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Lawyers have often been accused of working in silos and being slow to embrace innovation. Fortunately, the tide has changed in recent years, and in-house legal teams are finally beginning to welcome innovation and the legal implications it brings with more open arms. Legal teams are now starting to express interest in and other legal tech solutions, and they’re acknowledging the benefits of doing so.

Sadly, the progress made regarding the way lawyers and tech teams collaborate has been much slower. Between the jargon and competing demands, it can often feel like the departments are speaking different languages, rather than heading in the same direction.

However, with the use and development of technology becoming so heavily regulated, businesses can’t afford to ignore this disconnect any longer. Lawyers need to apply their knowledge of industry-specific regulations to upcoming product development projects, and legal teams need to delve into technological knowledge to better understand the company’s legal position regarding certain advancements to begin with.

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Fostering better collaboration and communication between legal and tech teams is critical in 2022. Here are some tips, tricks and best practices to help you to achieve it.

Best practices for fostering greater collaboration between legal and tech teams

1) Make legal terminology and knowledge more accessible (and vice versa)

One of the most effective (and obvious) ways to make communication easier between legal and tech stakeholders is to simplify the language both parties use when collaborating with one another.

It’s natural for complex legal concepts and regulations to be alien to technology specialists and product developers. And it’s also unsurprising that lawyers won’t necessarily have in-depth technical knowledge of a product’s functioning and development in order to apply these legal rules.

As a consequence, both legal and technical teams should make a conscious effort to ensure that the information they deliver is both accessible and digestible for their colleagues. This means simplifying complex legal rules and conditions and making them relative to the product or feature at hand. One of the most efficient ways to achieve this is to create a playbook of some sort that lists and explains all of the jargon in one place, which can be done using a tool like .

Similarly, tech teams could deliver in-depth demos into certain contentious features to aid legal teams in their understanding of the technology’s workings. They could do so using a tool like , as this allows them to create and share explanatory videos of new features and invite questions when both teams’ calendars are too hectic to sync in real-time.

It might also be beneficial to run some basic training sessions for both legal and tech teams to provide them with a clearer insight into how the other team works, and what their pain points are.

2) Establish (and use) robust knowledge-sharing systems

Following on from the above, it’s also useful to establish a knowledge sharing culture within your business. This often involves creating knowledge databases for both legal and tech teams to lean on for information. This enables them to self-serve on their queries more efficiently and eliminates the need for both legal and tech teams to respond to the same questions repeatedly.

The best way to do this is to use a shared space like Notion, where large amounts of information can be shared and formatted for easy reading. Alternatively, teams could create a shared channel, where they can pin and share relevant resources and updates since most businesses use this as their company-wide communication platform anyway. is yet another great alternative for this type of knowledge sharing, as it allows teams to create and share information manuals, training materials, and other content.

3) Proactive relationship-building, not reactive

Too often, legal and tech teams will refrain from communicating until a risk or contention has surfaced, either because they themselves are immensely busy or because they’re wary of one another’s time restraints.

The danger of this, though, is that when it comes to finding a fast and effective solution to a product-related legal contention, the foundations of a strong working relationship are yet to be established, which can hinder effective collaboration.

To preempt these difficulties, in-house legal and tech teams should be encouraged to build relationships proactively, rather than reactively. This can be achieved on a one-to-one basis or through team-building efforts, like routine meet-ups. It also places emphasis on introducing newly onboarded legal and tech hires to the rest of the teams to ensure that these relationships are developed and nurtured from day one.

This is a great way to ensure that, even when there are conflicting priorities, legal and tech teams can collaborate efficiently and respectfully to reach a mutually beneficial conclusion. Since risk-averse lawyers can often be perceived as blockers to innovation, building this robust relationship and understanding can be vital.

4) Engage with feature updates and roadmaps early on

The same principle should be applied to feature updates and roadmaps, too. It’s far more expensive to rectify a legal issue within a product or product feature once it's already been built, so legal teams need to engage with product development in the early stages, rather than after something new has shipped.

That’s why it’s useful to involve legal in the roadmapping process throughout. This provides legal with the opportunity to express their concerns and flag any risk areas before the tech team begins to invest time and money into developing certain features that might later need to be rolled back.

From our experience, the best way to do this is by inviting legal teams to quarterly meetings and roadmap planning sessions, as well as providing follow-up advice and guidance about certain contentious updates.

Beyond this, it might also be worth establishing a workflow whereby certain product updates or projects are pushed through to legal for their approval before progressing. Some form of Kanban board is most effective for this, like Trello, or other project management tools.

5) Share actionable data amongst teams

Finally, both legal and tech teams should actively pursue opportunities to assist one another, as building a business and a product is undoubtedly a team effort.

For legal teams, this could mean identifying points of friction within the contract process, particularly when this friction is a consequence of a missing feature or a privacy concern. This can then be passed on to the product and tech teams to inform their future priorities. Similarly, legal teams can extract contract data on the value of specific contracts, and this information can be used to allocate budget for certain projects owned by the tech team. On the flip side, tech teams can collect and share the data they have about the efficacy of certain features, and this information can be leveraged during or when assessing the company’s position on legal issues.

Key takeaways

At most tech companies, the product is the backbone of the business. As the business and product grow, so do legal and compliance issues, making it increasingly important for legal and tech teams to collaborate effectively as companies scale.

The basis for this collaboration is respect, understanding and a strong willingness to both learn and share knowledge amongst teams. In the absence of these things, communication breaks down, legal risks go unchecked and the company is left vulnerable.

So, whilst legal and tech team collaboration can be a significant time-investment, it’s an investment that businesses simply can’t afford to scrimp on.

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