We know legal teams are busy but we believe it is important to set aside the time to work on the “important but not urgent” part of running a legal team. We’ve had great feedback from those teams that have taken the time to work on and improve the way they handle matter management, their documents and knowledge, internal reporting, their external legal counsel, or other parts of their legal operations.
So it was an interesting exercise when we sat down to “eat our own dogfood” and practice what we preach.
Juno Legal is a new law firm; we don’t work like traditional legal firms, but we also don’t work purely like in-house legal teams. When we first set up, we couldn't find a legal practice and matter management system that really suited our model. Instead, we used a more general project management tool that really worked well for us at the time.
However, as Juno Legal grew and we became more sophisticated in our legal operations, it was apparent that we could do better. While there was nothing wrong with the tools that we were using, they just didn’t fit our current requirements.
The key first step to any kind of operations improvement exercise is a needs analysis to figure out what is actually required. If you’ve got a list of requirements, it’s far easier to identify and analyse possible solutions. For us, this showed just how unique our requirements were and it quickly became apparent that an ‘out-of-the-box' solution wouldn’t work for us.
Instead, we chose to use a low-code application development platform. This was a blank piece of paper that required quite a bit of configuration to adapt it to our requirements. This tool provided us the flexibility we needed to address all our unusual requirements and produced an exceptional outcome.
This type of tool won’t be for everyone; if your requirements can be met by something that is more straightforward to deploy, you will almost always be better served by that approach. But if you do have unique requirements, low code platforms are a fantastic middle ground between standard solutions and having to learn three different programming languages to code something new.
We took an agile, rapid application development approach to our project. This meant that we identified, deployed and tested multiple iterations of our new tool. We weren’t afraid to try something and discard it when it didn’t work for us. Once we decided on our preferred solution, it then took multiple small tweaks, lots of feedback and continuous improvement to get it to the stage we could use it “live”. Even after that, we still found other issues along the way that needed tidying up.
It was undoubtedly a steep curve to do it this way, however it suited our unique needs and ways of working. We’ve now got a fantastic solution specifically tailored to the needs of a new law firm and our flexible lawyers. In our discussions with in-house legal teams, time, money, time, expertise and time (did we mention time?) are the most frequent barriers to starting on this type of operations improvement exercise. Having just done it ourselves, we can confidently state that it might not be straightforward, but it’s not as hard as it seems.
The key to success or failure is that first needs analysis. If you’re considering a similar exercise, take an hour, an afternoon, or a day with your legal team to figure out the problems you’re trying to solve. Only you and your team can articulate these. But from there, you can absolutely get internal or external help and support to help you find solutions to fix those problems. That might be new technology, using technology already available to you, or even non-technical solutions.
We are fortunate to have a legal technologist in-house who initiated and led this project. If you have a similar digital champion, great. If you don’t and don’t know where to start, or you’ve figured out your problems and need some help with solutions, please get in touch for a consultation about how we may be able to help you with your legal operations improvement.