De-Stressing the Municipal Legal Department

Whoever said the city never sleeps could have been thinking of the municipal Legal Department.

Indeed, consider the range of issues that pass through a municipal Legal Department. There are all of the concerns of a business – a myriad of contracts and large workforce's chief among them. Add on the specifics of government, from taxation to land use regulation to law enforcement. Finally, layer on a few wild cards: drones, self-driving cars, and backyard chickens.?

(Not to mention the sometimes-unpredictable vox populi.)

While serving as a local government lawyer can be very fulfilling, it’s certainly not without its challenges. Backyard chickens aside, the sheer volume of subjects (and clients) that a municipal Legal Department must handle prompts the need for efficiency and visibility.

Yet because many municipal legal teams are underfunded, most make do with manual tracking, institutional knowledge, and scrappiness. Historically, legal technology was tailored to large Legal Departments (and large budgets) – a hard sell for municipal lawyers who a) are frugal by nature (and well-aware their budgets are public); and b) are pragmatic enough to know they are fighting for budget dollars with firefighters.

However, as cloud-based legal software empowers the democratization of LegalTech, making it available to everyone, modern matter management emerges as a solution to many municipal Legal Departments’ struggles.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Everything is tracked manually

Again, without a centralized matter management system, the lawyers and staff track their work with disjointed tools – spreadsheets, to-do lists, email archives.

You rely too much on institutional memory

Many team members have been there a long time – and it hurts when they leave. Moreover, a surprise absence – sickness, leave or vacation – can force frenzied investigations and double work.

There is a lack of visibility across the team

Those old-school manual tracking systems are offline and individualized – so there is no clear way to see who is doing what, for whom, on what deadline.

It’s also hard to fully visualize resource utilization. One component of this is capacity: Who is overwhelmed, and who has the capacity to help? Another is right-resourcing – ensuring you have matched the right resources, internal or external, for the work. A critical concern for all Legal Departments, to be sure, but the need for ROI is amplified in the municipal arena.?

You have specific (and time-consuming) reporting requirements

Municipal legal team reporting could overwhelm a publicly traded company. And while the volume is hard enough, doing it all manually – remember those spreadsheets and to-do lists? – consumes hours, if not days, you don’t have to spare.

There is a better way.

Modern matter management can be deployed as municipal legal department software.

With the affordability and scalability of a cloud-based legal platform, municipal Legal Departments are streamlining their operations with simple matter tracking and automated reporting.?

For example, consider the Upper Hutt City Council in the Wellington region of New Zealand, which uses Xakia to create a real-time dashboard of its legal workload.?

Or the City of Overland Park, Kansas, which found that with accessible legal operations software, it could reduce the time for quarterly reporting by 80 percent.

Ready to learn more?

Review these case studies of municipal Legal Departments like yours, or catch up with the Xakia team at the upcoming IMLA Annual Conference.