So You Want to Modernise Legal Operations…

While most organisations have adopted a digital transformation strategy, most legal teams are still receiving requests through email and using spreadsheets to track and manage their work. Legal departments are seeing increased legal demand and being are asked to do more with less. Continuing to manage work in this manner is no longer practical or sustainable. Legal teams should be spending less time sifting through emails, searching spreadsheets, and answering simple questions, and more time on strategic work protecting reputation, reducing bottlenecks, and enabling the business.

There has to be a better way

Organisations can quickly replace these manual, legacy processes and modernise legal operations with ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery. With many other departments, such as IT, HR, and Finance already managing and delivering their work through the ServiceNow platform, collaborating on cross-departmental matters is no longer a challenge, employees can engage through the same self-service channels they are already familiar with, and legal operations can gain insight into service demands and trends to improve efficiency.

Legal Service Delivery offers a set of applications aimed at modernising legal operations by providing a unified experience between the employees requesting legal support and the legal teams serving them:

• Legal Request Management provides employees with the ability to get information, request services, and ask for help from the legal department at any time from anywhere. Employees can submit structured legal requests, check on their status, and read legal knowledge articles through the Employee Center portal, Now Mobile application, and Virtual Agent chatbot.
• Legal Matter Management provides legal departments with the ability to complete legal requests that require cross-departmental collaboration, with standardised, repeatable, workflow-driven tasks, including the capability to store documents and track important milestones. In addition, security is maintained for each record to ensure sensitive information remains confidential.
• Legal Counsel Center enables efficiency for legal teams, by providing a workspace for all legal requests and matters. This unified view allows the team to quickly categorise, prioritise, assign, and manage work to maximise productivity and balance workload.
• Legal Practice Applications enable legal departments to quickly enable industry best-practice workflows for common legal requests and matters such as conflict of interest, simple contracts, and stock preclearance.
• Legal Reporting Dashboards enable operations managers and executive leaders to make informed decisions and view trends by providing real-time insight into the demand and performance of legal operations with dashboards and metrics across all practice areas.

Where to start

While all these amazing capabilities are great, it can be overwhelming if too much is taken on at once. Thirdera recommends starting small, showing quick wins, and building upon this success and momentum to further mature. The first goal should be to get the legal department out of email and tracking spreadsheets and into ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery. Start by building a strong foundation with this in mind, enabling self-service, providing structured request management, and a home base for managing and reporting on work.

Step 1 – Build a Modern Foundation with these ServiceNow apps/products:

• Employee Centre
• Knowledge Management
• Legal Request Management
• Legal Counsel Centre
• Legal Operations Dashboard

This recommended roadmap to full-scale legal operations maturity is best captured in a recent case study: Major Transit Agency Streamlines Legal Service Delivery. Connect with our Employee Experience experts to learn more about ServiceNow Legal Service Delivery and how you can enable your legal team to act faster and more efficiently.