[Music] [Applause] hi thank you for joining us today i'm karen glazier and i'm really excited today because we're going to be talking about a brand new application that servicenow recently released i believe it was in july and it's called the legal service management application very specific to those that work in that legal function within their company and according to servicenow and i'm taking this right off of their release information the legal service management enables users to request changes to the operation and maintenance of their legal related case work and that's that is kind of cryptic to a certain degree maybe to those who aren't necessarily illegal but even so it's kind of the high level view pretty much the legal staff can track the requests that are coming in and they can make any necessary changes that need to be made and my assumption is that there is also a way that they can track their billable hours a little bit tighter and have the ability to have visibility into where that time is going based on their case work so knowing service now my assumption is that's just cracking the surface and what i'm really excited about today is that i actually have somebody on this call with me uh thomas hunt he is one of our solution consultants here at crossfields who actually knows quite a bit about servicenow's legal service management application so thomas i'm hoping you can do a little deep dive with us today yeah i think i can i'm i'm trained up and uh and ready to go so definitely excited to dive in great well let's start with a little bit of something that i'm curious about so we hear the phrase legal service management application is this something that is for the legal department within a company as well as a law firm or is it one or the other yeah great question um i i think servicenow has designed this application to be you know organizationally agnostic if you will so you know i think whether you're a you're a company right so if you think of of any sort of organization in any sort of vertical likely they have a team of of lawyers or legal personnel to manage various legal requests that may be coming in from the sales team or delivery or just back office write this applications for you similarly right if you're a law firm that you know services customers directly right and you today currently manage uh your requests and tasks in an unorganized or maybe manual spreadsheet email-oriented way right this this application is for you as well um you know the way that servicenow has structured this is it gives legal service delivery teams their own space within servicenow right so they can track things like their time how long they're spending on requests they can report on these separately and it keeps it separate from you know all the other types of of data that servicenow holds right because you may have your customer service management team in servicenow your it service management team your hr team etc so i'd say definitely both both of those use cases would fit this application that's great so let's let's uh talk for a minute about a legal department within a company so the other general counsel they have their whole legal staff and they are fielding different requests from like you mentioned a variety of other areas of the the business so how does that make that easier you mentioned some spreadsheets um things like that i'm assuming that it's cutting back on the number of steps they have to take and giving them more clarity into what they're doing and what they're working on maybe maybe they can look at that and save a little time in the future and and do things a little more efficiently that sort of thing yeah definitely so so if you think about um you know servicenow as a whole right it's a it's a platform that has tons of different features and functionalities that are leveraged by you know it and customer service management hr teams that are currently on the platform today um when you dive in into those those different features those are features that these legal teams will be able to use so things like you know actual reporting right that you would be able to to schedule and send have sent to your inbox right every friday at 8 a.m you would be able to track how many tasks are assigned to our contracts group versus our um you know other group that that we leverage for a different type of contract right so all that functionality is going to be there for you and and what that means for you is you're no longer sifting through emails you know what your prioritized work is you know when it needs to be completed by all these different metrics that i think to some extent are absent today maybe within uh you know a legal uh service delivery organization um is really at your fingertips and they're out of the box within the application it's interesting i know from some work we've done in the legal industry specifically law firms that obviously at the end of the day everything's about that mighty o billable dollar sure and making sure that that that billable time is structured as efficiently as possible and unfortunately lawyers and their staff deal with sometimes i've seen stats that say over 50 of their time is put on admin work right and when you look at that all that time 50 or more could be spent billing out and that's the bread and butter of that law firm that that's critical so i would think that this application with the visibility and the reporting it gives you could really cut down a lot in on that admin time and say oh this particular workflow could be more efficient let's tweak it this way and before you know it you just saved x number of hours per employee which could be put towards a billable hour and that probably could be applied to an internal law department as well correct absolutely so so i think you know with that that specific use case right it does two things right a what what you're going to be able to do is you're going to be able to just modernize your legal service delivery process right whether you are leveraging you know spreadsheets emails whatever the case may be and i think it's no secret that lawyers love emails right and and and legal teams love working through emails which you can still leverage as part of the platform as as well right that's a functionality that we can dive into but um from a cost-saving perspective i think it actually reduces costs in two ways right it it reduces cost by replacing that manual service so it's reducing internal cost and it's allow by reducing that internal cost it's able to um allow you to spend more time working on billable work right because you're you're just more streamlined right you're more efficient you're more productive um so yeah i think this is a cost-saving uh tool 100 because i think traditionally legal service delivery teams whether it's a law firm or a team of of uh you know legal counsel or lawyers within an organization typically you know they're they may be using point solutions and what they're doing is when that doesn't work they're reverting back to email and then they buy another point solution and that doesn't work so they re revert back to email and it's this you know never-ending cycle essentially of point solutions and email and what servicenow is put in in front of them is is a place to you know essentially leverage a platform that's already being used across the organization and then benefit of course from all the things that that we've just discussed yeah everything in one centralized spot which is one of the main if not the main value points of service now um and i would also think for security that would be security of information that would be important you know keeping everything you know in that one platform keeping it within tightly within those workflows and being able to report specifically on where that information go is going to whom and when would be important um you know i read a little something about a legal catalog what is that exactly yeah so you know since this is built on the platform of course um what you're able to do by implementing this or what organizations are able to do is they're able to leverage all of the standard platform functionality so when you think about a service catalog right or a series of requests a legal team can put out their own service catalog they can also deploy which comes out of the box the own their own legal self-service portal right and you could have access to that via mobile you could deploy the virtual agent on that so i think if you're a legal organization um you know imagine being able to track or for users to submit an nda request or a contract expedition request right or a privacy request or maybe if you're an organization that has legal counsel there maybe a stock trade approval that needs to be sent to the cfo right you can leverage the power of of the platform and the workflows um to to you know better service whoever your your end customer is whether that's you know an actual end customer or an employee of the organization like someone from sales so i think that's you know extremely valuable to a lot of organizations and i think it goes back to your security point as well right this is siloed off from from i.t right we're not having to create a legal request within it and then create a separate queue for them and hope that nothing ever intermingles right because there there could and always is i think sensitivity around uh legal matters so um it gives you your own place in the platform to to track all the various different types of requests that that you would need to that's excellent um and that brings me to remembering that this is a cert this is part of servicenow's service management suite that's right so it's built on that exact you know core system that servicenow is known for that you know enables service delivery across the organization in so many different capacities so obviously leveraging all of those best practices and and things like that that are built into the platform legal can take full advantage of all those things that have already been proven to work in other departments it's just applying it specifically to the functions that that legal department may have absolutely correct yep so what do you think thomas about so this is another service management application within that service management suite at servicenow you know they've released telco they've released financial what do you think about all these verticalized applications being delivered by service now personally i think it's pretty exciting yeah you know i definitely think that over time servicenow has realized that um you know and i not just servicenow but the customers of servicenow right the world has realized that servicenow is not just a quote unquote ticketing tool right that may have been what it started out you know 12 13 years ago as um but now it's it's a it's a platform that allows you to really drive growth and innovation regardless of what your your business case is right so you know obviously today we're talking about legal you had mentioned the new telco product right there's very industry specific applications that servicenow is starting to deploy and i think that's you know allowing these types of organizations that have that one siloed use case to drive growth and innovation because um you know today there's there's a lot of point solutions right there's a very niche tool that's very exact you know for a specific use case for a specific industry so on and so forth and although those may be great you don't get any value right that's simply for that tool and you could have you know 20 of those different applications to fit those use cases um so i think what it does is it allows not just you know the different groups within an organization but you know the business as a whole to look at servicenow as a strategic investment to run their entire enterprise off of um and you know i think kind of some subsequent value points of that are you know you go back to modernizing those service delivery processes right whatever it is um and then again reducing cost you're leveraging one platform for your entire enterprise um that is a massive i think cost savings uh point to be made for a lot of organizations out there today that may have uh you know i like to call it cloud sprawl just an application for everything right this team uses zoom but this other team uses microsoft teams the other team uses go to meeting right that's three different licensing models three different types of services that you may be paying for servicenow puts it all in one bucket and uh i think that's why you know servicenow is seeing the value in that and and servicenow customers are seeing the value in that as well i couldn't agree more and and it's the resources they have to support all those disparate systems right so if you have 50 different systems doing just the one point of service when you could have one platform doing all of that and the incredible scalability and flexibility that servicenow offers how quickly you can shift i mean look at this world we live in today how quickly we all had a shift and support workforces and things like that that in different ways we didn't expect to do you can't do that when you have 50 different systems operating within their own fences uh yeah it's just it's just too rigid and too difficult they're not talking to each other in servicenow it's all in one place one centralized location which is great exactly you have the ability to kind of cross cross-functionally work if you will right um hr can collaborate with it legal can collaborate with it and hr right um you can send things kind of you know throw it over the fence to the appropriate team that you need to throw it over because today that probably means you know one team working in one solution the other person isn't licensed for it so they're pulling up outlook or gmail and saying hey i need you to do x y and z um you know so so i i think that is a huge point you know specifically around why servicenow is starting to release a lot of this you know or these industry specific applications it makes sense and i'm really glad that legal was a focus we've been focused on legal for quite a while now as you know yeah and uh we've seen tremendous success with applying service now into these law firms across the globe and when i saw that the release was coming out for the legal service management application i was really happy about that because i think that's one industry that servicenow could do wonders for and it's really good to see that they have taken that service management model and put that in good use for in-house legal as well as law firms themselves so thomas this has been absolutely wonderful it's always good to do a deep dive with you into what's happening at servicenow and of course how we're helping our customers leverage all that great stuff that servicenow is releasing out into the uh the business landscape today so thank you so much for your time today and for all those who are watching this video if you want to continue this discussion we're here to have that discussion with you feel free to give us a shout at let's talk crossfuse.com thanks so much thomas take care of yourself yes thanks karen