Is work piling up in the Legal department? That’s fairly easy to sort out. You post a job ad, bring in a recruiter, and a few interviews later you’ve got an extra FTE. Problem solved. Right?

Well, no, that isn’t necessarily the best solution. Before you start writing job adverts, it’s wiser to first look at where your capacity is actually being spent. After all, how much time do your lawyers spend on actual legal work? And how much time is wasted on searching, emailing, copying, checking, following up and providing the same information over and over again? Take a team that receives dozens of enquiries every day about current documents. When does a document expire? What agreements have been made? Who needs to sign it? Where is the latest version? Who is responsible for following up? The lawyers usually know the answers, but have to look them up time and time again. That’s where you can make your first gains.

The problem is actually good news

Because if it turns out that three lawyers are wasting time every single day searching for documents, manually entering data, managing documents and constantly having to dig up the same information, you don’t have a staffing problem. You clearly have a process problem. Before you get too downhearted, we want to emphasise that this is actually very good news!

Precious hours

So don’t rush out and post job vacancies straight away; take a step back first. Have a look at how many precious hours you’re wasting on work that shouldn’t take any time at all. Certainly not precious hours of lawyers’ time. You don’t always solve a capacity problem by bringing in more people, but you can by reducing unnecessary work. With Legal Tech, you can organise that flow of information much more intelligently. Information becomes easier to find, processes can be streamlined and repetitive manual tasks can be reduced. This means that the FTEs you already have will also have time to spare – for work that actually requires legal expertise. Think of assessing risks, contributing ideas for solutions and advising the business. Tastes differ, of course, but we’d go so far as to say that this is precisely what makes the work more enjoyable for lawyers. Otherwise, they’d have ended up as document searchers!