How legal teams can rise to the productivity challenge

Legal teams are under more pressure than ever to boost productivity and enhance efficiency. Like other departments, they’re being asked to work smarter and do more with less — in other words, cut costs while getting more done. 

It’s a big ask. Yet, if you talk to the right people, you quickly realise that it’s more than possible for legal teams to live up to today’s high-pressure expectations. All it takes is some innovative thinking and a willingness to try new things. 

This was certainly the message emerging from a fireside chat we had with two of Docusign’s global experts in the legal field — Pete Seeger, Deputy General Counsel, Product and Technology, and Sandy MacDonnell, Senior Manager, Legal Operations. The webinar, held in partnership with the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), explored ACC’s recent research around the state of collaboration in corporate legal departments. 

Below is a recap of the conversation, which honed in on four key priorities for legal teams over the next 12 months.

Priority 1: Improving cross-departmental alignment

According to the ACC research, 70% of legal teams want better alignment internally, yet 71% say there’s a lack of bandwidth for process improvement. 

“In a distributed world, and in a global company like ours, alignment can be really challenging,” said Sandy. But it’s certainly possible. 

“To help Docusign gain greater alignment across the legal department and the whole company, we’ve rolled out a goal-setting framework that outlines clear objectives and key results (OKRs) — in other words, spelling out the things that are going to make a difference in the year ahead,” she said. 

Pete agreed, saying, “OKRs are huge. It’s a lot of work to set them up and make sure they’re valuable and measurable. But once you do, and the more you can make sure they’re not siloed but instead reach across the organisation, the more you can gain leadership buy-in for changes that can make a real difference to legal teams’ productivity.”

Priority 2: Using technology more effectively

Legal teams often lament the fact they lack the bandwidth to get full value from technologies. For example, 60% say that it’s critical for collaboration tools to be integrated to improve collaboration, yet 71% lack the time to improve processes and procedures.

Sandy suggested that legal teams should think about technology implementations in smaller, bite-sized pieces. By doing so, you can realise some great wins. “For example, when I was at another company, we implemented Docusign to build what we called the instant NDA. It allowed our sellers to send out a pre-signed NDA without legal having to touch it. The efficiency gains we saw were huge.”

“More recently, at Docusign, we’ve just streamlined our contract review process for vendor contracts. Our legal team was spending a lot of time reviewing low-risk contracts they didn’t need to be involved in — for example, a contract with the person who waters the office plants. We’re using technology to better route these agreements, and we’ve immediately seen around 20% fewer contracts coming through legal,” said Sandy. 

Pete agreed, also reinforcing the value of legal teams meeting internal clients in the tools and systems they’re already familiar with. “In product legal, we do a lot of work with developers and engineers who love using Jira. So we built a product legal intake form in Jira that they can easily access and complete on the platform they know and love.” 

Priority 3: Change the perception that legal teams are risk-averse roadblocks 

Many lawyers and legal departments have an image problem. They are unfairly blamed for shutting ideas down and getting in the way of progress. Yet both Sandy and Pete are firm believers in shifting the dial. 

“We rarely say ‘no’. If someone comes to us with a product idea that’s a bit ‘out there’, then instead of saying ‘no’, we say ‘yes, but …’. We ask them what they want to accomplish, and we surface the legal risk in a helpful way by showing the pros and cons of different options. This way, we become a support function that happens to provide legal counsel. We’re facilitators, not referees,” said Pete. 

Showing that you’re curious about the business and its products also helps. It’s all about building trust and showing that you listen. Sandy’s team asks for feedback from internal clients on a regular basis, and uses the survey responses to make changes to how they operate as a team. “This all helps change perceptions about the legal team’s role in the business,” she said. 

Priority 4: Controlling legal costs

Leadership teams like to keep a close eye on the bottom line. And no department across the organisation is immune. In the legal department, the top strategy for controlling legal costs is to bring more work in-house, while about one-third of teams are interested in using technology and AI to control costs.

On the latter, Pete thinks the future holds huge promise, but he also acknowledged that there’s still a long way to go. “Contracts are everywhere across an organisation. They’re in Salesforce, your ERP, in Slack, on somebody’s desktop or in an inbox. And say there’s an auto-renewal clause on one of those contracts that obligates the company to renew a costly license automatically,” he said.

“If that contract isn’t easily tracked and monitored, then the renewal could kick in for a product or service the company doesn’t really need any more — and you end up having to pay thousands for another year’s service. Or, on the flip side, you bring in a massive team of lawyers to sift through everything and do the job for you. Again, costly. Once contracts are correctly tagged and digitised, then AI and automation will be able to do these jobs, saving legal teams a huge amount of time and money.” 

Sandy said the smart use of technology helps reduce the volume of work coming through the legal team, which helps keep costs down. 

“We use a simple, old-school chatbot in Slack to answer the most common questions we typically get, like, ‘Where do I find an NDA?’” she said. “The chatbot points the person in the right direction — job done, we don’t have to get involved. It’s about enabling internal clients to self-service, which in turn reduces costs and frees up the legal team to take on more value-driven work.” 

Looking ahead, it’s all about data

When asked what’s next on their legal transformation roadmaps, both Sandy and Pete unequivocally stated, “Data.”

“I’m really focused on how we can better use data to make decisions that help us become a better business. We need the ability to answer a whole range of questions. Like, do we need to hire new lawyers in one geographical area? Is the volume of one type of request astronomical in one country? Without the data to back up our answers, we can’t act efficiently,” said Sandy.

Pete agreed. “Being a data-driven legal department is massively important. So is the ability to increase the self-serve component, giving people the ability to get the information they need without having to come to us every time. It’s about democratising access to information.”

“I also want to keep exploring how we can use  AI in a smart way, for things like search, obligation management, clause creation, and more. All these iterative tools won’t replace the legal department, but will help us do things more efficiently,” he said. 

Keen to hear the full story?You can watch the one-hour webinar on-demand now, which also includes some interesting questions from the audience at the end.