Uncovering the Secret to Helping GCs Better Manage Legal Matters

As one of the legal industry’s most popular speakers, David Lancelot, the CLO and EVP of Advocacy at LawVu(https://lawvu.com/, has interacted with countless GCs about the challenges they encounter when managing their workload.

And that workload is increasing.

“Amid ongoing economic and industry pressures, businesses are increasingly more likely to retain work in-house than outsource to outside counsel,” Lancelot said. “As a result, in-house legal workloads are on the rise. At the same time, businesses are expecting more value from a strategic perspective from their GCs.”

It’s a quandary.

But there is a solution.

“For in-house legal teams to deliver tangible value and meet the growing demands of their businesses, it’s imperative that GCs embrace technology,” he said.

Despite the compelling need for a tech-driven solution, only 36 percent of in-house legal teams currently use dedicated matter management software. With the rest still dependent on email and spreadsheets, or on software which is not built for the specific demands of in-house work, teams remain bogged down by manual tasks and struggle to access the data they need to work strategically and demonstrate business value, according to Lancelot.

“Legal teams deserve better – and so do their businesses,” he said. “More than ever, in-house legal is a pivotal function for the wider business. Investing in the right matter management solution helps the legal team and the business get important work done with more efficiency, while reducing risk and freeing up valuable time for legal to focus on more strategic work.”

Lancelot expanded on this, noting that “in-house legal matter management is the way to measure everything that matters.

“While it’s increasingly common for larger organizations to implement e-billing and contract management solutions, teams of all sizes often operate with very limited transparency into the majority of work they do.  Picture a pie chart image that represents the work a legal team does: some percentage is contracts, some percentage is with law firms, and some percentage is administrative tasks, and everything else is matters.

“So, while an e-billing tool or CLM can give you some good data, it’s a partial picture; without matter management you don’t have transparency into the majority of the work that your team is doing, so you are clearly not making effective, accurate decisions.”

The painful reality of trying to be data-driven without matter management technology

“When I led a large corporate legal department without internal matter management technology, I relied on surveys of my team to understand their workloads,” said Lancelot. “We were doing our best to provide data so that we could manage the function in a way that was effective. But it was not accurate, and it was time consuming for everyone.

“Another pitfall of not having technology is that you struggle to maintain a process, which impacts workflow efficiency AND gets in the way of gathering data reliably.  You might have a manual process to fill in an intake form, for example… .but in an in-house team, things are happening too quickly to rely on human processes that require much data entry or context switching.  Without a system, processes are ad hoc – and from a data perspective, that means it’s impossible to capture the data you need in a reliable way.”

Creating scale and using data is critical for leaders, and can’t be achieved without people, process and technology

Lancelot added that “if you want to be a business leader with legal skills who operates at the same level of sophistication in leadership management and operations as your peers, you need to create a scalable, data driven and cost-effective department.  In my experience, the right combination of matter management technology, people and process allows you do that. And, when implemented well, the software gives consistency and shape to your ways of working, which gets repeated – generating high value data and transparency as a natural outcome of standardizing and streamlining your workflows.

“If you choose a matter management solution wisely, and implement it well, you’ll build the backbone of an efficient, scalable and forward-thinking in-house legal function and the data you need to be an effective, modern legal leader.”