How Legal Tech is Changing the Game for In-House Lawyers

“When you’re in Biglaw, you have two sets of clients: your senior attorneys, and the clients themselves.” That was the advice given to me as a junior associate in Biglaw. It was spot-on - to gain the most experience in Biglaw required having senior associates who had your back, and that in turn meant giving them high-quality work product (which they typically reviewed and passed along to the clients directly). Being a firm lawyer also meant serving the clients directly (even if the asks were unreasonable), since clients needed you to get the legal work done. 

In-house lawyers, however, must serve different groups of clients, and sometimes these clients have different and even contradictory interests. Not only must an in-house lawyer serve the company’s external clients, they also answer to the company’s internal stakeholders (sales teams, HR, and sometimes the CEO directly). And if these folks aren’t happy, they’ll try to find ways to circumvent legal entirely.

How can an in-house lawyer juggle these different types of clients? I’ve spoken with several directly about their workflow and ways to tame their various competing intra-company constituents. These are the standout themes: 

• Transparency and Communication. In many companies, the legal department is seen as a black box with no visibility as to the status of the contract. This lack of transparency is frustrating for sales in particular, made worse by tight deal deadlines and pressure from management. By providing frequent updates to internal stakeholders about the status of their contracts, an in-house lawyer can assuage the internal stakeholders’ anxiety. More communication is better communication.
• Metrics. In the daily hustle and bustle of a company with a high volume of deals, it’s easy to blame the legal department for delays. For this reason, it is critical for in-house legal teams to keep accurate and up-to-date metrics that demonstrate the performance of the legal team. CYA, if you will. These metrics can include number of turns on a contract, time spent with the legal team, time spent with the client, etc. These metrics can also help identify and fix problems in the process, making it run smoother.
• Reports. As deal volume piles up, it’s often hard for in-house legal teams to keep track of what the company has agreed to, what contracts are still active, which ones will renew, and so forth. By keeping accurate records of the company’s contracts, internal stakeholders can easily and quickly glance at the company’s obligations to its clients. Good organization helps all parties involved.

Thankfully, there are great legal tech tools out there to help make in-house lawyers’ lives easier. For example, LinkSquares addresses these concerns. First, it provides dashboards and metrics to provide transparency to the various internal clients. These metrics are automatically logged so the lawyers don’t need to manually enter this info. LinkSquares dashboards also show the status of the contract at each stage, so internal stakeholders know exactly where to find their contract and what the status is, without having to involve legal at all.

LinkSquares also leverages artificial intelligence to quickly extract information and provide insights on the status of the company’s contracts. These AI models are trained on millions of data points and are constantly being fine-tuned by LinkSquares data scientists. Things like analyzing contract terms, summarizing them, or checking what the Company has previously agreed to can be done with a single click.

Going in-house is often referred to as “the promised land” amongst Biglaw lawyers due to the (on average) better work-life balance, positive company culture, and less demanding workload. But going in-house comes with its own host of challenges - foremost of which is keeping the Company’s internal stakeholders happy. Legal tech tools like LinkSquares can make this process easier and streamlined, ultimately helping the lawyer have a more fulfilling career while keeping the rest of the Company well-informed.

This article was sponsored by LinkSquares. LinkSquares is the AI-powered legal technology partner for in-house legal teams. Its market-leading, AI-powered contract lifecycle management, and legal task management solutions surface business intelligence with speed, accuracy, and scale. Check out a demo at: https://hubs.li/Q01S-tst0