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The Summit on Legal Innovation and Disruption (SOLID) East, held on September 13, 2018 in New York City, delivered on its promise to bring together professionals who are transforming the legal industry. The daylong event held an action-packed sprint of 14 TED Talk-style sessions spanning the full spectrum of stakeholders in the legal ecosystem. SOLID East 2018 was the third such event orchestrated by The Cowen Group and delivered in partnership with several sponsors, including HBR Consulting. Each summit has reflected the ethos of those dedicated to exploring the rate of change and innovation at the intersection of technology and the business of law in both law departments and law firms.

Data science and analytics are relatively new to the legal industry. While companies across almost all sectors are investing heavily in analytics, legal organizations are very much in the early stages of learning and adoption.

That situation is changing, however. Through the work we have done with clients and as we observed at ILTACON 2018 and other industry gatherings, there is tremendous interest in legal analytics. HBR Consulting is beginning to see new, creative uses emerge and an expansion in the field of play for analytics in law. The reasons for change are many but expanding business expectations for law departments, an increasingly competitive landscape for law firms (including new non-firm competitors) and the noticeable adoption outside the legal industry are three drivers of note.

With the rise of new compliance laws like GDPR in Europe, California’s new privacy requirements and other increased privacy scrutiny, as well as well-publicized law firm data breaches, it is understandable that law firms are feeling even more pressure to take steps to reduce their risk profile and triple-check that their data is safe. CIOs are looking at all aspects of security, including how systems can be breached or how data can be shared inadvertently. If you are working on 2018 data protection commitments made to your firm’s upper management, we wanted to make sure you are aware of a tool that can bolster the effects of your data loss prevention (DLP) solution: DLP Tagger.

Law departments are eager to make use of legal analytics technology to better manage their spend and help guide other decisions. According to HBR’s 2017 Law Department Survey of 300 U.S. and global law departments, nearly half of all respondents reported already having legal spend analytics technology, and 24 percent planned to adopt in the next two years. But once the decision is made to implement new or updated legal analytics technology, what is the best way to do it? Law departments have two options: develop it themselves or engage an outside provider.

Corporate law departments are increasingly challenged to track their e-Discovery activities and costs. In today’s metric-focused business environment, law departments should be able to answer simple questions about their e-Discovery lifecycle, including: Exactly how much is being spent on e-Discovery and how do those costs break down? What volume of data is being handled? What is the cost of reviewing documents? What are the opportunities to reduce costs?

In recent years, law firms have seen a major shift in how their libraries function. As new technology has transformed the legal space and firms face a myriad of unique challenges like mergers, employee departures and cost reductions, law library structures and priorities have transformed.

This is the final article in a three-part series of blog posts designed to help corporate law departments take their operations up a notch. In Part One, we provided an overview of maturity models for six of the twelve CLOC Core Competencies that we reviewed with participants in HBR’s educational program at the 2018 CLOC Institute. The post invited readers to examine the models and conduct a self-evaluation to identify the level of maturity that best describes their current state. In Part Two, we shared specific insights for how departments in the “Foundational” stage can take the next step toward operating as an “Advanced” corporate law department.

During my recent visit to Denver for the 2018 Aderant Momentum conference, I noticed a common theme as I interacted with attendees at the conference: Many law firm leaders are currently questioning the effectiveness of their financial reporting systems.

In a previous blog post, my colleague Kevin Clem provided an overview of six unique maturity models that we laid out to participants in HBR’s educational program at CLOC’s 2018 Corporate Legal Operations Institute. Our invitation in that initial post was to study these models and conduct a self-evaluation to determine where your department fits, then challenge yourself to take your operations up a notch.