Cover photo of Successful Innovation Outcomes in LawThis post is part of a series of sample chapters from my my book, Successful Innovation Outcomes in Law: A Practical Guide for Law Firms, Law Departments and Other Legal Organizations.

Three Innovation Efforts Corporate Counsel Want

This chapter contains some of my best insights from work on the customer side as an in-house counsel. It also contains some of my best practical advice on actual innovation projects. It’s up to you to choose whether you want to follow this advice or not, but I urge you to consider it, especially as you get started and if you are considering only innovation megaprojects.

A few years ago, a survey of general counsels showed that the most common answer to the question “What innovation has your outside counsel brought you in the last year?” was “None.” None. Note that I said most common because saying “most popular” answer would be wrong.

What’s been striking in my career is how I often I hear about in-house counsel telling their outside firms exactly what they need and the outside firms either ignoring that or returning with something completely different.

The current fashion in innovation proposals is heavy on artificial intelligence, contract life cycle management, and the like. They propose big, expensive projects with lots of moving parts and many permissions and much coordination required in a corporate setting. More important, the benefits tend to be more theoretical than practical, and, truth be told, could often be achieved by using existing legal tech tools already on the market.

The current fashion in innovation proposals is heavy on artificial intelligence, contract life cycle management, and the like. They propose big, expensive projects with lots of moving parts and many permissions and much coordination required in a corporate setting. More important, the benefits tend to be more theoretical than practical, and, truth be told, could often be achieved by using existing legal tech tools already on the market.

PRO TIP: Three places to find early wins if you are struggling to find a starting point: simple dashboards, expert locators, and lightweight knowledge management tools.

What do I think clients want and where you should consider focusing your efforts?

1. Simple Dashboards. Far too often, basic information needed by a general counsel or in-house counsel is simply not readily at hand in an easy-to-find and easy-to-consume way. Talk to any general counsel and you are likely to hear a story about them being asked by a CEO or CFO simple business questions like year-to-date legal spend, spend compared to budget, total legal exposure, law firms with highest spend, and other standard metrics (let alone key performance indicators), and not having any answer other than, at best, that they needed to have some reports run to get this basic information.

Similarly, in-house counsel too often don’t have metrics at hand that are useful to them: caseload, success rates, numbers of contracts signed, average times for projects, and the like.

I often use the Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker (formerly known as Serengeti) as an example. It is probably the standard tool for managing outside counsel (and has been so for many years). However, I often point people to the simple and targeted dashboard tools designed around metrics they’ve learned that in-house counsel care about and want.

Dashboards are a simple and powerful concept and the discussion around what should go into them will give you and your client tremendous insights into their needs, their approaches, and what is most important to them.

Law departments are increasingly looking to outside counsel to recommend legal technology tools. You get at least as much credit for suggesting an existing tool (which the client might already own) to accomplish something valuable for the client as you will by creating a custom tool. If the only innovation offering you were bringing to corporate clients was to help create effective Legal Tracker dashboards, you would go to the top of the class and open the doors to other innovation opportunities.

2. Expert Locators. People have been working on full-scale knowledge management platforms for many years. A big lesson is that they are very hard to do successfully and have them fully adopted by users.

However, there is one aspect of knowledge management tools that can be broken out and used to create customer value. I use the term “expert locator.” In any organization, we know that there are usually one or two people who are either the “right person” to answer a question or can point you to that person.

Getting to that person is a hard-enough problem, but it becomes exponentially more difficult when you want to find experts within your organization and in your outside law firms.

For example, if I need help on a blockchain legal question, I don’t really want to go through the client representatives of my outside firms to find a lawyer with that expertise and experience. I’d like to find them quickly and talk to them directly.

A tool that allows me to do that would be highly useful and appreciated, especially if it eliminates hype and puffery and can get me to the real experts. If that’s an associate, that’s fine with me. I have work to be done, and ego-feeding of law firm partners is not part of that work.

Expert locators are a highly fertile area for innovation efforts. You probably already are realizing that, if you create a tool, it can be repeated for other clients and even become a product.

3. Lightweight KM Tools. They are lots of skeletons on the road to the land of successful comprehensive knowledge management projects. They are hard work and, in some legal settings, impossible.

In many law departments (and law firms), there are many ideas about desired, target knowledge tools: news and development mini-sites, clause repositories, negotiation playbooks, best practices, and even tips and after-action learnings.

By reducing the scope of the project, your odds of achieving completion, results, and customer value increase greatly. The term for this is “addition by subtraction.” I’ll discuss in Chapter 46 something we did at Mastercard called the New Technologies Center of Excellence (the acronym was ”NeTCoE”) that illustrates this approach.

The key takeaway from this chapter is that you can focus on certain types or families of innovation efforts that are easy to explain, much simpler and faster to execute than big projects, and show value quickly. And, as I’m sure you have noticed, each generates the opportunity to learn about a client’s business, needs, and problems in a deep way, bring value to the client, and cement your role as an innovative, helpful, trusted advisor, while giving you an opportunity to create something repeatable for other clients or potentially even a new product line.

That’s a lot of wins.

PRO TIP: Three places to find early wins if you are struggling to find a starting point: simple dashboards, expert locators, and lightweight knowledge management tools.

Buy the book on Amazon here.


[Originally posted on DennisKennedy.Blog (https://www.denniskennedy.com/blog/)]

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