The Biggest Challenges Corporate Legal Departments Face Today
There are a number of problems which the typical corporate legal department has to deal with today, but they often stem from one inescapable cause: strain on department budgets from the slower economy. This results in attorneys facing problems including:
Losing time to low-value work
Many legal departments try to reduce costs by assigning more and more low value work to in-house attorneys. While this work is necessary, it ends up taking a lot of attorney bandwidth away from higher-value tasks.
Morale issues
Being bogged down with data entry and other lower value tasks results in low morale, which can create a retention problem for your department before long.
Slower turnaround times
In our ever more complex business world, attorneys find themselves with an increasing workload, which can mean slower turnaround and less satisfaction on the part of end users.
Loss of control over contract management
When you’re not able to maintain centralized control over the contract management lifecycle, you open your company up to any number of dangers.
Harder to reduce risk
Stressed, overworked attorneys are far more prone to making errors and missing items in contracts which could be problematic.
Making your legal department more productive
These days, many legal departments are left to do more work with less resources. Third party firms typically charge hourly rates which make outsourcing many tasks too costly for companies. This leaves legal departments with one choice: becoming more productive.
How can you increase productivity? Not by piling more work onto your already overworked attorneys. The key is to improve the efficiency of your processes.
Optimize and automate
A less than efficient contract management process can mean a lot of lost time and energy on the part of your attorneys. This is due to more time spent answering client email and taking calls, more low-value tasks like data entry and more time tracking down missing information in contract requests.
Optimizing your contract management processes and lifecycle can greatly reduce the low-value work your attorneys need to do. This gives them more time to focus on high-value contract related work as well as non-contract tasks. The advantages of more efficient processes include:
More attorney bandwidth
Time and money saved
Reduced exposure to risk
Higher client satisfaction
More time for attorneys to engage in high-value work
Making your legal department more efficient begins with standardizing your contract management lifecycle. The idea is for every step of the way to work exactly the same, every time. Once you have an optimized workflow in place, improve your efficiency even more by implementing an automated solution which is designed specifically for how your legal department gets things done.