Legal operations means running in-house legal like a business, focusing on competencies like financial management, analytics and service design to make legal efficient, effective and fit for the modern business.
A mature legal department with effective legal operations should have developed a high level of competency in each of these core areas. Successful legal operations teams will often draw on non-legal talent to drive these areas forward - putting finance experts in charge of budgeting, IT people in charge of the tech stack, procurement professionals in charge of vendor management, and so on.
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Legal technology traditionally referred to the application of technology and software to help individual lawyers, law firms, medium and large scale businesses with practice management, document storage, billing, accounting and electronic discovery. Since 2011, Legal Tech has evolved to be associated more with technology startups disrupting the practice of law by giving people access to online software that reduces or in some cases eliminates the need to consult a lawyer, or by connecting people with lawyers more efficiently through online marketplaces and lawyer-matching websites.
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Legal procurement focuses on buying legal services and managing the business side of relationships with law firms and other legal services providers. Buying and negotiations is their forté. They are based in the procurement department and report to the chief procurement officer. The majority of legal procurement professionals have a business/finance background rather than a legal background.
What legal procurement “is not” is replacing the judgment of in-house lawyers regarding which firm to ultimately hire for any particular matter. Rather, it is a process that replaces picking law firms based on relationships and hourly rates with data-driven decisions related to value.
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Data and analytics is the management of data for all uses (operational and analytical) and the analysis of data to drive business processes and improve business outcomes through more effective decision making and enhanced customer experiences. Specifically, drawing data for use from large legal teams comes with it’s own challenges. SME skills can be utilised to better capture the legal data but the follow on practices and methodologies in creating prescriptive analytics for business best use are widely the same as other industries.
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Rapidly growing global regulatory requirements, new security threats and challenging business goals are causing legal departments to be more operations focused in their approach. Increasingly, they are looking to leverage technology to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and better manage risk and compliance.
Current themes include:
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Electronic discovery, commonly known as e-discovery, is the process by which electronic data is identified, collected and produced, in response to a request for evidence in a civil or criminal court case. E-discovery isn’t a single action; rather it’s a process comprised of many related actions that begins when a lawsuit is imminent and lasts until documents are presented in court, should they go to trial.
Once litigation is on the horizon, parties involved have a duty to preserve electronically-stored information (ESI) that could be relevant to the matter. Lawyers from both sides of a case will define the scope of e-discovery, identify and preserve the relevant ESI, and make e-discovery requests and challenges of the opposing side. Once the limitations are set, ESI is collected, analysed and formatted for use in court.
This is a dynamic, complex process that can present many challenges to legal and IT teams. However, new developments mean that e-discovery can now be managed in a single technology platform.
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