Oh, look! Another marketing email hawking the latest fancy piece of legal ops software. There's no need to spend your time perusing that – delete and move on.
Small legal departments often do not have the people, time, or budget to consider intricate software or other complicated and expensive solutions that larger law departments might utilize.
That’s a challenge. And an opportunity.
Legal ops on a shoestring requires small legal departments to get organized, get intentional, and get creative.
Get Organized
Get yourself and your staff together for a venting/brainstorming session.
What process is driving people up a wall? What form is broken? What do you wish you had? With unlimited resources, what would you do?
Write all of those things down and then put them in order.
What hurts the most? What is a need versus a want? What can Legal solve independently versus needing to involve IT or some other department?
Moving sticky notes around a wall is a great way to do this exercise.
Get Intentional
Now, it’s time for a deep dive. Let’s say the sticky note you chose to work with is “contract management.”
Good effort! However, “contract management” is too big to solve. You need to identify the discrete portion of contract management that is the problem.
Perhaps your actual pain point is keeping track of termination dates.
What about that process is problematic? Do you need to look at a contract every time you need to know a termination date?
Do you already have a database of dates, but that database is hard to manage? Or maybe you do just fine keeping track of the termination dates, and it turns out the actual hurdle is notifying business people that a termination date is coming up.
The more exact you can be in defining the problem, the better. Using the “five whys” technique is helpful here.
Get Creative Part 1: What Do You Have?
Now that you have identified a discrete problem, you need to figure out what you already have that can help you solve that problem. (No budget for new toys, remember?)
This is the time to learn new tricks. Often, you already have access to what you need – you just don’t know it.
For instance, we use SharePoint for many of our legal ops processes. Why? We already have free access because our corporate intranet is based on SharePoint.
Over the years, we have learned how to design and build lists and libraries, automatic notifications, and multi-step workflows, as well as how to share files with outside counsel, how to set security parameters, and how to automatically move files from a public page to a locked page (key for intake and for gathering documents during an investigation).
How did we learn all of that? Playing around in the software. Watching YouTube. Reading articles and forums. Talking to IT. Attending webinars. Standard software you already use can do amazing things if you look beyond the basic features.
Get Creative Part 2: How do We do It?
Sometimes, your biggest hurdle is the excuse, “Because we’ve always done it that way!” That’s great, but that way isn’t working for you anymore. You’re going to have to break it and rebuild it.
Occasionally, that means stripping a process down to the studs and starting over. More often, however, it means making tweaks. Think creatively! Question everything! There’s almost always more than one way to solve the problem.
Has your spreadsheet grown so large it’s unwieldy? You could move it to a SharePoint list or some other database software so it’s easier to slice and dice the data or run reports. Or maybe rethink (or implement) your retention policy.
Why is the spreadsheet so large? Do you really need all of that data? Have you ever actually used the information in Column F? Is there a better way to track the dates in Column H? Can you solve the whole problem by reorganizing the columns? Would this be better as a chart? Or a calendar?
This is your opportunity to get those creative juices flowing. Don’t feel constrained by the existing process. Remember, you just learned about that impressive software feature from the article you read –use that knowledge!
By thinking deeply and creatively, your small legal department can address many legal ops issues without the benefit of full-time resources and a budget.
And, yes, you’ll need time to get organized, intentional, and creative. But legal ops makes your life easier, especially in a small legal department, and that’s always worth the time and effort.