Legal Innovation on a shoestring: How to innovate on a budget
Legal teams must cut costs. But how can you innovate with no time and no money?
In this article, I share some ideas and tips on how to innovate your legal work with little to no extra funding.
The article originally appeared in The Australian Corporate Lawyer, Volume 28, Issue 2 (Winter 2018). This post has all the links to the sources and technologies mentioned in the article. You can read the full article here.
Some of the links below may be affiliate links, read about these here.
Functional requirements and non-functional requirements
Do you have a $0 software budget in your legal team? You are in good company if so! Nearly half of all legal teams have no money in their team budget for software according to the 2017 ACC Tends Survey.
No cash some cash lots of cash
Breaking survey results from the ACC Australia 2017 Benchmarks & Leading Practices Report down, we can extrapolate that in-house legal team share spending one third of their legal budget on work that is of low value or low importance.
That is an incredible amount of money!
So how can we stop doing this low value work more with less budget? We can innovate on a shoestring!
Manifesto for Agile Software Development: http://agilemanifesto.org
How cars are designed: https://www.howacarworks.com/technology/how-cars-are-designed
Does Innovation Make (SME) Firms More Productive? By Alfons Palangkaraya, Thomas Spurling and Elizabeth Webster
Sacha Kirk and Richard Stock, ‘Innovative KPIs are critical to secure greater value from law firms’, Australian Corporate Counsel Volume 27, Issue 3 – Spring 2017, https://acla.acc.com/ documents/item/1910
Free and low cost innovations you can do on a shoestring budget
Microsoft Word Smart Art: Create a SmartArt graphic
Microsoft Word Developer Mode: Create a fillable form
Google Forms: Create client surveys (consider your privacy policy and sensitivity of the content
DocuSign: Easy to make automated document workflows and electronic signatures (and then build templates)
What low cost innovation techniques are you trying?
I'd love to hear what tools and methods your using to try new things in your legal team!
