Focus on: The legal department’s transformation

The role of legal department has fundamentally changed over the years from legal services and advisory offering to more of business partnerships. The historical legal department modus-operandi are currently not a real working model and hence, it should move towards more pro-active role; in-house lawyers should be at the centre of finding solutions that will help the businesses, add to the overall transformation at all fronts within the organisation, and have real legal value.

For legal departments, ensuring they are establishing strategies to keep up with best practices is key to ensuring the business is well placed to effectively manage risk.

Legal transformation is a spectrum, and every legal department team member will find themselves somewhere along the line, even if the legal team member does not feel quite ready for technology. There are plenty of ways legal team member can begin to optimise the processes and shift the needle from bottleneck to strategic business initiative.

We can summarise the pillars to transform legal department into four main ideas:

Digital transformation;

People adaptation, innovation, collaboration, and agility;

Cost optimisation;

Effective legal sourcing.

Legal departments should have a clear strategy which must contain vision and mission. To achieve such a strategy, there should be distinctive strategic initiatives that would lead to such change and achievement. Digital transformation is a key factor in leading such strategy achievement, and technology plays a fundamental role in that.

The risk and regulatory landscapes are also critical and are interminably expanding, imposing new requirements and increased complexity for the operating business. Organisations are having to adapt to an ever-evolving global marketplace, balancing regulatory and business demands and an expanding trend for digitisation. These challenges are becoming ever more incorporated into business strategies and KPIs, and while organisations are optimising team synergies, legal departments are equally evolving from acting as separated ‘advisory units’ to acting as strategic partners to the business.

Key features of an effective legal transformation strategy can be summarised as follows:

1. Alignment of the legal transformation strategy with the business’s overall objectives.

2. identify the most critical business requirements from legal department including clear set of templates and guidelines.

3. Technology adaptation and usage.

4. Clear legal team members KPIs.

5. Continuous training and development.