Extract from Frank Ready’s article “In-House’s Legal Tech Goals: Efficiency, Cost Reduction, and Soon, Privacy Compliance”
Gone are the days when corporate legal professionals considered tech to be a flourish rather than a necessity. The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) released its “2021 Legal Technology Report for In-House Counsel” on Tuesday in conjunction with Exterro, and the findings indicate that “efficiency” remains the magic word for lawyers and legal ops teams alike.
Case in point, when asked what is the biggest factor in deciding whether their law department will purchase legal technology, about 64% of the 250 in-house counsel and legal operations professionals surveyed across 18 different countries named “efficiency.” Coming in at a distant second was “cost reduction” (about 27%), with “consistency” then following at about 5%.
Exactly how corporate legal’s quest for efficiency will play out in future tech purchases remains to be seen, but the ACC report does offer a few clues. Among the approximately 63% of respondents who indicated that they were “definitely” or “maybe” buying/upgrading legal software in the next 12 months, about 56% were looking at contract management tools, followed by matter management solutions (about 37%) and document repository tech (about 25%).
