2022 In Review
What a whirlwind 2022 has been…
At the outset of the year, we saw legal operations leaders continue their focus on a number of priorities including refining existing ELM systems, controlling and reducing spend, and reviewing and procuring CLM solutions.
Meanwhile, the Legal Automation Group (LAGL) team worked feverishly to build out its innovative MyLegal Automation Platform, targeting a commercial release in May at the 2022 CLOC Global Institute in Las Vegas.
MyLegal, which was born out of hundreds of conversations with legal operations leaders and a few key forward thinking clients, set out to transform legal operations through automation (To learn more about the MyLegal story read here).
While not high on the priority list in years past, automation’s emergence gained momentum at CLOC 2022. We also saw a number of new entrants and competitive offerings on display.
This was exciting to see because over the past five years automation had been implemented in a very limited way typically done through existing legacy legal systems. Unfortunately, this approach can only address a small set of activities which the tools themselves set out to automate.
As a stop gap to overcome this challenge, many legal operations leaders were told to pursue automation through the development of business applications via large enterprise-grade service platforms. While service-based applications scale quite well, they require far too much IT involvement and coding to make them usable in a broad-scale. In short, these platforms lack the speed and agility needed to enable measurable change to occur. At the end of the day, the legal department is beholden to IT and the business does not get its needs met in a timely manner.
A second automation approach taken has been to utilize one of the basic workflow tools that have proliferated in the legal space. While these do provide some measure of agility and speed of development, they do not scale or perform well in complex, high volume scenarios. The applications built with these tools do not have sophisticated governance and runtime management capabilities to manage the hundreds, if not thousands of workflows that exist as part of a broad-scale automation initiative.
Thus, the marketplace was primed for solutions which address the many flaws existing with today’s current automation approaches.
Legal Automation Group is thrilled to have brought to market the MyLegal solution which is transforming legal operations like no other. It has the necessary agility and speed of development capabilities required to address broad-scale automation needs quickly, enabling faster time-to-value.
MyLegal also future proofs longer-term automation objectives by providing capabilities necessary when departments run at scale. These include application and user governance, runtime management and more.
Most importantly, MyLegal provides a much-needed “Legal Front Door” where all requests of the legal department can be centralized, tasks can be monitored/audited, and where executives can leverage detailed analytics. This unique collaboration environment provides a simplified user experience for all stakeholders (legal staff, employees, external partners) that participate in the legal request processes.
Our introduction of the MyLegal Automation Platform to the corporate legal tech market could not have been more timely. Three years ago we identified a gap within the technology stacks of corporate legal departments. We believed that filling this void would enable true digital transformation. That belief has driven the evolution of MyLegal and our company.
Just recently, HyperionGP an Epiq Company published a Legal Operations Benchmarking study (dated October 2022 – click here to view) of in-house legal executives detailing their transformation priorities. Automation has emerged as a top 3 priority! So, it seems our mission has been validated, the legal ops community clearly recognizes the importance of automation to its future.
So, let us show you why MyLegal is the right automation solution for your legal department. Its impact to departmental efficiency and productivity as well as cost reduction will be unmatched by any other legal technology pursuit.
Have a great holiday season and a Happy New Year!
Jim Tate
Co-Founder, Managing Partner & CEO
MyLegal
