­out becom­ing over­ly bureaucratic 

Or more grease, less fat. 

Legal teams walk a fine line. More process could reduce risk and increase effi­cien­cy, but the addi­tion­al work­load might not be worth the upside. Or, even worse, it could just cre­ate more red tape – reduc­ing effi­cien­cy and giv­ing peo­ple an excuse to work around the system! 

The key to avoid­ing this trap is pri­ori­ti­sa­tion and user-centricity. 

• Pri­ori­tise, pri­ori­tise, pri­ori­tise. Not every prob­lem needs to be solved right away. Based on your foun­da­tion­al dis­cov­ery work, grab the low-hang­ing fruit that will have the biggest impact, and tack­le the big­ger juici­er prob­lems in a more cadenced manner. 

• Be user cen­tric. Process­es must work for all users, not just the legal team. If a process frus­trates your busi­ness coun­ter­parts, then it’s bro­ken, no mat­ter how well it works for legal.

• Involve stake­hold­ers ear­ly. One of the most com­mon mis­takes in process design is leav­ing key stake­hold­ers out. Don’t drop a new process on your users (or their boss!) and expect them to embrace it when you try to sell it to them. Bring them along for the ride from day one and they will sell the solu­tion for you.

• Bal­ance risk with out­comes. Some legal process­es can be too rigid, try­ing to account for every pos­si­ble risk. But here’s the thing. Process­es that are over­ly fool proof are more like­ly to break the first time some­thing unex­pect­ed hap­pens. Legal teams need to cre­ate flex­i­ble process­es that allow for some wig­gle room with­out becom­ing bot­tle­necks themselves.

Let’s look at sales con­tracts again (we love sales con­tracts!) Imag­ine a legal team that’s bogged down review­ing every sin­gle sales con­tract, no mat­ter how stan­dard or low val­ue the deal might be, pre­sum­ably because they don’t trust the busi­ness. If they’re forced to pri­ori­tise, they might intro­duce a tiered review process: high-val­ue or com­plex con­tracts still go through a full legal review, while low­er-risk, stan­dard con­tracts are fast-tracked with less scruti­ny. Well, that speeds things up but leaves the team a bit ner­vous. Now, if the team also puts their users first, they might recog­nise that the sales team are a smart bunch who want to be empow­ered. So, they might start trust­ing the busi­ness to han­dle some con­tracts with a pre­de­fined set of approved fall-backs. So, the team can deliv­er a faster process with an accept­able lev­el of risk – because they’ve been pri­ori­tised and empathised with.

Align­ing legal process­es with broad­er busi­ness operations 

Or — fourth leg, not fifth! 

Legal teams must nev­er work in a vac­u­um. When legal and busi­ness process­es are dis­con­nect­ed, you get bot­tle­necks and mis­align­ments. But when legal is a strate­gic part­ner that’s well inte­grat­ed into the wider busi­ness, legal process­es don’t just man­age risk, they help the com­pa­ny move faster and achieve its goals. 

Two crit­i­cal things need to hap­pen for this to occur: 

(a) the legal team must real­ly under­stand the busi­ness process (and the users who oper­ate or are impact­ed by it, and what dri­ves them) before try­ing to fix the legal process. 

(b) the legal team must involve the busi­ness through­out, not invent and build in isolation.

Lex­So­lu­tions’ blue­print for align­ing legal processes 

Here’s a prac­ti­cal cheat sheet for imple­ment­ing bet­ter processes: 

• Spend the right amount of time on dis­cov­ery. Artic­u­late your pur­pose. Always know why you’re imple­ment­ing a process. 

• Under­stand what your users need and have con­ver­sa­tions at the lead­er­ship lev­el to set expectations. 

• Don’t try to fix every­thing at once. Con­duct a dis­cov­ery process and focus on the biggest-impact issues first. 

• Begin with what you already know. If you’re redesign­ing a con­tract process, start by sim­pli­fy­ing the con­tract itself. Focus on mak­ing it more user-cen­tric and out­come-focused. Once that’s nailed down, you can turn your atten­tion to align­ing process­es and only then think about adding technology. 

• Don’t jump to tech too soon. The temp­ta­tion to throw tech­nol­o­gy at a prob­lem is strong. But, if you’re automat­ing a bad process, all you’ll get is a faster and more embed­ded bad process. Get the doc­u­ments and process­es right first. 

• Upskill the team in legal design. Legal design is a mind­set and method­ol­o­gy for mak­ing doc­u­ments, process­es, and work­flows clear, sim­ple, and func­tion­al. It will help your team to solve prob­lems in a more cre­ative user-cen­tric way. It’s a crit­i­cal skill set for legal teams look­ing to align with busi­ness needs.

Key trends and tech­nolo­gies impact­ing process management 

Or wood and trees 

Sev­er­al trends are start­ing to reshape how legal teams look at process. 

• AI as an accel­er­a­tor of self-serve: AI chat­bots and agents will help busi­ness users to han­dle rou­tine tasks, like con­tract gen­er­a­tion and legal queries, with­out wait­ing on legal. This will free up legal teams to focus on more com­plex, high-val­ue work. 

• Smart legal ser­vices: Legal teams will increas­ing­ly use automa­tion and data to iden­ti­fy the high-risk areas they need to pri­ori­tise, while empow­er­ing busi­ness teams to man­age rou­tine mat­ters autonomously. 

• Legal Design: The suc­cess of tech­nol­o­gy will depend not only on good, struc­tured data, but also on whether the under­ly­ing process­es and doc­u­ments are user cen­tric. For the smartest legal teams, legal design will be an increas­ing­ly impor­tant part of the toolk­it for mak­ing sense of — and stay­ing rel­e­vant — in an increas­ing­ly com­plex world.

Start­ing your legal team’s process improve­ment journey 

Make it roll, make it stick 

If you’re just start­ing out on your process improve­ment jour­ney, here’s some extra secret sauce from LexSolutions. 

• Talk to peo­ple who’ve done it before. Learn from those who’ve gone through the process already. Their insights can help you avoid com­mon mistakes. 

• Cre­ate a pri­ori­tised roadmap that laser focuss­es on low hang­ing fruit. But keep it flex­i­ble. Your needs might change, and com­plex sys­tems are a hard nut to crack. Don’t over-com­mit to com­plex solu­tions and big projects until you know what you’re doing. 

• Treat process improve­ment as an incre­men­tal jour­ney, not a series of projects. So, exper­i­ment, iter­ate fre­quent­ly and then scale. Small, steady changes will have a big­ger impact over time. 

• Make the process improve­ment jour­ney excit­ing. Engage the team, find cham­pi­ons, and use legal design to make the entire effort more user-cen­tric, out­come-focused – and who knows, maybe even fun.

It goes with­out say­ing that our team of process improve­ment experts are on hand to help your legal team wher­ev­er you are on your journey. 

Ready to get your hands dirty with process improve­ment? Or need to unstick a stuck project? Con­tact Lex­So­lu­tions to learn how we can help your legal team imple­ment smarter process­es and align them with your busi­ness goals.

9 Oct