Presenters: Matthew Kelly and Lynda Rees
Session title: Legal Management as a Service
I've negotiated 100's of contract in my career and it can be a real administrative nightmare. For this reason, I was particularly interested to see what ServiceNow's VP Senior Corporate Council had to say about the Legal Management as a Service solution they built on the ServiceNow Platform.
Business context for legal
The legal process can be cumbersome and it's not unusual for the legal department to get an email request that just says, "Can you please review this contract?" with absolutely no additional information or context. This context is an important part of the legal process as it informs the legal department what terms and conditions should or should not be present in the contract. It tells legal what is important to the business in the negotiation process.
ServiceNow's legal management process starts by addressing this important first step. When a request is submitted the requester is immediately asked to provide context, and must answer question like:
- What type of product or service is it?
- Who will be using it and for what
- Business requirements — SLAs, Metrics, Reporting, and Support
- Will the vender be handling sensitive or regulated data?
Address the "legal stack"
The process ServiceNow created also addresses the challenge of what I call the "legal stack." Most contracts are not a single document, but a series of documents such as, NDAs, Security Agreements, Acceptable Use Policies, Master Service Agreements, and SOWs. The order in which these items are negotiated is important, and many times there are multiple people involved in the review of these documents. ServiceNow addresses this by allowing users associated these documents to one-another, so that no matter where you are in the process you can easily reference what's already been agreed to.
You can also create contract negotiation checklists so you can make sure all critical contract terms have been addressed in any given contract.
The coordination of business stakeholder, vendor, and legal feedback, coupled with high-pressure deadlines, makes the legal process a perfect candidate for workflow and document management.
Leverage data for vendor negotiations
Since ServiceNow provides a single system of record, the legal department can also leverage the data in Vendor Performance Management in their negotiation process. When a contract come up for re-negotiation, you can easily reference the performance of a vendor, or compare key metrics against other vendors like performance, pricing, and scorecard data. You can also see all related contracts from a given vendor to see if there are opportunities to consolidate contracts or negotiate better volume pricing. This is an extremely power tools for managing vender performance and costs.
To consider before launching
If you're thinking about launching Legal Management as a Service in your organization, consider the following requests types in your process.
- Library Request - Request for legal forms (templates)
- Contract Review Requests - Sales contracts, NDAs, SOWs, RFPs, Vendor contracts
- Corporate Maintenance - Annual entity legal, finance and tax filings
- Legal Policy Queries - Code of Conduct, Insider Trading Policy, Social Media
- Compliance - Pre-clearance trading requests, related-party transaction management, whistleblower hotline
- General Questions - FAQs and knowledge articles
Here's some advice
I asked our speakers Matthew and Lynda what their advice was for companies starting their Legal Service Management as a Service journey, and they suggested:
- Target business processes that impact multiple departments and groups or are email-based, manual or repetitive.
- Find a champion within legal who understands operational delivery and can evangelize ServiceNow and the benefits within your legal department.
- Identify and prioritize use cases that can provide quick wins and high ROI.
Let's get this party started
If I was having a ServiceNow Platform party for Legal Management, I would invite:
- Vendor Performance Management
- Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC)
- Contract Management
- Document Management
- Knowledge management
Product Management Shout Out
Big thanks to Matthew Kelly (VP Senior Corporate Council for ServiceNow), Lynda Rees (Service Domains Practice, Advisory Solution Consultant), and Garrick Vance (Product Manager) for helping me get the word out today on Legal Management as a Service.
Want to know more?
The Legal Service Management application lets you request changes to the operation and maintenance of your legal-related cases. The legal staff can then track these requests and make the necessary changes. Any user in the system can view all open legal requests. This gives your users a chance to see the legal issues that have already been reported before they submit a new request.
