As Legal Operations professionals, we want to find a silver bullet software or application that will solve for the inefficiencies of the many different processes and unique team solutions that seemingly address the same problem. We want an Enterprise Legal Management System (ELM) that will magically normalize processes across multiple stakeholders and create efficiencies from the moment of its expensive implementation and integration with the 19 systems already in use by various legal silos. Many of these ELM products are excellent, but without accompanying enterprise commitment their value diminishes. Low-code and n0-code applications offer an opportunity to introduce your Legal Department to new ways of working in baby steps, while at the same time providing short-term efficiencies and productivity gains.
Simply buying a silver bullet ELM does not address the way the users in your Legal Department are used to working and does not change behavior or thought processes. Lawyers and the paraprofessionals who support them are used to being strong individual contributors. The systems they have designed – or the design they inherited from those before them – that’s what works for them. The longer the system is in use the more the user perspective on efficiency and knowledge management deficits caused by a siloed, stagnant, or manual processwane.
Low-code and no-code applications have been available in the marketplace for years and are now seeing adoption in corporate legal departments. These platforms provide an application development environment through a graphical user-interface, and do not require understanding of coding languages. Novice users can take a shared spreadsheet and create a small app accessible by many stakeholders to centralize access to the information normally kept in the spreadsheet and facilitate reporting on that information. Low-code development platforms enable accelerated delivery of business applicationsand allow a wider range of people to contribute to an application’s development—not only those with coding skills.
For example, one contract team may have a review and approval workflow with its corresponding Legal team that is very different from another contract and Legal partnership. If both teams participate in the exercise of building a low-code or no-code workflow solution that provides useful insights and reporting on the metrics those teams care about, both teams will understand the mindset of innovation and Operations will understand the processes an ELM product will need to accommodate. The solutions may be different, but walking through creating the solutions provides valuable insights as to much “normalization” is possible through ELM.
Low-code and no-code platforms offer Legal Departments a stepping-stone to Enterprise Legal Management. Teams can build solutions to small workflow and efficiency problems quickly, which helps map critical processes and foster an acceptance of change and innovation in small, manageable chunks. Operations professionals – the ultimate vetters and purchasers of ELM solutions – can participate in these low-risk and low-cost solution building exercises with individual teams. Even if the solutions are temporary pending an ELM roll out, the work done to move one process or workflow forward can be repurposed for ELM integration.
