The 25 Universal Legal Tasks ‘Brainfactored’
This blog is our contribution to the legal field based on our takeaways from the Legal Design Summit 2019. It looks at how to get started on redesigning your team’s legal tasks. (5 min read)
We couldn’t be happier with our decision to sponsorthe Legal Design Summit 2019 and the Brainfactory workshop (held from 10–12 September in Helsinki). The summit brought together over 500 international experts and forerunners in the fields of law, design, and digital services. It was a significant opportunity for our company to learn from the international participants.
We named our Brainfactory challenge: Data, design and daily work – ‘Redesign lawyers’ legal every-day work process, that is inspired by designerly methods and innovative use of organizational data’. Read about our Challenge in more detail here.
Crafting value from organizational information made easy
The work of our five-person team was mentored by the internationally renowned expert in the field, Caitlin Moon, Director of Innovation Design, Vanderbilt Law School. The team was represented by members from global law firms, courts, global companies and students.
The legal market is moving from a relationship-based to a buyer-centric and data-driven one. The legal profession is facing the challenge of learning which organizational information can add business value, and boost efficiency in order to meet their clients’ more for less demands. We want to narrow the gap between organizational information and the future of everyday legal work.
In preparation for the challenge and to brief our team, our enterprise search technology team https://ilveshaku.fi/en/ focused on finding the most hands-on approach to link organizational information to lawyers’ daily work. Ultimately our goal was (and still is!) to help legal organizations maximize value creation for their clients and increase their own profitability by utilizing their organizational data.
In order to make this abstract goal more actionable and attainable for the workshop, we ended up suggesting that our Brainfactory team would start solving the challenge by first listing lawyers’ daily tasks. The question then became, “what are the universal legal creation tasks in lawyers’ everyday work?”
Meanwhile at Ilves… we wanted to make our Brainfactory team’ work actionable for the whole legal community, so we decided to develop an on-line platform where the universal legal tasks could be listed after the workshop.
We believed that the value of redesigning tasks by utilizing organizational information could be made possible by estimating how much money it would cost, and therefore save. The assumption that legal tasks identification would be an actionable starting point, was based also on several discussions with our clients. Naturally, we also had a need to demonstrate the value of our Enterprise Search service.
So we could demonstrate the potential cost of searching for information, we created our ‘Search Cost Calculator’ https://ilveshaku.fi/roi and then launched this on the same day that the Brainfactory challenge started. The scope of the Calculator at this stage was to make it possible to estimate the staff time costs by legal search tasks i.e. the time and cost saved could be used for more skilled tasks.
The 25 Universal Legal Tasks ‘Brainfactored’
The Brainfactory team 8 visited our office on 11 September… and I was curious. Was my assumption right? Would starting the redesign process by listing lawyers’ universal daily tasks help to choose the tasks where the most value could be crafted from the organizational information? The answer was a definite yes. At this point we had already achieved our most important goal – getting our assumption proved correct by a international group of legal business professionals.
The team also assumed that the list of 25 legal tasks list they had drafted might help everyone interested in creating more value with their organizational information. According to our original plan, I’m pleased to announce that the team 8’s ‘the 25 Legal Tasks Brainfactored’ list has been added to our brand new online-platform (beta), ready for your own tweaks.
The platform and the list of lawyers’ legal tasks is our contribution to the legal field and the international legal design community. It’s our way of helping legal organizations embark on their journey to become more data centric and it fulfills our commitment of giving all that we have learned back to the community. We hope you benefit from it.
How does it work? (2 minutes play)
To give you an idea of how our service works, I have added some example numbers into the Calculator, assuming the costs of a legal business of 150 people with staff and staff costs as follows:
- 30 partners: 250 €/h
- 100 lawyers: 150€/h
- 20 people in other roles/100 €/h.
Personalize the Brainfactory Team 8’s list by changing the values and sharing the link by e-mail. You are able to engage your team by sending the link to them for comments. Feel free to create your own settings with relevant legal tasks and numbers.
Click the picture or link below:
The legal task list represents the legal creation tasks defined by the Brainfactory team 8. Our enterprise search solution supports the tasks by speeding up access to information needed to perform the task. The final staff time cost is interconnected with other elements of organizational knowledge management capabilities. For example, the quality of data and staff’s searching skills naturally affect the ability to find information and gain better results. The final business value gained in the redesign process depends on the fact of how well the tasks are redesigned and the change executed in a legal team.
Narrowing the gap between organizational information and legal tasks by bringing information into one place is therefore just one step in the right direction – but a crucial step.
We would appreciate your feedback. We have a number of ideas already lined up, such as making selection of currency possible, adding grouping for the tasks, template calculations, etc. When we’ve received enough feedback to understand what is important for you, we will continue to develop the platform!
What is the big vision? We envision transforming the Calculator (beta) into a platform for a strategic legal design platform for all legal businesses. We’d love to do it together with organizations that share our passion and mission for making organizational information valuable by redesigning lawyers’ everyday work.
More information about the insights of the amazing Brainfactory team 8 in the next blog. Stay tuned!
Please don’t hesitate to contact me for further information.
Heikki
+358 40 547 1501
