In my role at SYKE, I’m in the fortunate position of being able to look across the entire sector, and by supporting a number of banks and financial institutions as they embark on their digital transformation journeys, I get first-hand insight into the innovation that is happening in the real world.
Here is the first of my upcoming series on the state of the legal tech market in FS, and where we could be heading in the future. This week I’ll be exploring a tech trend that’s coming to fruition now, and one that’s just getting going.
FINANCIAL BENEFITS OF CLM EMERGE
Organisations that began automating their legal processes two to three years ago are seeing real, tangible, business benefits. On average, in my experience, those firms taking advantage of technology are seeing:
- 30% increase in business users self-serving,
- 20-30% reduction in price per matter, and
- 25%-35% increase in contract conversion to executed product/agreement
All of this is driving substantial increases in revenue, and significantly reducing lawyers’ time wasted deciphering what legal advice the business user is actually looking for.
INCREASING PUSH TO LEVERAGE EXISTING TECH
I help clients identify where there are repeatable logic-based business processes that, if automated, would help teams work much more efficiently with their legal & compliance colleagues – without overhauling existing systems.
This can often involve linking how clients are using existing systems – e.g. CRM, RPA or chatbots – with their CLM or workflow systems to integrate these more closely. This is helping our clients evolve existing processes by giving users dynamic access to all the know-how their legal teams have developed.
You can examine data from multiple sources to look for discrepancies and ensure accuracy and, in doing so, reduce your current operational risk. And all of this can be done using your existing tech stack in many instances.
SELF-SERVE IS KING
When users are able to self-serve, they are quickly and automatically directed to the answer they need without needing to pick up the phone to their lawyer or wait for a response to an email. RPA also enables you to reduce costs, turnaround times, and eradicate human error while helping employees focus on higher-value-added activities.
If you can deliver a customer experience that is faster, better and more seamless than what exists today, then the shift to efficiency is inevitable .and because of that I only see this area of legal tech accelerating.
Next time, I’ll be looking at the question of how legal teams can balance demand with scarce resources using tech. If you’d like to discuss your legal tech needs, please contact me using the form on this page or via simon@syke.tech
Simon has over 20 years’ experience in financial services and has delivered matter management, CLM and doc automation programmes at SYKE using a wide range of technology solutions (including HighQ, Icertis, DocuSign Agreement Cloud, M365, Repstor and Pega).
Prior to joining SYKE he led a lending business and in-house legal teams at Barclays, where he sponsored the development technology solutions, expanding the use of e-signature to the corporate bank and successfully sponsoring the use of an AI solution for the loan book.
