Live on Monday, 24th February 2025, 5PM UTC

In a recent Platforum9 session, Alan Ragueneau, an international legal professional with extensive experience across academia, corporate settings, and law firms including Dentons, shared his insights on how legal technology can enhance the efficiency in a Management Board. With a legal background spanning commercial law, IP, and international private law, he brings a unique perspective to the intersection of legal operations, technology and the practice of law itself.

The Gap in Legal Tech Understanding

Our discussion highlighted a significant gap in the legal industry: despite the growing importance of technology, many legal professionals lack adequate understanding of either technology and the business of law. Based on his research, including a 40-page report on barriers to digital transformation in law departments, he found that there are numerous challenges, including cultural, technical, financial and lack of time, which have resulted in the under utilisation of technology today.

“What I see is that general counsel are lost in translation. They look at the legal industry in a very traditional way,” Ragueneau explained. He emphasised that transformation is not merely about technology but about the ability to change—starting with individual and collective assessment of current processes before implementing technological solutions.

The Time Challenge for Legal Teams

One of the most pressing challenges for legal professionals is the lack of time to focus on improving processes. As he points out, most legal teams are in constant firefighting mode, with a small number of lawyers facing demands from thousands of business people.

“76 percent of the time of the in-house lawyers is spent on low to medium complex activities,” Ragueneau revealed, based on data from a client project. This statistic highlights the inefficiency in how legal resources are deployed in many organisations.

From Defense to Offense: Changing the Legal Function Mindset

Ragueneau advocates for a significant mindset shift for legal departments—moving from defense to offense. Rather than positioning themselves as cost centers, legal teams should view themselves as value drivers.

“It’s not because I’m a lawyer that I should put myself as a cost center,” he explained. “What you need to do is to look at your function as a value driver.”

For general counsels sitting on management boards, this means being able to present meaningful data and KPIs, just as marketing, sales, and other departments do. Instead of only discussing major litigation cases, legal leaders should track and communicate productivity metrics such as the reduction in hours spent on low-value activities.

The Power of Integration

A critical yet often overlooked aspect of legal technology implementation is integration. While many legal tech solutions offer impressive capabilities, they often require manual data entry, which reduces their efficiency benefits.

“If you really want to create progress for your team, get the data without them having to do a lot of manual data entry, there is a magic word, which is called integration,” Ragueneau noted. He observed that few legal tech providers adequately address this aspect, despite its critical importance in creating value.

By properly integrating systems, legal departments can generate powerful ROI metrics. As Ragueneau illustrated, if a team of 50 lawyers in Europe spends 76% of their time on low-value activities, that represents nearly 3.8 million euros of potential waste—a number that can drive meaningful conversations with business leaders about investing in better systems.

Risk Quantification: A New Approach to Board Management

Ragueneau has developed a platform called that helps quantify legal risks for management boards—a key area where legal teams can demonstrate their value. He distinguishes between compliance (black-and-white issues) and risk (situations with varying degrees of legal uncertainty).

For example, when a company wants to launch a product that might compete with a patent-protected competitor, legal teams can use sophisticated data modeling to assess the risk profile. This allows them to provide business leaders with clear information about potential outcomes and costs, enabling more informed decision-making.

“You can quantify. And then based on this information, you will have the board members say, ‘okay, we understand the risk,'” Ragueneau explained. This approach transforms the typical lawyer’s “it depends” response into actionable intelligence with a much narrower variance in potential outcomes.

The Future of Legal Work

Ragueneau envisions a future where legal professionals spend less time on routine tasks and more time on meaningful analysis. By harnessing AI and other technologies, lawyers can move from vague “it depends” responses toward more precise guidance, reducing variance in legal advice from 200% to about 20%.

This shift would allow legal teams to better understand legislation, industry dynamics, and emerging challenges, ultimately providing more value to their organisations.

Conclusion

As legal departments face increasing pressure to modernise and deliver more with fewer resources, Ragueneau’s insights offer a roadmap for using technology to enhance efficiency and demonstrate value. By understanding how to quantify risks, integrate systems, and focus on high-value activities, legal teams can transform their relationship with management boards and position themselves as strategic business partners rather than cost centers.

This journey requires both technological tools and a fundamental mindset shift—moving from defensive to offensive positioning and embracing the opportunity to provide clearer, more actionable guidance to business leaders. As Ragueneau puts it, it’s about leveraging technology to enable lawyers to answer the basic question business people need answered: “Do I go left or do I go right?”