7 Essential Tools for Your Legal Tech Stack

What Is a Legal Tech Stack?

A quick definition: the term “legal tech stack” refers to the tech tools and software your team uses to manage their workflows and data. A well-structured legal tech stack centralizes essential information, making it easier to track progress on matters and legal spend. 

In-house tech stacks can include:

• • Core systems: Like matter management and e-billing
  • Workflow tools: Legal tech tools that guide or automate routine tasks, like approvals
  • Analytics and reporting tools: These give insight into spend and performance

• AI-driven solutions: Legal technology software that integrates AI to support decision-making and efficiency

Core Components of a Legal Tech Stack

With the above definition in mind, it’s time to get to specifics. Each team will have its own preferences for where to start when investing in legal software, but the following categories are the eventual “must-haves” of every legal tech stack.

1. Matter Management Tools

Matter management tools provide a centralized system for organizing and tracking legal matters, from intake to analysis. The best matter management tools integrate directly into your e-billing system, creating an all-in-one solution so your team can see all your matter and spend data in one place.

Essential Features of Matter Management Software

Your matter management software should include matter templates to make sure you gather consistent information across matters. It should also have deep reporting capabilities to analyze matters by complexity, practice area, vendor, and attorney.

When it comes to your vendors, the software should provide secure access and a user-friendly interface that allows external partners to report their progress. That includes being able to submit files and timekeepers and provide context with updates easily. Both sides should also be able to track progress through a matter and communicate risks that may arise.

Additional features to look for include collaboration and project management tools – such as calendaring and task or workflow management. While legal project management is different from matter management, you want to make sure your matter management system includes functionality to communicate about a matter and assign tasks to others involved in it.

Pain Matter Management Software Solves

The most important role that matter management software plays in your legal technology stack is to reduce risk. Matter management ensures legal leadership has complete visibility into the legal team’s ongoing work, its risks and complexity, and the workloads across different practice areas. This enables Legal to allocate its time and resources in the most effective way to protect the company.

Your matter management software also breaks down silos around a matter, so you always have the latest information, including the stage, next steps, and involved parties. This cuts down on the game of email ping-pong required to get status updates and answers to basic questions.

2. E-billing

E-billing tools are designed to streamline receipt, review, and payment of legal invoices. They help your team ensure invoices align with outside counsel guidelines and give clear insight into legal spend. That makes them one of the most important investments for any in-house legal team.

Brandy Musick, Senior Manager of Legal Operations for Keurig Dr. Pepper, puts it like this: “If I were coming into a legal department and they were still building everything from the ground up and really didn’t have a lot in place, e-billing would be the first thing that I would focus on.” 

Many other in-house legal professionals agree. Financial management is a foundational skill, according to the CLOC 12 Core Competencies. One that allows teams to budget and identify potential cost-saving opportunities effectively. 

A good e-billing system is also one of the best tech candidates for quick ROI: automating billing tasks frees up a lot of time for legal teams under pressure and, combined with enhanced visibility into legal spend, can quickly translate into better financial outcomes. 

Essential Features of Your e-Billing Software

The best e-billing software will offer several features to save you time and streamline your most manual processes.

Look for an invoice review process that automatically applies your outside counsel guidelines and flags any issues for review. The software should also integrate with your organization’s accounts payable and accounting systems to simplify payment processes.

You’ll also want significant reporting options. Your e-billing system should not only track outside counsel work, but also allow you to filter data by vendor, department, matter type, and practice area. You should also be able to set and track budgets at the matter, practice area, and department levels, and receive alerts when you are about to exceed a matter’s budget.

This puts your team in a much stronger position to benchmark and evaluate outside counsel performance and negotiate better cost outcomes. As Musick states: “When I ran a report for our 2023, we were well over six figures in cost savings alone, and that’s just due to negotiating discounts with our law firms.” 

Pain e-Billing Software Solves

To sum up: With the right e-billing software, you can understand the entire legal spend picture and find opportunities to both reduce spend and improve performance. You’ll also be able to streamline the time-intensive and error-prone invoice review process and automatically ensure invoices comply with your outside counsel guidelines.

Finally, by reviewing historical data, you can ensure the legal team sets accurate, realistic budgets rooted in estimates of your legal spend. 

3. Contract Lifecycle Management

In-house teams handle many contracts, so having dedicated software to manage them all is a smart move. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) systems help teams navigate all stages of the contracting process, including initial drafts, negotiation, approval, renewal, and storage.

Essential Features of Contract Management Software

As noted above, CLM software should enable your team to streamline the entire contract process, not just digital signatures or contract storage. Features to look for include templates and clause libraries for generating new contracts, as well as automatic data tagging. Smarter tools on the market also automatically flag unapproved or problematic clauses, making it easy to identify potential future issues. 

Like matter management, your CLM tool should have collaboration features that make life easier for all parties to the contract. That includes built-in notifications for approaching key deadlines and auditable history and change logs.

Analytics to track contracts by stage, type, and negotiation rate are another must-have feature that will make it much easier for your team to keep sight of existing or upcoming contracts and their current status.

Pain Contract Management Software Solves

Reviewing contracts manually is a time-consuming and error-prone process. And it’s very easy for inconsistent or unapproved language to slip in, putting your organization at risk. Meanwhile, if you accidentally work from an outdated version of a contract or clause, it can significantly delay your timeline. 

A good CLM solves all of those issues and keeps your team on top of renewals and deadlines. 

4. E-Discovery Tools

E-discovery tools are another essential part of the legal tech stack. They help you identify, manage, and access electronic information that may be used as evidence in a legal proceeding.

Many in-house teams lean on their law firms and ALSPs to fulfil this function. Still, in-house teams that manage a lot of litigation or regulatory investigations can benefit from investing in their own e-discovery tools. 

Essential Features of e-Discovery Software

Good e-discovery software provides robust data preservation capabilities, including tools to manage legal holds and ensure relevant information is retained throughout litigation. Also, look for data processing and analysis features, such as tagging, to help build a searchable database.

An effective e-discovery platform also has to work with any file type you might encounter, including spreadsheets, presentations, emails, word-processing documents, audio files, and text messages. It should also be able to extract the metadata for each file. 

Meanwhile, for teams working internationally, multi-language support is another must-have functionality. 

Pain e-Discovery Software Solves

It can take significant time to manually review and organize the huge amounts of data needed to prepare for a case and meet the obligations of discovery. That doesn’t include the time it could take to track down documents stored in different places based on the file type. An e-discovery platform creates a single source of truth that’s easier to search and keep secure.

E-discovery tools also help defend your discovery process and prove that everything was reviewed, tagged, and shared correctly.

5. Document Management Systems

While every organization has a document management system, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft Sharepoint, legal teams often choose to implement legal-specific solutions.

Worth noting is that many e-billing and matter management tools already provide document storage and management as part of their platforms. These aren’t necessarily as full-featured as dedicated document management tools, but they are often enough to cover the legal team’s needs (depending on the size and complexity of your department).

Essential Features of Document Management Software

At the most basic level, your document management system should serve as a repository for easily uploading and organising information. Look for intuitive search features to make legal research quick and easy. Your software should also index the full text of the document so users can identify any item that includes a specific term or name.

In addition, document management software should include version control so you can identify which changes have been made to a file, when, and by whom – as well as which version is current. It should also provide secure storage to ensure files don’t get deleted inadvertently, and only people with appropriate access can view them. 

Pain Document Management Software Solves

Without dedicated tech, managing different documents often requires repetitive manual work. Especially when various versions of documents live across email inboxes, cloud storage, or individual computers.  

Poor document management can also create data security issues, potentially giving people unauthorized access to sensitive information. 

By having everything collated in one place, document management becomes far less time-consuming. As does finding the versions of a given document that are up-to-date and correct, and ensuring everything is completely secure. 

6. Seamless Integrations

Each piece of software is a powerful tool on its own, but the more effectively you can get them to talk to each other and share data, the more complete your data set will be.

Integrations allow you to seamlessly pass data from one system to another and are crucial to your legal tech stack.

Essential Features of Legal Tech Stack Integrations

There are two common types of integration for your legal tech stack: sFTP/Batch integrations and APIs. The sFTP or Batch process means updates occur in “chunks” rather than in real time. That’s fine for cases where instant access to the most up-to-date data isn’t needed, but legal teams working on fast-moving matters typically need all relevant data available at all times.  

APIs can provide near-real-time updates. As information is updated in one system, an API will look for the updates and pass them to the other system—no need to wait for batches.

Look for software that provides open, well-documented API integrations and pre-built integrations with other common tools. Check the vendor’s case studies or get recommendations from vendors who have used the same integrations you want to build.

Pain That Integrations Solve

Integrations eliminate the need to manually format data before you can import it into a different system or compile it into a spreadsheet for analysis. They also improve the accuracy of your data, because it’s coming directly from one system to another. 

That means you don’t have to worry about having the wrong version or a file getting changed between export and import. It also speeds up processes, such as loading data into your enterprise analytics software, enabling you to make data-driven decisions faster.

Adding AI-Powered Tools to Your Legal Tech Stack

So far, we’ve covered six of the most essential legal technology software types every in-house legal team needs. No legal tech stack would be complete, however, without mention of the newest addition to the toolkit: artificial intelligence. 

In today’s legal teams, AI is used for everything from research and writing to contract drafting. Here are the three main ways teams are using it to improve legal efficiency.

AI Writing and Drafting Tools

AI writing tools, like ChatGPT and Gemini, have made their way into every facet of the workplace, and legal teams are no exception. Many are already using these tools to help draft everything from emails to reports. 

With that said, when it comes to sensitive legal information, there are some areas where dedicated legal tools are preferred. So far, we’ve seen a handful of these, including Legora and Harvey.ai. Ironclad’s AI assistant is another option, specifically geared towards more efficient contract drafting. 

Our advice? Use tech to speed up routine tasks, but vet new AI tools carefully to ensure compliance with legal standards and information security requirements. 

AI Conferencing Tools

Many video-conferencing tools have also incorporated AI to automatically act as a “note-taker”: capturing meeting minutes and summarizing action points. This includes widely-used platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. 

For busy legal professionals, those features can save time and reduce manual work. But, as above, be sure to double-check everything included in AI notes for accuracy. And keep data privacy considerations top of mind when using these tools. 

AI Research Tools

Lastly, many teams are using AI for research. For general background research, tools like Claude can be incredibly helpful. For legal-specific work, however, teams should focus on dedicated legal technology software, especially when accuracy and diligence are paramount. 

For internal data, dedicated AI assistants like Ask Brightflag are a great option. They allow teams to analyse spending patterns, identify cost-saving opportunities, and track trends using a natural language interface. All of which can save a lot of time when compiling accurate reports and analyses of in-house legal trends. 

Handling Objections When Building Your Legal Tech Stack

And that’s it. You now have a solid understanding of the tools to improve your team’s efficiency. The last hurdle? Getting buy-in to invest in them in the first place.

Even when a specific legal technology’s benefits are clear, you will likely face some resistance in trying to deploy it. It helps to make a strong case for how it will improve efficiency and deliver ROI through increased productivity or reduced costs.

Here are three common objections you might encounter as you grow your legal tech stack and how to handle each one:

Budget

In recent years, legal teams have had to deal with both budget limitations and more stringent approval processes. So, to make the case for a new tool as a strong investment, you need to demonstrate a strong ROI clearly. Good legal software will make it easy by clearly demonstrating how it helps you cut costs and improve productivity – and how long it takes to get there.

Need an example? See how Lufthansa recouped the cost of purchasing Brightflag’s e-billing software in just one quarter.

Not Enough Time

Legal staff is notoriously overworked, so you might face internal resistance from teams that simply don’t feel like they have the capacity to learn new software and processes. The key here is to highlight how the tool simplifies workflows. 

If you need inspiration, take a glance at what happened when Ocado implemented its new legal spend management program. And then ask your team what they could do with an additional 1,470 hours in a year?

Change Is Too Disruptive

There is a system. People know it. It works. Not well, but it works. Be proactive about the objections you know will come up, such as how you can get vendors to use the software, how integrations will work, and what the implementation timeframe will be. The best software vendors will do much of the heavy lifting for implementing the tool and training your users, so look for vendors that offer support and assistance.

And once you’ve identified your trusted partner, showcase the training options to your team and have the vendor demonstrate the product to build excitement.

Conclusion 

Improving your legal tech stack is one of the best moves in-house teams can make to increase efficiency and navigate the increasingly complex legal data landscape. But the starting point should always be evaluating which tools your team needs most and which pain points you’re trying to solve. 

Still not sure where to start? Reach out to Brightflag today. We’re here to help and happy to talk you through every stage of your legal technology software journey. 

FAQs

1. What is a legal tech stack?

A legal tech stack is all the legal technology software and tools an in-house team uses to manage legal matters, workflows, and spend. A well-designed legal tech stack centralizes data and improves visibility across legal operations.

2. What tools are included in a legal tech stack?

A typical legal tech stack includes tools for matter management, e-billing, contract lifecycle management, document storage, and e-discovery/research. AI is also increasingly finding its way into legal team workflows, including dedicated legal AI tools.

3. How do you build a legal tech stack?

Start by identifying your biggest pain points, then review your options for legal technology software that addresses them. Focus on integration, ease of use, and a full stack of features when making selections, as well as case studies and vendor demos that demonstrate value and ROI.

4. Why is legal technology software important for in-house teams?

Legal technology software helps in-house teams to manage growing workloads more efficiently. It can also take many manual tasks off your team’s plates, freeing them up for more strategic work while simultaneously improving legal performance and reducing spend. 

5. How often should you update your legal tech stack?

Ideally, you should review your legal tech tools regularly to ensure everything is working as intended and that they are actually solving the pain points you deployed them to address. That can be a challenge for busy in-house teams; however, it’s often worth looking into a comprehensive enterprise legal management platform where the vendor regularly updates and improves its legal tech.