3 Ways Legal Software Scalability Saves the Day in Legal Ops (and Beyond)
If a Legal Operations team didn’t know how to flex before COVID-19, there’s a great chance they learned in a hurry. Legal software scalability is a key part of that lesson plan, too.
Organizations had to adapt with haste to the demands imposed by the pandemic. For legal departments, the changes that had been ushered in by increasing pressures to perform profitably and productively were now part of an emergency evolution to meet those challenges — including the need to accomplish more work without entailing greater outside spend…and in some cases, cutting back on it.
Operations suddenly had to be flexible and agile enough to address a different set of dynamics: Remote work, a new retinue of legal matters related to the pandemic, and more.
Legal software has to scale, or else
As 2020 broke over the business world, scalability suddenly mattered more than ever. Processes needed to be scalable; so, for better or worse, did workforces. Enterprise technology solutions – legal technology included – had to deliver scalability, of course, minimizing the costs and disruption of pivoting to new parameters. Of growing or contracting to accommodate changes within the department and the enterprise.
The best legal software offerings deliver scalability that’s essential in a business environment where markets expand and shrink, customers rise or falter, yet the upward curve of new legal and risk mitigation challenges never seems to slacken. Whether it’s an enterprise legal management platform, a workflow automation solution, or a seemingly prosaic but vital tool like legal hold management software? Its scalability is key to its value, because it’s able to adapt to whatever the situation is facing Legal Ops and legal staff.
Three ways legal software scalability delivers value
So as. the legal industry catches on to the benefits of software that’s flexible and scalable, what are three big ways where legal software scalability pays off for Legal Ops and in-house legal departments?
Powering
Flexible Workflows
Workflow automation is one of the most fundamental legal tech solutions, mainly because it delivers immediate efficiencies while also making it easier for a Legal Ops team or legal staff to accomplish more work even if they’re forced to reckon with reduced headcount or limited budgets.
By streamlining processes, removing mundane work from human hands (and thereby preventing human error), and making it easier for your legal team to process more matters more efficiently, workflow automation helps content with extreme business circumstances. The capacity of the best of these solutions to scale nearly at the drop of a hat (or a gavel?) to meet increased (or decreased) workloads is one of their most potent attractions.
Ease of
Use & Training
Here’s another thing about legal software scalability: For a solution to really succeed, it has to be adopted by all those users whose headaches it’ll alleviate. But “scalability” and “ease of use” aren’t always concurrent in some software products. So it’s important that a legal software offering not only be scalable, but that it scales with ease – meaning it’s comparatively easy to not only add or drop instances to meet new workload demands, but that when you’re adding new users, they’re not confronted with a steep learning curve.
By allowing new users to quickly and easily learn the ropes of a new solution, that solution makes true, hassle-free scalability far simpler to implement for everyone.
Cross-
Business Adoption
Today, legal tech scalability isn’t just about how it flexes to satisfy the requirements of the legal department. Solutions like the aforementioned legal workflow automation are seeing increasing cross-disciplinary and cross-departmental adoption in many companies. Why? Because users outside of the legal department are seeing the benefits of utilizing these tools, especially since introducing them into their own operations means that legal best practices can now be embedded in everyday processes used everywhere across the organization, from HR to Procurement.
The solution that scales to meet the needs of Legal Ops and company counsel should, therefore, also be able to smoothly scale to meet the needs of these outside users. And by “outside users,” that can also include outside counsel and other service providers who can be integrated into the same legal tech ecosystem.
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