Startup Idea: Legal Assistance Routing Software for Large Companies
I work as an in-house counsel (attorney), handling contracts. A big pain point in my daily work is people just finding the right counsel to help them in my large company. We have a company directory that is online, but it's not much help, as it's hard to search, hard to figure out who does what (especially if the asker is not an attorney) and hard to use in general. Since this is a global company and there are thousands of people working in countries all around the world, it's not like someone can walk down to the legal department and announce they need help. They may be in Bahrain and the lawyer they need is in California, etc.
What usually happens is that somebody who thinks they need legal help goes to either a lawyer they used in the company before for something (that may have been totally unrelated to the current need) or they go to some work mate of their who used a lawyer for something. And then one of these guys calls whatever lawyer they know, who then has to take time from his or her work to route this query to someone they think might be the right lawyer, who may actually still be the wrong lawyer and have to route the query further as we probably have a couple hundred lawyers also working in countries all over the place.
What would be great would be a solution where somebody could just hit a button on the computer and fill out a very brief questionnaire with their name, contact info (maybe this could be autofilled) and ONE SENTENCE what they need help with, or maybe check a bubble box (you don't want too many details written down) and then it automatically gets routed to a lawyer who's at least in the department where the help is needed (e.g. sales, contracts, patents, etc.) who then can either re-route it by hitting one button or pick up the request and work on it.
This would solve a number of problems:
- it would work similarly to people making requests for IT help - one channel for the requests to come in
- it would keep lawyers from having to drop the actual legal work they're doing to be nice to somebody who's just called with a problem that they totally can't fix and have to, in a friendly way, divert to the department that should be handling it
- it would prevent these requests for help from coming in through 10 channels (e.g. through the email, through the skype, through the phone, through another lawyer, through some other guy in the company, etc.) and have them just come in through ONE channel which would allow for better tracking and avoid involving so many people in a problem who don't really need to be involved.
I have no idea why my company doesn't already do something like this, but nobody likes to think about lawyers I guess, so something that would be a really basic thing for another department is not considered for us. It seems like this idea could also have applications to departments other than lawyers.
That's my idea for the morning given that I already had to reroute two people before 10 am even...
and this seems super basic especially since for a legal request, you really want minimal info attached (for various legal reasons you want a very short request instead of a long one like I would write for IT)
good luck. I haven't tried finding a solution because I know the company won't want to use an outside solution. Also, I'm a lawyer, not a process improvement guru.
How do I solve it now? Some lawyers solve it by just saying "can't help, sorry" or ignoring the query, which causes management to become upset at the legal department...as I am a nice person I try to be nice and chat with the people who contact me in error (at least 3 a week to me alone, I'm sure all the other lawyers are getting similar numbers) and try to send them to the right person, service with a smile, etc.