The ÀÏ˾»úÎçÒ¹¸£Àû In-house Legal Technology Survey 2023 shows that communication across the wider business is an essential challenge for in-house legal teams. But the survey shows that it’s a particular concern for general counsel (GC) and senior team members, with 71% of GCs stating the need to improve communication with the wider business, compared to 54% of all in-house respondents.
The need to improve communication and collaboration has become a core objective for in-house leaders. This article looks at key takeaways from the In-house Legal Tech Survey and explores how GCs and senior team members can foster effective communication, dismantle silos, and promote collaboration, and how embracing legal tech can help.
It is no surprise that GCs are concerned about communication. Effective communication is an essential ingredient of a successful in-house legal team, bringing plenty of important benefits that ripple throughout an organisation beyond the legal function. Communication allows teams to resolve conflict and use conflict constructively. It encourages engagement, which leads to employee buy-in, greater transparency, and a consistent acceptance of purpose. Communication ensures work remains balanced, spread evenly across a team and an organisation, and it minimises duplication.
The benefits of strong communication are evident. But achieving that level of communication is not as simple as many assume. Effective communication is complex: there are (verbal, non-verbal, visual, written, etc), various forms (IM, phone, in-person, etc), different styles (dominant, passive, etc), and so on. Strong communication is about making the right choices, picking the forms and styles that suit the needs and demands of in-house teams, assessing successes and failures, and improving in the future. The role of GCs and in-house leaders is finding ways to promote effective communication in their teams.
When it comes to communicating with the rest of the business, the most obvious answer to is to ramp up internal exposure to the wider business. Sitting down with heads of sales, finance, marketing, product, digital and the like to advocate the commercial value of the legal team, for example.
Crucially, rather than treating the rest of the business like a legal client, asking lots of questions to understand business need, and using the right tools to demonstrate the value of the legal function back to the business, goes a long way.
A great place to start with a ‘showing, not telling’ approach is to adopt the existing technologies and tools already used by other departments, enabling legal teams to communicate with their peers on common platforms, using the same metrics and language. It’s also likely to be cheaper and easier to get underway.
Effective communication depends on effective collaboration – and neither can exist where the business works in silos. It is thus no surprise, as referenced in the ÀÏ˾»úÎçÒ¹¸£Àû In-house Legal Technology Survey 2023, that silos are another concern for GCs. Silos contribute to ineffective communication, absence of collaboration, duplication of work, failure to grasp opportunities, and inconsistencies in terms of long-term organisational vision. Silos can effect entire teams and entire organisations, which explains why they’re perhaps of a greater concern to GCs and senior team members.
As we have shown in a previous article, GCs want to be seen as team players and they want to protect their internal reputation. That means they need to dismantle silos. This depends on promoting a unified vision, incorporating collaboration tools into daily operations, creating shared accountabilities, improving socialisation, ensuring training promotes co-operation, and implementing legal tech to support all of the above.
It also depends on the promotion of a collaborative spirit across the business. GCs and senior team members are perfectly positioned to bring together teams and departments, dismantling silos and promoting org-wide collaboration. A report from ÀÏ˾»úÎçÒ¹¸£Àû, for example, showed that in-house leaders possess a wide view of their organisation, which affords them a unique perspective. GCs and senior team members can find commercial opportunities others might miss, promote unexpected interactions between departments, inform strategy, and bolster the building and sharing of knowledge across the business.
Legal tech can boost communication, dismantle silos, and promote collaboration in various ways. Tech promotes inclusion, giving teams the ability to host meetings anywhere, at any time, bringing in people who may have been excluded due to geographical limitations. Tech improves productivity, as claimed by 74% of survey respondents, allowing in-house lawyers to add value to work, prioritise important tasks, and invite colleagues to contribute solutions.
Implementing the right technologies promotes engagement, fostering a sense of teamwork, promoting active collaboration and effective communication. Tech boosts integration, ensuring insights and analytics can be shared and used by the entire team. It enables automation, as referenced by more than half of respondents (54%), allowing lawyers to free up time and complete low-value work at scale. Tech leads to greater transparency across the business, giving team members a centralised and open forum to track interactions and record progress on any given project, unifying a common vision and providing visibility on shared accountabilities.
Legal tech is essential to achieving effective communication and collaboration. It is perhaps no surprise that in-house lawyers are increasingly dependent on tech, with one in two respondents saying they would not join a company that did not offer legal tech.
Over recent years, legal tech has become essential for in-house leaders, allowing them to improve various elements of collaboration and communication in their teams. And the need to improve such elements of in-house legal teams will only grow in the future, alongside growing calls to embrace even more exciting technologies.
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