Last week, two major legal technology companies, Harvey and Legora, each announced their new AI Legal Front Door solutions on the exact same day and with the exact same solution names! What a coincidence!
Front Door solutions such as theirs serve as comprehensive legal intake tools to enable business clients to engage with their in-house legal teams in a scalable manner.
These announcements also demonstrate the growing importance and growing totally addressable market (TAM) of corporate legal departments as key consumers of legal AI technology.
I’m a big fan of Front Doors as I have a lot of experience working with both Front Doors that were created organically by corporate legal teams and Front Doors that are licensed from third party legal technology providers.
If you are in the market to license and deploy a Front Door, here’s 🔟 best practices:
🚪 EASE OF USE: A Front Door must be super easy and inviting to use or else business people won’t embrace it. Configure a Front Door in a manner that requires business users to effortlessly add must-have information to initiate a request for legal help.
🚪TRAIN, TRAIN, TRAIN: Provide short trainings on how to use the Front Door to your clients. Record those trainings so clients can listen to them on-demand.
🚪SELF-HELP RESOURCES: Include self-help or do-it-yourself resources near the entrance to the Front Door such as contract templates, playbooks, FAQs, policies, etc..that business users can exhaust before initiating a formal request for legal help in the Front Door. Such resources need to be continually updated.
🚪AGENTIC CAPABILITY: Ideally, Front Doors should have agentic capabilities that are native to their solutions which serves as a digital concierge for users to seemlessly navigate with the Front Door. In addition, your company should create/license an agent that takes a business user directly to the Front Door from wherever they are already working and which provides the business user with quick access to applicable Front Door information.
🚪 ALL ACCESS: All business users should have access to enter the Front Door when legal assistance is needed. The legal team should reinforce to business users to go to the Front Door for legal help so that matters can be properly tracked and key metrics can be created.
🚪 SENIOR BUSINESS BUY-IN: Since interacting directly with a Front Door is a change in the way business people have historically interacted with the legal team, make sure that senior business leaders are on-board with this approach and that they are willing to reinforce any messaging to use the Front Door.
🚪 CAUTION WITH SENSITIVE INFO: Not all business users should have access to the totality of information that may be housed in a Front Door. Be mindful of attorney-client privilege considerations as highly sensitive matters may not be appropriate for routing through a Front Door.
🚪 STAY DISCIPLINED: Other than requests for individualized legal support from your CEO, SLT or Board, be persistent in requiring you business clients to leverage the Front Door when they need legal help.
🚪 REPORT OUT: Use the data and key metrics from the Front Door to demonstrate how the legal team is serving as a business accelerator.
🚪 TRUST IS PARAMOUNT: There are a growing number of Front Door providers nowadays. Take your time to select a provider that you can truly trust and whose solution is enterprise ready.