Solving the “Last Mile” Challenge in Legal Operations
Tonkean hosted an intimate roundtable discussion for legal ops leaders in SF on Monday 9/23. Here are our thoughts from the night.
The “Last Mile” is a trillion-dollar challenge in transportation. However, what people don’t realize is that a very similar, equally significant Last Mile challenge also exists in the world of business operations.
Enterprise legal operations leaders met in San Francisco at the “Solving the Last Mile Challenge in Legal Ops” event to discuss and share their thoughts.
The hidden cause of the Last Mile problem
Defined as the gap caused by the misalignment between how systems function and how people work, the Last Mile problem in operations leads to tremendous drag on business processes, but more importantly, it leads to highly valuable people spending significant time on manual, low-value work.
At the start of the night, Sagi Eliyahu, the Co-Founder and CEO of Tonkean, asked the group, “Why are automation and technology growing all around us, but at the end of the day, we still spend the majority of our day doing manual, mundane, and boring work?”
The reason, he went on to say, is that “When we design a process, if we don’t think about who the people are in that process and what are the things they care about, we’ll end up with the last mile problem in operations.”
There is a fundamental flaw in the way business processes are typically designed because the main focus is on optimizing for the business goal, while people, being the most flexible, are forced to mold their behavior around the needs and limitations of other components of the process.
Technology is also applied primarily with business goals in mind, and people end up needing to learn new processes, change their behavior, and in many cases perform manual work to support the technology. However, this approach ultimately limits process improvements because people end up being taken away from doing the things that are natural or where they provide the most value.
Starting a movement…
There is a shift that needs to happen in process design. Eliyahu argued, “The only way you can make a new process or a new technology work is if you think about that process people-first…Technology should serve people, not people serving technology.”
During the event, legal operations leaders shared their experiences and discussed processes that could be improved through a people-first redesign. Use cases such as legal request queues, accrual validations, conflict waivers, new matter creation, and more, came up as areas where people spend time doing unnecessary manual work.
The group also put people-first process design in practice by mapping out the needs of people, both business customers, and the legal team, as well as company needs for the specific process of legal request queues. By keeping both of these in mind, the group mapped out what steps in the process should be handled by people and what should be handled by technology.
The future is #PeopleFirstAutomation
“Solving the Last Mile Challenge in Legal Ops” marked the beginning of rethinking how organizations approach implementing technology, coordinating people, and designing processes. Technology, like automation, can be applied for the benefit of people and organizations alike with the right mindset.
The opportunity and responsibility rests on the shoulders of operations leaders to design what the future of work looks like.
“We as operations leaders have the ability to control the future,” says Eliyahu, “if we make small changes to the way we look at processes and the way we design work.”
From the engaging and thought-provoking discussion on Monday night, we are well on our way to that people-first future.
Tonkean is a people-first robotic automation platform for operations teams to integrate systems, coordinate people, and automate work.
