Streamline Your Legal Department
Managing a legal department is a careful balancing act. With the need to adhere to certain regulatory principles combined with the constant demand to reduce operating costs, finding ways to do more with less is always a challenge.
However, there are ways to streamline your legal department without compromising on quality. To find out how to simplify your processes, take a look at these key ways to restructure your department now:
Update your core values
The vast majority of businesses have established core values that help to keep staff operating in accordance with the company’s goals. When you incorporate innovation into your organization’s core values, this becomes a key principle for every team, including your legal department.
Of course, you’ll need to provide staff with the flexibility and support they need if you want them to increase innovation. Providing you ensure your legal team has the versatile framework they need to be able to adopt new innovative ways of working; this is a sure-fire way to facilitate restructures and streamline operations within the department.
Set realistic goals
If staff don’t know what they’re aiming for, they may remain unmotivated or unchallenged. Equally, enforcing unrealistic goals can have the same effect and could even harm morale within the workplace. By setting realistic and achievable goals, however, you can ensure your legal team has the incentive they need to operate efficiently and the challenge they require to keep them motivated. What’s more, realistic goals will ensure staff feel successful and rewarded when goals are consistently met and sometimes exceeded.
Access to the right tools
If your staff don’t have the right tools to work with, there’s no way the department can operate productively. Providing your team with legal matter management software is a key way of improving their efficiency, for example. When legal staff can use matter management programs to undertake legal research, manage disputes and contracts, prepare for litigation, and ensure compliance, their workflows can be streamlined with immediate effect.
Facilitate collaboration
Constant collaboration is needed within legal departments, so it’s vital staff are able to work closely with one another. However, in today’s environment, working in close physical proximity to your colleagues simply isn’t possible. Furthermore, the use of flexible work schedules and remote working means that many colleagues are based in different geographical locations.
By using dedicated collaboration software, you can ensure that your team can work closely with one another, regardless of where they’re located. Whether staff are sitting next to each other or are miles apart, the ability to share ideas, update documents, review changes, and strategize will greatly enhance the quality of their outputs. In addition to this, collaborating in this way minimizing the time it takes to deal with matters, which means higher quality outputs in a reduced amount of time.
Introducing New Processes in Your Legal Department
If you’re eager to streamline your legal department, it can be tempting to introduce a range of new processes at the same time. However, a strategic approach is likely to be more effective. When you carefully consider which tools and protocols will benefit your staff, you’ll be able to streamline your legal department with greater success and maximize your results.