Building a Center for Workflow Automation Co-Innovation | Mitratech

Collaboration has been found, time and time again, to be an essential trait of any healthy organization. For corporate legal departments, that’s equally true. And that collaboration can often extend beyond the legal department, to involve outside counsel, technology providers, and other members of a company’s legal “ecosystem.”

In the case of legal workflow automation, collaboration should take the form of co-innovation between the Legal Operations users of a particular solution and the vendor’s client support team. The goal? To adapt the tool to suit the needs of the organization, and not vice-versa.

That co-innovation begins with the workflows being used by Legal Ops. In-house staff and vendor merge their talents and insights to deliver process solutions perfectly calibrated to Legal Ops requirements. The result is often more than the sum of its parts, and something neither would have arrived at on their own.

One useful practice to encourage a culture of co-innovation, of sharing ideas and building better iterations upon the success of others? Launch a collaboration center where legal workflow automation users can post and browse workflow and form designs created by others.

That center not only should allow people to view the work of others, but should encourage communication (and, if feasible, collaboration) between the original designer of a workflow and others who want to adapt it for their own purposes.

We’re talking, obviously, about internal idea-sharing. It’s a good thing to have a central portal or repository where corporate co-workers can share workflow designs. But would a Legal Ops team ever want to share its ideas with outsiders?

To understand the value of this kind of external collaboration and idea exchange, look no further than how two different communities treat idea-sharing. One of them has seen huge success, while the other is suffering stagnation.