Mick Sheehy, Partner, PwC NewLaw
Outside these tools we need to rely on enterprise systems that the tools don’t talk to, or even more likely, manual processes. It’s my view that legal operating systems will change the game for legal departments and the legal industry more generally. But let’s come back to what these legal operating systems do a little later and briefly discuss the evolution of point solutions that have their own important role to play.
Legal technology for in-house legal departments largely originated in the form of e-billing solutions. Technology to make sense of and reign in the huge amounts of money spent on external law firms was a no-brainer given the dollars involved. It doesn’t require much in the way of improvement over a portfolio of legal spend for the investment in e-billing to more than pay for itself. Another area where there has been considerable technology investment is document management. The return on investment in document management may not be as clear cut as e-billing but given the huge amount of time lawyers spend in documents, drafting, negotiating, storing, opining, it makes sense that we use tools to manage our document-related processes. It can get tricky when we need to work alongside enterprise document management systems which are not always fit for purpose for legal or easy to integrate with, but the rewards tend to be worth the effort. More recently, significant progress has been made with document automation and there are increasingly interesting developments in using machine learning algorithms to review contracts. Automation and artificial intelligence will drive some of the more noticeable and transformative changes in how legal services are provided.
My contention is that none of these great solutions will reach their full potential unless they sit within a comprehensive legal operating system. And there are two main reasons for this. Firstly, an operating system lays down the foundation for an end to end legal workflow: from intake to triage, matter, document, vendor and knowledge management. With this in place and seamless integrations into point solution tools, we now have an across-the-board digital legal environment. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, unless we are working within one system, we don’t have a single source of truth. It is the single source of truth that produces the data to measure not just the performance of the legal team but the value it contributes to the organization it was set up to support. Legal departments are still at the beginner stage of using data to explain performance. Legal operating systems are going to unlock amazing data sets and produce rich insights to inform a raft of decisions we make around areas including workflow, contract and risk management.
Earlier this year PwC announced its strategic tie-up with legal operations platform LawVu. We selected LawVu after reviewing the market and deciding it was best placed to deliver the way of working described in the first paragraph of this article. The day after our announcement another Big4 professional services firms announced a similar tie-up prompting legal articles to ask whether this was the beginning of the ‘legal platform wars’. I’m not sure I’d call it war but I do see it as an alignment of thinking that the legal operations platform will be a key foundation layer for great tools, and the ultimate source of data that will produce metrics to accelerate the engine of change in the legal industry. It’s time for all legal departments to get on board.
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