There are two types of efficiency gains
Which one are you hoping for?
Efficiency is often the main goal in Legal Ops, but not all efficiency gains are created equal.
It’s worth pondering what kind of efficiency we're chasing: are we oiling the engine (incremental gains), or are we redesigning (elements of) the car (strategic gains)?
🔧 Incremental gains
A lot of tools/hacks/ideas are basically adding oil to the engine - necessary but you can’t expect huge gains. They typically improve performance by 5-10%. The existing workflow or process remains untouched; we're just speeding it up.
Examples are:
having clause banks and contract databases structured well so you spend less time searching for things
playbook tooling that enables you to auto-insert frequently used comment bubbles (one of the most popular features of our tool LexPlay)
[WARNING: automating an inefficient broken workflow often just locks it in, so be careful! E.g. adopting an AI drafting assistant that enables you to insert really unreasonable positions really quickly may save you time on the first mark-up, but will still lead to 5 rounds of negotiation instead of 2. Better to fix the positions first.]
🚀 Strategic gains
But if we're seeking a leap rather than a step, we need to not just change the oil, we should change how the car itself works.
Examples are:
deciding that certain contracts won't be negotiated at all
switching out complex NDA templates to universally accepted ones like OneNDA or Bonterms—minimising negotiation to the bare essentials.
empowering business teams to self-serve
using AI chat to answer common questions from the business
using detailed playbook positions + guidance to enable paralegals to do the heavy lifting on common contracts, as opposed to senior lawyers.
What these examples have in common is that they change the extent of the work itself, or who can do the work.
As opposed to just improving how something is done.
Why this is useful
There’s room for each type of efficiency gain. Sometimes the incremental one is so easy to implement, that it’s worth doing.
But if a part of your workflow feels like it’s actually quite hard or expensive to improve, it’s worth double checking it’s the right kind of efficiency before doing it.
Thanks for being here,
Daniel