In-house legal ping-pong
Historically, companies have struggled to allocate legal work efficiently among in-house lawyers. With the introduction of AI, the issue has grown larger: how to allocate work among lawyers and AI?
Have you ever sent (or received) an email to the in-house legal team with a note that says, “Please review this asap” and no explanation?
This is one of the biggest resource wasters in modern organisations. Because such an email provides limited (or no) relevant information, the lawyer has to ask a series of questions to better understand the situation. This back-and-forth process, often like a game of ping-pong, can be frustrating for both legal and non-legal teams. The time it takes to gather all the necessary details and understand how to proceed can be significant, leaving everyone involved feeling the strain of inefficiency.
Legal AI assistants that help with review, drafting, and summarising do not solve this problem at all, because the bottleneck is communication between the lawyer and the business manager requesting legal support.
Even more, in-house departments often struggle even with the basic triage of dividing incoming matters into urgent and non-urgent. The cause is not necessarily the lawyers, but rather the fact that they often lack sufficient information for triage.
This problem is not isolated to a few companies but is a widespread issue affecting many in-house legal teams. Even the teams themselves are acutely aware of it. 90% of legal staff report feeling they slow down other companies’ functions. On average, it takes 32% longer to close a deal with a customer due to the involvement of legal.
Through time, companies come up with a unique and ingenious solution: a form to fill in, with questions like “Why should we sign this?” and “What is the business goal?” which are often answered without conveying any meaningful information, such as “It’s a good deal, and we need to hurry”.
Triage is often an underlying source of the problem.
In-house legal teams often struggle to allocate work efficiently. You can’t blame them. They are flooded with diverse matters, and allocating them correctly is challenging. Requests can be easy or complex, urgent or non-urgent, high- or low-value, and repetitive or unique, and they relate to various fields of law. For every request, a responsible layer must understand the factual background, the legal grounds, the business goal and commercial challenges.
Without optimal triage, matters are not allocated to the correct lawyer, and much time is wasted in back-and-forth discussions with the assigned lawyer and the user to gather all relevant information and resolve the matter. Without complete, correct and relevant information, AI does not return correct results.
Offer an intuitive way to request legal support.
Users, who are company employees, need an intuitive way to request legal support that naturally fits into their operational flow. Ideally, they should be using the tools they already use daily, such as email, Slack, or Teams. The system should act as a single entry point for all legal requests, so the users do not need to research which in-house lawyer is the competent (and available) one. Filling out an 18-question form is neither user-friendly nor productive. Users should be encouraged to provide all the relevant data and circumstances so that the lawyers can get a complete picture of the matter.
Allocate matters to the most suitable lawyer. Or to AI.
By implementing a triage process, you can ensure that the right people or AI do the right work. Triage should classify matter requests according to various criteria, such as urgency, importance, complexity, risk, value, legal field, and repetitiveness, and allocate them to the most suitable solution provider. Today, this is the most suitable in-house lawyer. Tomorrow, it will also be an AI agent. Allocating matters among the most suitable lawyers and AI can improve the utilisation of in-house lawyers and enhance the quality and timeliness of the legal work.
Collect and manage data.
Collecting and organising data for each matter is fundamental to successful triage. If the data is concise and complete, the responsible lawyer will require less time to provide a solution, or, in the case of AI, the solution is more likely to be correct.
Analytics to manage your resources better
By implementing a triage process, you can manage your legal team effectively. You will be able to understand which tasks burden your legal team the most and which legal fields require more or less capacity. This can enable you to make informed, data-driven decisions about team management, in-house lawyer hiring and implementation of AI automation.
AI to the rescue
AI assistants have become productivity boosters for everyone, including lawyers. But they do not fix the bottleneck problem. Even with AI assistants, matters can get stuck on lawyers’ desks. AI Automation can change that. It can intake requests, collect information, organise it, and either provide solutions or engage the most suitable lawyer from the team.