At LegalTechTalk in London last week, I spoke on a panel and shared 5 tips on how in-house legal teams can transform for the digital age and truly reinvent their legal function. The energy in the room was incredible, and the insights shared by me, Chris Combs (founder, LinkSquares) and Anand Pandya (Accenture) were a big hit.

Reinvention is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but it’s not about blowing everything up. It’s about being intentional with change - focusing on how legal can operate more like a modern business, and less like a bottleneck.

Today, I’m sharing the five game-changing tips we discussed, with actionable steps you can implement now.

Tip 1: Adopt a “Product Team” mindset

Many legal teams are stuck in reactive mode, fighting fires with little space to breathe. And if you’re building a legal function from scratch, it’s easy to get swept up with that style of working from day one, and hard to break the cycle.

Traditional Approach:

• Wait for requests

• Handle each one individually

• Seen as bottlenecks

Product Team Approach:

• Identify recurring patterns

• Create self-service solutions

• Anticipate business needs

Actionable tip: Start by mapping your legal team's most common user requests and identify one process that can be standardized and streamlined as a product.

💡 Spend ages marking up 3rd party MNDAs? Draft a simple 3 pager template with your own logo on it.

💡 Spend ages reviewing all MNDAs? Maybe not reviewing any at all is the answer for your team - triage them as ultra low risk and get business users to self-serve, from creation to signature.

Tip 2: Become data-driven

Data is the love language of the business, and business leaders respect teams that speak in numbers. This can be hard for wordsmith lawyers, because we are educated, trained and depended upon to translate business goals into words (via contracts or negotiation calls, for instance).

“Speaking data” gives you credibility, helps you prove the value of your legal team (including how it supports wider business goals), and helps you justify why you need more resources. When you have real data on turnaround times, workload distribution, and contract risk, you can shift from defensive to proactive.

Actionable tip: start tracking 1-2 simple metrics connected to business goals e.g. if you work in a scale up, speed to closing deals will be a business goal so track:

• How many deals we closed on your paper vs 3rd party paper

• How many turns there were on each sales contract

• How long each sales contract was with Legal (starting from the first email request to agreed form)

Pro tip 1: I know how busy you are - so if for instance your business is quarterly driven, take 2 days at the start of the new quarter to review these data points as part of your lookback on how you can improve. Report on these to leadership to show where you’re moving fast and having impact, and where you are moving slow and need resources.

Pro tip 2: Even non-legal tools like Jira (use it to create a form adapted for legal intake) can help track basic data on your performance (turnaround times etc).

Tip 3: Thoughtfully embed AI and automation

The operative word here is “thoughtfully”. Right now, there is a constant rush to do something - anything - with AI. Every functional head is coming under pressure to justify how their team is using AI to boost productivity and reduce spend.

But tech is only helpful when it’s solving the right problem, so that’s where you need to start.

Before evaluating any AI tool, ask:

• What are the top 2-3 pain points keeping me awake at night?

• What is the current process for those (even if it’s awful and clunky, map it out!)

• Where exactly does that current process break down? 🫠

• What does an ideal process look like (speed, simplicity etc)?

Actionable tips:

👉🏼 Conduct a time-tracking exercise over a week to identify 3-5 repetitive manual tasks that could be automated.

👉🏼 Start with no code solutions, ideally even a tool that the company already uses (like a slackbot in slack, or simple intake form in Jira or Zendesk if IT is already using it!).

👉🏼 There are plenty legal AI tools on the market now uniquely designed for in-house legal use cases that come with a freemium version, so you can even try them for free before committing to the spend!

Tip 4: Upskill - build a tech-forward team

Transformation is very much a two-pronged approach. It’s about growing the right team capabilities in terms of mindset AND skillset.

Mindset Shift: you want to get from an attitude of "we've always done it this way" to "how might we do this better?". Carve out play time for your team to experiment, “fail” and try again. Encourage this and set a regular cadence for “playtime”.

Technical Skills: you don’t need to create programmers here, just build enough technical literacy to partner effectively with technology. Get folks skilled in using dashboards, workflow tools and legal AI platforms - not just how they work, but how to apply their judgment when using them.

Actionable steps:

1. Monthly Experiment Fridays - create safe space for trying new approaches

2. Tech Skills Buddy System - pair team members with different comfort levels

Tip 5: Design for a user experience

This is about putting yourself in their shoes to improve their experience of working with you.

What’s it like for them to engage legal? Slow, scary, complex? Do they know where to do that, or who to approach first? Is any of the process confusing for them?

Rethinking legal from the user’s perspective changes everything because you start optimising for clarity, consistency and accessibility.

Actionable tips:

• Map user journeys and identify friction points

• Test and iterate based on user feedback

• Measure success from the user's perspective

Final questions from the floor

We wrapped with a few questions, and here are two that speak to common friction points I am asked about all the time.

Q: “How do you get buy-in for budget to pay for tech and innovation?”

A: The key is to frame legal tech as a value enabler: show how it supports faster deals, stronger controls and compliance, helps avoid litigation, whatever your company goals are… Also, get key senior internal stakeholders with a vested interest to champion this too (e.g. if you’re order form process is poor and causing headaches for Finance, help your CFO understand how the tool will fix that and make their life easier too so they can advocate for legal buying this tech on your behalf).

Q: “How do you separate AI hype from reality?”

A: See tip 3 above - start with the problem, not the tech. Pilot tools in one high friction area, especially if it’s easy to automate (e.g generating MNDAs on your paper with your company details in them). Measure the outcome, and iterate.

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That's a wrap for this edition! If you found this valuable, forward it to a colleague who's also building the future of in-house legal.

Until next time,
Sarah

P.S. Want to dive deeper? I run one-off, 90 min 1:1 online consultations to teach you how to transform your legal function. Reply with "TRANSFORMER" if you're interested!