Clinton Crosier is Associate General Counsel at iManage
Over the past decade, digital technologies have revolutionized nearly every industry, transforming client relationships, business processes, and individual work functions. This digital transformation has been particularly acute in the world of legal operations. As illustrated in the Annual Law Department Operations Survey, the number one challenge for legal operations professionals is improving business processes in the era of digital transformation.
Legal operations has grown in strategic importance by embracing digital transformation to bring efficiency and innovation to corporate legal processes. One critical area of focus should be information management – enabling users to save, search, and work effectively with the volume of documents, emails, and messages that flow through the legal department. It’s clear from the relatively low effectiveness scores for document management revealed in the survey that traditional products are not meeting the needs of contemporary legal departments.
Modern document management is the next step in the evolution of work product solutions for legal departments. It delivers an intuitive, consumer-like experience that empowers professionals to work more productively while enabling legal departments to be more efficient, agile, and responsive to the changing business environment.
This approach is based on adding value in four key areas:
- Value to the user: The core objective is to empower the user by delivering a dramatically better experience. It should mirror consumer applications like Amazon and Google, with intuitive features that work the way users want to work and require minimal training. Modern document management starts with a clean, modern interface, accessible on any device including personal computers, phones, or tablets.
- Value to the information: Modern document management is more than a file repository; it adds smart features and capabilities to enhance the value of information. For example, it anticipates user actions, with smart document previews, suggested filing locations, and personalized search that delivers more accurate results by remembering what you search for most often. It integrates with the tools that legal professionals use including matter management, contract management, and workflow software.
- Value to the organization: Improving the individual user experience while enhancing the value of information delivers profound benefits at the organizational level. Modern document management helps legal organizations become more efficient and productive while delivering better outcomes. Cloud delivery models enhance organizational agility with rapid deployment, automated updates, and the flexibility to add new functionality as needed.
- Comprehensive security: Legal organizations have stringent requirements for securing documents from both internal and external threats. Modern document management delivers comprehensive security, built on established industry best practices, to protect information assets. These protections are augmented by comprehensive governance, security and risk mitigation features including need-to-know security, and ethical walls, to govern information access.