This report was initially published in Legal Dive.

As your corporate legal division navigates its way by means of this era of financial uncertainty, assessing your team’s technological maturity must be at the top rated of your priority list.

Sophisticated technologies can aid you minimize charges, make greater strategic choices, and drive worth for your organization when it is required the most.

But how do you measure if your division is technologically mature? It requires additional than just operating an inventory of your tools, assessing their age, and monitoring their use.

You need to have to dig in and analyze your solutions’ capabilities to see if they meet your demands. If not, it could be time to grow to be additional mature.

Right here are 4 inquiries you could not have believed to ask when measuring your legal team’s technological maturity.

How you answer these inquiries will identify your maturity level and aid you start out arranging the subsequent measures in your technologies journey.

1. Does your technologies aid you prioritize and tackle danger?

Every single legal matter, no matter how easy or complicated, carries with it a degree of danger to your enterprise.

Expense and spending budget overruns are considerable dangers that can severely influence your organization and your legal department’s standing inside the enterprise. You actually can not afford to go into matters blind.

You can mitigate this challenge by focusing your efforts on the largest locations of danger to your enterprise. Your technologies must be capable to aid.

Today’s legal tools can present transparency so you can comprehend if the perform becoming accomplished by your internal legal group and outdoors counsel is in proportion to exactly where danger lives in your matters.

This aids your law division safeguard your organization from excess or unnecessary charges and show higher worth to your enterprise.

two. Do you often solicit and assess feedback about your technology’s overall performance and examine it to your objectives?

Legal technologies must be a lengthy-term investment that grows and evolves with your organization’s demands.

If your technologies is not meeting these demands, it could be time to reassess its worth to your organization.

1 of the most effective methods to gauge if your technologies investments are delivering worth is by often soliciting feedback from the folks who use the tools.

The technologies customers can inform you no matter whether a answer is performing properly and meeting their demands or failing to aid them attain their objectives.

A very good rule of thumb is to carry out these assessments annually.

Assessments must be viewed in the context of your enterprise objectives and compared to your roadmap to make sure that your plans nonetheless make sense.

Assessments also enable you to address any lagging overall performance difficulties just before they start out to drag your organization down.

three. Do you have a systematic and properly-defined strategy to alter management?

How you deal with the introduction of new technologies in your legal division can make or break the technology’s adoption and effectiveness.

If customers are not comfy with the technologies just before it is introduced or they fail to comprehend its added benefits, usage will probably be low and your investment will not spend off.

The most technologically mature legal departments have systematic and properly-defined approaches to managing technological alter.

They have a strategy in spot and anytime new tools are introduced, they execute that strategy to the letter, the identical way each and every time.

They train customers on the technologies and ask for their feedback, communicate the added benefits early and typically, and continue to aid group members grow to be comfy with the tools lengthy following the initial roll-out.

A alter management strategy signals that organizations comprehend how to handle and message alter. These organizations are additional probably to locate results in adopting and gaining worth from new technologies.

four. Does your technologies track diversity information?

Operating with diverse outdoors counsel brings fresh perspectives, suggestions, and greater final results. As a result, measuring the diversity of your law firms is vital.

Sophisticated legal technologies includes diversity modules that automatically track the diversity information of legal service providers.

They make it straightforward to track if firms are assigning diverse teams to your matters, are diverse in their timekeeper roles, and if they are committed to advertising and hiring diverse employees.

With this information in hand, you can act and have proactive discussions with outdoors counsel to make sure that your law firms are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&ampI).

Concluding thoughts

As the winds of financial alter continue to blow, use this time as an chance to consider about exactly where your corporate legal division is on the technologies maturity scale and adjust as required.

The proper technologies can aid your group minimize devote, obtain efficiency and drive greater enterprise worth.