2020 will come to be known as the year synonymous with ‘digital transformation,’ with Google Trends having seen a steady rise of online searches for the term in recent years. With the challenges that COVID-19 has thrown at us, businesses have leveraged technology, firstly as a survival strategy and subsequently to become more agile, adaptable, and successful in 2021 and beyond.
Whether used to describe the implementation of video conferencing tech, or for remote working tools, digital transformation has evolved to mean a lot, which can be daunting for teams looking to get started. Whilst upgrading technology within a business in any form is great to see, when it comes to legal departments it is key that logical steps are taken to help general counsels (GCs) achieve their future visions and provide strategic value to the business.
The Sensible Approach
New, intuitive developments are shining the light at the end of the post-pandemic tunnel. Whilst COVID-19 has most definitely accelerated the use of a vast range of technologies including cloud and video conferencing, there are still some key steps for companies to make in order to digitally transform their legal departments.
Digitising contracts and making them easily accessible online, will be a core focus for companies in 2021. By streamlining this process, teams are able to search quickly and efficiently to locate similar clauses in order to use them again when needed. While pre-contract review software and tools that enable data extraction can lead to proactively improving key business decisions, neither are possible without the initial digitising of contracts in the first place. Companies will need to follow this approach in order to make a real difference to their traditional processes.
Once digitised, legal teams can make full use of other software available to them and implement steps to further their digital transformation projects. This is because 2020 cannot be seen as an anomaly in the journey to a digital future. It must serve as an inflexion point for the legal industry to place technology at the core of key processes such as negotiating and signing contracts. Doing so will not only help close more deals in the immediate term but will future proof any business or department against long-term macroeconomic changes and trends.
Doing anything else would be remiss. Technology will be key to maximising the full value of any deal. Without it, any organisations wishing to improve, its level of deal velocity will find doing so difficult to achieve.
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