From reactive to proactive: how legal teams can use data to unlock business value

The rise in col­lab­o­ra­tion plat­forms and oth­er cloud-based busi­ness appli­ca­tions has helped com­pa­nies improve effi­cien­cy. But the shift away from sin­gle-suite enter­prise solu­tions has also cre­at­ed chal­lenges for busi­ness­es, and for cor­po­rate legal depart­ments in par­tic­u­lar, as data becomes trapped in silos across mul­ti­ple sys­tems.

One major issue with siloed data is that it is dif­fi­cult for legal teams to access and con­trol this infor­ma­tion for reg­u­la­to­ry and com­pli­ance pur­pos­es, mak­ing it hard­er to man­age risk effec­tive­ly. The more the data is siloed, the hard­er it is to find and the big­ger impact it has on pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, says Kel­ly Gris­wold, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer
of Onna.

“With­out the right tools, it is very time con­sum­ing and inef­fi­cient for legal depart­ments to find what they are look­ing for in legal dis­cov­ery,” she says. “Using a sys­tem like Onna helps mate­ri­al­ly cut down on the time and cost of per­form­ing a col­lec­tion, so this opti­mis­es pro­duc­tiv­i­ty but also gives access to infor­ma­tion that would have oth­er­wise just been very dif­fi­cult to find in the first place.”

Part of the rea­son why legal depart­ments need spe­cial­ist tech­nol­o­gy to help them cap­ture and retrieve this data is because it comes in an unstruc­tured for­mat, which makes it dif­fi­cult to process and under­stand.

“Mak­ing data con­sum­able, through tech­nol­o­gy that is eas­i­ly adopt­ed with no-code deploy­ment, is crit­i­cal to unlock­ing val­ue for the legal depart­ment,” says Gris­wold.

Such tech­nol­o­gy can also enable cor­po­rate legal depart­ments to move from being reac­tive to tak­ing a much more proac­tive approach to man­ag­ing and using data. Take edis­cov­ery. Tra­di­tion­al­ly, a legal depart­ment would per­form a one-off col­lec­tion from a par­tic­u­lar data source by pro­cess­ing this infor­ma­tion, find­ing what they are look­ing for and then prompt­ly dis­card­ing it, wast­ing a valu­able source of processed and indexed data.

“Instead, if you’re main­tain­ing an archive of that sys­tem, not only will the data be able to be reused and repur­posed for a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent use-cas­es, but you’re also able to respond to these events more quick­ly and proac­tive­ly,” says Gris­wold. “The return on invest­ment ver­sus just look­ing at it as a one-off col­lec­tions project will actu­al­ly pay back in and of itself very quick­ly, but then the return becomes expo­nen­tial the more you use the data asset you’ve cre­at­ed.”

While edis­cov­ery is one exam­ple, legal depart­ments can also look at cre­at­ing cen­tralised and search­able index­es across many dif­fer­ent data sources, such as con­tracts, merg­ers and acqui­si­tions or com­pli­ance, which can then be used to gen­er­ate valu­able strate­gic insights for the wider busi­ness.

“The legal depart­ment holds the keys to the enter­prise in many dif­fer­ent ways; they’re the cus­to­di­ans of con­tracts which gov­ern all busi­ness rela­tion­ships across the enter­prise,” says Gris­wold. “They have access to so much infor­ma­tion and so being able to organ­ise this infor­ma­tion in a way that can be served for greater busi­ness util­i­ty can ele­vate legal from a reac­tive, risk-man­age­ment focus to a proac­tive, val­ue-gen­er­at­ing func­tion for the busi­ness. That is a mas­sive oppor­tu­ni­ty and data man­age­ment is at the heart of it.”

That evolv­ing rela­tion­ship where in-house legal depart­ments are no longer seen only as a cost cen­tre, but instead as a val­ued and trust­ed busi­ness part­ner can also change the way gen­er­al coun­sel (GC) and chief legal offi­cers are viewed by the rest of the C‑suite, poten­tial­ly paving the way for more GCs to start run­ning busi­ness­es.

“If you look at some of the rea­sons why it would make sense for a chief finan­cial offi­cer to turn chief exec­u­tive, those same rea­sons exist if we look at the cor­po­rate legal func­tion and the role of the GC,” says Gris­wold. “We expect to see more GCs and peo­ple with legal back­grounds becom­ing CEOs and the turn­ing point for that is look­ing at reac­tive oppor­tu­ni­ties in the con­text of a proac­tive strat­e­gy that ben­e­fits cross-func­tion­al busi­ness stake­hold­ers.”

For more infor­ma­tion please go to www.onna.com

Pro­mot­ed by Onna