Remote Legal Teams
Overview
The legal world is increasingly globally networked. Digital and cloud-sourced technology allow communication and protection in times of COVID-19 and beyond. There are many advantages to remote legal teams, however the legal community is hesitant and still too often focused on problems instead of seeing opportunities.
Consequently, this LLI project can be likened to a speedboat; we wish to give swift orientation, model scenarios for setup and use. Further, we want to make it easy to manage remote legal work and virtual communication technology. Our deliverable will therefore not ignore or downplay the inherent risks and liabilities, but show in several models and scenarios how to implement a feasible balance of these issues for successful virtual legal work now and in the future. The project thus aims to increase transparency with regards to the state-of-the-art digital technologies and tools used for knowledge bases, project and team management.
Importantly, we plan to work transparently and align with other LLI projects including the Agile methodologies project, so anyone who feels so inclined can jump on the boat.
Overall, our purpose and aim are to provide information and resources on how to build a legally successful, healthy and inspired corporate legal culture where employees and legal teams can thrive!
The benefits
Here is a short list of benefits of remote legal teams for open-minded lawyers:
- using this emergency situation to learn new virtual ways of working that rely on transparency, communication, and trust
- saving on overhead expenses that usually accompany a location-dependent workforce
- saving on travel costs and CO2 emissions
- enabling a more independent and flexible manner of working
- increase in self-organization and potentially fostering an agile mindset and structures
Our LLI team, Virtual Legal Teams is interdisciplinary. We are working and navigating remotely with LLI’s MS Teams environment. That is to say, we’re using agile tools, like personas, user-stories and soon the MS Team Kanban board. Our first visualization was a co-created product-backlog with a Miro board. New for all of us! Here we’d like to share one of our key legal user stories to demonstrate our working method and perspective shift. Our project deliverable will create understanding for this legal user and above all help him or her to solve the following problem:
In short, as a lawyer, I would like to understand the risks and opportunities of remote legal teams, to leverage useful technology while simultaneously avoiding risk for the organization for “me and my clients” and even “for my law firm”, especially regarding information loss and privacy breaches.
Contact (Remote Legal Teams): Karla Schlaepfer, Jutta Löwe, Carolin Schug
2021 Update - Remote Legal Teams FAQs
Who would have thought that our Remote Legal Work user-research (2020) would retain its relevance for so long? We’re happy to share how virtual working is seen through the eyes of lawyers. The results are presented in a “Frequently Asked Question” format and address the hypotheses that we raised in our first paper, “ Remote Legal Teams: Getting Started and Making It Work!” Have a look at our FAQs and let us know if these answers match with your experience!
Karla, Jutta and Carolin