Legal operations professionals play a crucial role in corporate legal departments by managing processes, systems, and technology that streamline legal work. They ensure efficiency and effectiveness in managing legal tasks, such as contract management, budgeting, and compliance. By handling the business side of legal work, they allow lawyers to focus on their core legal tasks. Alongside their core responsibilities, legal ops teams are increasingly tasked with knowledge management (KM) duties, particularly as a way of laying the foundation for successful use of AI and powering greater efficiency within the legal team.
In today’s fast-evolving legal landscape, successfully tackling these challenges requires a strategic approach. What are some key considerations to keep top of mind, and what kinds of technology do legal ops teams need at their disposal to deliver the best outcomes?
Start with a single centralized repository
Too often, enterprises store critical and valuable information across multiple disconnected repositories or applications with limited search capacity or version control.
Collaborators sift through countless document versions and file locations, stalling progress. Essential information in email attachments, personal OneDrive stores, and undocumented chats may fail to surface when needed; conversely, confidential information may surface when and where it shouldn’t. These repositories are generally not designed to protect sensitive materials in a demanding regulatory landscape.
A sophisticated cloud-native document management platform that is designed for legal professionals can unify workspaces and securely make knowledge more accessible – and iManage Work matches these criteria.
Specifically designed for professionals who manage sensitive knowledge content, iManage Work delivers advanced document and email management via a highly secure, cloud-native platform. Relied on by more than one million professionals at 4,000+ organizations around the world, iManage Work provides a foundation that enables legal ops teams to seamlessly progress from document management to knowledge management.
Use intelligent search to harness the organization’s collective intelligence
Since organizations run on knowledge, they need a way to extract the greatest value from that knowledge. Put another way, it’s not enough to have content in one location: Legal ops teams need to be able to find that content.
Enter iManage Insight+, a knowledge search and management solution native to the iManage Cloud ecosystem.
Its best-of-breed search enables knowledge workers to find and re-use quality work product faster than ever. Templates, checklists, finalized agreements, policies, and other knowledge assets are submitted directly from iManage Work for a frictionless user experience — all while accounting for appropriate access and permissions.
Granular filtering capabilities in Insight+ enable users to fine-tune the results more than they would with a traditional document management system. The platform accommodates flexible tagging that includes taxonomies, multi-value tags, helpful notes, and more, so users get more context, detail, and search parameters.
The Matter Locator in Insight+ even empowers legal ops teams to surface patterns of information in the larger data lake – for example, projects per department, workload assessments, outside counsel, spend by firm or matter type, time spent per request, or even the number of revisions by document class. Insight+ delivers all this intelligence while documents stay safely in iManage Work.
Ultimately, Insight+ delivers effective tools for curating and enriching knowledge assets. In an information-intensive economy where organizations run on knowledge, Insight+ makes that knowledge more structured, accessible, and valuable – while also making that high-quality data “ready to go” for AI efforts aimed at increasing efficiency and optimizing processes.
Create the right data for AI
AI is only as reliable as the data that supports it, and legal ops teams need vital data architecture and classification capabilities to successfully deliver their AI strategy.
Insight+ is a powerful way to reach that goal, but it isn’t the only way. Another way that iManage embeds AI throughout its knowledge work platform is with iManage AI Enrichment. This capability automatically classifies documents by type, extracts key information points to preserve context, and saves the information with the document, enabling more accurate searches and improved productivity.
In short, it makes data more actionable and builds a strong foundation for AI, ensuring that the data pool being drawn upon is sufficiently rich to produce accurate, meaningful outputs.
Automatically and at scale, AI Enrichment works to analyze and classify existing documents and new documents as they are added without requiring any additional input from workers. This reduces the operational burden on legal ops professionals and efficiently builds the essential foundation for successful AI delivery.
Meet your ideal partner for transformative legal ops at CLOC
Legal operations is a fast-moving, evolving, and varied discipline – and iManage is the ideal partner to support legal ops professionals in all their document and knowledge management needs, particularly as they lay the groundwork for AI.
We’ll be at booth #220 at CLOC. Come stop by – we’re excited to go into deeper detail on all the latest developments we’ve been working on that can assist with document management and knowledge management for legal ops.
Look forward to connecting and sharing ways to work smarter, faster, and safer, so that legal ops teams can meet today’s needs and seize tomorrow’s opportunities!
About the author
Paul Walker