Building a Strong Business Case for Legal Tech

Adopting legal tech can often be met with pushback and one of the most overlooked aspects of building a strong business case is understanding your stakeholders’ motives. Building a case requires lawyers to think outside the box and consider who this legal tech solution will be impacting and what it will take to get the stakeholders on board. To help you understand this process a little better, we have put together a few tips on building an irresistible legal tech business case. 

Identify Your Stakeholders and Where They Fit In 

Oftentimes, in-house legal teams approach legal tech by focusing solely on the legal team itself. In a sense, this makes sense because it revolves around their department, but the benefits of legal tech go far beyond one team. Legal professionals must understand that the person signing off on the budget isn’t necessarily from the legal team. She or he may be a business user with responsibilities that extend to the entire organization, like the CFO, who needs to understand how the investment is going to benefit the business beyond the legal department.

When analyzing the quantitative and qualitative benefits of legal tech, you must focus on how it will benefit the broader business. For example, your business case should highlight the speed at which legal tech will deliver outcomes they need without any delays or hiccups which ultimately contributes to the bottom line. As soon as you can show the business-focused benefits, your business case will start to resonate with the stakeholders and become more irresistible. You will be able to present yourself as a partner in their success which is a win-win scenario that will get you the support of the business making your case stronger.

Focus on ROI and Justifying Your Investment 

Another important way to build a strong business case for legal tech is to understand the ROI. This means asking how many people are involved with this process? How often do we do this process? How long does this process take each time? By answering these questions, you’ll be able to calculate the total human hours for that particular task in a given week, month or year. This will also allow you to attach a dollar figure by multiplying the salary of the average lawyer which will calculate the cost of a certain activity. You will then be able to look at the equivalent before and after state and ask, “how does that compare?”. You should also be sure to factor in costs associated with the process which may include training, change management, switching costs and risk of execution and transition. 

Understand The Broader Corporate Strategy 

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Another important way to build a strong business case is to align your business case with the broader corporate strategy. In-house legal teams often make the mistake of building a legal focused business case and they may overlook the opportunity to think about how the adoption of this technology meets the strategic needs of the wider business. Once you align these two thoughts, you will be able to present your business case in a way that gives your company a competitive advantage. 

Legal software like LeasePilot helps legal teams streamline their processes so both attorneys and non attorneys can focus on accelerating business strategically. This means printing automated abstracts rather than spending countless hours summarizing deal terms. Never re-keying the same information into multiple systems. Generating transactional reports for lenders, investors, and buyers rather than have lawyers read and re-read the underlying leases ad nauseum. Ultimately, the impact is radically more efficient legal teams that free up a massive amount of wasted human potential so it can be re-directed toward pursuing more meaningful objectives.

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