2024-08-20 15:10:29
What if working in a company’s legal department is not just about managing risk and defending the company’s interests in the face of laws and standards? These departments are also being asked to transform into key players in innovation.
However, various internal barriers are sometimes encountered, particularly at three levels. The first barrier to innovation is the positioning within the legal department. Historically, it has long been seen as exercising a strictly functional role and having no representation in the company’s management bodies. This internal perception can lead to a lack of support from general management, which can limit its access to the resources needed to innovate.
The second obstacle lies in the IT team’s reluctance to accommodate the legal department’s requests. They tend to prioritize requests from “the business” and force others to turn to expensive external service providers. As a result, over time, ideas proposed by lawyers are relegated to the background or even abandoned.
The third barrier is resistance from lawyers themselves. Their professional training and identity often default to security and framework, qualities that are essential to ensuring compliance and minimizing risk. However, these qualities can become barriers when it comes to adopting innovative practices that involve risk-taking and openness to change. As a result, internal skepticism and resistance make legal innovation difficult to adopt.
To overcome these barriers, we identified three good practices during our meeting: Research Can be deployed.
Finding internal support
The first option is to seek strong internal support. Reference authors in the field of organizational change emphasize the importance of gaining support from powerful groups in the change process. This support not only guarantees access to financial, human or material resources, but also allows for better communication of the legal department’s needs and projects. On our website, a legal director explained:
“We organize weekly meetings with the CEO to discuss the vision and strategy to be able to define and understand how we are going to register and be a player in achieving the goals, how we are going to contribute to the transformation, to the goals, to the development, how we are going to play a role in the company strategy as lawyers in a broad sense.”
This proximity and communication facilitates access to resources:
“We were given the means to support, not just support, but to develop our strategy and innovate.”
Challenges for IT Teams
Faced with the reluctance of IT teams and limited access to external service providers, consider a third approach: innovation by and for lawyers. Management must take its destiny into its own hands, reduce reliance on IT experts and drive innovation initiatives on its own.
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The law department we studied set up a multidisciplinary team called “Innovation” that included, in addition to lawyers, a developer, a designer, and a product manager to internalize the design and development process of IT tools.
“The idea is to get away from the ‘you’re not a priority’ situation. The IT team has other priorities that are more aligned with the core business of the company: innovation needs may come after that, but the deadlines are long and it’s hard to understand each other because these are very distant professions.”
As a result, several new capabilities emerged. The legal department even won several awards in the field of legal innovation, which changed the perception and legitimacy of the stakeholders it interacts with.
It’s also a cultural issue
At a cultural level, efforts can also be made to mitigate the resistance lawyers may experience to innovation. Institutionalizing innovation involves embedding innovative practices and routines that support innovation into the day-to-day operations of the legal department. Training, reflection sessions, and hands-on workshops help lawyers become familiar with new technologies and approaches. Thus, they are encouraged to experiment and adopt an attitude of participation in change.
In our field, a set of practices aims to institutionalize innovation within the legal department. These include organizing internal innovation workshops to showcase projects and train working teams, systematic brainstorming sessions, project management platforms to increase their visibility and formalize the approach, without forgetting promotions and rewards through “innovation” challenges. By integrating these practices into the daily lives of lawyers, legal departments ensure continuity and a lasting commitment to innovation.
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