Legal Service Delivery in ServiceNow
With Wesley Flock
In this article, we are taking a look at Legal Service Delivery. The objectives that will be covered here are a description of legal service delivery, out-of-box applications associated with it, and some of the practice areas. We will also walk through a few use cases for an end-user, a fulfiller, and a manager. Lastly, we’ll wrap up by talking about important features of the application.
What is Legal Service Delivery
ServiceNow has defined its Legal Service Delivery set of applications as a unified experience between the employees requesting legal support and the legal teams serving them. Overall, Legal Service Delivery will help you track legal requests with self-service experiences, increase practitioner productivity through the use of the legal counsel center, and allow you to gain insight into legal demand and trends with real-time reporting.
For the out-of-box applications associated with legal service delivery, we have legal request management, matter management, conflict of interest, digital forensics, simple contracts, stock pre-clearance, council center, virtual agent conversations, and the mobile app. There is a star next to legal request management, which just indicates that legal request management is at the core of all of the applications beneath it. You need to have that installed in order to get anywhere else with the rest of the applications in Legal Service Delivery.
For practice areas, there are currently about 18 practice areas available out-of-box including compliance, corporate support, ethics, government affairs, labor and employment litigation, mergers and acquisitions, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. Now, we're going to transition over to our first use case with Nicole Robins; she's going to submit a request for us. For this demo, we have impersonated Nicole Robinson. We're going to select Service Catalog. We'll expand here on the categories and as you can see (reference video at 2:37), we have a handful of requests out-of-box to choose from. We have conflict of interest disclosure, content review, digital forensic request, general legal request, non-disclosure agreement, privacy assessment, and stock preclearance.
Submitting a Request
For this demo, we are going to choose a non-disclosure agreement. On the form that loads, we have the title and description of the NDA form. We scroll down to see some fields we need to supply information to and specify the request that we want to submit. For this example, we are going to choose vendor; for the purpose we're going to say, to protect sensitive data. For the company, we will choose Amazon, leave the address as null, choose the United States, and choose a date in the future. We have to add an external signatory; for the sake of this, we will add Wesley Flock. The title will be Legal NDA Lead, populate ourGlideFast email, then click add. At the bottom we see the information populate. If we wanted to we can also add attachments for any relative data that may be relevant to this situation, but we're not going to add anything to this; we're just going to click submit.
As this processes and makes its way through, it will eventually end us on a page that shows the status of this request. We will also have an overview of just the details for this request. We have a preview tab, which is a preview of the document that contains some of the data that we just provided on the previous page with details of some of the signatories that are required to approve and process this. Again, it lists the signatories involved. We have an activity tab that lists the activity that is conducted while this request is being processed. Here we can add attachments after we have submitted the request, and we will also be able to view attachments that have been submitted. Lastly, we view the request details tab, which allows us to just see the various bits of data that Nicole had entered when she submitted this request. With the request being made, we will now transition over to the Council Center, which is a workspace where our user Susan Foster will work out of, and she will process this request.
Processing the Request
We have now impersonated Susan Foster and loaded the Legal Counsel Center, which is a workspace that provides a graphical interface for fulfillers to view unassigned requests, assign requests, and work them as they would intend to, to process this request. Upon loading the council center, we have been brought to a landing page that contains some widgets with unassigned matters and requests, any pending approvals, tasks to do, and any requests/matters that have been assigned to Susan Foster. We're going to go into unassigned requests and we're going to find the request that Nicole Robbins just submitted. It's at the top and on clicking this case, it's going to load a record page that contains the details and some other activities that we can work through here to process Nicole's request.
On the left-hand side under the details tab, we have the details of the record, and various bits and pieces of the record, but most importantly we have a section down at the bottom that contains the variables of the data that Nicole had provided. This will allow Susan to reference this in order to become informed of the status of the request. In the center, we have compose which allows Susan to log information pertaining to this request and how she has worked through it. For work notes, it is private which means it's just internal communications between herself and anybody else who may be accessing the record. The comments tab allows her to communicate back and forth. Down below, we have the activity stream which records all changes whether it's under variables, general contract support, or any additions made under work notes or comments.
On the right-hand side, we have Council Assist which can provide catalog items and knowledge-related information to assist Susan through completing this request. For the approvers tab, this would show anyone that needs to approve to process part of the workflow associated with this request. In the additional tabs, we can view any applicable task SLAs, documents needing to be revised, and the two signatories that are currently assigned to this request. We will now jump over to Dominic Collins to view the dashboard that shows some of the reporting information based on available requests and matters logged within the Legal Service Delivery application.
Reporting Information
Now we have impersonated Dominic Collins, who is a manager in the Legal Service Delivery space. We have loaded the dashboard for legal operations and we have two tabs: open requests/matters and trend analysis. First, we'll take a look at open requests/matters; you can see we have a few widgets across the top for open requests, unassigned requests, open matters, and unassigned matters. Matters are escalations of a request that require an expansion into the rest of the company to include other departments in information-gathering and rationing out whatever the request may be.
When we scroll down, we have a few widgets for open requests and open matters, open requests by assigned to, and open matters by matter owner. Under trend analysis, we've got some more reporting features’ we can see open and close requests per month, open requests and matters per month, requests this year, matters this year, Knowledge articles viewed, and top 10 Knowledge articles viewed. This wraps up our use case for Legal Service Delivery, and now we’ll cover a few additional features that come with Legal Service Delivery.
Additional Features
The important features that we have for Legal Service Delivery are Edge Encryption and Access Control Separation.
In this image for Edge Encryption, ServiceNow likes to emphasize that any file uploaded here into ServiceNow on the customer premise is encrypted and transmitted over to ServiceNow's infrastructure, where it is then continually encrypted and rested there so that you have complete item security on any files that you send over to store in your instance. This is very important in the legal space because we want to keep that information tight and secure so that nobody else can access what they don't need to see. This also plays into the Access Control Separation; those practice areas also come with their own set of access controls, so only those that are assigned to those controls and practice groups can access that data. Anyone who is not required or supposed to see this information cannot see it, so you have proper separation of viewing of your sensitive data.
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