This write-up was initially published in Legal Dive.

As your corporate legal division navigates its way by means of 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 support you lower expenses, make greater strategic choices, and drive worth for your organization when it is necessary the most.

But how do you measure if your division is technologically mature? It requires far more 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 could be time to turn out to be far more mature.

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

How you answer these concerns will ascertain your maturity level and support you start out organizing the subsequent measures in your technologies journey.

1. Does your technologies support you prioritize and tackle threat?

Each and every legal matter, no matter how very simple or complicated, carries with it a degree of threat to your small business.

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

You can mitigate this challenge by focusing your efforts on the greatest locations of threat to your small business. Your technologies really should be in a position to support.

Today’s legal tools can supply transparency so you can fully grasp if the operate becoming completed by your internal legal group and outdoors counsel is in proportion to exactly where threat lives in your matters.

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

two. Do you frequently solicit and assess feedback about your technology’s overall performance and evaluate 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.

A single of the ideal approaches to gauge if your technologies investments are delivering worth is by frequently soliciting feedback from the persons who use the tools.

The technologies customers can inform you whether or not a remedy is performing properly and meeting their demands or failing to support them attain their objectives.

A great 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 nevertheless make sense.

Assessments also permit you to address any lagging overall performance challenges prior to they start out to drag your organization down.

three. Do you have a systematic and properly-defined method to transform 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 prior to it is introduced or they fail to fully grasp its rewards, usage will probably be low and your investment will not spend off.

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

They have a strategy in spot and anytime new tools are introduced, they execute that strategy to the letter, the similar way each time.

They train customers on the technologies and ask for their feedback, communicate the rewards early and usually, and continue to support group members turn out to be comfy with the tools extended following the initial roll-out.

A transform management strategy signals that organizations fully grasp how to handle and message transform. These organizations are far more probably to uncover accomplishment in adopting and gaining worth from new technologies.

four. Does your technologies track diversity information?

Functioning with diverse outdoors counsel brings fresh perspectives, tips, and greater final results. For that reason, measuring the diversity of your law firms is vital.

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

They make it quick 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 transform continue to blow, use this time as an chance to believe about exactly where your corporate legal division is on the technologies maturity scale and adjust as required.

The ideal technologies can support your group lower invest, obtain efficiency and drive greater small business worth.