PODCAST: Eliminating silos in tech-driven legal departments

"Automation is coming for us all—not in a bad way, but in a way that helps to improve efficiencies and increase the pace [businesses are moving]." 

—Vanessa Davis, Vice President, Research and Product Development at LegalZoom.

PactSafe’s “Legal Departments of the Future” podcast is hosted by PactSafe founder and CEO Brian Powers. As an attorney who’s ventured into the tech business, Brian is always looking for ways to fuse the legal and tech spaces together. In the fourth episode of our podcast, Brian sat down with Vanessa Davis, Vice President, Research and Product Development at LegalZoom.

Tune in as Vanessa and Brian chat about what happens when a legal department has too many technology resources that aren’t integrated across departments, and how you streamline these silos into a single solution that works for every team.

Vanessa also dives into her experience working in technology-driven legal environments, and how they have scaled growth and evaluated software solutions that improve workflows and productivity.

More information in this podcast on eliminating silos in tech-driven legal departments:

How to be proactive in looking at improving inefficiencies: Vanessa shares how and why she went looking for more forward-thinking, fast-paced legal environments in the online-legal tech world.

How legal and product work successfully together: Vanessa dives into how LegalZoom’s legal department is not like a traditional ones, with one side being dedicated to the product, and the other side being more of a traditional legal function. She discusses how these two teams work together as the business grows.

Challenges in legal departments: Brian and Vanessa take a deep-dive into the gradual movement towards specialization as your legal department grows, and how to effectively manage and scale.

Additional tidbits:

• Knowing what other team members in your department are working on and what resources are needed and how to prioritize
• How to solve for the inability to have transparency and 1:1 communication due to the department’s growth, and what systems can help
• Challenges of technology adoption even in a technology-driven environment.
• Successful implementation stories from Vanessa on how to get consensus on implementing a new technology tool from all teams.

Listen here:

Previous episodes:

Episode 1: How TiVo’s Senior Legal Counsel is trying to make complex legal issues as simple as possible

Episode 2: How to Embrace and Drive Innovation in Your Legal Department

Episode 3: How sales and legal work with each other, not against

Subscribe for new episodes on iTunes and  SoundCloud.