The Ultimate Guide to Legal Change Management

For in-house legal teams, change is a constant. Whether it’s new regulations, emerging technologies, or shifting business priorities, corporate legal departments are expected to adapt without missing a beat.

At the same time, delivering practical legal services requires precision, compliance, and consistency. This means that a poorly managed change—whether it’s implementing new legal tech, restructuring workflows, or adjusting to regulatory updates—can lead to serious business risk.

How can in-house teams strike the right balance when it comes to managing change? It starts with an innovative and structured approach to legal change management. In this guide, we break down the essentials, including how to plan and execute change, secure stakeholder buy-in, and ensure change lasts and produces the desired outcomes.

What is Change Management?

One of the most fundamental frameworks for describing projects or changes in a business context is PPT: people, processes, and technology.

While all three elements are essential (e.g., the tech you pick to handle your legal matters will influence your success), it’s the people part of the equation that’s considered most important during change management.

Change management is a structured process for managing people during a business change.

In practical terms, that means ensuring that:

• All affected stakeholders are prepared for change
• Stakeholders understand why the change is being made
• Stakeholders have the necessary information to implement change effectively

For example, consider a legal department adopting a new e-billing and matter management system. The technical side often takes center stage: choosing a vendor, setting up integrations, and training everyone on using the new system.

However, if the in-house team is reluctant to switch to using the new tool in the first place or views it as unnecessary, training them on how it works isn’t going to solve that issue.

In other words, if the people part of change isn’t managed effectively, the result is often that change won’t stick.

When Do You Need a Legal Change Management Plan?

A common misconception about change management is that it’s only needed during significant changes—like restructuring reporting lines across your entire legal team.

The truth is, a change management plan is beneficial anytime you make a change, whether it’s large or small. It’s just the amount of effort and detail needed in the plan that varies.

For example, say your team is changing a couple of fields in your matter opening form to add additional information. It’s a small change, but one with the potential to cause delays or mistakes if it isn’t handled correctly. Because this change is straightforward, the plan for managing it might be as simple as informing members of affected teams and ensuring everyone knows what’s required and why—which could be handled in a couple of emails or maybe a short explanatory video.

A more considerable change—like implementing a whole new system in your tech stack — would need a much more comprehensive plan. Your plan to drive change of this magnitude might include having an initial all-hands meeting to introduce the change, and then rolling it out with workshops or training sessions, along with establishing lines of support and communication during the transition.

In both cases, however, minimizing the negative impacts of change requires that you start with a concrete idea of what needs to happen. And a plan for addressing the core questions of:

• Who needs to be informed?
• Why is the change happening?
• What processes or support are needed to implement this change effectively?

Key Components of a Legal Change Management Plan

To answer the questions above, you need a solid framework for your legal change management process. There are a lot of change management models out there (e.g., ADKAR or Kotter’s 8-step model), but in practice, it often helps to break down your change management plan into just four key components:

• Awareness
• Understanding
• Knowledge
• Adoption

Awareness

Your first question should be: When and how will stakeholders be made aware of the change?

Depending on the tools and rhythms your business or team uses, there may be a logical choice for how to communicate this information. For example, if your legal team regularly holds town hall meetings to provide updates on new developments, that’s probably the perfect forum for rolling out a significant change.

Minor change efforts could be communicated via a quick email to your team. Meanwhile, communicating with external partners may require sending out an email with more formal instructions for a new process.

It’s also worth factoring in the level at which the change will initially be communicated. For example, for a sensitive or strategic initiative, it makes sense to first hold a meeting with the leadership of affected teams before rolling out a broader comms strategy for the rest of the company.

Understanding

The understanding step answers the question: Why is this change being made? And what are the benefits?

Is this change being made to meet new regulatory requirements? Or is it a matter of improving efficiency, and how exactly does the proposed change address that issue?

What’s important is that you can easily articulate the reason behind any proposed change because you’re going to need to be able to communicate those reasons to other stakeholders. If it seems like the change is being made arbitrarily, that may impact buy-in.

A good approach is to frame change in terms of the positive impacts it will have on each stakeholder group. That ensures motivation and helps everyone to understand why it’s necessary.

For example, let’s say your legal team is implementing a new document management system to replace a patchwork of shared drives and email-based approvals. In this case, your messaging to legal team members might be that the new system will save them time by making it much easier to track document versions.

Knowledge

The knowledge component tackles the question: What processes or support are needed to ensure this change is implemented effectively?

If the change is a small one, like the matter opening form example, it will require very little support. Perhaps just update a process document and send out comms about what’s changed.

But if you’re implementing a whole new legal spend and matter management system, the training process will be more involved. You may need to think about how different parts of the legal team will be trained, how partners at external law firms will be trained, and what mediums you’re going to use for training.

In the case of a new technology solution, there might be ready-made resources that you can tap into, like comprehensive training materials or expert guidance to ease the transition. But for structural changes to the team or process changes based on external factors like regulation, you may need to tap into specialized resources or expertise—like bringing in an external consultant.

Whatever the case, the success of your change initiative hinges on making sure you have a plan in place to support team members and other stakeholders.

Adoption

Finally, once your change has been implemented, you’ll need to monitor whether it sticks. Are people using the new tool or following the new process? Or are there roadblocks preventing adoption?

You should be looking at the efficacy of your change. Is it actually addressing the problem, or do you need to outline it in the first place? Or are unforeseen challenges throwing a spanner in the works? And if so, how can it be tweaked or adapted?

Many of those factors can be tracked qualitatively, i.e., by getting feedback from the team members the change affects. But for changes tied to efficiency and performance, like tracking your legal spend, it’s worth also setting clear KPIs.

Change Management: The Golden Rules

With a strong change management plan in place, you’re well on your way to ensuring success. But there are a few golden rules to keep in mind to ensure everything goes off without a hitch.

1. Get executive buy-in: If people see their managers and executives getting excited about a change, they’ll be more likely to buy in themselves. So, try to get your General Counsel to talk about the value the change brings. Or, if it’s something that impacts stakeholders outside of legal like the sales team, such as changes to contract review, get the Head of Sales to explain to their team why it matters and how it can streamline their workflows.
2. Bring end users into the change process: Effective change management requires end users to be involved in the change process as early as possible. That includes giving them input during the initial stages of a change, making sure you understand their needs and challenges, and getting their opinions on the new legal tech, systems, or processes you plan to adopt. The more involved everyone is, the more motivated they’ll be to drive adoption and ensure the new system works as intended. If your legal department has a legal operations function, this can be a great project for them to focus on.
3. Communicate early and often: The more notice you give people about a change—and the change management strategy behind it—the more comfortable they’ll be when it rolls out. Make sure you repeat communications (in case anyone misses them), and if your company has multiple avenues of communication, use them to ensure the message reaches everyone.
4. Explain the ‘why’: The first question most people will have about a change is: How does this help me? If you can explain why a change is significant to them personally and how it’s going to improve their quality of life, they’ll be much more likely to adopt it. So keep your end users’ needs in mind and tailor your communications to their specific context.

With the above in mind, you’ve got the tools you need to manage change successfully. But if you’d like to learn more about change management and how new legal technology adoption is streamlining change in legal departments, you can subscribe to Brightflag’s newsletter or browse our blog for the latest insights for legal professionals.