| | December 20149CIOReviewKnowing what information is available and where to find it. Lawyers are in the business of knowledge, expertise and infor-mation, and our work product resides in the realm of documents and other knowledge or information assets. No transformation initiative can begin without effective control of these assets. Whether it's knowledge management, document management or content management­every law department should have a technology solution and a process in place to capture, maintain, search and share information. At the most fundamental level, such a system increases ef-ficiency, consistency and reuse capability across the law depart-ment. Beyond that, control of knowledge assets is the founda-tion of any transformational effort because moving work to lower cost providers, consistent with quality and risk management, de-pends on the use of tools that are centrally managed and readily available. And the value-add of transformation for legal departments­the ability to access and manipulate the information contained in legal documents­is entirely a function of technology systems. When such information is extracted, "datafied" and analyzed, it constitutes a new form of value that the law department can provide the corporation to help drive and inform business decisions. Unbundling corporate legal services.Law departments can benefit from reduced costs and increased efficiencies if they are willing to look hard at the services they provide and consider what aspects of that work could be done more cheaply, more quickly or more consistently by a non- lawyer. Look for the work, or aspects of work, that does not require a unique solution but is routine, limited in scope and susceptible to process and work flow efficiencies or to a technology solution. E-discovery is an obvious example but routine drafting can also be automated, and even negotiation can be pushed down to a lower cost provider if supported by playbooks, templates, clause banks and similar tools.Rethink your staffing model to include a different mix of skills and expertise.One of the clearest implications of the value chain analysis is that law departments need to rethink the professional "demographics" of the legal team. We must be willing to look beyond lawyers and legal assistants, to recognize the value that other professionals bring to the table, be they information specialists, technologists, process analysts or project managers. As we move from one-to-one, bespoke legal solutions for all legal work to systematized and commoditized approaches to routine work, we need new expertise and skills to build and maintain our systems, to manage information and knowledge assets, to design processes and workflows and to work in tandem with lawyers to develop the sophisticated algorithms that support effective automation.Joanne Schehl
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