Unveiling the Power of Legal Workflow Management Software for Legal Departments

Traditional manual processes that have long been commonplace in the legal function can be time-consuming, error-prone, and hinder the department’s overall productivity. However, with the advent of innovative legal workflow management software, the legal industry has been on the forefront of a profound revolution.  

Legal workflow management software has the potential to revolutionize and create a more agile future for the legal function.  

What is Legal Workflow Management Software?

Legal workflow management software refers to specialized software applications designed to optimize and streamline the workflow within in-house legal departments. This type of software offers a comprehensive set of tools and features that enable legal professionals to better streamline and manage their work.  

The main purpose of legal workflow management software is to automate repetitive tasks by reducing the administrative burden, allowing legal professionals to focus on more critical and complex aspects of their work.

Why You Should Automate Legal Workflow Processes

Today, businesses are requiring increasing amounts and growing types of legal support. This demand however, does not often translate to more resources in the legal department to meet that increase. This is partly due to the expectation that legal should do more with less, and partly because most legal teams lack the data to demonstrate their value to the business and to justify needing additional resources to meet company goals. As a result, the business either becomes dissatisfied with the turnaround times from legal, or the lawyers end up working in overdrive just to keep up – with high risks of burnout. Both effects are further aggravated by the efficiency and opaqueness of legal workflows, which sets the business up to misunderstand legal, leading to the dreaded sentiment of “legal being the bottleneck”.  

Common challenges include the time-consuming nature of manual processes, the risk of errors in repetitive tasks, difficulties in managing deadlines, lack of standardization across workflows, limited collaboration among team members and lack of visibility.

Activate Data & Visibility Over Services

Implementing legal workflow management software can effectively address these challenges where one of the most significant and unique advantages is their ability to activate data and visibility through dashboards and analytics to provide valuable insights into service performance. With Checkbox, you not only gain visibility over incoming requests, but can leverage powerful, customized reports to drill-down into workload and capacity, and view data on request volume, type and status, SLAs, cycle times and more.  The full picture for data is unlocked, where it not only enables better management and transparency to request for resources and demonstrate the value of legal but enables legal to come to the strategic table with unique business insights.

Better Business Experience & Optimization of Legal Work

Legal workflow management software enables the legal team to move away from the manual, ad hoc collection, sorting and assignment of requests to creating a centralized intake channel. Legal requests are submitted via a standardized form, creating consistency and providing a streamlined way to capture information, build in controls and enable basic reporting.

In Checkbox, the platform goes beyond and enables an automated and intelligent intake and triage system by leveraging AI or a conditions and logic engine. Requests are automatically triaged to the most appropriate resource or lawyer based on considerations such as capacity, request complexity and specialization. With Checkbox, business users can access the legal department through an AI-powered legal front door, making adoption and navigation easier than ever. Meet business users where they are—Slack, Teams, email, intranet portal & more, and leverage AI to allow a conversational experience for business users to submit their requests.    

Implementing a legal intake and triage automation solution removes the manual management of requests. For legal teams, better intake and triage streamlines the submission and allocation of requests, ensuring lawyers are always working on tasks that are high value and best suited to them. Automated triage also unlocks the ability for non-legal requests to be automatically redirected to other parts of the business, removing administrative overhead and promoting collaboration.  

Accelerated Request Resolution

By automating legal workflows, this can significantly fast-track the resolution of requests and enhance efficiency for the legal team. Self-service journeys can be created to guide business users through contracts, knowledge resources, policies, FAQs and more. This self-service approach fosters a culture of empowerment, allowing non-legal staff to obtain quick answers to their common queries without over-reliance on legal professionals.  

With Checkbox’s AI-powered triage, requests that require lawyer advice or dedicated consultation can be automatically assigned to the most appropriate lawyer based on factors of capacity and specialization.

Use Cases of Legal Workflow Management Software

Legal workflow management software addresses a wide range of use cases within legal departments. Here are some of the key use cases that this software effectively addresses:

• AI Legal Front Door: Legal workflow management software can be used as a front door for the legal department where it can capture requests from anywhere in the business. It can also guide users through the initial request to resolution.  
• Task Management: The software facilitates the assignment and tracking of tasks, allowing legal professionals to stay on top of their responsibilities and manage workloads.
• Reporting and Analytics: Legal workflow management software generates comprehensive reports and legal analytics, providing valuable insights into requests, team performance and resource allocation.

• Regulatory Compliance: The software can help legal departments and firms adhere to complex regulatory requirements by automating compliance checks and documentation.
• Intake & Triage: Intake and triage works with legal workflow management software to capture requests from the business and then triage them to the appropriate lawyer based on type, function and priority.  
• Contract Automation: The software allows legal to collect information or connect with systems to automatically generate a contract that is completely ready to review and sign.  
• Legal Policy / FAQ: Using legal workflow management, it is easier to address policy inquiries instantly, using AI or other routing methods to send users to a relevant resource.  
• Process Automation: Users can automate, streamline and execute processes between people, systems and data using legal workflow management software.  

Common Features of Legal Workflow Management Software

Where Legal Workflow Management Software Fits in the Legal Technology Stack

Legal workflow management software plays a central role within the legal technology stack. It is a crucial component that can connect various technologies and optimizes the overall role of legal operations. Here are some ways in which it fits in relation to other legal tech:

• In-House Legal Software: While in-house legal software might handle specific tasks like legal research or case management, the workflow management software streamlines the end-to-end processes, including intake, triage, collaboration, document automation and reporting. It acts as a bridge that ensures seamless communication and collaboration between different legal tools.
• Matter Management Software: Legal workflow management and matter management software are both essential components of a comprehensive system. Matter management, however, focuses more on organizing specific items like documents while legal workflow management software complements it streamlining and automating the processes of matter management.  
• Contract Lifecycle Management Software: By integrating legal workflow management software with contract lifecycle management, it provides a way for lawyers to automate, monitor and optimize the various stages of the contract lifecycle from creation to execution to renewal. CL offers features like task automation, deadline tracking, and collaboration tools, empowering legal teams to manage contracts with greater ease.  

‍How Legal Workflow Management Software Works with Intake & Triage

Legal workflow management software plays a crucial role in streamlining and optimizing the intake and triage process for legal departments. Intake and triage refers to the process of receiving, managing and delegating legal requests from business users to the appropriate lawyer to resolve them.  

With Checkbox, for example, users can access the legal department through an AI-powered legal front door, that allows the legal department to meet business users where they are. Through our AI-powered workflow engine, routing is determined automatically triaged and assigned to the relevant self-service tools, team or lawyer.  

When a new request from the business comes in through the legal department, legal workflow management software acts as a central hub to receive and capture required information. This can be done through forms, emails or other communication channels that business users use to submit a request.  

Once the information is collected, the software can triage the request by categorizing them based on predefined criteria and send it off to the right lawyer to resolve it. The software can also generate reports and analytics related to the intake and triage process, providing valuable insights.

‍How Checkbox Can Help

Checkbox is the leading legal workflow management software that enables legal teams to power their workflows and request management with AI.

With Checkbox, you can build an AI Legal driven front door or portal and guide business users through contract requests, knowledge, policies, FAQs and more. Streamline legal services, achieve efficiency and strengthen partnership with the business. Loved by legal and the business for our ease of use, features, and support, companies like Allianz, Coca-Cola Europacific Partners and BMW, and transform their workflows and request management with Checkbox.

Curious to understand more about how our platform can transform your service delivery? Book a call with one of our legal technology consultants to learn more.