One question that we get repeatedly asked is, “How did you come up with the idea for MyLegal?”
Four years ago, my co-founder Jim Tate and I were selling ELM software to law firms and legal departments. In 2020 the pandemic hit, and it served as an opportunity to reinvent ourselves.
We had several clients and had hundreds of conversations with legal operations leaders over the years. What they repeatedly indicated was the need for process automation, improved collaboration, and a more integrated technology stack. This became the jumping off point for the idea that became MyLegal. Interestingly, during these customer interactions a common set of problems and challenges were being shared.
These included:
- The legal staff being overwhelmed by an ever-increasing number of administrative and manual tasks.
- They are still using email and spreadsheets for the bulk of their general work activities.
- Even in those instances where technology has been deployed to automate a particular set of tasks (like matter management, as in the case of an ELM), these activities are often part of a larger, more global workflow stream. This causes a proliferation of manual work activities surrounding the automation technology implementations.
- There remains a lack of timely support from IT to help legal teams make the necessary operational changes. Often, the solutions that they provide require lengthy software development efforts using technologies with limited agility.
- Due to all the disparate legacy systems leveraged, data is not available to develop actionable KPIs with which to manage the legal department’s work activity.
Each customer interaction brought clarity. It became evident that a solution was needed which could address all of these problem areas. Jim, our resident automation guru, with over 30 years of experience in workflow, concluded early on that corporate legal departments were ripe for an enterprise-grade Low-code/No-code automation platform.
The platform supporting MyLegal has long been made available to other parts of the enterprise but had not made its way into the legal business function yet. We knew a Low code/No-code citizen development and process engine could get us part of the way there. It would eliminate legal’s reliance on IT by allowing the business to rapidly build its own applications in an effort to automate on a broad scale, eliminating all the administrative and manual activities that were bogging the department down.
However, we quickly realized that more was needed to address all of the problem areas. Thus, a legal department front door/portal was added to our solution. This simplifies the user experience for all users (department staff as well as internal and external users), dramatically improving efficiency and productivity. Furthermore, building all of the applications on one platform and improving accessibility to disparate systems, served to consolidate the data needed so that actionable KPIs and reports could be generated to better manage the business.
And voila, MyLegal was born – the most agile, extensive, user-friendly automation platform on the market today. Oh, and by the way, did I mention far more cost effective than other products if widely deployed!
Andy Baldocchi
Co-founder & Managing Partner
