Lawyers tend to be somewhere on a scale of openness to changing their existing ways of working. At one end there’s a belief that solutions need to be people intensive, personal and bespoke. At the other, a certainty that technology, process and data are the future of the profession.

We believe that people are fundamental to everything we do. However, we don’t see the issue as binary. It’s absolutely vital that we as a profession, in-house or in private practice, embrace process, technology and data where it makes sense to do so. This is something we put into practice at Tacit Legal and help our clients to achieve too.

But where do you start? Which activities in your team lend themselves to being augmented with process, technology and data? And how do you get from A to B?

This article begins to answer these all-important questions, taking you from what to think about when deciding what’s ripe for improvement though to the practical considerations you need to bear in mind to get there effectively.

Demystifying the terminology

Before we get started, it’s worth saying that we use the words process, technology and data broadly, and none of it has to be particularly scary or technical:

• Process doesn’t have to mean rigidity and process diagrams. It can equally be new ways of working that everyone understands and buys into.
• Technology does not have to mean something you need to build or buy. It can mean making better use of tools your IT team already makes available to you.
• Data does not have to mean dashboards and data warehouses. It can mean organising your knowledge resources and precedents more effectively.

Where do you start?

Which activities in your team would benefit from being augmented with process, technology and data?

If you have little control over core infrastructure (offices, high level technology, finance) there’s little point spending significant amounts of time trying to come up with a solution. Instead, stay focused on those things you can do something about.

This simple checklist will help you narrow down the field.

1. What are you trying to achieve?

The exercise of putting together a shortlist of potential improvements is much easier if you’re clear on the type of improvement you’re looking for. For instance, is the desire for improvement driven by:

• budget constraints, meaning you’re primarily focused on cost?
• a change in your organisation’s risk appetite, meaning you’re primarily focused on improving accuracy?
• a lack of business engagement, meaning you want to favour making it easier for the business to engage?
• an unhappy team, meaning you’re trying to improve their quality of life while at work?

In an in-house setting, you also need to think about your stakeholders. Has senior management given you priorities. If not, do you need to agree priorities with them first?

To give you an example, at Tacit Legal our priorities are generally as follows:

• Internal improvements are focused on giving our colleagues back time to focus on clients and their professional development and reducing risk by baking our policies into our everyday actions.
• Externally facing improvements are about making it easier for clients to engage with us (think sleek onboarding and billing transparency) and offering clients a range of solutions that are appropriate to different levels of risk appetite.

Our prioritisation conversations always come back to these things.

2. How much of a mismatch is there between cost and value?

Whether you’re in-house or in private practice, there’s a cost to providing a work product. There are two important things to bear in mind when calculating this cost:

• The cost may not be exclusively financial. It could factor in risk and the experience of the person doing the work.
• Where it’s financial, it doesn’t need to be (cross-)charged to the internal or external client to be relevant.

Value can be even harder to quantify (even on transactions with a committed contract value) as the value contributed by lawyers is usually (but not always) to do with risk reduction or awareness rather than reducing cost or generating revenue. However, for an initial assessment, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with a gut feel of how comfortable it feels against the cost.

If cost’s greater than or equal to value it’s usually a tell-tail sign that there’s a better way of doing it. Possibly through use of process, technology or data.

When going through this exercise, it’s important to try and break things down into their smaller component parts.

A great real-life example of an activity with a poor cost/value ratio that will apply across most (if not all) in-house teams is proof reading. It’s costly in time, and I would hazard a guess that no lawyer enjoys it and few do it as much as they should as they don’t feel it proportionate.

3. Is the juice worth the squeeze?

Very few solutions that can be applied straight off the shelf. Those that can be either solve a very simple problem (document management, for example) or require you to adopt someone else’s process, knowledge or take on what data is useful. This is of course great if it meets your requirements.

Most of the time, you’ll need to simplify and standardise how you do things to get the most out of the planned improvement activity. Otherwise, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and may cause more problems than you solve.

You shouldn’t underestimate the amount of work involved in doing this. Even the simplest tasks can involve a not-insignificant number of ifs, buts and whens without you realising until you try to turn it into a process. And the more variables there are, the harder it will be to fit into a process or build into technology.

Generally speaking:

• The higher the volume of the task, the more likely it is that your investment will be worth it.
• The more consistency there is in that volume, the easier (and cheaper) it will be to simplify and standardise.
• The more complicated the work type, the less likely it is to be worth the amount of time and effort needed to simplify it and standardise it (unless you have a very high volume of it).

4. What will the users think?

Doing all this work is pointless if the end users refuse to engage with the new process, technology or data you put in place. So before you decide to go ahead, consider how your end users will take it. Or even better, ask them.

It might be idealist to try and keep all your colleagues happy. But it’s still important to listen to their views. They may even spot a genuine reason why your proposal won’t work, or won’t work in its proposed form.

If you know you’ll get push back, you can factor in and plan for how you’re going to win over hearts and minds to get the engagement you need. This can be the most difficult part, so if you have two improvements in mind that should be equally impactful, we’d go for the one that’s the easier sell first.

Getting from A to B

Great. You’ve identified the problem you’d like to tackle. As you enter planning stage, there’s a few things to bear in mind that will help you get off to a flying start.

1. What dependencies and blockers might you encounter early on?

There’s nothing worse than getting excited about starting a project and doing a load of work, only to find out you have a dependency on someone else or a blocker which can’t be shifted quickly. So pre-empt these obstacles where you can.

Does your solution depend on IT already used by your organisation? If yes and you need your IT team to set you up, let them know well ahead of time.

Do you have all of the skills necessary in your team? If not, do you have them in the organisation? It’s worth giving those you’ll depend on a heads up of what’s coming and when, so they don’t become the bottleneck.

Are there any potential upcoming resourcing issues? For instance key people being on parental leave or having a particularly busy periods. It’s important here to think about your target users’ availability as well as those that will be helping you deliver the improvement. Which leads nicely on to…

2. Keep your users involved throughout

We’ve already mentioned testing the water with your users during the ‘where do you start’ process. It’s equally important to keep them involved while you’re starting to implement your improvements.

This is particularly true where you’re likely to get some push back: people are much more willing to engage with the improvement if they feel like they have been heard – or even better, that they can see their ideas have been incorporated into your plans.

It’s also much easier when you have something to show them. It doesn’t have to be perfect but starting with a blank piece of paper when engaging with your users can make for quite a painful experience. Providing a prototype or a mock-up of how the solution might work will give you something to get the conversation started.

3. Simplify and standardise first

We’ve already touched on the need to simplify and standardise before you start implementing a new process technology or data.

If you haven’t done this first you risk creating more problems than you solve. You might also end up building a solution that’s over complicated, difficult to use and easy to break.

Where do you start with this?

We find it useful to think about all of the different variations of how you and your team might conquer a task. When would you reach for A over B, or C over D? Boil that down to a list of variations on the problem or outcome.

It’s not practical to try to cater for all of those variations in a single solution as things start to get exponentially more complicated. You should try to avoid having more than two or three so that you don’t overload everyone involved with the implementation or the learning involved.

Instead, agree which of the problems or target outcomes are most common and need to be more urgently addressed. Then agree on one way of doing things for each of those problems or target outcomes.

In our experience, users would rather have one good solution for their problem than lots of options, none of which are great.

Think of it like a restaurant menu. If there’s more than five or six options for a main course, you can get decision paralysis and wonder whether they can really be doing everything well.