In this piece from veteran legal industry observer, Eyal Iffergan, managing director for Epiq’s legal business advisory practice, the legal transformation wave disperses as it progresses.
“While controlling spending is a perennial priority, a reflection of persistent cost pressures, it is noteworthy that leveraging internal resources and automating workflows follow closely behind,” he says in Corporate Counsel Business Journal. “Why? The short answer is that automation is not solely an efficiency play.” In a Legal Operations Benchmarking study conducted in Q1 2022, Hyperion teased out strategic priorities and to show that “transformation,” which once connoted multifaceted operational change, now includes “significant, hard-won change in more discrete aspects of operations.” As legal departments adopt workflow automation tools,” Iffergan says, they also generate valuable operational data. “Not only do they show the volume and types of requests, and ideally improvement in response cycle times,” he says. “but the legal department can also use trend data to pinpoint opportunities to improve service through additional legal resources, whether human or informational.” Read more about the important byproducts of automation at CCBJ.