Platforms for Corporate Legal Departments: What They Are and How They Expand Influence

Platforms for corporate legal departments have proven critical to digital transformation in the past year, as companies have worked hard to figure out how to meet the uncertainties and challenges stemming from the pandemic.

The right platforms will empower your corporate legal department to better manage the day-to-day aspects of any legal matter while also gaining better insight into operations and improving collaboration by offering real-time visibility into tasks and processes. Making the switch to a platform approach starts with understanding:

1. What is a platform?
2. How can platform technologies benefit a legal department?

What is a Platform?

At its core, a platform is an environment in which other pieces of software function and are executed. The term “platform,” however, is both overused and underrepresented by technology providers. In a market saturated with many different types of technology products, people all too often use terms like platform and solution interchangeably, even though they function very differently and serve different purposes.

Here’s the difference:

• A solution serves a single purpose and exists to handle a discrete task, either simple or complex. Examples of well-known legal operations solutions include enterprise legal management, contract lifecycle management, legal holds and legal service requests.
• A platform is a robust technology foundation that can address several different scenarios and serves as a toolkit for hosting and building an infinite number of solutions.

With the right platform, a corporate legal department can build any solution it needs for either internal use or cross-collaboration with other departments in the organization. Platforms allow you to take advantage of preexisting solutions that have already been built on the platform or build additional solutions as new needs arise.

For legal departments, platforms serve as the foundation for enterprise legal management and contract lifecycle management solutions, intake forms and self-help portals, among other things. Basically, a platform is the best of both worlds in the solutions vs. platforms discussion.

Some platforms incorporate artificial intelligence for corporate legal departments. AI platforms help automate routine tasks and boost efficiency. In other words, they help legal departments meet the constantly mounting pressure to do more and do better with fewer resources and a shrinking budget.

How Platform for Corporate Legal Departments Enhance Efficiency and Collaboration

Adopting a platform approach to technology offers a wide range of benefits for today’s corporate legal departments. Some of the biggest include:

• Limitless building opportunities – Platforms give you the greatest possible ability to support your department’s vision by building solutions to address nearly any need, from accounting to compliance to HR concerns and more.
• Unlimited scalability – Platforms allow you to right-size your technology as needed because they can grow along with your company and adapt to meet whatever changes arise.
• Customization – When you build solutions on a platform, you can customize them to work exactly how your corporate legal department needs them to work and continually adjust those customizations over time.
• Flexibility – Legal departments learned the value of innovation this past year, and platforms offer the flexibility required to keep innovating in the future as needs continue to change.

Better yet, you get all these platform benefits regardless of your level of technical proficiency. While platforms were once the exclusive province of IT experts who knew how to code, things have evolved significantly with the rise of no-code platforms. Today, even those with little or no technical training can master platforms and use them to create new solutions. These no-code platforms allow corporate legal departments to engage in levels of technological self-service that were previously unheard of.

For further reading on how platforms benefit corporate legal departments, you can download The Power of a Platform: Building Corporate Legal Influence Across the Enterprise.

Onit’s Apptitude and Precedent platforms have helped countless businesses enhance efficiency with automation and AI. Contact us today to learn more about how a platform approach can benefit your corporate legal department.