Callie Sierra
Posted 16 April 2019

Last week, we had the opportunity to partner with Lexology, the most comprehensive source of international legal updates, analysis and insights, on presenting a webinar titled: From Library to Contract: Automating the Knowledge Lifecycle. During the webinar, we discussed how forward-thinking law firms and legal teams are working together to streamline the entire service delivery process - from accessing and sharing knowledge to automating contract execution.

In short, the webinar explored best practices for managing intellectual property to improve service delivery. To give you a glimpse, here are some of the key takeaways from the webinar, which you can now watch on-demand.

Focus on Building a Better Knowledge Library

Efficient and high-quality service delivery starts by building a better knowledge library. Your firm’s knowledge library should be a place where lawyers can quickly find the information they need. However, all too often, knowledge libraries hold information that is out-of-date, impossible to find, or simply irrelevant. Building an exemplary knowledge library requires careful and strategic planning: during the webinar, we outlined some of the steps that you need to take to make know-how accessible and relevant for users.

A few best practices to consider:

• Use practice-based taxonomies and firm-driven metadata to make content easily discoverable
• Include previews, ratings and comments to provide more context around documents
• Implement gatekeeper workflows to ensure know-how stays up-to-date
  
  

Streamline Contract Processes with Automation

Once your firm has its know-how in order, it’s time to devise a plan for leveraging that knowledge. Automating the contract process, you can quickly put high-quality managed IP to work to generate quicker, more secure contracts.

More times that not, contract drafting is done by junior staff or associates. Contract automation enables junior staff members to easily and quickly generate contracts by filling out dynamic, web-based questionnaires created automatically from input by subject matter experts. This approach not only speeds up contract drafting, but also greatly reduces the risk of human error.

During the webinar, we discussed some of the key considerations for contact automation:

• Drive contract creation from within Microsoft Word - automated contracts needn’t require programmers or coding knowledge
• Standardise multiple variants to ensure quality
• Identify opportunities to integrate CMS and financial systems
  
  

Deliver Innovative Service with Client Portals

Once your contracts are created, you need to deliver them to clients. Client automation portals enable you to make your firm-managed contracts available to clients 24/7, on a self-service basis. These client-facing online portals streamline document creation, making it possible to engage in more sustainable fixed-fee arrangements, while also enhancing service delivery.

Client portals offer an array of benefits to both law firms, and their clients. Here are just a few of the benefits we discussed in the webinar:

• Provide clients with high quality, value-driven contracts managed by the firm and updated with current legislation
• Ability to route contracts to lawyers for final approval
• Better position firms to win new business

Watch the Webinar

During the course of the webinar, we covered a ton of information on how law firms and legal teams can better manage their internal know-how and create innovative services for clients. If you weren’t able to attend, but would like to view the recording, you can register to see the webinar here.