Just do this yourselves, won't you...?
How to avoid being the bottleneck in your organisation, by helping others to help themselves (providing a "vending machine" of simple legal tasks to your client)
For the last few months I’ve been giving training to in house legal teams, showing them how they can use AI to make their lives easier.
In House Lawyers are a good market for me because they’re always being asked to do more with less (less resources, less cost, faster turnaround), they are often (unfairly) seen as a “cost” to the business and they’ve also been my clients for legal work for the last 25 years so I feel like I know them well (I’ve also been in their position at least six times now, working in-house, full time with my clients).
One team I ran a workshop with last week described a process that they’d really prefer not to deal with in the legal team, but which was passed their way because they’d always just done it (customer onboarding). It led to a conversation about triage and how they received their instructions.
I showed them how they might use a workflow to triage work that came into the team. The real excitement however came when I showed how this process could be turned into an interactive web page that would carry out that process directly for the client - meaning that the sorting process would happen before the matter ever got to the legal team.
In the latest edition of my newsletter - AI for In House Counsel - you’ll find the workflow and also a short video describing how to use it. You will still need someone from your IT team to upload the page to your intranet but that’s an easy process. (I could demonstrate how you’d host it but not all sites are built the same and if I host it then…well I’d receive all instructions into your legal team (which I don’t want either!)
This wasn’t what I’d set out to cover in the workshop but it was what my client wanted and they were pleased with the results.
You can find my newsletter (and all back issues of the newsletter) at skilldiligence.com/newsletter-archive
And if you want to find a whole load of ideas for workflows for a legal team (pre-made so you can just upload them) you’ll find that in my book - “Useful lawyers”
I enjoy workshops where the client suggests the idea. If you have any suggestions for things you’d like to see built (as a workflow or agent) please do let me know and I’ll get that built and back to you.
(For low value repetitive tasks - offer a vending machine rather than space in your email box)