The legal technology landscape has recently become a sea of noise filled with point solutions and private practice applications that don’t fit the true needs of the in-house legal department.
In-house legal teams manage a variety of work, and to carry out the job successfully, it’s crucial that they build and maintain good relationships with the wider organization.
This all begins with having a defined way for the organization to communicate with legal.
Sam Kidd, CEO at LawVu, saw the opportunity to improve intake when his own team was struggling with manual processes and constant back-and-forth.
“This prompted me to look into how this could be streamlined by moving in-house legal teams out of email and documents and into an end-to-end workflow solution which would manage how they engage with their team, the wider organization, and outside counsel,” said Kidd, who co-founded LawVu in 2015.
Through LawVu’s intake functionality, the in-house legal team can setup an easy-to-use portal to interact with the wider organization. Through customizable intake forms the requester can be guided in giving structured and informed requests.
“LawVu is the best of both worlds, giving us some flexibility to customize, control and utilize features that matter to us and to turn a blank slate into something bespoke to us when we need to. LawVu hits that sweet spot right in the middle,” noted Lemons.
Streamlining this process saves time spent on having to go back and forth with the organization, searching for information, and also reduces the risk of information getting lost or siloed.
“The transformation we’ve seen in our customers ways of working has been significant with consistent reports of more than twelve hours saved per month managing intake using the LawVu workspace,” said Kidd.
The beauty of LawVu as an end-to-end workflow solution is that it doesn’t end at intake. Once the platform is implemented and optimized, LawVu’s true value becomes apparent through the data it surfaces which allows the legal team to demonstrate their impact back to the organization.
“Our counsel is quicker now because we can easily track our work and track how long things have been sitting for and how quickly they’ve been progressing,” added Lemons.
In-house legal teams are among the largest collectors of information inside an organization, but they’re also the largest incinerators. The LawVu workspace, in its simplest form, helps legal teams collect information from the organization, collaborate effectively on that information, and generate reports to demonstrate their impact on the organization.
The reporting that the LawVu workspace generates allows teams to tell a data-driven story to demonstrate the legal function’s performance and impact within the context of an organization’s wider objectives.
A key factor in LawVu’s success to date has been its sole focus on helping in-house legal teams. For Lemons, this was a key factor in the decision to purchase LawVu.
“In vetting a number of legal technology platforms, LawVu came in first place for in-house counsel,” he said. “The others were very much geared towards private practice, and in-house is very different. LawVu was best placed to help in-house lawyers deal with the variety of things that in-house lawyers deal with – which is vastly different from the repetitive nature of private practice.”
Working with like-minded organizations and individuals is where LawVu succeeds.
“It’s this strong foundation in serving in-house legal teams that guides our product roadmap, ensuring that we are serving the needs of our customer,” said Kidd.
