What Is A Digital Strategy?

By Victoria Swedjemark.

Why you need a strategic approach to your digital transformation journey as an inhouse legal team

What is the difference between a digital strategy and a tech roadmap?

What is a digital strategy? Some legal teams might think that a digital strategy equals a tech roadmap. But a tech roadmap is merely the plan you use to implement the strategy (such as the action steps and the time, resources and people involved), it is not the strategy as such. The strategy is rather the logic or design principles that backup your tech roadmap. It’s the rationale for your efforts, and brings clarity to what you are trying to accomplish with the technology, and why.

Your strategy is also what forms the narrative around your tech journey, that you can use to tell the story about it to your team and to others, such as to your internal stakeholders.

It is helpful in the change management to be able convince others of the value of your plans, and also to get funding, as a compelling story helps back up the business case around your investments.

A tech roadmap without a strategy often ends up tactical at best, or perhaps just a set of ad hoc initiatives.

Approaches that can indicate lack of strategy

Some legal team tech roadmaps are simply the result of what tech companies have approached them with the most impressive demos of shiny tech tools, rather than a well thought through strategy addressing most pressing needs. This often means you are letting the tail wag the dog, letting tech companies push you into initiatives with unclear benefits or that lack internal buy-in, instead of making yourselves the driver of your own development.

Many legal teams also resort to copying what peers are doing. It can be wise to exchange notes with, and learn from, others legal departments, and it can make sense to do a benchmark to see what technology other legal teams are implementing. For example, that type of comparison can be a helpful illustration to create internal sense of urgency – and get funding – for tech investments and legal operations efforts (“look other legal teams are implementing technology at scale, we cannot become a legal department laggard or an unattractive workplace”), but be cautious about just copying others’ initiatives. Unless you can validate you have the same needs and operate under similar circumstances. Better is to do a proper needs assessment based on your unique situation.

Applying a holistic approach

Why you should start with your overall function strategy and set longer-term targets

The term “digital strategy” is flawed in the sense of giving the impression that your digitalisation efforts are somehow stand-alone or separable from your general strategy as a legal function.  A better approach is to view technology as an enabler in the execution of your overall strategy.

The starting point for your tech initiatives should be the overall vision, mission, targets and objectives of the legal function. Where are you heading and why? What is your aspirational state, your target operating model, and how can the tech help you get there? Are you building for scale, speed, impact, cost efficiency or what? What is your aspirational role as a team, and how can technology enable you to take such a role?

If you don’t apply a longer-term view there is an apparent risk that you will focus too much on just incrementally improving the status quo rather than embrace the more transformational change that will be needed to prepare for the future.

One common mistake legal teams make is digitalising a status quo that is sub-optimal - such as automating a poor process - or unsustainable, such as going after tech solutions that cement a role for the legal function that is not desirable in the longer-term, such as that of administrators or highly invested in other type of low end work. It can involve selecting an NDA automation solution designed for the legal team, rather than entirely moving all handling of NDAs to 1st line business and rather go for a solution that fits non-lawyer users.  Or implementing an entity management solution that boggles down the legal team as the corporate administrators rather than seeking a solution that enables task sharing or delegation of parts of the process to others - or even going after a full-fledged outsourcing of all entity management instead.

This is why a good starting point for your digital strategy is to clarify the strategic positioning of your legal function. Do you seek to be a service center for the business, able to broadly service requests and turn things around quickly? Well, then you should probably go after tech solution that improve intake, speed up the legal team or that help you measure your service level to business. But if you rather seek to delegate the bulk of high-volume contracts to other parts of the organisation for example, or perhaps outsource it altogether, than this is not at the core of your strategy.

And if you seek a role as a business enabling legal function you probably want to go after tech enhanced self-serve solutions for business. It can be document or contract automation solutions that the business can use to produce “legal products” in day-to-day business themselves, or a conversational form or chatbot that the business can use to find answers to common inquiries in the legal or compliance domain, or on-demand nugget videos able to provide quick legal guidance to common problems or challenges. But, again, if you have already scoped out most of this work, these tech initiatives will most likely be run by sales and procurement instead and will not be at the core of your strategy.

And if you seek the role as a strategic business partner perhaps you should go for technology that is able to help you measure how much time you spend on high value work, such as CLM or matter management solution with such capabilities, or a solution that feeds data into a dashboard able to show your value contribution to business or the RoI of your external spend - or that help you free up time to move to more tech solutions.

If you skip the step of addressing the role and positioning of the legal function, and forget to make the analysis of what lawyers should spend their time on, the technology you implement can end up counter-productive once you later want to move out of some of that work that you have now effectively integrated into an (expensive) tech solution. Instead, why not let the technology you choose to implement support your aspiration to repurpose the team to more high-value work?

Overall business needs matter too

Key business objectives should also be factored into your tech initiatives. If you are a highly regulated company, or handle a lot of personal data and need to ensure GDPR compliant business, perhaps what you then need is technology that can help you manage compliance more effectively. Or if cost efficiency is very imporant, then spend management or outside counsel management is probably a relevant focus area for your tech initiatives. What contract management solution is best for you also depends on what matters most to your business – is it speed in the contracting process, or better obligation management or more high-quality contract data for example. And perhaps CLM technology should be addressed in tight collaboration with Sales or Procurement?

All these “why”s for your technology form the basis of your strategy. This means that the aspirations – of the legal function and the business more broadly – should be the core design principles for your digitalisation efforts.

The other pillar of your strategy should be your pain points. What is the legal team, and your business stakeholders, struggling most with? These are the problems that the technology can help solve. Do you know what they are? A good way to find out is to simply gather insights on it, from the team and from the wider business. Doing this will also super charge your change management, as people will more easily buy into solutions that help solve their biggest challenges and address pain points they experience daily. It will make it much easier to sell the initiatives, and the efforts involved, to these people.

Too many tech initiatives fail because people do not feel they are solving key problems they have or do not do so in a helpful way.

A people strategy and a digital culture matters too

What is also often overlooked in succeeding with digitalisation in the legal function is the people aspects. A common reason tech initiatives fail is lack of strategic maturity and digital maturity in the legal team.

That is why a successful digital strategy should also encompass a people & culture strategy. Part of this is having people understand the overall strategy and purpose of technology, as outlined above, but it is also about having the team understand what digital transformation is all about. That it also involves engaging with people (such as business colleagues) in new ways, in line with evolving customer- and end user expectations on accessibility and convenience (facilitated by technology) and new approaches to collaboration, such as cloud based, real-time and cross-functional approaches.

What can help here is to reinforce business acumen of the lawyers, through business alignment and more “run legal like a business”-thinking, because if the team understands how business is changing now, as a result they will probably better understand how these shifts impact the legal function, and legal and compliance work, too.

The people strategy is also about hands-on upskilling people on technology, data, change management and project management, which are all key elements of a succeeding with tech selection, solution design and tech implementations – especially if you expect lawyers to shape and carry through initiatives

This is a subset of an upgraded holistic competence strategy for the function. Perhaps you also need to add people to the team that are not lawyers but rather have legal operations type of skillsets, or you need to bring in relevant competencies from external partners, such as management consultants or legal operations consultants, to complement your team.

Reinforcing a digital culture in your team is also about fostering a culture of experimentation and challenging some of the traditional values, beliefs, assumptions and practices of the team, that may have served you well in the past but may stand in the way as you embark on your digital transformation journey. Such as perfectionism, legal focus rather than business or end user focus, or too much risk conservatism.

So how about you, do you have a strategy to back up your tech initiatives, or just a tech roadmap?

---

About the Author Victoria Swedjemark works as a management consultant and is the founder of Glowmind, a boutique consulting firm. She helps legal and compliance teams transform into the future, by 1) clarifying overall function strategy – in terms of role, focus and contribution – 2) identifying opportunities to work smarter – using technology effectively and revisiting how work is resourced and carried out and 3) evolving the team – building the skillsets and mindsets needed for tomorrow and succeeding with change management. She does so by helping in-house legal leaders and their teams analyse relevant change needs, set change plans and succeed with implementation. Victoria is herself an ex in-house legal leader, having headed up the legal function in three different companies for 14 years. She is passionate about bringing more business thinking into Legal and helping legal teams understand how the world is changing and how the legal function needs to adapt, and can reposition to more value and impact. www.glowmind.com.

Photo credit: Åsa Hafmar (Jusek). #VictoriaSwedjemark #digitalization #adaptation #legalteams #future #strategy #transformation