Getting The Best From Lawtech: Learnings From The Lawyers

Lisa Urwin, FutureLaw Professional Support Lawyer, TLT LLP

In an industry that has been evolving over hundreds of years, lawtech is a relative newbie in the evolution of the legal services industry.

As the volume of available solutions soars, a competitive law tech market can only help drive innovation faster and push costs down. But with such a wide range of solutions to choose from comes the obvious pain of evaluating them all, assessing return on investment and, ultimately, deciding whether they will actually help or hinder.

You might ask - why go through this process? As integrating lawtech solutions becomes the norm, we look at the benefits can it offer you and your business.

How to get the best from lawtech

The following questions may be all too familiar to you: Do I have the information I need readily to hand if the regulator knocks on the door? Am I meeting legal and regulatory requirements? Am I using the best available processes to meet those requirements?

When looking to lawtech to help address these issues, having to evaluate the market and choose from the vast range of available products may seem daunting. But you don’t need to reinvent the wheel and, in order to save evaluation time and still get the best from lawtech, it’s worth considering the advice of experts in the field - from lawyers and legal project managers, to business analysts and tech innovators.

Drawing on the expertise of multi-disciplinary lawtech specialists can help you get to the bottom of key concerns, and address these concerns effectively through a range of tech and process driven solutions. This kind of team, whether forming part of a law firm or otherwise, really understands how good legal and regulatory housekeeping relies on sufficient lawtech and well-designed solutions.

 Applying a tech-agnostic approach and design thinking to help tailor solutions can help minimise risk and remove any nagging concerns faced by those in positions of responsibility.

Examining possible solutions

General Counsels (GCs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) know all too well the time it takes to streamline the process of reviewing and negotiating legal agreements. An efficient contract review tool can be the perfect product to solve many of the pre-signature challenges faced by GCs and CIOs.

When looking for the right solution of this kind, it’s useful to bear in mind that a well-crafted contract review tool should be able to identify key clauses in your contracts and serve up either legal and/or commercial guidance on-screen after carrying out a contract review. With the help of the right AI technology, this can take place in minutes rather than the several hours it might take to trawl through contracts in the old-fashioned manner.

The real beauty of a good contract review tool is its configurability, as it can allow GCs and other senior managers to set parameters specific to their business taking into account the limits of what can be agreed during a contract negotiation, and therefore removes the need to consult with Group Legal regarding the same issues over and over again.

End-to-end contract management solutions should also be considered, as these allow businesses to store, draft, review, update and manage contracts as well as other documents throughout their lifecycle.

Solutions that don’t just rely on tech but that are flexible to blend services, such as project management, legal support and process optimisation consultancy, as well as legal services, can also be extremely helpful in helping you deliver your projects on time and get them over the line as efficiently as possible.

Lawyers don’t just provide legal services these days, and neither do they just provide white labelled lawtech solutions, which of course makes sense when you consider that law firms will have looked to optimise their own systems and processes alongside offering the same to their clients.

So, if you want to work out quickly how best to streamline your legal and compliance processes, then just ask the lawyers – or more specifically, ask the lawyers that have already gone through the processes of working out what’s best on the market and how best to apply it to your unique business requirements.