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Legal engineering companies support law firms and legal departments by designing and developing products that meet requirements and solve a particular problem. The tech stack used to do this varies from company to company, with some legal engineering companies - such as Engineer.Legal - partner with specific vendors and build using their solutions. Others, such as Theory + Principle, build proprietary technology. Knowledge engineering is a sub-category of legal engineering, whereby consultants help law firms or legal departments map out and maintain the content that will sit in the back end of a product, or help to train AI models.

Legal Engineering

<p>There are numerous consultants addressing law firm management, the business of law, and legal innovation and technology. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to find a consultant who provides the services necessary to address the needs of a particular environment. This category encompasses all consultants who operate to improve the effectiveness of commercial legal organizations, either on the law firm side or for corporate in-house departments. Consultants are not to be mistaken for ALSPs, who may offer some similar approaches but also provide low cost legal services. The consulting services in this category include technology implementation, knowledge management and data strategies, change management and adoption support, as well as broader legal management consulting and hands-on legal engineering. Well-known consultants include Fireman &amp; Company for enterprise search, intranet and document management system implementations; HBR for data strategy, matter profiling and technology implementations; Traveling Coaches for change management and adoption; Theory &amp; Principle and FoundationLab for prototyping, product design and product development; and Bam Legal for document automation.</p>

Consultants

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal practice has become widespread, with machine learning built into many platforms and solutions. Consultancies with applied AI practices offer a variety of services, including helping organizations select and implement AI tools for contract review, training algorithms to create machine learning models for data extraction, and custom developing AI solutions to solve organizational problems. Cognia is a leading provider in this space.

Applied AI

Consultants offering services around change management and adoption generally fall into one of two categories. Either they support major technology implementation efforts by developing strategies for communication, training and change management that encourage adoption of the new technology, or they offer ad hoc strategies for improving the adoption of a firm's existing technology stack. Traveling Coaches is perhaps the best known vendor in the former space, though Fireman & Company has recently expanded its services here; Baretz + Brunelle offer services in the latter category.

Change Management and Adoption

As firms and corporate in-house departments begin to recognize the importance of data and the potential competitive edge to be gained from effectively leveraging their data, so they have also started to realize they need help to streamline, clean and normalize their internal data and to develop cohesive organization-wide data strategies and processes. Several consultants help firms develop and execute data initiative strategies. These are large projects that can take several years. Additional data-related consulting includes evaluating and selecting data analytics tools or APIs and leveraging analytics and integrating internal and external sources of data. HBR has been a leading consulatancy for these types of services, with Fireman & Company having more recently developed similar capabilities.

Data Management and Strategy

A document management system (DMS) is so foundational to the functioning of a law firm or legal department that implementing or upgrading such a system necessarily becomes an enterprise-wide, multi-stakeholder project. Various workstreams therefore arise in relation to this kind of project, including requirements gathering, information governance and policy work, change management and adoption, workspace design and folder structures, launch planning and training, as well as technical work that often encompasses migration of documents from an older system and strategies for cutting over from one system to another. Additional complexity can arise when a firm is moving their documents to the cloud. Consultants supporting DMS implementations work with law firms and legal departments to ensure the various project workstreams are all progressing within the established timeframe, develop strategies for document management, drive consensus for key decisions, and assist in technical implementation. Fireman & Company is the leading vendor for DMS implementations in the US, although Encoretech is a strong competitor. In the UK and other regions, both Fireman & Company and Morae support DMS implementations.

Document Management Implementation

Enterprise search software is very important in larger law firms and in-house departments. Most in-house departments and law firms need support implementing enterprise search engines. Implementation varies depending on the needs of an organization, including the number of systems to be indexed, mapping of taxonomy terms, definition of required results, configuration of tabs and filters, API integration with various systems, and change management efforts to support adoption. Fireman and & Company and HBR are the main consulting firms addressing enterprise search implementation.

Enterprise Search Implementation

Digital transformation efforts are focused on integrating digital technologies and automated processes across all parts of an organization to entirely reshape and improve the way the organization conducts its business. This kind of wholesale transformation is difficult for organizations to undertake without targeted assistance. Consultants in the space offer strategic approaches to digital transformation as well as development and implementation of digital workflows. Although law firms are beginning to think about digital transformation, efforts in the industry have been primarily focused on corporate legal departments. Leading providers include UnitedLex and Elevate.

Digital Transformation

Connecting with key demographics in meaningful ways is an ongoing challenge for vendor organizations. A number of consultancies have developed services connecting vendors with their buyers and providing go to market strategies that promise to increase the efficiency of the technology buying cycle. LexFusion, for example, leverages the broad network of its founders to connect vendors directly with law firm partners and legal operations executives. Baretz + Brunelle, by contrast, works with vendors to help them more eloquently highlight and explain their value proposition to the market.

Go To Market

Implementation of a new or upgraded intranet is a complex, enterprise-wide project involving multiple stakeholders, generally including Business Development, Knowledge Management, Finance and IT. Managing the requirements across a firm's business units and implementing an intranet platform with logical architecture that delivers information intuitively to users often requires external support. Consultants in the space can assist with all of these aspects of intranet implementation as well as the integration of data across systems. Fireman & Company and Encoretech are consulting firms providing this service.

Intranet Implementation

Venture capitalists and other investors looking to enter the legaltech market often need help navigating the industry. Consultants with expertise in legal technology funding and knowledge of start-ups in the market are able to advise these investors and help them to identify suitable prospects for investment.

Investor Advisory

At a minimum, knowledge managment (KM) consultants can help law firms and legal departments assess their knowledge-sharing culture, technologies (including DMS, collaboration tools, extranets / client portals, and intranets), personnel, strategies, and tactics. Consultants will focus on ways to improve access to data and information within the organization, and the experience of lawyers, ensuring that firms and legal departments access and leverage the collective knowledge of the enterprise. Since most modern legal KM functions also include innovation, consultants have expanded their scope from traditional KM functions to advising on matters such as client-facing product development, process improvement, legal project management, design thinking, and others. KM consulting providers include Fireman & Company and Tiger Eye Consulting.

Knowledge Management

Legal design is the application of design principles (including service design and design thinking) to the practice of law and related work product. Legal designers and legal design agencies work with law firms and legal departments to (1) re-imagine the way that legal and legal-adjacent services are offered and design those services in a way that is directly responsive to client needs, (2) review and re-design legal process in a more user-centric manner, and (3) design legal documents in a way that makes them more intuitive and accessible, thereby improving the experience of the recipient. Legal documents to which legal design methods have been applied are usually shorter, cleaner, and clearer than most, potentially including visual elements. Leading legal design agencies and consultants include Ground M, Astrid Kohlmeyer, and Bold Duck Studios.

Legal Design

The remit of legal mangement consulting firms is broad, supporting an organization's overarching strategic goals and drivers and delivering value through insights and paths towards revenue or profit growth. Law firms will frequently retain legal management consultants to help address a particular aspect of legal business or strategy. Examples include diversity and inclusion strategies, pricing and profitability consulting, reimagining the service business model, transformation projects, and so on. Providers in this space include Morae Global and HBR Consulting.

Legal Management Consulting

Legal operations consulting is targeted at improving the efficiency and efficacy of a corporate legal department, working strategically to help legal departments improve and streamline operations and make better data-driven decisions for a business, thereby redefining themselves as value or profit centers rather than cost centers. Consulting services may be offered around outside counsel spend, legal billing, panel (outside counsel) management and the RFP process, business analytics and insights, streamlining the way a team works or the way contracts are managed within the business. E&Y Legal Function Consulting provides legal operations consulting, as do Morae Legal, Factor, Argopoint and Elevate.

Legal Operations Consulting

Process improvement consultants leverage methodologies such as Lean Six Sigma and Kizen to help law firms and legal departments evaluate current workflows, identify areas of inefficiency, and then eliminate that inefficiency (or "waste") in order to create a better, faster process. Mapping processes in order to optimize them prior to automation is a common use case. Consultants offering this type of service include EY Legal Function Consulting and Bold Duck.

Process Improvement

Consultants offering prototyping services will often work with legal teams to understand a problem and related user needs, developing solution ideas and then prototyping these in wireframes or low-code technology (such as InVision and Figma) to provide validation of a solution before it is developed in a more permanent form. Consultants offering this service include FoundationLab, Spicebox and Engineer.Legal.

Prototyping