It’s a familiar scenario for anyone looking to onboard new technology in a law firm.
The IT department finds a new product that promises major efficiencies and the elimination of mundane tasks.
While the tech professionals are eager to move forward, getting lawyer buy-in requires a fair amount of persuasion.
After all, deals were getting done effectively before this new product was introduced, and busy lawyers may resist investing the time to learn a new product — no matter the upsides.
For Naveen Pai, Chief Knowledge Officer at Gunderson Dettmer, one key to success in this type of change management is listening intently to a new system’s detractors — and then turning them into its champions.
In implementing Closing Folders from iManage at his firm in 2019, for example, Pai took some critics’ feedback directly to the company, which responded with some product enhancements.
“It was about making sure to listen to those detractors, and making sure to meet them where they are,” Pai said in a recent CLE webinar sponsored by iManage. “And in some cases, they are some of our biggest fans now.”
Closing Folders is a Cloud-based transaction management solution that automates the repetitive, often tedious tasks associated with closing deals, from creating checklists and managing versions, through to capturing signatures and creating final closing books.
In the webinar, two iManage customers using Closing Folders at their firms took a deep dive into implementing new tech and realizing its benefits.
Here, we present select takeaways from the discussion. (Register to view the full presentation on-demand here. CLE credit is available.)
Addressing the Pain Points
A technology system is only as useful as the problem it solves. So what can Closing Folders improve?
For Scott Kunde, an associate at Holland & Knight, the sheer volume of documents in a sprawling transaction comes to mind.
He recently worked on a financing deal involving numerous nursing facilities, each with its own set of real estate-related documents. The number of documents being worked on quickly ballooned to several hundred.
“It was definitely a pain point in having to revise all of those documents as dates slipped or terms changed, or entities changed,” he said.
There are also the coordination challenges that arise when one associate is stretched among multiple deals.
Gunderson Dettmer’s Pai, a former practicing lawyer, particularly sees this phenomenon arise when handling multiple venture capital financings at once.
In addition to the volume challenges, this dynamic creates coordination hurdles among multiple parties when finishing negotiations and finalizing deals.
“Between those things, you’re looking at a lot of work,” he said.
No matter how skilled the lawyers may be, these types of organizational challenges are part of the practice of law.
If mismanaged, they can increase the chances of a critical mistake arising in a fast-moving deal, the panelists noted. That’s where technology comes in.
“The common thread really is avoiding unnecessary risk,” said iManage’s Brett Young. “Whether it’s reputational risk or risk to the deal itself, we don’t want people making mistakes.”
The right technology can facilitate secure collaboration to ease scheduling challenges while getting a mass of documents and their revisions under control.
Meanwhile, it can cut down on manual work and bolster efficiency, even automating tasks like the dreaded creation of the closing book.
“With Closing Folders or a legal transaction management tool, it’s something that really complements an existing workflow,” Young said. “It’s not something where you’ve got to reinvent the wheel. It’s intuitive.”
(Register to view the full presentation on-demand here. CLE credit is available.)
