The benefits of closer collaboration within Legal Tech

Legal communities often talk of their desire to achieve collaborative working. The aim is to bring together legal, technical and product specialists with different mindsets, backgrounds and experience, to help boost innovation, increase understanding and ultimately build better product solutions.

At the latest London Law Expo, Karen Waldron and Dani Mccormick shared how LexisNexis has moved towards new collaborative working practices and culture. They outlined LexisNexis learnings which could help you to reach this goal.

Creating the right culture and environment to enable collaboration

Achieving a collaborative way of working is more than just throwing together a variety of people in a room and hoping something great comes out of it. Instead, a wider cultural change is vital in attaining the benefits of closer collaboration.

Cultural change is difficult and takes time. But, as LexisNexis discovered, it’s worth it.

Three key building blocks of business collaboration

On its journey, LexisNexis identified three key building blocks that allow collaboration to flourish in business:

Physical environment

In order to bring your teams together, one of the easiest things to do is change your physical environment. Though it is not the be all and end all, it is a start.

LexisNexis recently made the move to locally based development teams, creating a shared environment for them to work – the ‘Tech Hub’. This space has bought together technology, product, delivery and user experience teams. Crucially, these development teams work alongside the legal content experts in LexisPSL. By bringing the teams together it has enabled them to work on common goals in a cross-functional approach.

Creating a new environment not only allows the space, facilities and means to employ agile and service design practices, but also enables continuous learning through discussion and experimentation.

Benefits seen by LexisNexis included:

• moving from silo based work to more cross functional teams
• having more optimal communication, quicker product development and getting a better understanding of customer needs
• moving from a waterfall to agile working practice.  This led to the constant daily flow of information that informed continuous development decisions

Measuring success

Another key to successful collaboration is to focus your business on tracking measura