Automating legal processes, whether by adopting ELM, CLM, or workflow automation solutions, has allowed legal departments to swiftly and easily implement processes in response to the pandemic, such as for tracking the ability of outside counsel to continue to deliver services, or measuring DEI progress even during disruption.
But legal departments are discovering some less obvious, but still important, benefits of automating.
Legal reimagined: How legal technology helps retention
Automating mundane legal tasks, such as NDA processing, so staff can work on more rewarding projects is one way workflow automation can help with job satisfaction and retention. When great employee onboarding is capable of improving retention by 82%, it’s crucial to have good HR workflow automation in place as well.
Another benefit? Legal technology can temper the loss of the institutional knowledge represented by the departure of attorneys or other legal staff.
By embedding vetted best practices within automated workflows or management solutions, the enterprise can retain institutional knowledge within proven processes. This also includes data on what best practices were more productive, which activities consumed the most time, and so on, allowing leadership to hone those processes. They’re then able to onboard new employees into workflows which have been tried and tested.
As legal departments increasingly reach across departmental boundaries, they’re able to pass along these optimized processes to other business units, equipping them with workflows that have a certain legal “expertise” already woven into them.
64% of in-house legal departments say legal technology has resulted in better workflows and processes for attorneys, helping to mitigate the issues caused by mundane, traditional processes. Legal technology will continue to evolve, though; some CIOs and GCs are retiring the idea of simply adopting standalone, one-off products. They’re interested in implementing flexible, single-source, seamlessly integrated legal tech stacks capable of driving success for the entire organization, while making their legal departments much more alluring for future (let alone current) generations of attorneys and legal staff.