As a result of the Covid-19 worldwide pandemic and subsequent shutdowns, the legal services industry is now in the midst of profound disruption. Many legal firms and corporate legal departments of all sizes are realizing the importance of moving to a technology-first business model. Forced to offer remote work options for staff and clients, an industry that has traditionally been cautious of technology and virtual work for a host of reasons is now left with accelerating their digital evolution.
- Recent events have established that resiliency, confidence and how quickly an organization responses are critical for business continuity, and competitiveness, that can change suddenly.
- As client expectations increase, legal services operations need to establish and/or enhance their digital delivery channels with client-friendly services and solutions.
- The need to scale operations quickly will be paramount, and moving information to the cloud will be key.
Resiliency and confidence
The pandemic has made it clear that how quickly an organization responses to sudden change is critical. The global pandemic and its economic fallout has demonstrated that clients are quick to increase their expectations and demands for how organizations respond during difficult times. Your clients have seen what’s possible from change. The most tech-savvy and tech-mature organizations are, clients and prospects will consider less-advanced businesses as second-rate.
Clients aren’t going to wait for organizations to waste a lot of time hemming and hawing to get things right: they have needs that need to be addressed quickly. The way of doing things prior to the pandemic are over.
Even so, the most sophisticated digital technologies must be deployed with a client-first, client-centric focus instead of using technology for technology’s sake.
You can operate with as a digital-first enterprise, just keep finding ways to make the digital experience more smooth-running and immediate, with less effort required from your client.
Legal services will need to embrace hybrid workforce models. Physical locations will need to deliver more self-serve, digital capabilities for clients and become more visual and contactless. Firms will need to be able to scale operations quickly, which means they’ll have to continue migrating their data, content and information to the cloud.
Don’t lose sight of your client and ensure they are able to seamlessly conduct business when and where they want through whichever channels they prefer.
According to a recent Forbes article: “The Covid-19 pandemic, however, is forcing the {legal} industry toward digital transformation. Even before Covid-19, lawyers acknowledged they were tech laggards.
“A Gartner CEO survey from December 2018 found that legal departments positioned to support digital business efforts can increase on-time project delivery by 63% and increase the number of digital projects with appropriate risk management measures in place by 46%.”
Yet, according to a Gartner research vice president, general counsel are concerned that existing legal and compliance practices are incompatible with the speed at which digital business operates.”
Begin with the right partner
There’s a fairly good chance that legal firms and corporate legal departments will lack the in-house expertise to address digital transformation challenges. Seeking an expert, outside partner and outsourcing for experience will help to establish a clearer set of expectations for what can be will delivered. While attempting to lead through digital transformation, each firm will have different customer bases and approaches to serving those customers. Working with a partner that understands your business can better clarify goals and expectations.
In absence of accurate, detailed planning, you may end up damaging your services which in turn will be costly to repair.
Seek a partner that demonstrate experience and understanding of the legal industry and how businesses function, and have a customer-centric culture of their own. Being able to discover novel ways to help their clients run a better business will go a long way to achieving confidence in digital tools.
Consider outsourcing a partner as an extension of your business and whose approach fits yours.
The cloud and document management software (DMS) is driving success
As the industry slowly transitions out of pandemic mode, one thing is increasingly clear: the same old same old way of working has quickly changed. Some of the on-the-fly changes undertaken in order to survive will become permanent, having demonstrated their efficiency and effectiveness. New digital ways of doing business embraced by consumers are now the norm. Indeed, customer expectations for digital experiences have only escalated, and firms that fail to keep the momentum going risk alienating those they seek to serve.
The cloud and DMS are quickly becoming must-have necessities. They are widely used solutions driving better management of core business processes.
While an initial investment is necessary, the cost-savings over time will be evident. With proper planning and working with an experienced firm, a successful software rollout will happen.
But amidst the uncertainty, especially for smaller firms with limited budgets, the success rate of cloud and DMS implementations is rising—and so is customer and end-user confidence.
You’re following the right path as firms that embrace technology outpace the competition
The pandemic permanently altered how businesses run and client expectations. Seeing how some organizations successfully pivoted and adapted disruption, clients now expect more from the organizations they do business with.
The legal services industry need to keep pace with new, ever-changing expectations while still maintaining security and safeguarding regulatory risk without falling behind competitors.
Firms need to continue to press forward with their digital agenda—to achieve scalability, flexibility, and resilience. New challenges will arise and new opportunities to grow their businesses will follow.
The speed of decision making in the legal industry has never been quicker as the pandemic and clients altered services and operating constraints since March 2020. With that experience, we know everything is forever changed and the way innovation happens in the legal industry requires the confidence needed to make decisions in a more agile way.
Your partner should be a customer advocate
At RBRO Solutions, we painstakingy dedicate time and effort to understand our clients’ business and guide and coach them from the beginning to ensure they understand that they must:
Own the implementation process.
Actively take part in the decision-making and steering committee.
Select key project members based on their depth of experience and knowledge of the business.
The project team becomes integral to your organization-wide competency at the completion of the project and continue to guide future changes to their cloud and software systems.
We encourage our clients to follow an approach that helps them align their IT needs and the business. By also putting a focused approach to how they fare against their competitors, an organization can set realistic goals—they can understand their strengths, where they are competitive, and where they may be falling short. It also helps to define which processes are core competencies and deserve greater attention, and which are context processes where best practices should suffice.
We constantly strive to be our clients’ partner in continuous improvement, and regularly check in with them at scheduled times to discuss their pain points and wish lists and develop a roadmap of recommendations to maximize their ROI.
With the right partner, you can be confident. And you can weather any storm.