At first glance, Legal seems perhaps the last functions to apply digital. The tools and capabilities that improve operations in other units can also be used by Legal, although we believe Big Data analytics will provide the greatest value as these teams mature their adoption of digital. Analyzing big data has already proved effective in reducing fraud, theft, and corruption. For instance, fusing and analyzing disparate data sources including social media content makes it easier for insurance companies to detect and eliminate fraud.
Inviting Legal to help form enterprise digital strategy serves two purposes:
- Share marketing’s digital best practices and help educate legal on how to apply digital capabilities to their functional/operational needs.
- Keep in-house legal informed about these emergent digital opportunities and activities, so they can better calculate risk and guide decision-making in fast-changing and uncertain regulatory environments.
Legal and Social
Legal departments are less dependent on technology than other functions, so it’s not surprising adoption of social by legal professionals has lagged other professions. Linkedin is the preferred social network by a wide margin (helpful for recruiting of legal staff!), and recent research shows adoption picking up and the gap between generations of legal professionals closing in social media.
Legal Professionals’ Use of Linkedin: Generation Disparities Narrow
Figure 5. Legal Professionals’ Use of Linkedin: Generation Disparities Narrow
(Source: Greentarget Strategic Communications, InsideCounsel, and Zeughauser Group – 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey)
Figure 6. Legal Professionals’ Use of Linkedin: Generation Disparities Narrow
(Source: Greentarget Strategic Communications, InsideCounsel, and Zeughauser Group – 2012 In-House Counsel New Media Engagement Survey)
In-House Legal Staff Should Improve Their Social Acumen
One concerning trend for companies is the fact that in-house legal professionals are less engaged in social than external legal professionals. It’s incumbent on in-house legal staff to become familiar with the social media domain to better advise the company on risk and regulation as it expands social and digital efforts. In-house legal should also take a page from external legal firms and use social to improve their interaction and collaboration with both internal teams and possibly customer contacts.
Expanding Use of Social for Legal: Collaborative Process
Legal departments are under-utilizing social. Currently, legal use of social is focused on professional promotion and some research, but social tools have value for core legal processes. For instance, contract preparation and negotiation is a notoriously iterative, linear, lengthy process that manages many inputs from many reviewers and approvers. The contract process is exactly like Marketing’s own creative asset review process, which has been streamlined and accelerated with collaborative tools that allow multiple users to review and modify a document while tracking and organizing even simultaneous updates.
Finding internal expertise is a tedious, email-driven process for legal departments with hundreds of professionals. Expert search and matching is fairly standard in enterprise social collaboration tools and is easily extendable to legal teams.
Digital may finally be the technology age for Legal departments—there’s much to learn and leverage from the early successes in social media and networking.
Social Tools Help You Find Internal Experts Fast
Figure 7. Whodini, a member of TCS’s Co-Innovation Nework (COIN), offers a product that automatically builds expertise profiles from email content and helps you quickly find an expert that matches your need.
|
TCS Q&A with CNA CIO on Digital Enablement for Legal Teams Tonya McKinney, Head of Digital Strategy, TCS, speaks with Becky Nelson, Vice President – Client Executive, Information Technology, CNA, on digital enablement for legal teams. Read more » |
Legal and Mobile
Legal’s use of mobile mirrors their use of social—underutilized. While legal professionals own and use smartphones and tablets, their professional use is primarily limited to email, research, and PDF document readers. In fairness, searching Apple and Android applications reveals few designed for legal professionals. Still, many existing and planned mobile investments could be extended or modified for legal use. For instance, automated approval is a common process delivered via mobile and would be a boon to legal teams. Digital strategist need to actively engage with legal to capture their requirements and use cases for mobility.
Advanced Mobile Benefits Elude Legal Staff
Figure 8. Advanced Mobile Benefits Elude Legal Staff
Caption: Legal professionals primarily use their mobile devices for email and have not been able to tap more advanced use cases in Mobility.
Source: ALM Legal Intelligence – “Productivity in the Legal Profession: The Impact of Mobile Technology”
Legal and Cloud
Few can argue that Legal, as a function, is underserved by enterprise technology. Many factors contribute to this state: the smaller size of legal teams make it hard to create a compelling business case, legal teams lack the technology expertise to make the case for new tech, IT departments fail to understand how legal can use technology, and there is a distinct lack of technology designed for legal use.
Cloud Can Make the Legal Business Case
Cloud computing may help overcome the lack of business case. The cost efficiencies that Cloud computing provides can make more functionality available to legal teams at lower cost…IF security concerns are sufficiently addressed. Certainly Cloud computing is essential for deploying the social and mobile capabilities we’ve already discussed.
In the Am Law Tech Survey 2010, 80% of firms report using hosted solutions for eDiscovery, litigation support, and operations. – Forrester
Legal and Big Data
Legal activity generates a huge amount of unstructured data ranging from reams of prose in contracts to video depositions. The high volume and variety of formats have been limitations that have left this information has largely gone untapped. Now, with the new capabilities to manage and analyze big data becoming generally available, legal teams can quickly mine these sources.
Big Data Analytics Give Legal Teams Predictive Insight
The advantage of faster, deeper research is obvious, and companies have already begun analyzing social data for fraud and intellectual property infringement. Now, consider how the use of advanced analytics could offer legal teams new insights to create legal strategy. By combining internal data with external data sources (market data, economic factors, company profiles), legal teams can get a view of contributing factors in previous litigation that better inform current strategies. Other analytical techniques can offer legal teams predictive insight—the ability to identify risk areas and take action before issues arise. Because of these transforming capabilities, we see big data as the strongest business case in Digital Legal Strategy.
|
|
|
About the Authors
|
