All companies have legal obligations and requirements, often in terms of documentation and policies. For example, it is common for companies to need to manage information regarding employment policy, licenses, product and service terms, compliance, and all sorts of other requirements. Lexoo: In terms of your legal team, can you give us a brief overview of the story and how it`s currently set up? The Atlassian Marketplace offers hundreds of integrations, plug-ins, and add-ons to help your legal team manage legal services A template designed to streamline stakeholder management by allowing you to manage your contracts in one place. Easily move from one stage of the contract cycle to the next using legal case types and workflows, or customize them to create a new template for your team`s legal processes. Streamlined, cross-functional workflows enable collaboration between legal and business teams. Seamless. In-house legal teams working in technology companies that have adopted agile practices find the need to break with old practices even more critical. Also, for teams working remotely or in technology silos, this means relying on channels like email and Slack conversations for internal communication, collaboration, and scheduling, which often leads to a lack of clear communication, loss of context, late planning, and more. Jira Work Management helps legal teams manage documentation, including confidentiality agreements, copyright policies, and terms of use, to ensure the right people review, edit, and approve before signing. Anna: From the perspective of the in-house legal team, JIRA`s reporting feature is a godsend, because as an in-house team, you often struggle to find ways to prove your benefits to the entire company, and we can do that pretty quickly because we can just pull out a report that shows the total number of jobs we`re working on at any given time. The number of jobs that are with external partners, the number of jobs we work ourselves and the number of jobs we closed the previous week, for example. So it`s a feature I`ve always struggled with in the past to find a good way to report and even have some sort of project management tool.
In previous roles, it was a very manual process, for example an Excel spreadsheet. So I think the JIRA tool is fantastic for both of these reasons. Whereas in this example, the Salesforce legal team and the service and pre-sales teams use Jira, it can simply be configured the other way around. With Connector for Salesforce and Jira, you can create a fully automated, two-way integration between the two platforms. • Legal Department Questions • Request for Contract Review • Email Request Project Management Experience. Automate notifications about legal status or documents. Customize permissions Easily create and centralize information such as frequently used legal forms, decision tabs, and meeting notes. Manage permissions so that only the right people have access to relevant information, and use simple versioning to stay informed of changes to documents. With Connector for Salesforce & Jira, you can create a consolidated, streamlined approach to communication, planning, and execution that minimizes unproductive context changes. This means that legal teams can continue to work on the platform they know, such as Salesforce, and have the means to collaborate with other teams to plan and deliver solutions to clients. “Jira Software is that de facto standard,” Noah Wasmer, vice president of product at Atlassian, told me. “We are currently making great strides with Jira Service Management, integrating IT teams into this loop.
We now have over 100,000 customers for these two products. So it`s going really amazingly. But one of the things CIOs say is that it`s really hard to put Jira Software in front of an HR team and the legal team. You often ask, what is code? What is a pull request? Many legal departments have turned to Salesforce to create and protect documents. This makes sense because Salesforce is already the go-to technology for other customer-facing teams, hosting all customer information and serving as a source of truth within the company. The challenge is that a big part of the process of delivering services to customers still relies on working with pre-sales, who work in Jira, not Salesforce. How do teams using two different platforms meet the challenge of effectively collaborating to plan and deliver products and services in an agile way? An inevitable byproduct of legal teams is the accumulation of hundreds of pages of important documents. With the advent of technology, these are no longer stacked around desks or crammed into filing cabinets; They are based on the Wiki and Salesforce pages, but the challenge of efficiency remains the same. “We hear about it all the time today,” he said. “They`ve just put the legal team in Jira Software, and it`s flooding them with information that`s not relevant to what they`re trying to do. Now we can expose them.
And then we also have this legal team, this marketing team, exposed to different models for different jobs. What they`re finding is that once they get used to this compelling use case, they start saying, “Well, hey, why not use it for contract approvals at the end of the quarter?” That`s cool. And Mel, another lawyer on your legal team, mentioned that you use Slack, a very popular communication tool, I think, especially in the startup ecosystem. Do you use other tools? So what do I think is in the stack of software tools you use globally? So when I started, it was very different and we didn`t have a management tool at all. We haven`t used JIRA yet. And then, now, a year and a half later, Anna is our General Counsel, we also have Melissa on board, that`s pretty much the base of our legal team and we`re all in Brisbane. We still have our Co-Sec who is in Adelaide and can help with ad hoc questions, but in general we now manage everything from Brisbane. Manage employee legal requests in one central location. Your internal service desk makes it easier for employees to submit requests and your team to manage them. As Wasmer pointed out, Jira Work Management is designed to help different teams do their jobs in the way that works best for them.
But because Jira is now a product family, it also allows for much closer collaboration between teams. This means that a development team working on implementing a GDPR requirement can now create a project board-related workflow for a legal team, which then allows the legal department to delay a version of the software until it approves that new feature.