No Bull Insights: Why Chang­ing How Lawyers Write Is A Game Chang­er for Legal Ops Success

Legal Con­tent in Action

LexSolution’s very first No Bull Legal Ops Work­shop brought togeth­er fifty Legal Oper­a­tions pro­fes­sion­als to dis­cuss the press­ing issues they face.

The hot top­ic was the impor­tance of legal con­tent in mak­ing Legal Oper­a­tions a suc­cess. That’s right, the con­tent that lawyers pro­duce all day, every day: con­tracts, poli­cies, brief­in­gs, risk assess­ments, advice.

At Lex­So­lu­tions, we’ve achieved amaz­ing results for our legal team clients, sim­ply by opti­mis­ing their content:

• Reduc­ing deal cycles by 80% for a sus­tain­abil­i­ty com­pa­ny, by design­ing a new enter­prise-ready sales agreement.

• Slash­ing nego­ti­a­tions for a glob­al media com­pa­ny from 6 months to 2 months, while also cut­ting the legal bill from £35K to zero and sav­ing 600 hours of busi­ness time — per contract!

Stats like this need no dis­cus­sion. The pow­er of redesign­ing your legal con­tent has tan­gi­ble busi­ness ben­e­fits. Yet it remains under­val­ued and even ignored.

So, in this first blog of our #NoB­ullSeries, we take a deep­er look into why your legal function’s con­tent mat­ters and how to make it work for you.

Legal Con­tent: The Secret Sauce of Legal Operations

Why Con­tent Gets Overlooked

When legal teams look to inno­vate and to solve oper­a­tional prob­lems, they tend to look to where the hype is: shiny new tech, or AI, or the lat­est process opti­mi­sa­tion fad. Most don’t realise just how much of a prob­lem (and an oppor­tu­ni­ty) is locked up in their content.

That’s because what lawyers write is, in gen­er­al, dys­func­tion­al: long-wind­ed, ambigu­ous, full of archaisms, with poor read­abil­i­ty scores. Lawyers are not trained to make their work prod­uct user-cen­tric. Most peo­ple strug­gle to under­stand it — whether it’s a lengthy con­tract tem­plate or a wall of text in an email. 

Over­look­ing this dys­func­tion means miss­ing out on a big oppor­tu­ni­ty to stream­line process­es and improve effi­cien­cy. Because bad con­tent cre­ates process issues, while good con­tent solves them.

The Rip­ple Effect of Poor Legal Content

Dys­func­tion­al con­tent dras­ti­cal­ly slows down legal process­es, and even leads to process prob­lems that would oth­er­wise not exist:

• Long com­plex agree­ments lead to inter­nal mis­align­ments and more nego­ti­a­tion rounds and can take months or years to sign.

• When the busi­ness doesn’t under­stand legal doc­u­ments, they are over-reliant on the legal team which cre­ates bottlenecks.

• Com­plex, poor­ly struc­tured con­tracts require extra effort to automate.

• Lawyers pro­duce most­ly unstruc­tured con­tent which is hard to extract, analyse and track.

If your busi­ness isn’t engag­ing with the con­tent your in-house legal team pro­duces (a com­mon com­plaint from in-house legal teams!), it means the con­tent is irrel­e­vant, unclear, or bor­ing. Legal con­tent should be clear and user-cen­tric and should align with busi­ness goals. Good legal con­tent bridges the gap between legal and busi­ness, mak­ing every­thing run smoother.

The Role of Legal Design in Content

Mis­con­cep­tions About Legal Design

There are two kinds of lawyers: those who under­stand legal design and those who don’t. Those who under­stand it know how fun­da­men­tal it is to deliv­er­ing a bet­ter ser­vice to the business. 

Legal design is not about mak­ing things look pret­ty; it’s about clar­i­ty, func­tion­al­i­ty and user experience.

It’s also not about dumb­ing down. A good design project can reduce the length of a con­tract by typ­i­cal­ly 50% whilst keep­ing all of the legal and com­mer­cial protections. 

Legal design makes con­tent more effec­tive. By com­mu­ni­cat­ing more clear­ly and sim­ply, legal teams can achieve out­comes with few­er process steps, and align bet­ter with busi­ness objec­tives. Well-designed legal doc­u­ments can speed up inter­nal approvals, reduce mis­un­der­stand­ings, elim­i­nate nego­ti­a­tions, increase com­pli­ance and cut costs.

At Lex­So­lu­tions we addressed many such objec­tives when we worked with a glob­al media and hos­pi­tal­i­ty busi­ness to redesign a com­plex fran­chise agree­ment. We sim­pli­fied it and rewrote it in plain lan­guage to reduce nego­ti­a­tions and elim­i­nate the need for exter­nal nego­ti­a­tion sup­port. The out­come? We reduced pro­ject­ed time to con­tract from 6 months to 2 months and cut legal fees from £35K to zero — while sav­ing near­ly 600 hours of human resource time!

What Is The Con­tent, And What Can You Fix?

When­ev­er a legal team tack­les a prob­lem, there’s con­tent under­neath the problem. 

The type of con­tent depends on the prob­lem. It might be a con­tract, a play­book, a com­pli­ance pol­i­cy, an intranet, an unstruc­tured intake process, or even the emails the lawyers send. It might be the tem­plates and advice that you get from your law firm, which need to be trans­lat­ed for the busi­ness every time! At Lex­So­lu­tions we’ve seen huge oppor­tu­ni­ties to improve con­tent across these for­mats and channels.

The key is to:

1. Diag­nose the prob­lem — espe­cial­ly your objec­tives, who your users are, what their needs are, and what’s going wrong.

2. Under­stand the impact the con­tent has on the prob­lem.

3. Iden­ti­fy what can be clar­i­fied, sim­pli­fied, rewrit­ten in plain lan­guage, visu­alised and restruc­tured — to elim­i­nate the neg­a­tive impacts and enhance the pos­i­tive ones.

4. Apply a design process to devel­op and imple­ment your find­ings — and get help if it’s your first time! 

We applied this approach when work­ing with a sus­tain­abil­i­ty com­pa­ny to make it eas­i­er to get to ​“yes” with their MNC cus­tomers. We mapped both sides’ objec­tives and built the con­tract around those, and then designed and wrote a fresh and prac­ti­cal doc­u­ment using plain lan­guage and visu­al nav­i­ga­tion aids. The out­come? Reduced deal times by 50% on aver­age, and in some cas­es by 80%.

But Doesn’t Automa­tion And AI Solve It All Anyway?

Think of legal con­tent as a dynam­ic busi­ness tool. It needs to be rel­e­vant. That means effi­cient, user-friend­ly, capa­ble of achiev­ing busi­ness out­comes and future-proof. 

If the con­tent isn’t rel­e­vant, nei­ther is the legal team. 

Good struc­tured con­tent is essen­tial for mak­ing AI work. As AI advances, human-cen­tred con­tent design will become a crit­i­cal tool for legal teams to stay relevant.

Before intro­duc­ing any legal tech­nol­o­gy, you must sort out your con­tent. Tech­nol­o­gy can’t fix con­tent; it can only scale what you have. So you can either scale bad doc­u­ments and process­es, or good ones. 

Look for tools that help you do things in new and excit­ing ways. Majo­to is a unique doc­u­ment automa­tion plat­form that is made for cre­at­ing and automat­ing designed con­tracts. Juralio is an excit­ing tool for plan­ning and col­lab­o­rat­ing on legal work. Miro is a fan­tas­tic white­board­ing tool that frees your mind from the prison of the A4 sheet. Flank builds AI agents for resolv­ing com­mon queries from com­mer­cial teams. 

The No Bull Take­away: The Future Is User-Centric

To stay ahead, legal teams should con­tin­u­ous­ly improve the rel­e­vance and clar­i­ty of their legal con­tent. Focus on user needs, sim­pli­fy, embrace new tech­nolo­gies, ensure they serve the users first and foremost.

If you need to work with a team of legal design enthu­si­asts who spe­cialise in cre­at­ing con­tent that your busi­ness loves, con­tact the team at LexSolutions.

Stay tuned for more insights and prac­ti­cal tips in the next edi­tion of the No Bull-etin. Have you signed up yet? https://​rebrand​.ly/​N​oBull

FAQS

What is a Legal Oper­a­tions team?

A Legal Ops team is a team with­in a legal depart­ment that focus­es on opti­mis­ing the effi­cien­cy and effec­tive­ness of legal process­es and sys­tems. These teams are respon­si­ble for imple­ment­ing strate­gies, tech­nolo­gies, and best prac­tices to stream­line legal oper­a­tions, improve pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, and enhance the over­all per­for­mance of the legal department.

How do you build a Legal Oper­a­tions team?

1. Define the team’s objec­tives: Start by clear­ly defin­ing the objec­tives and goals of your legal oper­a­tions team. Deter­mine the spe­cif­ic areas of focus, such as process improve­ment, tech­nol­o­gy imple­men­ta­tion, or project management.

2. Iden­ti­fy nec­es­sary skills and exper­tise: Assess the skills and exper­tise required for your legal ops team. Look for pro­fes­sion­als with a com­bi­na­tion of legal knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence in areas such as project man­age­ment, data ana­lyt­ics, ven­dor man­age­ment, and tech­nol­o­gy implementation.

3. Col­lab­o­ra­tive hir­ing process: Involve key stake­hold­ers, such as legal pro­fes­sion­als, IT experts, and busi­ness rep­re­sen­ta­tives, in the hir­ing process.

What is a Legal Oper­a­tions strategy?

A Legal Oper­a­tions strat­e­gy is a com­pre­hen­sive plan that out­lines how the legal func­tion will achieve its objec­tives and goals. It serves as a roadmap for the team’s activ­i­ties and pro­vides guid­ance on how to improve effi­cien­cy, reduce costs, and enhance performance.

23 Jul