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Over the last few years, it’s become increasingly important for lawyers to be able to harness technology in order to remain competitive, for private practice firms and in-house legal teams alike.

Georgia Jones, General Counsel for G. Network Communications Ltd, considers the effective use of legal technology tools to be crucial for staying ahead in the competitive legal market. She warns that in-house counsel who fail to embrace digital transformation put the legal team at a disadvantage, which is detrimental for the organisation as a whole.

Georgia says: “It’s absolutely critical that businesses are going digital - if you don’t digitise your processes you’re not driving efficiencies operationally.” She says that organisations will fail if they are not quicker than their competitors to deliver a better customer output. Since in-house counsel support their efforts to compete, if they “can’t be fast and can’t be creative and can’t drive change” then Georgia argues that they cannot “be an effective lawyer - and your team is not going to be able to support the business in the way that it needs to” and they will get left behind.

The Tech-Enabled Lawyer

A recent report from ������Ƶ, “The Tech-Enabled Lawyer,” explains the growing importance of legal technology to in-house teams, and the holistic benefits of embracing digital transformation for the wider organisation. Among its findings, the report estimates that 82% of in-house legal teams will increase their adoption of legal technology in the next five years.

Georgia says that one of the most important things for in-house lawyers regarding digital transformation is curiosity: “It’s not necessarily about having fancy technology - it’s about thinking what you’ve got in your business and how you can use it better.” She gives the example of, despite not having access to a bespoke contract management system, how she was able to use Sharepoint to create an effective tool.

How are other organisations using legal technology?

The Tech-Enabled Lawyer report highlights various ways in which in-house teams are using technology tools for the benefit of the business as a whole. One pertinent example of a successful digital transformation initiative comes from Deutsche Bank’s Head of Legal Domain Architecture, Avi Aggarwal. He noted the importance of having a legal technology platform which combines multiple legal processes and frees up the time that lawyers would otherwise have spent on switching between different platforms: “You don’t have disjointed systems where you do one thing in one place, and then have to go somewhere else to do the second part of that process." In other words, deploying technology which reduces context switching can lead to major efficiency gains.

To find out more about the growing importance of legal technology for in-house lawyers and how implementing the right tools can help both legal teams and the wider business, read our Tech-Enabled Lawyer report.

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