Implementing Legal Tech: A Roadmap for Legal Teams [New Playbook]

The legal profession is transforming. In-house legal departments deal with the overwhelming volume of data — documents, spreadsheets, and visuals. Organizations store this documentation across locations: public and private networks, shared drives, and even in email threads. Managing all this information is a formidable task. 

This is precisely where legal tech can assist, offering solutions tailored to complex file management. Current tools can revolutionize data handling, document drafting, reviewing, and planning. Some of the benefits include:

• Higher employee productivity through automation and collaboration
• Lower operational costs due to reduced manual oversight
• Enhanced decision-making with robust data analytics tools
• Higher client satisfaction rates because of better user experience
• Simplified workflow and work delegation and less employee stress

However, innovation is a demanding and resource-intensive task. Seemingly beneficial tech advancements can introduce difficulties or incite backlash if improperly implemented.

At ContractWorks, we have established ourselves as a leading contract lifecycle management platform. We partnered with companies across industries — from banking and software to agriculture and real estate. Our experts understand the hurdles companies can anticipate and have the tools to overcome them.

While transformation is always challenging, this guide can help companies navigate the landscape of legal tech and select the right software. With our help, in-house legal departments can use the latest tools to do their job faster, safer, and smarter.

Explore The State of Legal Tech in 2023 — Challenges and Benefits for insights into digitalization benefits, or jump to Legal Tech Implementation Roadmap: Checklist and Guide for actionable tips.

The State of Legal Tech in 2023 — Challenges and Benefits

The rise of AI-powered analytics and the shift to remote work forced many organizations to accelerate innovation. Legal organizations, in particular, are looking to streamline operations and minimize costs — something that can be done by embracing technology.

While monitoring the technological trends in legal tech, we identified the following trends:

• The legal tech market is growing. The global legal tech market, valued at $28 billion in 2022, is projected to reach a $69.7 billion market value by 2023.
• Companies seek cost relief in legal tech. According to Gartner's 2023 Legal Technology report, over 63% of surveyed legal leaders plan to accelerate tech investments to reduce their expenses amid high inflation rates.
• AI technologies will be widely used for legal work. The Thomson Reuters Institute 2023 survey shows that51% of lawyers believe in the industry-wide adoption of generative AI for legal work.

How Has Technology Changed the Legal Profession?

Legal tech is reshaping legal services in many ways. Here are the key areas of improvement.

Legal tech automates research

Digitalization has accelerated research for legal departments. Data analytics and eDiscovery software help find, sort, and review documents. Additionally, natural language processing (NLP) can quickly summarize large texts. This allows companies to delegate research to tech tools so that legal professionals can prioritize high-value work.

Technology streamlines information management

Centralized platforms automate document management, drafting, and scheduling. This greatly improves cross-department collaboration and boosts document security. Meanwhile, NLP can help translate laws and contracts into multiple languages.

AI enhances compliance measures

AI-powered software assists organizations with regulatory requirements, organizational policies, and data privacy standards. Compliance tools also let companies automate checks on contracts for different jurisdictions.

Legal tech enables risk forecasting

Legal tech can sift through historical data to discern patterns in legal decisions. These capabilities help attorneys anticipate potential litigation issues, non-compliance, or business risks to mitigate them proactively.

Broadened communication channels for clients

Online platforms open new ways of communication for clients and lawyers. Clients can instantly receive basic legal advice with generative AI and large language models (LLM). Meanwhile, attorneys can seek advice from expert and academic communities.

Technology improves quality and efficiency

Law departments can improve the quality of contracts by having AI ensure consistency, accuracy, and compliance. What’s more, organizations can save costs and time on research, contract management, and drafting. According to Gartner, these technologies will help automate half of the legal work and replace 20% of staff by 2024.

Top 8 Reasons Why Legal Professionals Embrace Technology

The potential applications for legal tech range from document management to improved research and automated drafting. Below are just some of the widespread use cases.

1. Effective contract management

Legal tech streamlines data transfer, storage, sharing, and collaboration. In addition, advanced security software (such as role-based access control and authorization mechanisms) ensures that only authorized personnel can access sensitive information.

2. Fast information discovery

Robust platforms help attorneys quickly find relevant laws, statutes, and judicial practice. Additionally, generative AI and LLM are used to sift through large volumes of documents and build persuasive rhetorical arguments.

3. Improved contract lifecycle management

Automating routine tasks with Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) software can reduce up to 90% of mistakes. Organizations can also accelerate contract creation with built-in templates, approval workflows, tracking capabilities, task management tools, and customizable due-date alerts.

4. Accurate performance evaluation

Modern legal tech solutions offer customizable reporting capabilities. Organizations can benchmark their performance against preferable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to find cost-saving opportunities or areas for improvement.

5. Automated dispute resolution

Data analytics and generative AI enable resolving disputes outside the traditional courtrooms. For example, automated Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platforms handle various business-consumer and landlord-tenant disputes and other small claims.

6. Fast document drafting

Over 82% of lawyers surveyed by Thomson Reuters Institute in 2023 believe that generative AI is applicable to legal work. Attorneys actively use LLM to draft and review documents for errors and inconsistencies.

7. Better customer experience

Advanced legal tech can mitigate document errors, provide remote legal services, and offer self-help tools. All of this improves client experience and, as a result, boosts business performance.

8. Higher employee satisfaction

Intuitive software allows organizations to delegate low-effort, time-consuming activities to non-lawyer staff. By incorporating automation tools, companies can ease the burden on their employees, making it easier to retain top experts.

The use of generative AI in legal divisions is still in its infancy. But it is already clear that it can potentially transform the legal profession against any challenges.

Download the full copy of our playbook ‘Implementing Legal Tech: A Roadmap for Legal Teams’ to get an actionable step-by-step checklist to digital transformation in the Legal department, and more!

Why Legal Teams Across the World Begin Digital Transformation  with ContractWorks CLM

In the current economic climate, businesses turn to solutions that are quick and easy to implement, have dedicated Customer Success teams that help champion change across the organization, and which quickly net positive ROI. Excelling in each of these areas, ContractWorks CLM is often selected as a starting point to innovating the ways in-house Legal teams operate.

With scalability and simplicity by design, ContractWorks is built to support the automation of your contracting ops at your own pace. Start small by moving your contracts to a smart and secure repository with automated scheduled reporting and obligations tracking – or go all the way with drafting and redlining automation with a built-in native editor and automated multi-step approval workflows.

With ContractWorks, you always know what you pay for, and get the value from month one. Start your free trial to see how our CLM will transform the way you manage contracts.