Legal departments lean into tech to simplify workflows

The need to understand and implement technology looms large as legal departments face significant, pandemic-fueled pressure to automate processes, increase efficiency, and reduce costs.

The mounting pressure to accelerate efficiency gains in corporate legal departments has firms leaning heavily on tech. In the recently published LDO index – 74% of legal departments ranked “Using technology to simplify workflow and manual process” as high priority. The report also showed that more than half (52%) of the legal departments responding to the survey have increased their use of legal technology over the past year.

This pandemic-fueled environment "is putting extreme pressure on the legal departments to understand and implement tech, to find ways to help them drive efficiency and reduce costs on top of their day jobs with assessing legal risks,” said Heather Nevitt, editor-in-chief for Corporate Counsel, Corporate Counsel Advance and Global Leaders in Law, in a recent law.com article.

It was in this environment that the conflicts management team of a global management consulting firm decided to automate what was a largely manual and time-intensive process around identifying conflicts of interest. The firm’s primary goal was to be more efficient with their time and resources – to obtain more granular search results with less effort.

“We wanted to eliminate a lot of manual work that was taking place. That was the key thing — to automate the conflicts search process,” said the IT manager.

Research showed that the firm’s time savings with iManage Conflicts Manager could be up to 75% in conflict clearing and up to 90% in identifying conflicts. Its intelligent search processing would help them streamline their work by quickly performing simplified conflicts check processes.

The firm partnered with iManage to develop a detailed set of documents that described the current state and mapped out the path to their desired future state with the iManage solution. This enabled the firm's IT and legal team to go into the build with clear expectations and to anticipate exactly how the implementation would roll out.

As with any new technology, adoption is key to realizing optimal value. The IT Manager told iManage that approximately 2000 employees at the firm could potentially be involved in conflicts clearing. They added that even the more peripheral users are reporting that the system is very easy to use.

“I have a lot of confidence in the product that we’re using, and I would love to dig in further,” the IT Manager told iManage.

Read the full case study to learn more about this implementation of iManage Conflicts Manager in a corporate legal environment.