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In-house lawyers will often need to deploy more management skills compared to their private practice counterparts. One such skill is considering how to increase efficiency of the legal team by monitoring processes and making improvements where possible.

Reducing time spent on routine procedures gives the legal department more time to spend on complex issues where they can add greater value to the organisation, ultimately leading to better company profits. Let’s take a look at a few methods for optimising the efficiency of the in-house legal department.

Streamline workflows

Streamlining legal process workflows improves turnaround times, which means that legal counsel can respond more quickly to any urgent requests, as well as ensuring that routine tasks take up less time. There are a couple of elements which can help in-house lawyers with workflow: workflow management and automation.

Workflow management

“This is the way we’ve always done things” is one of the most dangerous mindsets standing in the way of business progression and long-term success. Since the in-house legal team is part of the overall company and its efficiency affects the wider organisation, it’s vital that standard legal workflows are regularly assessed to find out if there is room for improvement. It can be helpful to ask new members of the legal team or even colleagues from other departments to provide a fresh perspective on how things can be done more efficiently.

Automation

Time spent on routine and repetitive tasks performed by in-house lawyers, such as preparing standard contracts, can be substantially reduced by using automation tools. Software such as LexisCreate provides access to a huge UU����ֱ�� database of precedents and clauses, ensuring that legal contracts can be drafted more efficiently and accurately. Furthermore, the software integrates with Microsoft Office, which means that there is less need for context-switching (i.e. opening up different programs or apps and switching between them), further enhancing the legal team’s productivity.

Lexis+ Practical Guidance

UU����ֱ�� provides an enormous range of practical guidance for in-house lawyers, including practice notes, precedents, forms and current awareness alerts across 36 practice areas. The In-House Advisor practice area includes practice notes that deal with various challenges facing legal counsel, with tips and examples of best practice to help them to improve collaboration and efficiency. A couple of examples are:

• Collaborating with legal colleagues to achieve quality and consistency - this note includes tips on improving consistency and encouraging better sharing of resources within the legal team.
• Supporting legal colleagues and sharing know-how - this note covers a variety of issues including the challenges of being a team player in the context of being an in-house lawyer.

Subscription to UU����ֱ�� is required to access these In-House Advisor practice notes. You can get a free trial here.