In-house legal keeps getting squeezed into other teams' software
Is your team shaping the technology in use or is the technology shaping your legal team? The answer says more about fit than any other feature checklist.
Many in-house teams I talk to are working with software that was built for somebody else. Most didn’t choose it. The business picked one platform for the whole organisation and then found legal a place inside it.
Approvals are often where you notice it first. In many enterprise systems, the approval chain was built for procurement. It moves a purchase request to a budget holder, gets a yes and carries on. Legal signoff works differently. Who needs to see a contract depends on what it puts at risk. Some matters need the general counsel and others don’t. And the step that matters most is a lawyer’s judgment. Fit all of that into a chain designed for buying things and some of it gets lost.
The software works well for the functions it was designed around. Legal gets fitted in afterwards, into a shape that’s already been decided.
Over the years, I’ve found one question does more than any feature checklist to show whether a platform fits. Is your team shaping the platform, or is the platform gradually shaping your team?
When the fit is poor, people often blame training, or say the team needs more discipline. From my own time in-house, I’ve rarely found that to be the problem. The in-house lawyers I know take process seriously. If they’re working around a system, it’s usually a sign the system is doing the shaping.
You’ll probably recognise the workarounds. An approval is given over email and recorded later, if someone remembers. A matter lands in whichever category comes closest. Each one is small, but over time the system’s record of your team stops matching the way the team works.
That gap matters when you need to show the business how much risk your team is carrying. The system can only tell part of the story, and your people spend time translating between how they work and how the system says they work. IDC calls the drag this creates legal friction.
Where the answer shows up
A platform built for in-house legal starts with how the team works day to day. Requests come in from across the business, matters need working through to resolution, and contracts go back and forth in negotiation. External legal spend has to be kept in check. Then all of it must be explained to a business that doesn’t speak legal.
When a platform wasn’t built that way, three details usually tell you your team is the one adjusting. Matter types don’t line up with how your team triages risk, so people pick the closest fit. Approval chains follow procurement’s logic, so signoff happens outside the system. And reporting fields make sense to finance but don’t help a general counsel explain the team’s workload, so someone rebuilds the numbers by hand.
It’s worth looking beneath the screens when you check. Almost any system can be made to look like a legal tool by relabelling fields and renaming screens, and that can make a poor fit feel better for a while. What sits underneath, the way work is structured, routed and reported, decides which way the shaping runs, and it’s much harder to change. That’s the part to test when you evaluate a platform.
Where connection falls short
I’m a big believer in connecting legal to the business. But a platform can connect every function and still ask legal to bend its process to suit somebody else’s. Information can move freely between teams while the legal work behind it is squeezed into the wrong shape.
Ideally, you’d have a platform that both connects legal to the business and was built for legal from the start. That’s the thinking behind a legal operating system such as LawVu LegalOS.
In The Future of In-House Legal report, Paula Pépin, CEO and founder of The GC Collective and LexGO, says: “Buying the tool without assessing your internal processes is one of the biggest mistakes teams make.” It’s a point I hear echoed in so many conversations. Getting clear on how your team works makes it easier to see what a platform needs to support.
So if you’re using a platform now, or weighing one up, come back to that question. Is your team shaping the platform, or is the platform shaping your team? If it’s the second, your team’s workarounds are the place to start, because each one points to something the platform should be doing for you.
Our guide to the legal operating system sets out what a platform needs to fit in-house legal, and the details that show whether it does.
