Morae Legal managing directors Brian Stearns and Mark Woolfolk discuss how legal technology enables corporate legal to rethink how it approaches and delegates work.
Modern legal departments bear little resemblance to what they were but a decade ago. No longer solely seen as a cost center that relies on outsourced work, these departments are tasked with helping organizations meet their bottom line, in no small part by bringing more work and processes in-house and acting as business advisers.
While this transformation is fueled by a multitude of factors, it could have not taken place without the growing impact of legal technology. Such technology plays an integral role in enabling a more agile and efficient legal team, and its potential is still being realized.
To understand what will define the future of how legal departments work and look, Legaltech News caught up with Morae Legal’s newest managing directors, Brian Stearns and Mark Woolfolk.
LTN: How have you seen the market for corporate legal technology and solutions evolve over the past few years?
Stearns: We are seeing increased levels of adoption from corporate clients, especially around workflow and analytics, and, due to the sheer number of technology offerings out there, a much more complicated landscape for corporations to thoughtfully navigate.
What trends do you see defining legal departments’ demand for legal technology?
Woolfolk: Demand is driven by law departments needing to act more like the business units they support. They need to think and act more strategically and implement the tools that are required—both technology and in other areas—to get their departments to perform better and be more effective and efficient.