Four ways LawVu’s Business Portal transforms the way legal and the business work together
With LawVu’s Business Portal as part of the legal workspace, the wider business can create legal requests, generate and manage contracts, and quickly get answers to common legal questions on their own — all within a beautiful interface.
The result? The in-house legal team gains back time to spend on more high-value and impactful work, and the business has an even better, more efficient, experience with the legal department.
In-house legal teams spend a large proportion of their time on manual daily activities. Over 90 percent of legal professionals in the 2022 In-house Legal Technology Report found this takes time and effort away from working on larger business goals, and affects their ability to deliver services on time.
Yet, Gartner found that, on average, 63 percent of in-house legal work is routine or can be standardized, by templatizing routine matters, creating self-service tools for the wider business to use, or implementing standard decision rules.
Read on to learn about common in-house legal challenges and how LawVu’s Business Portal addresses them, transforming the way legal and the wider business work together.
The challenges facing in-house legal and the business
When your legal tech, for example a legal workspace, offers a portal or hub as a way for your colleagues in the wider business (the business users) to access and self-serve a portion of its legal work, it helps to solve some of the common challenges in-house legal teams face. These include:
Wasted time: Research from the 2022 In-house Legal Technology Report found that 77 percent of in-house legal teams spend over one hour per day jumping between various systems to gain a complete view of their work and determine priorities, with a significant 39 percent spending three hours or more. This manual activity means that the legal team spends time on lower-value, higher-volume tasks, which could be actioned by the wider business with the right legal tech.
Incomplete details: When information arrives at the legal department, it’s often missing crucial details that are essential to move forward and complete the task. In the above report, 40 percent of respondents spend three or more hours per day on back and forth with the wider business to gather complete information or update them on work status. A further 40 percent spent the same time searching through emails or other systems to determine matter history or advice from outside counsel.
Unstructured data: A lack of structured data from legal work, including legal requests and contracts, makes it hard to measure and show the legal department’s value to the rest of the business. A lack of data also makes it difficult to plan for the future, as there’s no evidence to support operational improvements such as self-service contract creation for the business or identify areas of common requests or issues.
Disconnected tech solutions: The 2022 In-house Legal Technology Report found that 90 percent of legal teams use three or more software vendors, with 33 percent using more than five vendors. These disconnected tech solutions result in a lack of streamlined and efficient workflows and low adoption by the wider business.
How LawVu’s Business Portal transforms the way in-house legal and the business works together
LawVu’s Business Portal manages the above challenges and provides a multitude of tangible benefits across the business in four key ways.
1. Delightful and effective user experience
When legal tech creates a great first impression on its users, there’s much more likely to be a high level of adoption and ongoing use.
LawVu’s Business Portal has a custom-branded, easy-to-use interface that business wants to use — therefore improving adoption. The intuitive, streamlined, and engaging user interface welcomes business users into a space where they can find what they need quickly, with legal’s support just a click away.
“We’ve been striving to get our legal team out of email — and we are achieving this with LawVu. The Business Portal gives our business units an easier, more user-friendly system where they know their requests will be seen and not just disappear into a black hole of emails.”
Matt Brasch — Associate General Counsel, Buckle
2. Streamlined intake
With a streamlined intake process, everything moves faster! Business users can provide all details upfront based on the information the legal team needs, resulting in greater efficiency and better overall results for the legal team and the wider business.
With LawVu’s Business Portal, business users enter details into standardized forms, ready for seamless triaging, prioritization, and assigning by the legal team. Business users can also collaborate with the legal team, check the status of requests, and take action right from the Portal.
As everyone in the business is working from the same information in the legal workspace, there’s a reduction or elimination of duplication of effort. There’s also less time spent in email, and going back and forth with the business users to gather details.
“Implementing technology helped us to achieve several goals, one of which being that we streamlined all of our intakes into one place so that we could keep track of who was asking for what which then led us to be much more data-driven so that we could see where are the requests coming from.”
Rosanna Biggs — General Counsel, Linktree
3. Self-service contract creation
When wider business users create, manage, and upload their own contracts with little or no help from the legal team, the legal team gains back valuable time to spend on higher-value and impactful tasks.
With LawVu’s Business Portal, business users can generate simple contracts, such as NDAs, with wizards that walk them through the capture of details in a template. Knowledge articles are also available to guide them through the process. The contract’s lifecycle is easily tracked and managed in your legal workspace, with key dates, notifications, renewals, and e-signature tools.
When colleagues in the wider business create and manage contracts using LawVu’s Business Portal, it results in:
- an increase in legal velocity and a decrease in cycle times — the legal team can get work done without actually doing it;
- business users being kept up-to-date with the live status of their contracts, without having to ask the legal team;
- better risk management, all while bottlenecks are removed and commercial outcomes are improved, and at scale; and
- a central repository of contracts for better visibility and business management.
4. Legal knowledge is easily accessible
When the legal team shares its knowledge through LawVu’s Business Portal, it’s a win-win for legal and the wider business.
When the Business Portal is also used as a knowledge base, business users gain immediate answers to their legal queries, rather than having their request added to the intake queue and waiting for a reply. If business users need further legal advice, then it’s just one simple step to make a legal request, all within the Business Portal.
The knowledge base brings time-saving benefits for the legal team too:
- There is a reduction or elimination in interruptions that ask the same questions, as business users can find answers themselves.
- A help article only needs to be written once vs replying to individual emails with the same answer repeatedly.
- A single legal knowledge base and repository means controlling content access for business users is possible.
- With business users accessing their own legal knowledge, there is more time to spend on high-value tasks that contribute more significantly to business outcomes.
In addition, there’s a greater ROI as the wider business becomes comfortable with and continues to engage with the Business Portal, building confidence and competence in accessing their own legal knowledge.
“The business portal has been extremely helpful in setting up and getting closer to that self-service model to give our legal team more time to think instead of answering that email that you get every three days — how do I do this? Who handles this?”
Matt Brasch — Associate General Counsel, Buckle
Key benefits of the Business Portal
In summary, the benefits of the Business Portal include:
- less time spent in email;
- less time spent going back and forth to gather necessary details;
- reduced turnaround times;
- structured data is captured, ready to work with in the future; and
- the creation of a single source of truth, as all information funnels through a legal ‘front door’.
Learn more about LawVu’s Business Portal
With the new LawVu Business Portal, the Department of ‘No’ becomes the Department of ‘Go’!
Open the door to the legal department with a space that transforms the way legal and the business work together. LawVu’s Business Portal is the essence of a legal workspace, funneling everything into legal through one portal, creating a single source of truth. Like the wider legal workspace, the Business Portal also helps teams become a Connected Legal Function by improving productivity, engagement and proactiveness, so the legal team has the time to be more impactful across the business.