Why Legal Now Means Business

Legal’s no longer just a profession – it’s now big business, with a greater eye on profitability and efficiency than ever, Mark A. Cohen discusses in a recent Forbes post.

“Law is now a three-legged stool supported by legal, technological and business expertise,” Cohen writes. “Technologists are working with lawyers – end-users – to design solutions that automate processes and morph labor-intensive services into products. Business experts have injected process and project management into legal delivery and have better aligned it with the speed, efficiency, cost-effectiveness and transparency of business.”

As such, corporate legal teams are turning to legal operations and legal technology to meet the growing challenges and stressors they face, our friends over at ThinkSmart wrote in a recent post.

“As we’ve pointed out, there are rising pressures driving corporate legal departments to adopt new approaches to delivering legal services,” Mitratech CMO Kelli Negro states. “Building up legal operations capabilities and adopting technologies like legal workflow automation (surprise!) are among them.”

Why are companies rushing in droves towards the solutions offered by legal operations and legal technology? Simply put, their costs are getting out of hand and money speaks.

According to CLOC’s State of the Industry Survey, companies currently spend, on average:

• $60 million on external legal spend
• $221,000 on internal spend per legal department
• $607,000 on external legal spend per in-house attorney

56.2% of legal departments now use formalized metrics or reporting programs, one Blickstein Group survey noted.

The other option for cost control? Using legal technology as a remedy.

“Legal workflow automation is what we’d call an essential technology if these growing legal ops teams are serious about their mission: Enabling the legal department to deliver more services, but doing so more cost-effectively,” Kelli Negro states.

The final kicker, according to ThinkSmart? Legal workflow automation is typically much less expensive than other technology investments, while at the same time having a more lasting impact on legal operations success.