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The Legal Department of the Future February 2016 LocalGovernmentLawyer28 The automation of legal services is not a popular concept amongst lawyers. The thought of a tick box mentality among less experienced staff for commoditised legal advice is enough to put many talented lawyers off the legal profession altogether. However using tools such as workflows to automate processes can be an effective way of supporting client departments to do more for themselves and using client portals to provide routine advice as well as self-service updates can reduce your teams workload while maintaining an excellent service for the council. Local Government Association figures show the amount of central government funding available to local authorities has dropped 40 since 2010 and austerity is not likely to end soon. Yet despite these figures local authorities are still responsible for supplying core services that meet legal standards regardless of greatly reduced resources. So it is not surprising that the 100 heads of legal involved in the Local Government Lawyer survey put cost controls and budgetary issues at the top of their list of management challenges. The second biggest management challenge facing legal teams is a lack of experience in client departments 81 of respondents expected their teams overall volume of work to increase in part as a result of client departments losing corporate memory along with the growing number of innovative projects local authority departments are embarking on to generate income. The combination of more complex projects that have greater legal considerations and client departments with less experienced staff has led to an increasing need for input from legal teams with fewer staff and less capacity. Alongside this 46 of heads of legal are expecting the number of junior lawyers working in local government legal teams to increase. Taken in tandem with an expected decrease in senior staff teams will need to restructure to accommodate lower levels of experience with the law although junior lawyers training more extensively covers the use of new technologies. Helping clients to help themselves Altogether this helps to explain why excessive workloads were cited as one of worst aspects of working in local government legal today. How could workloads be reduced More support staff and better IT were two of the favourite suggestions. But what if client departments could take the place of support staff What if routine advice was readily available for less experienced internal clients What if technology was used to help ease the burden of fiscal fatigue and ever increasing expectations A common concern across local authority legal teams is the balancing act between empowering client departments and needing some dependency from them to justify the legal teams existence. Although automating some services through the use of technologies can make it seem as though the legal team is providing less value efficiency tools such as workflows and client portals are best applied to clearly defined and routine processes. The types of varied and complex work that are the reason many lawyers choose a career in local government cannot be delivered by technological platforms. The exercise of judgement applied to a specific circumstance and put in context of applicable laws can only be done by trained and knowledgeable professionals. So asking internal clients to complete a Tanya Corsie of Iken Business explains why you should be using technology to improve your service. Dancing with the devil