By necessity, manufacturing companies are keenly focused on efficiency. Manufacturing processes depend on the quickest, most cost-effective approaches to yield the greatest business success. But this principle isn’t limited to product creation. Efficiency and cost-effectiveness across all functions, including the legal department, create better results for the company.
Like their colleagues, legal teams in the manufacturing industry can improve the value they deliver by keeping productivity high and adopting technologies that support streamlined, efficient workflows. Now is the time to invest in innovative technologies that will benefit legal and the business writ large today and further down the line. Put another way, manufacturers should use this moment to future-proof their legal departments.
Our new whitepaper, Is your manufacturing company’s corporate legal department future-ready?, looks at how to do just that. It explores three main components of a future-proofed legal department:
- Scalable spend and matter management
- Advanced technologies (AI)
- A flexible legal technology roadmap
Let’s take a closer look at the insights this new whitepaper contains.
Scalable spend and matter management
Matter and spend management are complex and time-consuming tasks. Rising workloads and staff reductions only compound the challenge.
To be sufficiently prepared for the future, your legal department must invest in modern spend and matter management solutions, which can save both time and money, now and in the future. These will help you attain complete visibility into all matters, enabling data-driven decision-making and a comprehensive view of costs, risks, workloads, and matter status. They will also simplify global e-billing, improve reporting, and help you better manage outside counsel.
Advanced technologies
AI can help you quickly and effectively enforce billing guidelines, review bills, offer insights on law firm performance, and free up staff for higher-value work. In fact, AI is a big part of modern spend management, as it can also predict and manage legal costs at a granular level—a task that’s particularly urgent in the wake of lingering economic uncertainty.
For AI to be effective, though, it must be combined with the deep domain expertise of people who understand both law and data science. This combination is a competitive advantage for Wolters Kluwer. We have a team of professionals who understand the legal space and data analytics. Additionally, our expert bill review team helps clients understand and maximize their use of AI-powered solutions.
A flexible legal technology roadmap
The third tenet of future-proofing involves creating a strategy for a flexible, modern legal technology roadmap. That strategy should include components of AI, matter management, and spend management.
Creating a strategic technology roadmap can help legal teams achieve technological maturity and maximize cost savings. A good roadmap consists of short- and long-term goals, with the former focusing on easier-to-achieve objectives and the latter being adjustable as needs evolve.
Future-proofing starts now
In addition to these three keys to becoming future-ready, our whitepaper includes:
- Step-by-step instructions on how to build a strategy for a legal technology roadmap;
- How to create a framework for assessing your department’s current level of maturity;
- A deep dive into the benefits of bringing AI into legal operations.
Download the whitepaper and start getting ready for the future.
