What Banking Figured Out in 1969 That Legal Still Hasn't: The Case for Modernizing How You Work

Picture this: it's the 1920s. There's a bank on the corner, and outside it, a long line of people snaking down the street. Rain or shine, if you needed to check your balance, make a deposit, or ask a question, you waited. You had no choice.  

The service, when they finally got it, was probably great. But the experience of getting there? Brutal. And completely unnecessary, as it turned out.

Now, fast forward to today, if I described a department where business users have to track down the right person, send emails and keep track of communication chains, and genuinely aren't sure if anyone's even picked up their request — would you say that department has a service problem? Because that's legal right now at most companies.

Your business users aren't standing on a sidewalk in the rain, but they might as well be. They're shooting off direct messages, tapping colleagues on the shoulder, or worse — just not asking at all because they don't want to bother anyone. And while your lawyers are talented, committed, and trying their best to accommodate every request, the system around them is still operating like it's 1920.

But don’t worry. The good news is that banking figured out a better way. And so can legal.

The ATM Moment: Why Access Changes Everything

In 1969, the ATM came out. Think about what that actually meant for people. After 40 years of standing in line, you could walk up to a machine, at any hour, and get the information you needed. Deposit money. Take money out. No teller required. It probably felt like magic.

Then 1997 rolls around and digital banking starts. Do you have a banking app on your phone right now? Do you take pictures of checks and deposit them from your couch? I’d like to bet that you probably do. We all do and nobody thinks twice about it anymore.

Here's the thing though. The ATM didn't replace the bank and digital banking didn't replace the ATM. Each step didn't blow up what came before it — it just made access easier, faster, and more available to the people who needed it. That's what banking figured out.

And that journey, from queuing in the rain to checking your balance at midnight in your pajamas, took about 70 years. Now, I'm not saying legal needs 70 years, but I am saying the journey is real, it takes intention, and you have to actually start it.

So, where is legal on that timeline right now? Because for a lot of the teams I talk to, they’re somewhere around 1950. The line is a little shorter maybe, but people are still waiting outside. And your team and ‘customers’ deserve better than that.

What Legal’s "Mobile Banking App" Should Look Like

If the ATM was the first breakthrough and the mobile banking app is where we are today, what does legal's version of that look like in practice?

We call it the Legal Front Door. The concept is pretty simple: all legal work — every request, every question, every matter — passes through a single entry point. And this isn’t restricted to just contracting work. It encompasses everything that touches legal, such as employment, compliance, intellectual property, or a random question someone has about a vendor gift they just received.

When you start using a Legal Front Door, a few really powerful things follow. You have data, reporting, visibility into what your team is actually working on, how complex it is, and where the bottlenecks are. Your business users also benefit as they can engage legal in the way that’s most familiar to them and feel reassured that their requests are getting captured, triaged, and routed appropriately. And your lawyers — your most expensive, most valuable resource — are spending their time on high value strategic work instead of answering the same 150 questions every single day.

I was in a meeting recently where someone told me that because employee turnover had gotten so high at their company, all legal does now is answer the same questions on repeat because there's no institutional knowledge left. The Legal Front Door solves that. When you build self-service into the system, you embrace deflection as an actual strategy so that when something does land with legal, it actually belongs there.

Real-World Example: Kyndryl

Kyndryl spun off from IBM in 2021 and has become the world's largest provider of IT infrastructure services. They have around 73,000 employees operating across 60 countries. And their legal team — just the lawyers and legal specialists — is about 400 people plus.  

When Kyndryl came to Checkbox, they had no legal ops function. Work was getting done, deals were closing, and lawyers were busy. But there was no data, visibility, or way to answer the questions that actually matter when you're trying to run a department at that scale.

Ann, their managing executive, said she'd get a call from the UK saying they needed to hire another lawyer because they were so busy. And her response was essentially — okay, but busy compared to what? Everyone feels busy. Give me something more than that. She couldn't get it, because the systems to capture it just didn't exist.

So, here's the first lesson from Kyndryl. The problem isn't always that work isn't getting done. Sometimes the problem is that you can't see it. And if you can't see it, you can't make smart decisions about it. You can't allocate resources efficiently or identify where automation would actually help. You're just flying blind and hoping for the best.

The second lesson is about people. In parallel with implementing the tool, Ann hired a legal ops professional. And the person they found, Caitlin, didn't walk in and tell the lawyers how to do their jobs. She sat down with each lawyer and said, "tell me what you do and how I can help." And suddenly, lawyers who had been skeptical had a very long list of things they actually wanted help with. One of the most resistant people on the team interviewed her, told Ann she'd lost her mind for even considering this hire, and then came back and said she was fantastic and he wanted to hire another one.

The third lesson is about where you start. Kyndryl made a deliberate choice to go big on their first use case rather than start with something small and safe. They picked customer contracts — the highest volume, highest visibility, most revenue-connected work their legal team does. Because if you want the business to get excited about what legal is building, start with something the business actually cares about. The return on investment is obvious, the impact is immediate, and suddenly legal isn't a bottleneck anymore.

They also made an internal commercial — an actual promotional video, played at an all-hands meeting, to build excitement around the launch. I thought this was extremely clever because buying the technology is only half the battle. Getting people to actually use it (and want to use it) is other half. And the way you win that half is by making it real, making it tangible, and answering the question every lawyer and every business user is quietly asking: what's in it for me?

Navigating Internal Resistance from IT

Here's something I can almost guarantee will happen when you start this journey. Someone is going to tell you to just use Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk, or Power Apps. And they're going to say it like it's the most obvious thing in the world. "The whole business is already on this. Why can't legal just use it?"

That someone is almost always IT. And look — IT is sometimes like the strong arm of the law. They have a hundred times the budget that legal does and they are not shy about it. But legal is a bespoke part of the business. It exists for a reason and it should be treated as such — including when it comes to selecting tools. I'd ask IT: would you ever let legal tell you what tools to run your department on? Of course not. So why does it work the other way?

That said, you're not going to win this by digging in and hoping IT backs down. Here are a few tips to help you navigate it:

1. Bring IT in early. Don't ambush them at the end when everyone's excited and ready to sign. Get them in the room at the start.

2. Speak their language. Don't just tell leadership that you want a purpose-built tool because it feels right. Talk about the total cost of ownership, speed to value, and what it actually costs when legal is a bottleneck.

3. Make it a win for IT too. Kyndryl essentially told IT — let us handle this ourselves, we'll be fully self-contained, get us off your list. IT said yes immediately because their backlog was already a mile long.

4. Frame it around risk. If legal is missing 30 to 40 percent of requests because business users don't want to bother anyone, that's not an efficiency problem. That's a risk problem. And that framing gets attention.

5. Find your champions. Get the lawyers who are on board to be vocal about it. Leadership buy-in from inside the legal team is the single biggest predictor of whether these projects succeed or stall.

The Maturity Curve: You Don't Build a Banking App in a Day

Nobody went from standing in line at a bank in the 1920s to depositing checks on their phone overnight. There were decades of incremental steps in between, each one building on the last. Legal's modernization journey works exactly the same way.

What I find when I talk to legal teams is that most of them are living in stage one where requests are coming in from everywhere with no systems of record, no data, and no reporting. And the business is telling them they need to be at stage four which entails having fully automated, AI-ready, metrics-driven legal operations.

The north star is stage four. But the path runs through two and three, and that's okay. What matters is that you start, you follow the stages, and — this is important — you pick a vendor that can walk the whole journey with you. Because too many teams pick a tool that can only do stage two, accomplish it, and then have to start all over again because their vendor can't take them any further.

You can't automate what you can't see. Visibility comes first and everything else follows.

Key Takeaways

Banks didn't modernize for fun. They modernized because their customers standing outside in the rain deserved better.  

Legal is at that moment right now.

So, I'll leave you with the same question I leave every legal team I talk to. What is the one thing leadership keeps asking you that you can't answer with data? The one KPI, the one OKR, the one question that comes up in every meeting and every time it does you have to change the subject or give a vague answer. That's your starting point. That's your ATM moment.

You don't have to have it all figured out before you start. You don't need to know what stage four looks like in perfect detail. You just need to take the first step, pick the right partner to walk the journey with you, and sell the what's in it for me to every lawyer, business user, and skeptic in the room.

The ATM didn't replace the bank. It just made it work better — for everyone.

If you're not sure where to start, that's exactly what we're here for. Whether you're in stage one trying to get basic visibility or stage three ready to push into automation, our technology consultants have walked this journey with legal teams at every size and every stage. Schedule a call with us today and let's figure out together what your ATM moment looks like.