This write-up was initially published in Legal Dive.

As your corporate legal division navigates its way via this era of financial uncertainty, assessing your team’s technological maturity really should be at the top rated of your priority list.

Sophisticated technologies can assistance you lower charges, make much better strategic choices, and drive worth for your organization when it is required the most.

But how do you measure if your division is technologically mature? It requires additional than just operating an inventory of your tools, assessing their age, and monitoring their use.

You have to have to dig in and analyze your solutions’ capabilities to see if they meet your demands. If not, it may well be time to grow to be additional mature.

Right here are 4 queries you may well not have believed to ask when measuring your legal team’s technological maturity.

How you answer these queries will establish your maturity level and assistance you get started organizing the subsequent actions in your technologies journey.

1. Does your technologies assistance you prioritize and tackle danger?

Every single legal matter, no matter how uncomplicated or complicated, carries with it a degree of danger to your small business.

Price and spending budget overruns are important dangers that can severely influence your organization and your legal department’s standing inside the business. You actually can not afford to go into matters blind.

You can mitigate this challenge by focusing your efforts on the most significant regions of danger to your small business. Your technologies really should be in a position to assistance.

Today’s legal tools can offer transparency so you can fully grasp if the function getting performed by your internal legal group and outdoors counsel is in proportion to exactly where danger lives in your matters.

This assists your law division safeguard your organization from excess or unnecessary charges and show higher worth to your small business.

two. Do you frequently solicit and assess feedback about your technology’s efficiency and examine it to your objectives?

Legal technologies really should be a extended-term investment that grows and evolves with your organization’s demands.

If your technologies is not meeting these demands, it could be time to reassess its worth to your organization.

One particular of the most effective approaches to gauge if your technologies investments are delivering worth is by frequently soliciting feedback from the folks who use the tools.

The technologies customers can inform you regardless of whether a option is performing nicely and meeting their demands or failing to assistance them attain their objectives.

A superior rule of thumb is to execute these assessments annually.

Assessments really should be viewed in the context of your small business objectives and compared to your roadmap to make certain that your plans nonetheless make sense.

Assessments also permit you to address any lagging efficiency difficulties ahead of they get started to drag your organization down.

three. Do you have a systematic and nicely-defined strategy to adjust management?

How you deal with the introduction of new technologies in your legal division can make or break the technology’s adoption and effectiveness.

If customers are not comfy with the technologies ahead of it is introduced or they fail to fully grasp its added benefits, usage will probably be low and your investment will not spend off.

The most technologically mature legal departments have systematic and nicely-defined approaches to managing technological adjust.

They have a strategy in location and anytime new tools are introduced, they execute that strategy to the letter, the very same way just about every time.

They train customers on the technologies and ask for their feedback, communicate the added benefits early and generally, and continue to assistance group members grow to be comfy with the tools extended right after the initial roll-out.

A adjust management strategy signals that organizations fully grasp how to handle and message adjust. These organizations are additional probably to come across good results in adopting and gaining worth from new technologies.

four. Does your technologies track diversity information?

Functioning with diverse outdoors counsel brings fresh perspectives, suggestions, and much better final results. As a result, measuring the diversity of your law firms is important.

Sophisticated legal technologies consists of diversity modules that automatically track the diversity information of legal service providers.

They make it effortless to track if firms are assigning diverse teams to your matters, are diverse in their timekeeper roles, and if they are committed to advertising and hiring diverse employees.

With this information in hand, you can act and have proactive discussions with outdoors counsel to make certain that your law firms are committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DE&ampI).

Concluding thoughts

As the winds of financial adjust continue to blow, use this time as an chance to feel about exactly where your corporate legal division is on the technologies maturity scale and adjust as important.

The suitable technologies can assistance your group lower devote, get efficiency and drive much better small business worth.