Top five barriers to legal department modernization

This barrier came up in many of our interviews, but none more poignantly than in a conversation with one legal executive who initially believed that their organization had a solid project plan for modernization, including various assessments, and that executive buy-in was strong. Yet in answering a list of questions about the various proposed initiatives, including technologies they were trying to implement, it became clear that many had been cut from the budget.

Litigation, discovery, corporate strategy, mergers and acquisitions, contracts, and ethics and compliance often operate independently, and their responsibilities can be both wide-ranging and complex. Leaders of these areas can be protective, and modernization efforts, especially those involving technology deployments, may be carried out in isolation from corporate IT or even other areas of the legal department. Integration of legal operations technologies is often nonexistent, which prevents a clear line of sight across modernization efforts and impedes leadership’s ability to leverage successes and innovations across legal functions and activities.

In many legal operations departments, leadership has a general understanding of what their legal professionals are working on at any given time. However, workflows are typically not structured or governed across each function in a way that enables effective use of key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics to evaluate, among other things, individual and team performance; whether the most effective resources are being applied to high-risk, high-value activities; and how effectively legal budgets are being allocated internally or externally.

Many organizations apparently mistake content or document management for knowledge management. The distinction between them has become much clearer as many legal professionals have worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gone were “water-cooler conversations” through which insights and knowledge have long been shared among legal professionals. The tendency to reinvent the wheel from one project to the next—a long-standing challenge in legal departments—has been exacerbated by the virtual work environment. And the walls of the previously described departmental silos have only grown higher and thicker during the pandemic as legal professionals have focused on getting a handle on remote work and keeping pace with day-to-day demands.

Reliance on established precedent for decision-making and weighing the resulting risks of those decisions are traits that are deeply embedded in the professional DNA of most lawyers. So, for many, there is little appetite for change, and legal modernization is a concept fraught with potential risks. Change management is a discipline designed to address such concerns by clearly and consistently articulating the vision for and benefits of modernization and helping build buy-in and support through frequent communications.