Prime for digital transformation
Legal teams have unique and complex needs that can make it difficult to right-fit digital solutions. Even when point solutions are a match, they can wind up adding complexity to the tech stack and reinforcing unnecessary information silos.
When looking at our own legal team, we recognised ways that digitisation and a platform approach could make a big difference. We lacked real-time visibility into legal team activities and spent too much time on manual and repetitive tasks.
Investigation and goal-setting is where it began
According to Andrew Brereton, senior director of legal operations at ServiceNow, enquiry is an essential starting point. “The foundation for building a successful legal function is understanding some very basic legal data”, says Brereton. “For example, what are the types of requests our lawyers are working on? What teams are they serving? What is the true volume? Only when we truly understand the basics can we move onto the more complex solutions”.
Getting insight into legal projects and engagements was a requirement when developing solutions—but it’s also an outcome. Ongoing actionable data like this is key to better decision-making and resource allocation.
Based on our review, we defined a few concrete objectives. We wanted to be able to understand how and where work is flowing in real time. We aimed to be more agile and efficient, with the right legal staff working on the right projects. And we wanted to automate work where possible to free up time for strategic activities.
Solutions built on our own platform
To support our legal teams, we developed two complementary solutions on the ServiceNow platform: Legal Service Delivery and the General Counsel (GC) dashboard.
Legal Service Delivery was built to help us streamline legal operations and run legal like a business. The solution has enabled us to automate manual, email and spreadsheet-based processes. We created a ticketing system for our legal team that lets them assign and fulfil requests quickly and efficiently.
Additionally, Legal Service Delivery empowers all employees with self-service. Common legal questions are answered by AI virtual agents, or users are referred to knowledge base articles. This way, we lower time-to-resolution for issues, support employees more quickly and simply, and keep our legal teams focused on high-priority business needs.
General Counsel (GC) Dashboard provides our legal leadership with real-time visibility, elevating the data from Legal Service Delivery and providing actionable insights to decision-makers. From a single pane of glass, our general counsel can view real-time metrics to measure the temperature of legal operations and formulate actions. “With clear visibility over work requests, we can then start to make inroads into working effectively and efficiently”, Brereton explains.
The verdict: Modernisation can drive value
We have already seen great outcomes from our investments. By offering more self-service, we’ve been able to deflect 15% of work previously being serviced by legal. Our new “legal front door”, consisting of streamlined intake and routing of legal requests, simplifies the experience for stakeholders and adds transparency to the process.
More effective workflows and better visibility have unlocked significant financial and operational benefits. We’ve reduced outside counsel spend by 10% and can identify operational performance and resource constraints much more quickly and easily.