Digitalization remains high on the corporate agenda. Core business functions like Tax and Finance are progressing on their transformation journeys as part of the general push towards more digital ways of doing business.
But what about Legal?
As digitalization drives transformation, interconnecting legal data and processes is a true opportunity to more efficiently answer the companies’ needs.
At Guirbaden, we are committed to help you, the legal players, to navigate through the challenges that this journey conveys, through building an efficient tech-enabled ecosystem approach that involves all your key partners and facilitates the flow of legal data, enabling entire work streams to be accessed, processed, tracked and analyzed by the relevant stakeholders.
Our objective: empowering the different stakeholders involved in a matter, whether inhouse lawyer, private practice lawyer or anyone else, to build upon their strengths and help them deliver better services, outcomes, costs, and experience, without losing data on its way.
Contact us HERE to get to now more.
But what is our “legal ecosystem” approach?
A tech-enabled ecosystem approach means:
- capturing data from any and each contributor driving a matter forward, either originated through a manual input or pulled of a system (it can be from a law firm, or from a colleague).
- redistributing the data to the desired/selected contributors.
From a corporate perspective, the in-house legal team is its entry gate, facing a deluge of legal tasks. Its workload is set to grow significantly, while budgets will soon be decreasing, just like other functions already are.
This is triggering a real transformational shift in the way in-house lawyers work and deliver legal services to the corporation.
To manage today’s legal workload, they need to sum up resources and work with a number of very different means to come to end, like external law firms, self-service portals and managed services providers, as well as with their own internal centers of excellence.All these stakeholders have themselves undergone digitalization in recent years.
However, an integrated, consistent approach is still lacking.
That is why, to ensure a successful digitalization and to benefit from better services, outcomes, costs, and experience, we recommend looking at legal in-house departments in the context of a wider and more powerful legal ECOSYSTEM, one that involves and interconnects all needed parties at a given time.
The ecosystem configuration
Guirbaden’s approach to these challenges is unique because we consider that the stake is as follows:
Does it make commercial sense to digitize separately and independently 5 different entities meant to work together anyway (the law firm, the inhouse legal team, a managed service provider, the corporate center of excellence, and the internal end client), or is it worth thinking EFFICIENT from the start, with an ECOSYSTEM perspective, providing synergies and avoiding unnecessary costs?
Making effective and efficient use of the legal ecosystem is about allocating tasks appropriately to maximize the value returned by the spend. But it’s also about bringing the individual participants together seamlessly, through tools and technology.
“Clearly, without a shared approach, there is a risk of blockages in either the “legal data flow”, or the “access to data” required to feed the necessary “legal work”, from one professional to another. This inadvertently creates new inefficiencies in the very process of trying to tackle the old ones”, says @Eric Eck, Guirbaden’s Founder and Principal.
The whole ecosystem therefore needs to be redesigned to facilitate the flow of legal data, and enable entire work streams to be accessed, processed, tracked and analyzed by the relevant stakeholders.
In our approach, this next frontier of the legal ecosystem drives productivity for each of its components. It also allows each provider to deliver scalable services or expertise, where work distribution is adjusted constantly across the ecosystem, depending on the needs at any given time. Have a look at our Methodology and how we work.
It is also the only way for each stakeholder to forecast and anticipate future workload.
And what is the impact of a well-thought legal ecosystem?
The positive effects of a well-thought legal ecosystem are far-reaching and include:
- Managing legal operations more efficiently– e.g., matter, time, legal project (task), spend management
- Managing risks and rights more efficiently –e.g., IP, compliance, legal knowledge, contracts
- Accelerating performance – e.g., through automation, AI, more efficient litigation, or transactions, or corporate secretariat management
- Driving self-service – e.g., by extending direct use from internal clients, and even external customers
The success of the legal ecosystem depends partly on mindset and a willingness to connect and collaborate in new ways and with new partners.
Guirbaden leads the different stakeholders to efficiently team up and achieve a fully digitalized and consistent ecosystem, far more efficient budget wise than the implementation of individual solutions.
Let’s continue this conversation and talk specifically about YOUR NEEDS! Contact us here: projects@guirbaden.com
