Technology Creates Operational Wins in Legal Department Operations

The Blickstein Group recently published their Law Department Operations Survey 10th Anniversary Report. According to the report, the percentage of time that LDO professionals spent on tasks hasn’t changed much between 2012 and 2017. Last year time spent on technology was 14%, process improvement was 12%, implementing integrations was 3% and vendor management was 6%. A key take away is that technology is becoming much more of a driving factor now. In 2014, 53% of survey respondents agreed that they had access to the right technology to do their jobs. Last year this number increased to 71%, which means something is working right.

Onit’s CEO Eric M. Elfman is passionate about building software for the legal industry and was honored to include a bylined article titled, “The Transformative Fabric of Law Department Operations: Technology is Foundational.”

An excerpt from this is below and the full article can be found here.

“Legal operations is all about optimizing the law department’s ability to help grow the company. This requires a higher level of operational excellence, as evidenced by the embracing and reliance on innovation, increasing demand for automation of repetitive tasks and a workflow-centric approach. Simply put, law department operations professionals turn to technology to create operational wins.

The need to drive efficiencies and contain costs are two key reasons that the legal operations function is growing so quickly. That growth is no longer only in the Fortune 500 companies; smaller companies are saddling up as well.

Many believe, and rightfully so, that legal operations will be responsible for some of
the biggest changes in the legal ecosystem. In fact, according to the Annual Law Department Operations Survey, 85 percent of LDO professionals believe that corporate law departments will be the primary driver of innovation and change in the legal sector. In fact, change is so prevalent in the minds of LDOs that 62 percent of them believe their jobs to be “primarily change management.

Technology will increasingly play a prominent role, as the only way for LDOs to fulfill their mission is by leveraging well-chosen technology solutions to automate processes, track legal spend and deliver key decision-ready information. Again according to the Survey, LDOs split their time on more than a dozen different tasks, leading with outside counsel management and technology (14 percent of their time each), law department administration (13 percent), process improvement (12 percent) and financial reporting (11 percent).”