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As rising demands and competing responsibilities increasingly stretch corporate counsel, Conga’s director of strategy, innovation, and transformation highlights the real-time challenges legal departments are facing so they can overcome them.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Corporate Counsel Show, Charles Harb, Conga’s director of strategy, innovation, and transformation, outlined the key challenges and emerging trends he’s observing among in-house counsel.
Reflecting on the current legal landscape, Harb noted that corporate legal teams are increasingly being squeezed between rising business demands and expanding compliance obligations.
“It’s really interesting when I deal with different counsel [and] different legal teams. Legal teams are being sort of caught between rising demands for business, but also considerations around compliance and regulatory requirements and so on,” he said.
As legal teams work to meet their rapidly evolving roles and demonstrate their value, Harb also highlighted a growing disconnect between what is expected of these teams and the tools they have available to maintain efficiency and consistency.
“What I find fascinating is that many legal teams are still relying on very manual workforce flows and fragmented tools and outdated contract management processes to go through these sorts of processes,” he said.
Despite the availability and sophistication of legal tech solutions, Harb explained how many legal departments continue to use tools like “Microsoft Word to negotiate the contracts [and] use emails to route discussions back and forth”.
“There’s very little centralised system in trying to work through some of those challenges, with some of those regulatory requirements, trying to be able to meet those requirements and still also manage the compliance and so on is actually very tricky for a lot of legal teams,” he said.
While this lack of streamlined infrastructure might be expected in smaller firms, Harb noted that even some of the most resource-rich organisations continue to struggle with the basics.
“You would almost imagine that larger companies would have this down, this whole process in place very well and have it very well coordinated and managed,” he said.
“It really depends on the organisation. I’ve seen very large organisations with large legal teams that are still reliant on Microsoft Disparate, Microsoft Word and email and a SharePoint folder somewhere.”
On the other hand, Harb identified how some smaller legal teams have adopted more structured approaches out of necessity.
“Then I’ve worked with much smaller teams where they have a repository in place, they have their clause library in place, they know what their processes are, and because they are smaller teams, they have had to ensure that their process is really robust to be able to support the team,” he said.
Harb advised that firms of any size looking to navigate this complex landscape should start by asking some fundamental questions to identify what works best for them.
“Understand what your processes are, understand what good looks like, where you actually want to get to, and then work with a vendor that can help you through that journey, through that crawl, walk, run type journey,” he said.
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