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With an overwhelming number of legal tech tools on the market, many in-house teams struggle to pinpoint which solutions are genuinely worth the investment. Here, Charles Harb shares how legal departments can confidently assess and choose the technologies that will best support their goals.
Speaking on a recent episode of The Corporate Counsel Show, Charles Harb, Conga’s director of strategy, innovation, and transformation, shared insights on how legal departments can effectively evaluate and adopt new technologies to best serve their teams’ needs.
In the same episode, he outlined the key challenges and emerging trends he’s observing among in-house counsel.
Harb explained that the first step law departments must take when evaluating which legal tech solutions are worth investing in is for legal leaders to move beyond simply browsing product features and instead focus on understanding their own internal landscape.
“You need to understand what your scope is, what the different business processes that you want to have in place, and what you want to address? Which departments do you want to address, which use cases do you want to address first?” he said.
While it is essential first to evaluate your own firm’s needs, Harb emphasised that communicating with vendors is equally vital, as they are not merely product suppliers but also valuable guides.
“You also need to ask questions of the vendor about what they can potentially do because there is an element of unconscious incompetence. You don’t know what you don’t know. So, quite often, the vendor can also help guide you in that sort of approach,” he said.
For law departments aiming to make the right tech choices, Harb recommends taking a proactive approach – starting with clear communication with vendors about what they want to achieve and which use cases are most pressing.
“If you understand the use case you’re trying to achieve or the business processes you’re trying to achieve, one of the recommendations that I would have is to talk to the vendor about this, this is what I want to do and get presentations from them about how they would meet those use cases,” he said.
At the same time, Harb cautioned law departments against limiting themselves to their current understanding, noting that there may be more effective options available than initially considered.
“On the flip side, also ask them for what’s the art of the possible because as an extension to that unconscious incompetence, if you’re just saying these are the use cases I want to meet, you might not realise that there are potentially better ways,” he said.
“They may even give you suggestions on how to do things within your use cases that are actually better than what you’ve currently done.”
Ultimately, Harb stressed that no matter how promising a technology may seem – or how enthusiastic a legal team is about adopting it – success depends on strong support from the top down.
“One of the challenges that I see is quite often legal departments are seen as an expensive cost centre to the business, but they are actually vitally important,” he said.
“So if you don’t have executive buy-in that’s actually supporting the legal department in this decision-making process, it can sort of fall away, or you may lose some of the usefulness of the investment.”
