Introducing Tech’s Answer to Legal Department Workflow Management
LinkSquares, a promising technology firm, intends to arm general counsels with tools similar to those of their C-suite counterparts. The company plans to achieve this through the introduction of their ticketing system designed specifically for in-house legal departments, scheduled for launch next month.
The core concept is to equip legal teams with a tool similar to Jira, originally a ticketing system for engineers, or Salesforce, a popular business tracking system.
In the absence of a parallel system for legal departments to trace their tasks from inception to completion, it becomes a challenge for general counsels or chief legal officers to quantify the volume and value of their team’s contributions on a periodic basis.
“We’re trying to give them data that quantifies what they do and why the business should keep investing in them” said Vishal Sunak, LinkSquare’s CEO and co-founder to Legal Dive at the 2023 Corporate Legal Operations.
Bridging the Gap with ‘Prioritize’
While LinkSquare’s ‘Prioritize’ isn’t the first intake software for legal teams, it is distinctive in its orientation towards in-house teams. The majority of the available products are developed for law firms, primarily focusing on matter management.
However, the nature of tasks undertaken by in-house teams extends beyond contracts, which are tracked using contract lifecycle management (CLM) software. The requests handled by the legal team are so diverse that implementing a universal tracking tool can prove challenging.
Sunak paints a vivid picture of the constant demands legal teams encounter from companies, encompassing matters from visa requirements to complaint response deadlines to trademark expirations.
These requests generally reach the legal team via email, where their tracking largely depends on individual attorneys’ workflow. From the requestor’s perspective, there may be no visibility into the status of the request, possibly for months.
Sunak further explains that, “The state of the art currently is to just throw it over the wall to Legal and who knows what they do when they receive it.”
LinkSquares aims to resolve this with Prioritize, introducing a unified intake point for all legal work. This will streamline the workflow based on the nature of the request, offering visibility to all relevant stakeholders.
A Revolutionary Step Towards Enhanced Productivity
Sunak emphasizes the need for such a tool, considering the substantial amount of time consumed by managing requests. Without a proper system, it’s challenging to quantify the volume, duration, and type of requests.
LinkSquares, established in 2015 as a CLM provider, currently serves approximately 1,000 companies. The company used the opportunity presented by the 2023 CLOC conference to preview its intake product ahead of its formal launch at the end of June.
Designed with input from the company’s existing customer base, Sunak believes the tool will resonate with in-house legal teams.
“Our customers have their hands on the steering wheel” he added, and “[w]e built this without introducing our own bias into what we should build.”
Sunak and co-founder, Chris Combs, have relied heavily on input from in-house professionals in designing their products. The company’s offerings began with the components of the CLM system, known as Analyze and Finalize, and later added an e-signature function.
Built on the AWS platform, Sunak is confident that LinkSquares has the infrastructure in place to deliver whatever in-house teams require.
