What if working for a company's legal department meant more than just managing risks and protecting the company's interests in the face of laws and standards? These departments are also called upon to become key players in innovation.
However, a number of internal obstacles sometimes stand in the way, at three levels in particular.
The first obstacle to innovation is the position of the in-house legal department. Historically, and for a long time, it was seen as performing rigid functions and was not represented on the company's management bodies. This internal perception may have led to a lack of support from senior management, limiting its access to the resources it needs to innovate.
A second obstacle is the reluctance of IT teams to meet the demands of the Legal Department. They tend to prioritise requests from the business lines, forcing others to turn to costly external service providers. As a result, ideas put forward by lawyers are relegated to the background, or even abandoned over time.
The third obstacle is the resistance of the lawyers themselves. Their training and professional identity often, by default, favour security and framework, essential qualities for ensuring compliance and minimising risks. However, these qualities can become obstacles when it comes to adopting innovative practices involving risk-taking and openness to change. Internal scepticism and resistance make it difficult to adopt legal innovations.
To overcome these obstacles, three good practices identified in the course of our research can be deployed.
Finding internal support
A first step would be to seek strong internal support. Reference authors on organisational change stress the importance of obtaining the support of power groups in a change process. Such support not only guarantees access to financial, human and material resources, but also enables the legal department to communicate its needs and plans more effectively. In our fieldwork, one legal director explained:
‘Weekly meetings are organised with the CEO to discuss the vision and strategy, so that we can define and understand how we are going to fit in and play a part in achieving the objectives, how we are going to contribute to the transformation, the objectives, the development, how we are going to play a part as lawyers - in the broadest sense - in the company's strategy’.
This proximity and communication facilitate access to resources:
‘We are given the means to support and do more than support, to create our own strategy and to be innovative’.
Challenging the IT teams
Faced with the reluctance of IT teams and constraints on access to external service providers, it is possible to envisage a third way: innovation by and for the lawyers. Management must take its destiny into its own hands, reduce its dependence on IT and drive innovation initiatives itself.
The legal department we studied has set up a multi-disciplinary team called ‘innovation’. As well as lawyers, the team includes a developer, a designer and a product manager, and its aim is to internalise the process of designing and developing IT tools.
"The idea was to get away from the “you're not a priority” attitude. The IT teams have other priorities that are more in line with the company's core business: innovation needs could take second place to all that, with long lead times and a difficulty in understanding each other, because these are very different professions’.
As a result, a number of new features were introduced. The Legal Department has even won several awards for legal innovation, which has changed its perception and legitimacy in the eyes of the players it works with.
A matter of culture too
It is also possible to work on a cultural dimension in order to reduce the resistance that lawyers may feel towards innovation. Institutionalising innovation means making innovative practices and pro-innovation routines part of the day-to-day workings of the legal department. Training, brainstorming sessions and practical workshops familiarise lawyers with new technologies and methods. They are encouraged to experiment and adopt a participative attitude to change.
In our field, a set of practices aims to institutionalise innovation within the legal department. This involves, among other things, organising in-house innovation workshops to present projects and train working teams, systematic brainstorming sessions, a project management platform to increase visibility and formalise methods, not forgetting recognition and rewards through ‘innovation’ challenges. By integrating these practices into the day-to-day work of its lawyers, the Legal Department is ensuring continuity and a lasting commitment to innovation.
This article by Soufiane Kherrazi, affiliated researcher at the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute, and Christophe Roquilly, Professor at EDHEC, Honorary Dean of Faculty and Director of the EDHEC Augmented Law Institute, has been republished from The Conversation (french version) under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
