The power to pivot

The reasons were explored during a recent webinar featuring Jeffrey Marple, Director of Innovation, Corporate Legal at Liberty Mutual, who was joined by Mitratech’s Brian McGovern and Steven O’Donnell.

Best-in-class legal process automation solutions empower legal departments to quickly and easily design, build, and deploy workflows and processes that are highly cost-effective and error-free, which is important enough to legal department performance during “normalcy.” When disruptions strike, being able to pivot swiftly and implement new processes to cope with sudden impacts has proven to be a lifesaver for some in-house teams.

Some of the types of processes and workflows that were developed and deployed, often in just days, to mitigate COVID-19’s effects? Processes for vetting legal vendor continuity, for obtaining onsite visit request approvals, even for remote work tracking.

The ability of process automation to react in a hurry to the demands of a pandemic is just an illustration of its everyday value to your tech stack and operations. Nearly any process, anywhere can be automated, and successful adopters often start with the “low-hanging fruit” of high-volume tasks that can be easily digitized–and can thus immediately demonstrate the ROI and advantages of automation.

Take, for instance, processes that rely on email. As Brian McGovern, General Manager, Workflow Solutions at Mitratech, and a renowned Legal Ops leader, puts it, “Email is the most widely-used workflow tool and it’s simultaneously the worst workflow tool.”

By automating one of these processes to ensure the right gatekeepers receive the right emails at the right moment, with automatic notifications and escalations to keep participants on track? That not only accelerates execution and ensures completion but frees staffers and managers alike from the manual busywork of writing emails and doing followups. That, in turn, slashes time costs by as much as 95%, depending on the process.

But as Brian points out, it’s not merely about automating an existing process. “You want to build an improved process, not just the same process.”

“Look to do something better. Think about how you can make them better and start with ‘friendlies’…that have some good relationships in your organization because your initial steps are to get some points on the board, (and) convince people to come along on this ride with you.

“If you’ve designed a good process, you’re going to be generating savings…and then, as your company learns more about process automation, if you get those first wins under your belt and generate some excitement, go ahead and tackle the larger and more complicated processes.”

What this leads to, in his experience and that of other Legal Ops leaders, is that other business units and departments begin working with Legal in adopting process automation. This allows legal departments to actually embed legal and compliance best practices in those processes, allowing legal’s ability to drive pervasive, positive results for the entire organization. Which also burnishes the legal department’s star, of course. As Jeff Marple explains:

“Legal wasn’t originally a process or tech-forward organization within Liberty Mutual. Now we have developed several internal client-facing workflows that our clients just love, and that has changed the reputation…Legal now leads the organization with process automation deployments.”

In our next installment in this series about future-proofing your legal tech stack, we’ll address the importance of having a data strategy in place. And why that strategy should be driving your investment decisions about legal tech adoption.