As law firms and legal departments expand technological capabilities, an emphasis remains on increasing efficiency while providing value.
Leaders in the industry must identify ways to implement new tools without offsetting the return by bogging down system administrators with tedious tasks that eat away at productivity. Solutions templating in a technology platform can make creating and configuring new sites more intuitive, efficient and seamless. Users of varying technological capabilities can use site configuration to create repeatable, portable solution templates.
Many law firms and legal departments still utilize self-built systems for their intranet, which store files on local servers and offer little to no collaboration functionality. Essentially, a series of static sites that store information but offer no dynamic capabilities and certainly aren’t designed to be quickly replicated.
More and more, legal technology provides the ability for the legal industry to quickly share information, track financial and matter progress in real-time, and create meaningful data visualization in an effort to remain transparent. There’s a need to combine file-sharing with the ability to help colleagues and clients communicate better.
Technology platforms that can be branded to create flexible and customizable solutions can now be a differentiator.
The solution templating capability saves administrators time and effort, reducing “time to value” for sites and projects. Sharing templates across instances of the platform allows users to deliver consistent business sites quickly and efficiently, and building and templating sites that are needed regularly provides a quick self-service solution to your organization’s business users.
More simply, solutions templating can be the final piece of the puzzle to allow users to scale the advanced solutions they build much more easily and to leverage the advantages to drive transactional efficiency and process transformation.
A solution that can be turned into a portable site template can be shared, edited, and used to create new sites more quickly and easily. With the right system, templates can even be exported or imported to ensure consistency by automating and standardizing what would otherwise be a repetitive, manual process for site administrators.
Solutions templating can take the burden off of the administrators or other technology solutions architects to constantly be involved. Instead, multiple users will have the ability to efficiently set up sites that replicate desired configurations for structuring and displaying a full range of technology tools. This includes:
- Legal data
- Document automation configuration
- Folder structure
- Homepages and site navigation
- Repointing of data visualisation and navigation links
- Site and module configuration
- User groups and permissions.
In the effort to encourage the adoption of technology solutions with legal operations leaders, displaying an ability to create and own technology that can produce a reusable asset of value to clients should encourage buy-in from decision-makers. Additionally, a formal training program can increase the functionality of solutions templating and allow multiple users to assist in realizing the benefits.
Firms looking to embrace innovation and transparency can evolve and adapt the legal work to the system’s capabilities. Embracing solutions templating can provide significant value add as clients increasingly expect legal services to include more and more intricate technology to meet their demands.
