It's all about collaboration

It’s back!?As promised this newsletter - The Legal Transformation 5 – is a monthly publication sharing what I hope will be some interesting content from the world of legal transformation. ?

So what's happened in the last month? Here at Cloud Business Legal we hosted a lively roundtable to discuss the creation of a Legal Transformation Manifesto. Attended by representatives from in-house legal, law firms and legal tech companies, I think everyone who joined us found listening to each other's viewpoints extremely useful. The roundtable highlighted for me how valuable the collaboration process is and how rewarding it is to bring people together to share their experience and insights.

Which leads me to the theme of this month's Legal Transformation 5: collaboration. As you will see from the content I’ve highlighted, collaboration is the driving force behind successful transformation projects and new innovations. Here are my top 5 picks:

1. Celebrate?

FT’s Collaborative Innovation Awards?

Congratulations to all the finalists and winners in the FT’s Collaborative Innovation Awards for industry breakthroughs, held last month.?

Amongst the three winners I was delighted to see our friends at OneNDA who took home the award for design and development. OneNDA (and OneDPA) is a collaborative project that standardises agreements saving time and money when parties agree to use the standard template.?

As the name suggests this award celebrates collaboration. All entries had to involve a minimum of three organisations and address industry-wide challenges using technology-enabled solutions. ?

You can read more about the other finalists and winners here.?

2. Read?

Contract managers can be choosers?

According to?McKinsey, it’s not uncommon for companies to have up to 90 percent of their revenue tied?to vendor contracts. This makes a compelling use case for adding another vendor contract to your portfolio – a contract management vendor. They can help you streamline the contract creation process and manage supplier relations more efficiently. Resulting in better-performing vendor contracts and?more profitable vendor relationships. ?

To help you assess different contract management vendors, Jerry Levine GC at CPAi has written this helpful article. Top of his ‘must haves’ list is a single content repository for all legal documents. Without this it becomes extremely challenging, if not impossible, to get a holistic view on all your vendor contracts. Moreover, a single content repository enables all parties to collaborate on agreements?in real time, increasing engagement throughout the contract lifecycle.?

3. Listen?

Roadblocks on the journey to optimized legal support services?

In this podcast from Legal IT Insider, Duska Frink (solutions manager at BigHand) shares her tips for law firms starting a back office optimisation project. She recommends taking an agile approach to optimising your back office, instead of optimising the entire firm and all processes in one go. Look for teams that are already collaborating where introducing tech and automation will enhance processes that are already in place.

As with any change or transformation project, getting support from those impacted is critical. Sitting down with support staff and lawyers to understand their challenges, how they currently collaborate and the processes in place is the key to a successful project.?By exploring together how legal tech can help them, you will overcome many of the barriers to transformation and maximise user adoption for the solutions deployed.

Click here to listen to the episode.?

4. Read

What is legal transformation??

Back to the Legal Transformation Manifesto. Our inaugural roundtable to kickstart this project posed a number of questions including “what is legal transformation?” We all agreed that it would be useful to have a definition that we could all unite behind, and then expand on it for different use cases. ?

In this article, I summarise the key themes that came out of this discussion and put forward a suggestion to answer the question of what is legal transformation. Please let me know what you think.?We plan to host more roundtables like this as we explore the key components of the legal transformation manifesto, if you'd like to get involved / collaborate, please DM me.?

5. Listen?

Crafty Counsel's In-house Legal Podcast – Genevieve Landricombe?

I was delighted to meet Genevieve Landricombe in person recently, after?connecting online. For those who don’t know her, Genevieve is a Legal Transformation Director, who has supported many in-house legal teams transform the legal function.?

In this podcast for The Crafty Show, she discusses her career, emojis, sustainability and swimming in the Thames: as well as sharing strategic and operational advice, and how she works with GCs to help them deliver transformation. Genevieve’s career is a great example of how collaboration creates opportunities for everyone.?

Listen to the podcast here.?

That’s it for this edition of The Legal Transformation 5. I hope you’ve found it useful. Please let me know if you come across any relevant?content you feel deserves to be featured in next month’s edition – I’m very much in favour of a collaborative approach!?

Incidentally, we set up a LinkedIn group a couple of months ago with aspirations to "provide a platform for sharing ideas, best practice, advice and personal experience, to help our community develop and implement legal transformation strategies that deliver real value to their organisations and people." If you'd like to join, please click on this link.