How to run a lean in-house legal team

In the current macro-economic climate, it's never been more important to maximise the effectiveness of the legal team. The leading in-house teams are already turning to automation & software to do more with less. Ultimately, in-house teams can have a dramatic strategic impact, but this starts with nailing the basics.

Read on for our tips on keeping your team lean & effective ??????

1. Systematise legal intake

If requests are coming in from different departments in different mediums—email, Slack, JIRA—it’s going to be difficult to effectively standardise and prioritise requests. You’ll end up spending most of your time understanding the request and seeking the correct information rather than solving the problem. A simple legal intake tool—like the one we built on Airtable—is a great place to start for organising this process. Have all your requests in one place with the relevant data, and then prioritise your work accordingly.

Pro-tip: Integrate Airtable with Slack to be notified about new legal requests.

2. Make FAQs accessible

Often as a GC, you’ll receive the same questions over and over. Prioritise the most common questions and create documentation in the form of FAQs using software such as Notion.io. Share the space and allow other departments to self-serve their own questions before creating a legal request. If you want to take this one step further, build a Typeform that allows users to walk through more complex scenarios that require some logic to answer enquiries accurately (you’ll need a Typeform premium plan). You can also quickly build out an FAQs bot by using a Playbook Automation tool like Legal OS.

Pro-tip: Include a confirmation in your legal intake form that FAQs have been searched before submitting a new request

3. Hire software over assistants

You may have caught onto this theme after reading the first two headlines. Many Legal departments hire more legal staff to keep up with increasing demand. This is a costly way to increase the legal team’s effectiveness and it won’t make the team more efficient. As your org scales, you’ll have to request budget for more & more lawyers & paralegals to keep up with demand. This isn’t sustainable. And often, the risk profile of the org is increased as legal knowledge becomes increasingly decentralised & fragmented. We recommend leveraging software to digitise your repetitive work, such as: legal intake, FAQs, document automation, and negotiation support.

4. Empower other teams to self-serve

The single most impactful way to scale your expertise is by creating self-serve portals for non-legal teams. You can do this by building playbooks for non-legal teams to access during the the deal lifecycle. Playbooks offer live guidance, explanations, fallbacks, and justifications. With conditional logic you can ensure conditions are met before a colleague is able to use a play. See an example of Playbook Automation here.

5. Learn from Data

The initial benefit of adopting software is decreasing the burden of repetitive, low-impact tasks. You’re no longer a bottleneck. Time is freed to concentrate on needle-moving, strategic work for the business. The next benefit is the ability to learn from the data. For example, Playbook Automation software can quantify how often particular terms & fallbacks are used, in which deal types, and by which sellers. By digitising playbooks, you can generate strategic insights that can be leveraged to reduce commercial & legal exposure… and even identify new revenue opportunities.

Summary

1. Standardise Legal Intake
2. Internal FAQ center
3. Hire impactful software
4. Scale your expertise via self-service tools
5. Digitisation means efficiency + learning