The JFDI Guide to LawTech

Wise people will tell you that you should never start with the technology. First you must get the right people in place, next you must fix your processes and design your service and then, only then, may you consider the introduction of shiny things with buttons.

But, how boring is that?

Anyway, what those wise people don’t tell you is that your contracting problems look remarkably like everyone else's and there are some well understood solutions that you should just get in place.

With no end in sight to our current lock-in, here are some super cheap projects that you could get to pilot within one or two weeks without leaving your couch - and every one of them will add a ton of value to your team and business.

Forget grand plans of a system that will solve everything - it won’t and guess what just happened to the budget? Instead, get something done now and prove that working from home is effective!

E-signatures

Who needs it?

Everyone needs it, but especially now when your signatories are at home cursing anyone who makes them use their printer and scanner.

How to do it?

1. Get comfortable that it is safe legally (it is in many, many jurisdictions, see this helpful survey of global rules).
2. Choose a vendor. The IBM or Henry Kissinger of the industry is DocuSign, but some choose Adobe Sign on cost grounds. I suggest going with DocuSign given the overall low costs involved.
3. Sign up and ask an admin to teach themselves how to use it (it’s super easy and there are tons of materials if you want to go deep). DocuSign has a pretty horrible sales process but you can get going with a free 30 day trial and sign up for one user now (about ￡400 per year) and add users going forwards.
4. Start signing agreements through it, uploaded by the admin.
5. Confess to procurement and start a proper roll-out when everyone is back in the office.

What will it cost?

Just under ￡4 a signed agreement, going down with volumes. You get 100 contracts per user.

Portal

Who needs it?

Anyone who wants the business to start helping themselves (and their team to share knowledge in a useful way).

How to do it?

You already have the technology in your company to give the business users a single place to go to get help. Either use SharePoint if you’re a Microsoft shop, or Sites if you use Google. Assuming you’re using SharePoint:

1. Get your IT department to set you up with a Legal Resources dedicated site (or track down the ownership credentials of the site that was set up previously and forgotten about). Get admin rights for yourself and a couple of colleagues.
2. Set up company-facing and internal sections and include a wiki and document library.
3. Start filling out the content with everything that could usefully be reused. Err on the side of including materials in the business-accessible part of the site. See this summary of how we think about knowledge management.
4. Soft-launch with your team and the business. Keep growing the content, and over time (a) make sure that a few members of your team have a deep pride of authorship of the site (and will continue to maintain it) and (b) point people asking questions to the relevant part of the site rather than answering directly.

What will it cost?

It’s probably already covered by your Microsoft or Google licence and hence free to you.

Intake system (and dashboard)

Who needs it?

If your team is struggling to balance workloads you’re going to need a triage system to distribute work more evenly rather than the business just calling their favourite lawyer. As a side effect, such a system will give you a much better understanding of actual volumes.

How to do it?

At its simplest, an intake system can be a shared mailbox and someone in your team distributing the matters. 

However, you can do one better if you talk to your IT team about the ticketing system that they use. Innovation prizes can be won by borrowing ServiceNow from the IT department and as a bonus it comes with dashboards showing volumes and who is working on what.

The real advantage at this point is that you can require a form to be completed by the business user, ensuring you actually get the information you need (rather than a back-and-forth of questions each time).

What will it cost?

Free if your IT department already has a site licence.

Document automation

Who needs it?

Any company that creates high volumes of similar, but not identical, agreements on their terms.

How to do it?

There are now a huge number of document automation systems. What’s holding teams back (apart from the natural conservatism so common in law) is (a) budget for the system, and (b) fear of the complexity of automating documents.

Although many of the new systems make it much easier to edit templates, the reality is that in-house teams are rarely going to find the time or inclination to automate all their documents. Our suggested approach is to remove the budgeting barrier by using an open source system called Docassemble and get some third party help with the automation itself (Radiant Law can help). And if it turns out your lawyers want to get involved too, great!

To install Docassemble, your IT department can do it very quickly within your IT environment (tell them the magic words that it is Dockerised and there is a Kubernetes version) or you can get it installed in the cloud for a minimal annual cost.

To learn how to run document automation projects, have a look at our In-house Guide to Document Automation.

What will it cost?

Running Docassemble in the cloud will cost less than ￡500 a year once it’s set up. Budget about ￡1,500 to ￡6,000 to automate a contract, depending on the complexity.

Final thoughts

One of the biggest blockers to getting going with legal technology is the fear of choosing the wrong system. 

The reality, though, is that the value (and effort) comes from refining your forms, resources, templates and questions. Getting a system in place now lets you start the journey of continuous improvement and refinement and those improvements can easily be ported to a new system in future. It’s much, much easier to port between e.g., document automation systems than starting from scratch.

So JFDI.

If you want more on legal technology, have a look at our comprehensive In-house Guide to LawTech and our somewhat tongue-in-cheek LawTech Glossary.