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Workflow management is a broad term. It can include setting up and adjusting workflows, troubleshooting dysfunctional ones, standardising documentation, adapting to changing conditions, and so on. But, in simple terms, is the constant pursuit of effective legal workflows, to make tasks as simple and seamless as possible.

Strong provides many benefits. It allows you to spot cumbersome tasks, combine duplicated tasks, and eliminate unnecessary ones. It minimises manual work by introducing automation and improves transparency and accountability, allowing legal teams to see what others are doing. It also improves communication and collaboration, giving employees timely reminders, keeping everyone informed and updated.

In-house legal teams should attempt to improve workload management, but it can often prove difficult, largely because legal counsel aren’t sure where to start. With that in mind, here are five essential tips to help legal teams drastically improve their workflows.

Onboard specific project management tools

depends on effective project management tools. Project management tools improve transparency, collaboration, and communication, keeping everyone abreast of specific working requirements. Each tool has different functionality, some of which may suit in-house teams better than others. The key is to find the right tech to meet business needs.

A popular project management tool is . The platform lets you track, manage, and connect projects across various teams. It visually highlights tasks, allows users to build project plans, offers options for communication, and provides complete transparency for the whole team.

is another popular platform. It makes assigning tasks easy, helps users navigate processes, and automates the most tedious tasks. One core benefit is that can be linked to other apps, such as Slack, Google Drive, and Dropbox, allowing easy integration with your existing tech options.

An emerging option on the market is . The platform is an excellent choice for legal teams that want to manage and optimise databases, improve analytics, and collaborate in real-time. It offers templates that you can use for legal planning, product launching, event planning, training, and so on.

Companies often use to meet all their needs. The functionality of Airtable, for example, differs profoundly from Asana. You may need both and additional platforms, to improve workflows.

Focus on legal drafting workflows

Legal drafting is often time-consuming. In-house lawyers need to sift through documentation, remove errors, ensure consistency, and change language, all tedious tasks. It’s no surprise, therefore, that in-house lawyers often look to legal tech to optimise and automate.

Automating legal drafting is a quick and easy way to streamline an otherwise complex workflow. General counsel should utilise legal tech, such as LexisCreate, to enable them to create sound and watertight documents in combination with other ½Û×ÓÊÓƵ tools, all within the Microsoft ecosystem.

The tech improves other , too. It removes the need for in-house lawyers to meticulously check pre-existing documentation, or ask others to check. Instead, LexisCreate uses built-in calculators, calendars, and proofreading software to pick up any residual errors and check for citation anomalies. The legal tech provides an easy route to automating one of the more intricate workflows.

Optimise the legal research workflow

Much like legal drafting, conducting legal research is another time-consuming yet vital part of working as an in-house lawyer. The key is to onboard legal tech that allows you to optimise this process.

You’ll want to use trusted and transparent tools that enable you to explore primary and secondary sources at the click of a button, providing reliable information you can use immediately, that targets and segments information, helping you to find whatever information you need, no matter how obscure.

There are plenty of . One trusted example is Lexis+® UK. It provides quick and accurate answers using practical guidance with leading legal content. It allows you to start with a natural language search or question and offers loads of incredible optimisation features that help lawyers quickly sift through primary and secondary sources.

Using legal tech enables legal teams to streamline workflows in one fell swoop, saving in-house lawyers and legal teams time and money. An investigation carried out by the University of Manchester found lawyers using Lexis+® UK for research were saving over eight minutes per task, on average, potentially adding up to over eight hours every week. That’s a huge saving – a quick and easy win in a key area of workflow management.

Implement generative AI in various workflows

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has taken the legal world, and the rest of the world, by storm. AI offers huge advantages to legal teams and general counsel, particularly around boosting productivity and increasing efficiency. AI is revolutionary in its ability to complete tasks at speed, essentially ensuring that workflows flow more quickly. This includes producing content and comms, performing due diligence, reviewing invoices, drafting and negotiating contracts, and data management and analysis.

AI can be used in novel and innovative ways, and lawyers are constantly finding new use cases. General counsel should research how they can best use and start to apply it to workflows.

Audit your workflows

will help legal teams track progress in terms of improving workflows and scope out areas of potential improvements.

To audit workflows, simply map out each workflow and investigate any issues. You’ll want to look out for areas of overlap, duplicated work on several workflows, bottlenecking issues, unnecessary work, opportunities for automation, and any other pain points or areas of frustration.

Once you’ve identified the key issues, consider ways to improve. Each issue will require a unique solution: you could discard some tasks, automate others, and optimise others still. Legal teams should to see if previous changes to workflows have led to improvements and to note new areas of improvement in the future.