Legal technology is not just a legal concern – it’s a business imperative for modern organisations and business leaders. Investing in legal technology saves time, makes businesses more productive and, importantly, produces positive outcomes for business strategy and operations. Written By Heather Kidd
LawVu’s purpose-built legal workspace is trustworthy (ISO27001, SOC 1 and SOC 2 and GDPR, CCPA and HIPAA certified), reliable and easy to use – as evidenced by its high adoption and customer satisfaction ratings. Corporate legal teams from a wide range of industries across the globe attest to the ways in which LawVu has helped them create better processes, which in turn have helped them build stronger connections with their organisations and deliver amplified business outcomes.
In this article, we look at three in-house legal teams of different industries, locations and sizes who have adopted the LawVu legal workspace. For each of these legal teams, LawVu has become the backbone of a more efficient, data driven culture – and has helped to enhance and solidify their impact on their wider organisations.
CASE STUDY 1: CO-OP
Industry: Food, beverage and finance-Location: Manchester, UK-Legal team size: 50-plus
Choosing a legal technology partner aligned with its company values, which centre around ‘co-operating for a fairer world’, was key to Co-op’s search. Prior to selecting LawVu, the in-house legal team had used legal software designed for private law practice. It was not fit-for-purpose and didn’t meet the unique needs of the team or the wider business. Nor did it capture and surface data the team needed operate efficiently and show its value to the wider organisation.
Andrew Hay, Head of Operations Legal and Secretariat at Co-op, was initially attracted to LawVu because it is built specifically for in-house legal teams. “LawVu works by listening to customers, understanding their needs, and seeking solutions and resolutions. The team is flexible, responsive and has great communication, which leads to things getting done quickly.”
Because the LawVu product is simple, intuitive, and easy to use, there was a higher adoption rate within Co-op’s in-house legal team than with their previous software. “Everyone in the legal team at Co-op is now using LawVu. I have a much more robust record of what’s happening, and LawVu has reduced our exposure for not having complete matters,” said Hay.
Using LawVu to capture all matters across the team enhances reporting capabilities and surfaces useful data, enabling more accurate and efficient resource allocation across the team and ensuring that more impactful decisions are made.
Using out of the box dashboards and reports also gives a better picture of the work being sent to outside counsel. Previously, it was a challenge to estimate completion dates for a matter, how long partner firms had been working on it, or what progress had been made. Given the costs involved in hiring outside legal counsel, this kind of visibility is now a significant advantage for the business at large.
Working with the LawVu legal workspace, it’s also possible for the Co-op team to be future-focused. It’s not only about embedding the use of the workspace in the daily workflow of the legal team and the wider business, but also about using data to look forwards.
CASE STUDY 2: Property Finder
Industry: Real estate-Location: Dubai, UAE-Legal team size: 5
The issue that put Property Finder in the market for legal tech was its fast growth trajectory. The initial legal team of two was tasked with managing 300-plus people across multiple locations. It quickly became apparent that relying on informal shoulder taps and emails was an inefficient way of working, and there was a risk that critical tasks were going to slip through the cracks.
General Counsel Zaid Gardner employed Legal Operations Manager Charmaine Shyu to find a way for the legal team to become more effective, more focused on high-value strategic work, and better able to serve the wider business. Shyu’s research led her to LawVu, whose workspace approach to managing legal operations – a single solution that incorporates intake, workflow management, and insights and reporting – captured her interest.
“LawVu is built for in-house legal teams with an easy-to-use interface. It gives the wider business a good user experience through a legal front door, which means they are more likely to use it,” she explained.
The key result of consolidating intake and workflows into the LawVu system is that it brings together data and facilitates powerful insights and reporting to help the legal team demonstrate their impact on the wider business. “Metrics allow you to run your legal department like a business. They are about identifying your inefficiencies, finding your bottlenecks, and thinking about how you bring value to the organisation in a way the business appreciates and understands. Metrics also provide data-driven insights – they can replace that ‘gut feeling’ emotion. You can be confident that all the insights you have are actionable, measurable and clear,” said Shyu.
What’s next? The legal team is committed to optimizing LawVu across all departments, ensuring that all areas of the business can benefit from streamlined processes and improved visibility. Their focus will be on three major projects, including the automation and self-service of the many different contract types that come through the department, refining the metrics they’re tracking, and utilising the LawVu API to integrate with other teams’ systems to support the push and pull of data and information.
For Gardner, technology is mandatory if any modern in-house legal team is to thrive. “I’m incredibly proud of my team. We are now one of the most popular teams in the business, and I think it’s not just what we do, but it’s how we do it. The technology enables that.”
CASE STUDY 3: EMAPTA
Industry: Professional services-Location: Philippines and Australia-Legal team size: 20
Before bringing on LawVu, Emapta’s multifarious legal function was operating from a mixture of documents, email and spreadsheets, and was unable to maintain a cohesive file structure. The catalyst for change was when the company decided to bring the governance, risk, migration and business services disciplines under one in-house legal department.
“This triggered us to look at how we could implement a system that we could use across all the disciplines and that we could then roll out to the business,” said Ben van de Beld, Chief Legal and Operations Officer.
The goal was to introduce a system that would deliver a good user experience for legal and business users and be able to automate high-volume low value work. Managing change was critical to the success of this project – not only was the aim to improve the efficiency of the legal team, but it was equally important to improve their impact on the wider business.
“Contract management, matter management, intake, automation of documents and workflow were the key requirements we identified, which meant we came across the LawVu legal workspace in the market,” said van de Beld. Managing matters and contracts in one system was always a priority for this legal team. “Contracts and matters are best managed together, and the LawVu legal workspace provides us the platform to do so.”
An added benefit for Emapta of managing all their legal work in one system is that it has created team and business continuity – and all the team’s data is captured and stored within the system too. “We can now see the volume that’s coming into the department. We’re operating so much more efficiently with the ability to pull reports in a matter of seconds – allowing us to track growth in different geographies in real time and align with the overall company strategy.”
The next focus for the team is to further improve their contract and self-service functionality by utilising AI in the LawVu legal workspace. This will significantly speed up contract turnaround, given this feature’s ability to quickly compare clauses while also reducing the number of intake forms required from the business.
Legal is a critical business function that, like its peers in sales, marketing, finance and HR, benefits from technology which accelerates its productivity and integrates with the rest of the business. Legal technology helps in-house counsel create a synergistic relationship in a world which is increasingly complex and fast paced, creating a critical dataset which empowers them to analyze, plan, and show the value of the legal function.
Successful implementation of easy-to-use, dedicated legal technology, like the LawVu legal workspace, is resulting in positive outcomes for legal teams and their organisations. LawVu customers report, on average, a saving of more than 120 minutes per team member per week on administrative work, and contract turnaround time is 45 percent faster (and more efficient). These time savings and efficiency increases add up to a return-on-investment of over 300 percent for an average LawVu customer, and give valuable time back to the legal team to focus on more strategic work.
With stats and stories like these, it’s apparent that selecting the right legal technology is a bona fide value-add for legal teams of all shapes and sizes. The benefits offered by dedicated legal technology are being increasingly recognised by forward-thinking legal leaders and their partners in the C-suite. Choosing software that meets the combined needs of legal and the organisation is becoming a must-have rather than a nice-to-have.
