Streamlining intake in the LawVu legal workspace – a general counsel perspective

Great – can you do the same thing (2 paragraphs in the same style/tone as previous) and an excerpt .. for this transcript, again with Ashely and Shaun, from a video called “Streamlining intake in the LawVu legal workspace – a general counsel perspective”. Here is the transcript:

So Sean, one of the things you talk about a lot is the value of creating a single source of truth for legal teams so that they can get a handle on their data, have visibility and operate more efficiently. A common question though, is going to be. How does all that data get into the system? Right? So how do you create that single source of truth?

So why don’t you start by just showing us what that single source of truth could look like from the legal perspective, and then we’ll take it from there. That sounds good. So visibility you mentioned is key to every gc, um, and every legal team is having access or being able to see and surface everything that the team’s working on.

Um, this is my, my view. So this is a, uh, this is visibility. These are all the matters that the team’s working on, and we’re tracking data, data like the department, the type of work, the name, and its current status. So that gives me complete visibility of everything that’s happening within the team. But then I can also create my own different views.

I’ve got the value. Value is important for me as a GC to be able to track the things that are important to the business. So I have a value view here, and I’m tracking key metrics, like the risk, the complexity, and the significance. So I can see who’s working on what within the team, um, and which work is being prioritized about other work, because you always want to be prioritizing the high value, high risk, high complex work above the low value work.

So I want to make sure that’s happening again. How do we get things into here? How do we create that? And there’s three different ways of doing that. The first one is I can create a new matter or a new contract while I’m in the platform or the workspace itself. So typically if somebody comes in through the door or, or calls me on the telephone, they’ve got a legal issue, I can create a matter straight from here.

I can set this up from these different types of forms and fields. So I’m collecting the data that’s relevant to me and my reports and the relevant to the work that we’re doing. This is configurable, uh, and we can talk about that later on as well. So I can just do this by selecting the type of work it is and create these different forms to capture different types of information.

And that’s normally the way a legal team member who’s in law View day in and day out is going to. Add something to the system. That’s right. All the time you’re creating this data yourself. The other option, of course, is that you get the email responses. That’s pretty typical. Uh, it is, and we, and this is I think, how most in-house teams receive their requests, and it’s through email.

So we’ve built integrations with Outlook. We’ve also got integrations with, um, with Gmail. So same thing. Again, I can create a new matter or a new contract. I can pick the, uh, the different type of matter. So these are the same preset, pre-configured forms and fields. So the data’s consistent, absolutely the same across the, the board.

So I can pick up the advice, fill in the same form, and submit that information. That will create a new matter in law view, and it’ll save the email at the same time as well. And like I said, it’ll keep tracking and any, any files that are attached to that email, it will save those into the system as well.

And I can probably do 80% of my management of work. From within Outlook, I can attach files to emails and send emails to outside people or within the business. Uh, and those emails will be coming back in. The files will be saved into law view, so I can do probably 80, 90% of my work. And that would work if you were communicating with outside counsel as well?

It works. It works with outside counsel as well. So everything you carry on your, and it’s one of the reasons why we built the integration was because we know that many legal teams like to work in Outlook. The, but the most important thing is, is that we’re getting people out of outlook in terms of their data and their actual management of, of documents, and that’s going into, into law view.

So it’s a transition away from that way of working because the ultimate is that requests are not being submitted by telephone. They’re not being submitted by emails, they’re not being submitted by, by the, uh, people walking into the office. The business is actually going to a place. They can actually submit requests for themselves, and I think that’s what we should look at next.

Okay. Show me what it looks like. So this is my business portal, uh, which is the front door for the, for the legal team that the business can come to. And I can provide them with any information that I want to, uh, to help them to do the, the work that they need to get done so I can, uh, they can submit requests again by submitting a form again.

Pre-configured with the fields, the data that we want to capture, they can submit contracts for review or they can search the knowledge base. So the knowledge base is a place that we are creating and storing the legal assets that we create, or which we receive from external, uh, legal providers so that we can use those to be better at lawyering as we need to, but we can also surface some of that information and provide it to the business so the business can then help itself.

And that’s one of the goals of an a modern in-house legal function is. That, um, the business is serving its own purposes in terms of that low value work. So when I talked about tracking value before, what we want to do is we want to get the business to start to self serve the answers it needs to some of that low value work that we don’t need to do ourselves.

So if you’ve got standard terms and conditions, template documents, um, non-disclosure agreements, we can have the option here of using a wizard. So we’ve automated our NDA so that the business can serve their own, create their own NDAs. Legal doesn’t need to to be involved. We’ve done the same thing for our master services agreement.

We’ve got our standard terms, we’ve created a wizard, which is an automated contract. They can generate their own contracts and then they can start that process themselves. And they only need to get legal involved if they need to get legal involved. And is that gonna land in the repository that you showed us earlier?

And That’s right. Everything they create. Lands up in, in the repository in terms of the contracts, so we can get access to those if we need to. Well, I can, and I can imagine even just the time savings for legal, if the request comes in and the document’s been attached and now it’s in the repository, someone didn’t have to go and.

Ask a bunch of questions and drag and drop and do an upload. Like it’s just there. It’s just, it’s just there. Yep. And that, that’s not adding value. Yeah. I mean, that, that time isn’t adding value. Um, you’ve already got good relationships with the business. Um, it means that those conversations that you have are gonna be far more informed.

Um, so there’re gonna be a better, better quality, um, and it’s gonna save them a heap of time. And you as well. So, so this is my intake system or the team’s intake system. We’ve got three. Matters here that have been submitted and are rate waiting for, um, work to be assigned. I know we have customers who have some people who manage that portal centrally.

We have some people who automate, if it’s a certain type of contract or matter, it goes directly to a specific team or person. And then, yeah, some people it’s self-serve come in and when you’re ready to pick up a new piece of work you can. That’s right. Yeah. Uh, so, so many different, different ways of doing it, and it’s, it really depends on how you want to be working.

What we really want to get to is a place where work is coming in and it’s been directed to the right resource at the right time. Um, so of course all those, those forms that I was showing you before, those data fields. Um, all feedback into the grid view. So this is where all that data comes from. Uh, and again, it’s the system or the business that is creating that data that’s going into the, into the, the, the system that we can then use for the reports.

Um, my grid views or it’s also feeding through into the, um, outta the box reports as well. So I’ve got my. Contract view here, um, which is showing me importantly, um, how many contracts have been created using the Wizards. Oh, cool. So you can see how much the business is self-serving or identify opportunities to do more automation.

That’s right. And, and that’s real value. So we need to track that to show the business that we freed up. Wheels so it can keep moving. Um, and the wizards are one way of, of doing that. So it gives us that information. We can, we can drill down into, um, the different types of work that we’re working on as well.

The different contracts, the turnaround time as well, which is a really key one. So it can tell us how quickly we’re getting through different parts of the process by different, um, departments, by different types of contract. So that then helps you to work out is there something that you need to do to change the process?

If. NDAs are getting held up in, um, negotiations. Then you need to work out why are we spending time negotiating NDAs? If you didn’t have data like this, then you couldn’t make those, you don’t have those insights. Um, when you’re a GC and you’re armed with reports like you have from a legal workspace, you’re probably more informed in terms of data.

Then the, the, the finance team or anybody else sitting at that table, the power of the dashboards in terms of the value at your fingertips is, is probably more powerful than anything they’re actually using. Yeah. So Sean, you mentioned a few times as you were showing us this demo, the concept of modern legal teams or modern legal functions.

So how does this kind of technology implementation support that? Well, I think modern in-house legal functions value. Data, um, and how to use data equally as, as they do the substantive legal expertise that they have. The two things are kind of equal for these modern in-house functions and how they operate.

Um. It, it helps ’em to be far more productive in terms of being able to, um, address issues quicker, have more streamlined processes in place, not only just to, in the way that they engage with the business, but also in how they actually deliver the work as well in, in working in this way in a legal workspace way.

It makes you more connected with the business as well. It’s, it makes collaboration easier for the business. It’s effortless, uh, just by using the, the platform and how it operates. And I think the final thing is that it helps legal to set the business up for success. Some people are worried about rolling out something like a legal front door or a business portal, right.

It’s just a different way of doing things like you said. What advice do you have for those people? I, I think, um, it is different. Yeah. But, uh, people in modern businesses are used to filling in forms to submit requests for it to go on leave. So submitting forms for other functions. Is normal and to be expected.

So it shouldn’t be anything different for, for legal. Some organizations are, are just ready for it. That, that it’s easy to implement. A, a business portal is something that businesses say, why have we not been doing this, um, before? Or the ones, the integration, the Outlook integration and the Gmail integration is a nice segue into this better way of working.