Implementing a legal ticketing system sounds like a substantial challenge, and some find developing an effective system overwhelming. However, the process doesn't need to be a roadblock to your company's success. You can do it in three simple steps or work with an organization that knows how to meet your company's needs.
What does an effective legal ticketing system do?
An effective legal ticketing system makes work easier for your legal department while improving the customer and employee experience. To be specific, intelligent ticketing technology will:
- Increase efficiency and free up more time for legal teams
- Streamline workflows with minimal change management
- Increase visibility across the contracting process
An ideal legal ticketing system keeps your in-house lawyers from getting bogged down organizationally by information requests while keeping the data centralized and easy to reference far into the future.
Increase efficiency and free up more time for legal teams
Ticketing systems focus on the organization and automation of contract management. Legal teams can maximize efficiency when contract data is centralized and organized intuitively, freeing time for your lawyers to focus on more critical tasks, like strategic work that contributes to business development.
Streamline workflows with minimal change management
An intelligent ticketing system and contract hub will streamline your legal department's digital workflow with minimal change management. Compliance workflows will benefit from simplifying legal processes and eliminating unnecessary tasks to help boost efficiency across departments. Meanwhile, minimal change management ensures the overall legal operations remain the same, effortlessly reducing confusion and increasing compliance. In addition, these changes do not impact other teams.
Increase visibility across the contracting process
Contract details provide information necessary to those within your company outside your legal department, like the service period or payment terms. Therefore, increased visibility throughout your contracting process benefits your company in areas beyond legal services. Transparency helps your entire business function more smoothly, with more reliable procedures.
Your legal department may answer vital questions about your company's contracts in many formats, such as phone calls, emails, chat sessions, or in-person meetings if you currently operate without a contract hub. This decentralized process makes the data trail difficult, if not impossible, to track when the same or related questions arise in the future. When an employee leaves the company without a paper trail, this data may be lost forever. Finding the information will require unnecessary replication if it is even possible. Your legal team must perform the previous task, attempting to rectify the issue while delaying more critical projects.
With a legal ticketing system, this information is cataloged, organized, and searchable by the relevant departments. When future service requests are submitted, the previous data can easily be located and used to inform current submissions. Answering legal tickets can minimize the time commitment significantly, changing hours to minutes.
How to develop an internal legal ticketing system in 3 steps
Developing and implementing an internal legal ticketing system isn't as complicated as you may believe, and the benefits of organization, internal transparency, and increased efficiency heavily outweigh the initial effort. You can develop and implement a successful legal ticketing system in your organization in only three steps:
1. Map out your current intake processes and identify areas for improvement
The first step to developing your internal legal ticketing system is to map out your organization's intake processes and determine areas for improvement. Areas of improvement may include:
- How you receive information about the incoming project
- The task sequence that will take a project to its conclusion
- How tasks are assigned
During this stage, you should identify potential bottlenecks in your processes and minimize redundant work to prevent future delays and time waste. Carefully scrutinize intake processes that utilize email tasks, as these are often labeled areas of improvement.
Creating a thorough intake process map at the start can help you simplify the entire development process. Remember that one goal is to keep future processes intuitive for the organization's targeted users.
2. Create a project plan
The second step involves creating a detailed project plan. Your plan should include:
- Realistic goals
- Owners and stakeholders
- Resources
- Timelines
Realistic goals are of particular importance. There is no reason to take your in-house legal department from 0 to 60 in the first implementation, which can be detrimental. Those who follow this approach and jump into advanced contract life cycle management (CLM) solutions may limit their team's success. However, by taking the process slowly, you can give adequate consideration to your business requirements and your end user’s needs. There is an expectation that as legal technology expands through 2025, corporate legal departments will only capture 30% of the benefit of their CLM investments.
Rather than jumping ahead too quickly, keep your expectations realistic and implement technology one step at a time to help your organization capture more benefits in the short and long term while building confidence in your solutions.
Some of your goals should focus on increased transparency surrounding project statuses. With these improvements, you can unlock key legal metrics that can help organizations accelerate contracting, like:
- Volume
- Type of project
- Average review time for different stages
By keeping your goals realistic and focusing on the areas that are in the most need of improvement, you can help ensure the success of your system.
3. Implement a technology solution with the right features to ensure success
The last step concerns system implementation. Your solution should include the necessary features to help ensure success. At a minimum, your system should encompass the following:
- It requires little information technology or engineering resources to implement.
- It is exceedingly simple to use to ensure less tech-savvy legal staff can adopt it.
- It requires little or no change management to promote adoption by the rest of the organization.
- The solution automates and streamlines status tracking and reporting.
If you follow these three steps, you should be able to develop and implement a legal ticketing system that is relevant to your organization's needs, solves critical problems, boosts efficiency, and has strong adoption rates throughout your business.
Stay ahead of your legal service requests with Lexion
Lexion can help you implement a legal ticketing solution that will integrate seamlessly with your organization. If you want high-speed ROI on your legal ticketing system, we can work with you to ensure you get what you need to boost your return. We work with legal industry departments in various businesses, so we understand what areas can be problematic and what features can result in significantly increased efficiency. Contact Lexion for a demo of our contract review and task management workflows.
