Implementing legal technology at Personio

This is an interview from our in-house legal report, in which we take the temperature of in-house legal at some of the world's fastest-growing scaleups. Find out what really keeps legal teams up at night, with insights from leaders who have scaled legal at Airbnb, Whereby, Motorway, and more: download the in-house legal report here.

Hi 👋 Who are you?

I'm Claudia, I'm the legal operations manager at Personio.

What tools are in legal’s tech stack?

We use Juro, Confluence, Jira and Slack - and then the more obvious tools like GSuite.

What do you look for in a legal tech solution?

I look for simplicity and scalability. On simplicity, the solution needs to be simple to both implement and maintain. On the scalability point, the technology needs to keep up with the stakeholders and the legal department.

I also consider configuration possibilities; I need these possibilities to be as granular as possible, so that everyone only receives the information they need - in accordance with the ‘need to know’ principle.

Being able to configure this information, especially with certain roles and rights, helps me provide the relevant information without overloading my colleagues.

Ease of use is also important. A modern, intuitive UI is always useful - not everyone using the solution has the technical capabilities to understand how it works!

How can legal teams with limited budgets get started with implementing tech?

In the beginning, I also didn’t have a dedicated budget. I found it really useful to exchange information with colleagues in other departments, learning about the tools they use.

This is also useful for implementing new tech - buying another user license, for a tool that exists in another team, is less expensive than considering and implementing something completely new.

I would also recommend looking into your existing tech stack, and exploring the possibilities there. For example, I attended a Juro community event on Slack workflows and how legal teams can use Slack’s workflow builder. I had experimented initially, but with practical examples I was able to kickstart this project again - and now, we have new Slack workflows in place that help us work more efficiently.

It’s useful to try a pilot project; even if you don’t have a dedicated budget, there’s a possibility that you can make everyone understand the benefits.

What can vendors do better to help legal with tech implementation?

1. Understand your audience.

As a baseline, vendors need to understand they’re not talking to a person who deals with tech implementation on a daily basis - but rather, someone who does it on top of their actual work. It’s important to explain in layman’s terms during implementation: what are the concrete steps lawyers need to take in order to make this project successful?

2. Don’t take knowledge for granted.

People in the legal industry may not be familiar with project management and the steps they need to take to successfully adopt new tech.

3. Provide resources to help legal get buy-in.

Business case calculations can be difficult for some lawyers, so anything around resource costs, time taken to get a ROI, and so on, is super useful to pass on to your prospects, so we can get buy-in from other team members at a quicker rate.

4. Don’t underestimate the time commitment from both legal and other teams.

I love the “Who will be in charge of each team in Juro?” question in Juro’s onboarding form. Having a team champion is so important, and it’s the most effective way to guarantee adoption.

Thanks for sharing your experiences, Claudia!

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