Legal tech readiness for in-house legal teams
Legal tech readiness is no longer a ‘nice to have’ for in-house legal teams. It’s a baseline expectation. As businesses move faster and expect more from legal, teams need the right foundations in place to respond quickly, manage risk, and scale support, without adding headcount.
Legal friction doesn’t just affect lawyers, it impacts the entire business. Business leaders consistently point to slow turnaround times, limited visibility into legal work, and fragmented communication as their biggest frustrations. Concurrently, more than 70% say they want legal to invest in automation and process improvement to fix these issues.
Legal tech readiness is about meeting that expectation. It’s about making legal easier to access and work with, more predictable, and better aligned with how the business operates today – while keeping pace with rapid technology advances, including AI, to ensure the legal function remains modern, relevant, and competitive.
This guide explains what legal tech readiness really means for in-house teams, why it matters, and how to take practical steps toward a more efficient, business-aligned legal function.
Why legal tech readiness matters for in-house legal teams
In-house legal teams are under constant pressure. Request volumes keep growing; turnaround times are scrutinized, and expectations to add value continue to rise. Legal tech readiness helps teams meet these demands without increasing risk or burning out their people.
When legal teams are truly tech-ready, they see clear benefits:
- Quicker, simpler access for the business to engage with legal
- Faster responses to common legal requests
- Better visibility into workloads, priorities, and risk
- Less time spent on manual admin and rework
- Stronger collaboration with the business
A tech-savvy legal team benefits the business too. Legal becomes easier to engage with, plan around, and better positioned as a strategic partner rather than a bottleneck.
As one LawVu customer put it:
Everyone in the legal team is using LawVu now. Before LawVu, there was a significant risk around documentation – it was scattered throughout emails. I now have a much more robust record of what’s happening, and LawVu has reduced our exposure for not having complete matters. – Andrew Hay, Head of Operations, Legal and Secretariat, Co-op
What legal tech readiness really means for in-house teams
Legal tech readiness isn’t about having the most tools or the latest features. It’s about how well technology supports day-to-day legal work and the needs of the business.
At a practical level, legal tech readiness means:
- Legal work is centralized, structured, and easy to track
- Requests come in through clear, consistent intake channels
- Lawyers spend less time searching for information or chasing updates
- Technology choices align with real business priorities, not just legal preferences
It’s important to note that ‘readiness’ isn’t static and will evolve with changing business needs and technological developments. Legal teams should regularly reassess their workflows, tools, and adoption to stay effective.
What’s driving legal tech readiness today
Several forces are pushing in-house teams to rethink how they operate, these being:
- Demand for legal support is increasing across the business
- Stakeholders expect faster responses and clearer visibility
- Legal teams are expected to scale without growing headcount
- Fragmented systems increase operational risk and inefficiency
Technology has become the primary way legal teams can absorb this pressure while still improving service quality and reducing friction.
Which legal technology trends are shaping in-house teams
Legal technology has matured quickly in recent years. The trends having the biggest impact on in-house teams include:
- AI for legal: embedded AI is now table stakes, helping teams reduce repetitive work and surface insights faster
- Matter management: a central source of truth for legal work, documents, and history
- Contract lifecycle management: easter contract turnaround and improved obligation tracking
- Intake and the legal front door: structured requests that replace inbox chaos and improve transparency
- Integrated legal workspaces: fewer systems, better reporting, and higher adoption across legal and the business
- Reporting and metrics: in-house teams use legal and business data to move from reactive support to proactive strategic influence
Research shows legal teams lose significant time to manual, fragmented workflows – particularly across intake, matter management, contracts, and spend. These areas represent the biggest opportunities for improving readiness and productivity.
How ready is your in-house legal team today?
Understanding your current level of readiness starts with an honest assessment. We recommend considering not just what tools you have, but how well they work in practice.
Helpful questions include:
- Where does work slowdown or get stuck?
- How easy is it to see what legal is working on right now?
- How often does the business follow up for updates?
- How much time is spent on admin versus legal judgment?
The legal tech alignment survey is designed to help teams answer these questions by collecting direct feedback from business stakeholders. It highlights where speed, visibility, self-service, and collaboration matter most, as well as where technology can have the biggest impact.
What’s holding legal teams back from adopting legal tech?
Even when the need for change is clear, adoption can stall. Common barriers include:
- Resistance to changing familiar ways of working
- Difficulty justifying budget without clear business outcomes
- Skills gaps or lack of confidence using new tools
Teams that overcome these challenges tend to focus on practical improvements involve users early and prioritize strong onboarding and implementation processes that clearly connect technology changes to everyday pain points.
What legal tech solutions do modern in-house teams actually need?
While no two legal teams are identical, certain solutions consistently deliver high impact:
- Matter management: improves visibility, reduces risk, and helps legal scale support
- Intake and self-service: speeds up responses and reduces back-and-forth with the business
- Contract management: shortens turnaround times and reduces commercial risk
- Document and knowledge management: makes legal information easy to find, reuse, and trust
- Spend management: strings control and predictability to external legal costs
Teams using LawVu Workspace save, on average, three hours per legal professional per week, delivering a 281% annual ROI for a five-lawyer team – while also improving cycle times and reducing risk.
How to build a legal tech strategy that delivers real value
A successful legal tech strategy is focused and outcome driven. Rather than trying to fix everything at once, effective teams will:
- Identify where the most time and effort are being lost
- Prioritize workflows with the greatest business impact
- Choose solutions that address multiple pain points
- Evaluate vendors based on adoption, scalability, and support – not just features
The legal tech prioritization planner helps teams score pain points, align solutions to business outcomes, and define the vendor characteristics that matter most for long-term success.
How to drive adoption through training and change management
Technology only delivers value if people use it. Adoption improves when legal teams invest in:
- Practical, role-based training
- Clear communication about why changes matter
- Ongoing support and feedback
Change management isn’t a one-time step. It’s an ongoing effort to help legal and the business work better together as tools and processes evolve.
How in-house teams should measure ROI and improve over time
Measuring ROI helps legal teams demonstrate value to the Executive Leadership Team, justify their investment, and refine their approach. Useful indicators include:
- Time saved on administrative work
- Turnaround times for common requests
- Visibility into workload and demand
- Adoption by legal and business users
Regularly reviewing these metrics and gathering feedback ensures technology continues to deliver value as business needs evolve.
What’s next for legal tech readiness in in-house teams
Legal tech readiness will continue to separate reactive legal teams from strategic ones. As AI, analytics, and integrated platforms advance, legal teams will have even more opportunity to scale impact without scaling headcount.
In-house teams that treat technology as a core capability, not a one-off project, are better positioned to reduce friction, support growth, and clearly demonstrate their value to the business.
Legal tech readiness isn’t about preparing for some distant future. It’s about enabling legal to operate effectively today, while staying flexible enough to adapt to whatever comes next.
How ready is your legal team, really?
Attend the legal tech readiness scorecard workshop to benchmark your current state, align with business expectations, and prioritize the improvements that will deliver the most value, fast.
