As both external and internal demands continue to mount and the duties of associates spread ever thinly across a growing number of different specialisms, more and more legal departments are being pressured to function like individual business units within the wider scope of their company or corporation.

Teams are being increasingly expected to strive for more definitive performance targets – to unlock new efficiencies, and generally deliver a more value-added, consistent, accurately-costed service with as little time, budget, and resource as humanly possible.

It’s news to few that, in this day and age, when your question is  how can my business (or in this case, legal team) work better, the answer is usually technology.

And the truth is a lot of us already know this all too well.

The ongoing fight to be ‘digital ready’

Research by Gartner towards the beginning of 2019 suggested that only 19% of in-house legal teams were classified as ‘digital ready’. And while things may have improved since then, our sector is still trailing in the race of technological uptake.

For many of us, technological developments are still a cause of apprehension. Our deep-seated paranoia of being replaced by machines makes it hard in some cases to see new technology as anything other than a threat to one’s career longevity.

But when it comes to business intelligence solutions – which are seeing increasing rates of adoption and implementation across legal departments of all sizes – associates and decisionmakers can actually leverage them to the betterment of their own individual career, the experience they can deliver to their clients, and the operating efficiency of the wider team.