Legito PowerUp 2022: Success Story – CLM & Document Automation in a Large Law Firm
If we are tempted to assume there is one solution to a problem, get fresh ideas by looking at the problem through the eyes of another culture, another country, or another continent.
Mauricio Jaramillo presented a case study from the largest law firm in Colombia, Gomez-Pinzon. Here’s a deliberate summary of a few sections from Mauricio’s presentation that are not what we usually hear from law firm case studies.
Mauricio described the core challenge like this: how do you persuade the partners of a successful law firm to embark on a digital transformation project to change legal services that had been working successfully for 30+ years? Gomez-Pinzon acknowledged that they did not merely intend to change the way they created documents – they were going to redesign legal practice.
Before deciding the projects to deliver digital transformation, Gomez-Pinzon started by changing how people would respond and adapt. It helped that their organisation attracted young legal professionals keen to build their careers using new technologies. Gomez-Pinzon spent time thinking about how to get people to change the way they thought about their work. Mauricio believed the success of digital transformation would depend on how people embraced it. After they got their colleagues behind the project, they could leave them to continue to build on each new technical innovation so that it did not stall after one project.
Gomez-Pinzon kicked off their document automation strategy with a remarkable project: Mauricio observed that auditors regularly ask law firms to report on legal matters for use in clients’ audits. When he explained the cumbersome procedures for responding to audit requests, the problem was visible, and it raises the question, why has nobody found a better way to handle it? It’s an ideal starting project: it solves a problem that is a recurring administrative nuisance that must be done correctly, and it’s a problem that vexed every team in the organisation. Get that right (and they did), and you open the door to enterprise-wide adoption of the technology for multiple teams.
Having successfully built a solution for audit reports, Mauricio described how Gomez-Pinzon moved to another solution that lawyers will recognise: they automated the production of due-diligence reports. If you’re a lawyer, you will know that DD reports are a joyless but important task in every corporate deal. If you’re not a lawyer, the interesting thing about automating DD reports is that they are not ‘standard’ – an automation solution has to span many variables because the reports cannot be over-simplified.
We thank Mauricio for travelling to Prague to share his experience. They started thinking about people. They built a solution that automated a task that was tedious for people, but a task that must be done correctly. That’s how they began a successful digital transformation.
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Charles Drayson
Legito's Chief Community Officer
After a few years of working for a prominent London law firm, I started to get comfortable in my practice area, and I stopped feeling like every project demanded knowledge I didn’t have. And then something happened: I travelled overseas to work on a legal project in the middle east.
I started to work in the same way I worked in London – and it didn’t go too well.
I remember a senior lawyer in a local firm making arguments I had not heard before, and using negotiations in a style I had not experienced. I annoyed my counterparts by trying to do things the way they were done in London, and made no progress until I let go my narrow outlook.
In the years that followed, I was fortunate to work in multiple countries and to spend long periods in some of them. I started to enjoy the experience of different business cultures and legal traditions while observing that we share many of the same challenges.
Legito PowerUp 2022: Success Story – CLM & Document Automation in a Large Law Firm
If we are tempted to assume there is one solution to a problem, get fresh ideas by looking at the problem through the eyes of another culture, another country, or another continent.
Mauricio Jaramillo presented a case study from the largest law firm in Colombia, Gomez-Pinzon. Here’s a deliberate summary of a few sections from Mauricio’s presentation that are not what we usually hear from law firm case studies.
Mauricio described the core challenge like this: how do you persuade the partners of a successful law firm to embark on a digital transformation project to change legal services that had been working successfully for 30+ years? Gomez-Pinzon acknowledged that they did not merely intend to change the way they created documents – they were going to redesign legal practice.
Before deciding the projects to deliver digital transformation, Gomez-Pinzon started by changing how people would respond and adapt. It helped that their organisation attracted young legal professionals keen to build their careers using new technologies. Gomez-Pinzon spent time thinking about how to get people to change the way they thought about their work. Mauricio believed the success of digital transformation would depend on how people embraced it. After they got their colleagues behind the project, they could leave them to continue to build on each new technical innovation so that it did not stall after one project.
Gomez-Pinzon kicked off their document automation strategy with a remarkable project: Mauricio observed that auditors regularly ask law firms to report on legal matters for use in clients’ audits. When he explained the cumbersome procedures for responding to audit requests, the problem was visible, and it raises the question, why has nobody found a better way to handle it? It’s an ideal starting project: it solves a problem that is a recurring administrative nuisance that must be done correctly, and it’s a problem that vexed every team in the organisation. Get that right (and they did), and you open the door to enterprise-wide adoption of the technology for multiple teams.
Having successfully built a solution for audit reports, Mauricio described how Gomez-Pinzon moved to another solution that lawyers will recognise: they automated the production of due-diligence reports. If you’re a lawyer, you will know that DD reports are a joyless but important task in every corporate deal. If you’re not a lawyer, the interesting thing about automating DD reports is that they are not ‘standard’ – an automation solution has to span many variables because the reports cannot be over-simplified.
We thank Mauricio for travelling to Prague to share his experience. They started thinking about people. They built a solution that automated a task that was tedious for people, but a task that must be done correctly. That’s how they began a successful digital transformation.
FULL RECORDING NOW AVAILABLE
Charles Drayson
Legito's Chief Community Officer
After a few years of working for a prominent London law firm, I started to get comfortable in my practice area, and I stopped feeling like every project demanded knowledge I didn’t have. And then something happened: I travelled overseas to work on a legal project in the middle east.
I started to work in the same way I worked in London – and it didn’t go too well.
I remember a senior lawyer in a local firm making arguments I had not heard before, and using negotiations in a style I had not experienced. I annoyed my counterparts by trying to do things the way they were done in London, and made no progress until I let go my narrow outlook.
In the years that followed, I was fortunate to work in multiple countries and to spend long periods in some of them. I started to enjoy the experience of different business cultures and legal traditions while observing that we share many of the same challenges.