Legal Agile Toolkit
Hands-on tools and methods
What is it and who is involved?
Digital communication and integration between industries foster a seemingly ever-accelerating speed of change. Nevertheless, the legal industry often still uses the same procedural setup and methodologies as decades ago. This consequently leads to tensions. Our legal agile toolkit project identifies methods and tools which highlight potential for digitalization in legal processes. Thereby, legal processes can be more efficient and allow for collaboration in rapidly changing settings.
For this purpose, we have created an overview of existing legal agile toolkit. Our toolkit describes different tools’ properties, coupled with their application in the legal field.
We are an open project group, which a lawyer and an IT expert initiated. Both of these experts have previously worked on agile software development. We welcome others to join, and look forward extending our interdisciplinary perspective. This group regularly discusses digitalization with the group working on LLI’s own agile working environment.
Why do we think it is useful?
Legal services providers include corporate legal departments and law firms. However, they also include public entities such as courts. All these providers face the challenge of firstly delivering services more quickly and cheaply, and secondly adapting to changes without delay. These challenges demand a legal agile toolkit.
We aim to provide input to people involved in such processes, and to create material they need to find the best solutions for their specific challenges. Furthermore, we aim to educate them about findings other professions have so far already made. Thereby, we encourage interdisciplinary learning. This approach allows people to learn from existing perspectives without delay. As a result, they can establish design patterns that legal teams and organizations may choose from. They may select the ones that best leverage their expertise.
For full details of our working groups and the projects we are currently working on, see here.
How do we get there? What is the Timeline?
The project will be run in several steps, each of which enables us to learn from the earlier works and results. We aim to start small and to use iterations as necessary to create improved versions of the deliverables:
1
We will create a collection of known toolboxes and other works we can rely upon (a first version is estimated to be published in Q1 2020)
2
We will specify criterions based on which applicability can be evaluated and of leading questions (probably also within Q1 2020)
3
A collection of tools that can serve as basis for agile legal work, sorted based on the criterions established in step 2 (a first version is planned for Q2 2020)
There will be a regular exchange, the rhythm of which will be established within the project working group. Work status and results will always be openly available to all LLI members of the project within our collaboration environment.
Feedback and collaborators welcome! Please drop a line to Bernhard Waltl or Baltasar Cevc.