Case Study
Multinational Life Sciences Company Achieves Legal Operations Transformation Milestones With FTI Technology’s Guidance
A longstanding FTI Technology client sought support with improving adoption for an existing document management tool and accelerating progress toward legal operations transformation goals. The company gained a detailed assessment and an actionable roadmap for long-term technological and operational enhancements.
Situation
The legal department had made significant investments into an industry-leading document management platform but was not seeing the desired level of adoption among users. Additionally, the system was not designed with a clear structure and templates to help users standardize processes and customize functionality for different purposes. The team was unaware of these barriers and how to configure the platform for ideal use, and were unsure of whether they needed to consider selecting a different system.
Like many companies, the legal department also had intentions for a broad department technology transformation, including implementing artificial intelligence solutions. However, it lacked a strong foundation for knowledge management, which is integral to effectively scaling legal department technology and establishing a quality data set to feed into AI tools. This introduced additional challenges to the legal team making progress toward their objectives.
Our Role
FTI Technology had built a strong relationship as a trusted advisor to the client through years of supporting e-discovery, investigations and compliance work. The engagement to advise on legal operations efforts was an evolution of expanding the relationship across new facets of the legal department.
In working with numerous members of the legal department and legal operations leads, FTI Technology provided the following.
- In-depth assessment of use and functionality for the existing document management platform. This included surveys and interviews of users, exploring why they were not using the tool and what capabilities they would like to see.
- A thorough analysis of the system metrics to understand usage over time and use that information to determine how the solution was being used and integrated across various functions.
- A benchmark of the client’s current state against industry standard and FTI Technology’s maturity model for document and knowledge management.
- Redesign of the client’s chosen platform to shift from limited use as a document repository to a collaboration tool that was widely adopted. This included helping the legal department embrace a hybrid approach to agile workflows in support of flexible processes and continuous improvement.
- Training and education workshops for users to increase use of the platform and understand the long-term vision of the redesign.
- A future state roadmap of what an ideal program would include, supported by a business case and estimated costs for subsequent steps. The roadmap included action items that would help the client maximize its previous technology investments.
- Initial phases of enhancing the document management system to become a broad knowledge management program that could be widely used across the legal department, enabling progress toward the client’s digital transformation goals.
Our Impact
FTI Technology delivered an actionable assessment, system redesign and future roadmap for the client and continues to serve as a trusted advisor guiding the legal team through its digital transformation.
The system redesign has positioned the legal department to increase efficiency and insight, maximize investments and reduce the amount of time spent on numerous document-related tasks. Early results indicate increased collaboration and adoption of the existing system across the legal department.
Helped the client strengthen its legal technology foundation to maximize the effectiveness of future AI implementations.