Many law department leaders today are taking a step back to assess and evaluate their current infrastructure and systems. As one in-house counsel shared, “Now more than ever we are going to have to manage doing more with less. Proper information flow and organization of work, is going to be extremely important.” But it can be overwhelming to think of all the projects that you may need to tackle, and best to step back and assess critical pain points and identify which projects will have the greatest impact on the business.

In this post, we highlight our top tips for identifying and prioritizing innovation projects within your law department. 

1. What problems are you trying to fix? Taking a moment to understand the specific pain points and challenges that you are trying to solve is key. What bottlenecks do members of the team see? You can canvas your department through a quick survey or have a third-party do a deep dive assessment. It is also helpful to check-in with key internal stakeholders to capture their views on possible bottlenecks. By engaging with your team and key stakeholders, you are paving the path towards future engagement and buy-in. 
2. While it can be tempting to boil the ocean, there is a discipline required to prioritize projects to ensure you maximize your investment of time and resources. 
   Asking yourself:
   • What will have the greatest benefit to the department and the company?
   • How do these projects rank in terms of complexity to implement and change required?
   • What can we manage in terms of costs?

   Developing clear criteria (see example below) for how you and your team will assess the pipeline of potential scenarios/solutions will ensure that your plans for the new dynamic are robust and clear. How you measure benefit, complexity and cost will depend on your organization, culture, people, existing tools and budget.

3. Once you’ve identified your priorities, you’ll want to use this as an opportunity to communicate your direction both within your team and with key internal stakeholders. This is important to establish early buy-in and engagement across the team while creating a sense of urgency for change