What is no-code?

There is more and more talk about the future of enterprise technology being no-code, self-service and immediately usable. Still, no-code is often used interchangeably with low-code, or RPA, with little distinction made between these terms. So in this guide, we break down what no-code is, how it is has evolved, and how all teams, across industries, benefit from it. We cover:

Chapter 1. What is no-code?

No-code is a way to build self-service apps without any programming knowledge. It empowers those with domain expertise to build powerful digital applications themselves, quickly.

In operational terms, no-code uses building blocks and forms to design the logic behind the application. This model, or form-driven graphical development environment, is particularly well-suited to those who do not have programming skills, or even those who do, but value the visual representation of logic.

In short, no-code creates representations of business processes and application flows. By relying on logical decision trees that can be changed, edited, reused and updated, domain experts can deliver self-service apps, used either as a standalone solution or integrated with the existing systems.

Why is no-code now popular?

In short, because operational versatility and informational availability have become key drivers of business growth and companies need to ensure hyper-availability of services, both internally and externally.

To develop a piece of software with code (or “legacy programming”) requires a lot of effort and shows little value, especially in the early stages. Databases and architecture, integrations and connections between different parts of services, and the software frontend all need to be built and established from scratch and then customized to specific business needs. This requires a significant investment of resources from all departments: IT, software developers and internal stakeholders.

At the same time, it is inter-team communication that acts as the biggest obstacle to the successful completion of IT projects.

Also, the visual nature of traditional code gives a limited sense of structure to non-technical stakeholders. Until the final product is delivered, they are given only a modest grasp of what a piece of software will do for them. With some initial investment, this trajectory of development can be brought into a more linear shape, but that requires budget and time that departments may lack.

On the other hand, a no-code app builder allows non-technical stakeholders to take the lead in developing software. With no-code, the focus shifts to configuration. Anyone can configure, with no coding skills.

And, no-code platforms come with pre-built features, including databases, hosting, integrations, even some of the security aspects are already included.

Can no-code support complex projects?

As the solution capabilities increase, so do the costs—of both code and no-code.

The key difference is that no-code enables delivering the same level of capabilities at a much lower cost for a large number of projects. Only when a project reaches a certain level of complexity, when the coding needs cannot be easily anticipated and when highly specific requirements need to be included, does the cost of no-code rise exponentially as well. That’s when teams turn to some custom code.

These highly specific requirements can too be solved with no-code: through integrations and API, no-code delivers the value on two fronts: easily build foreseeable projects and allow complex projects to be built on top of more basic applications which address lower complexity issues.

Chapter 2. No-code benefits for in-house legal teams

The core value of no-code is best seen in the way it enables business experts across the company to turn specific workflows, applications, decisions and knowledge into digital applications, without asking for complex, costly applications from IT teams or external software developers.

In this chapter, we look at both short- and long-term benefits that no-code has for legal as well as for other functions across organizations. We focus on:

• Managing more work with no-code
• How to cut Legal Operations costs with no-code
• No-code for risk management
• No-code for data-driven in-house legal teams
• Workflow automation for in-house legal
• Reducing the ROI bar for legal apps
• Customer centric legal services and design thinking
• Boosting employee engagement with no-code

No-code brings the highest value to enterprises and legal teams in allowing automation of low-complexity, repetitive, yet slightly different tasks, enabling these professionals to focus on the more complex, bespoke work.

The timing of no-code emergence and adoption in legal operations follows a similar pattern. In-house legal experts today face numerous requests, each slightly different from the other. Building a single tool to address these requests does not work.

Building several tools with custom code to address these requests also does not work, as most of these problems are not a reason enough for the company to spend its resources: there is simply not enough ROI to invest.

But these requests, while not a priority for the company, are a major obstacle for in-house legal teams, dragging down their efficiency and keeping them unprepared to address the rising workload. That is where a no-code platform helps—it enables legal teams to build their own tools via legal workflow automation, without any coding required and within the approved budget.

How to manage more work with no-code

Facing more regulation, more data and more business risk, the workloads of in-house legal teams has only increased in the past decade – and it is not looking set to change. According to the 2021 Ernst & Young Law Survey, which surveyed over 2,000 General Counsel, while the workload is expected to increase by 25% by 2024, headcount is expected to only increase by 3%. And legal teams are already struggling: 76% of legal departments that took part in the study find it difficult to manage the existing workload.

The increasing workload is not the only challenge. Low-complexity work is taking up a substantial portion of legal professionals’ time, with law department managers saying that one-fifth of in-house counsel hours is wasted on low-complexity, repetitive tasks. Besides dragging down the overall efficiency of legal teams, this type of work also negatively affects the team morale: 47% of legal department managers report that the increasing amount of low-impact, repetitive work negatively affects employee morale according to the EY Law Survey. No-code presents General Counsel with a way to reconcile an increased workload without an increase in headcount. By giving their teams a way to build their own no-code applications, in-house legal teams can automate the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that otherwise occupy their time. In other words, they “scale themselves”. They build applications to manage the ever-increasing, frequently occurring requests for assistance, freeing up capacity to focus on the more complex and bespoke work.

How to cut legal ops costs with no-code

No-code makes it possible for General Counsel to deliver high-impact results while reducing overall costs.

The 2021 EY Law Survey found that 88% of General Counsel plan to cut the overall costs of the legal function by 2024. At the same time, 59% of General Counsel found technology to be an opportunity to drive cost savings.

And while technology broadly creates an opportunity to optimize processes and increase productivity, the average IT project requires a significant investment of budget and time: it takes months to be implemented and years before the benefits crystallize.

No-code applications, by contrast, can be designed, built and launched in a matter of weeks meaning legal teams see the benefits of using technology faster. By empowering in-house legal experts to easily build digital solutions themselves, no-code allows General Counsel to make more effective use of existing resources. In turn, they deliver high-value services that are more closely aligned to customer and market needs.

As indicated by the EY Law Survey, the second most promising source of cost savings comes from the insourcing of tasks. However, the concept of insourcing is diametrically opposed to the finding that legal headcount will only increase by 3% in the next three years (vs a 25% increase in workload).

So how do you insource more work at a time when the workload is already increasing and doing it all without more headcount?

One growing area is self-service applications: taking the expertise of in-house teams and scaling it across the business. This represents a strategic shift in legal sourcing, and one that is only now made possible with the advent of technology like no-code platforms.

Now, in-house legal experts can turn their legal services, playbooks, guidance notes and more into self-service applications. By doing this, they make their knowledge and decision making scalable, accessible and available 24/7.

Instead of answering the same question 100 times, or reviewing the same templated contract repeatedly, they empower their commercial colleagues to access that advice, or standardized agreement, themselves, on a self-service basis. By building these self-service applications themselves using no-code, without IT or external software developers, the legal professionals have, and maintain, direct control over how this information is disseminated.

There is massive untapped potential here – even though contracting is one of the key areas where self-service applications reduce error and deliver a better customer experience, only 16% of contracts are self-serviced now, according to the 2021 EY Law Survey. For General Counsel looking to secure buy-in from the rest of the company, automating contracting through no-code is a quick win to showcase the potential of the legal function in reducing costs and improving operational efficiency.

No-code for risk management

Self-service applications designed and built by the in-house legal team, without coding, equip the entire business with the knowledge they need to better manage risk. Self-service applications make guidance accessible and usable, streamline processes and improve communications, ultimately reducing business risk.

And it is not just managing risk across the business, but also how the legal team themselves manage large scale regulatory changes. Right now, only one-third of General Counsel are confident or very confident that their legal teams can manage legal risks coming from sudden changes in the business environment.

Similarly, only 11% of them are confident or very confident that their in-house legal experts could tackle Brexit-associated risks adequately according to the 2021 EY Law Survey.

By translating decisioning into usable workflows, legal teams can proactively and efficiently manage complex legal risks, like data privacy or regulatory disclosures.

How to build data-driven legal teams

A strategic priority of General Counsel is to mitigate risk by adopting a data-driven approach to business decisions. And yet, the majority of General Counsel lack access to the data they need to do this. Coming back to contracting, according to the 2021 EY Law Survey, 99% of General Counsel said they lack the data and technology to optimize these processes.

Disparate systems and paper processes, across multiple channels like email, phone and Microsoft Word result in a lack of insight and performance metrics. So, while they may want to take a data-driven approach, General Counsel lack access to the data they need to do this.

By creating digital workflows and self-service applications, legal teams take their manual legal work and turn it into something measurable. This transition – from offline and manual, to digital and quantifiable, means legal teams have access to previously unknown analytics, like how many requests are made of their team and in what legal area. By tracking data across legal processes, General Counsel are equipped to have meaningful conversations with the C-Suite, improve processes and achieve faster outcomes.

Workflow automation for in-house legal teams

The 2021 EY Law Survey found that 90% of Business Development Managers find it challenging to work with procurement, law and commercial teams on contracting. And even more alarming, around 60% of Business Development Leaders believe that inefficiencies in contracting slow revenue recognition and 50% of them believe operational blocks have resulted in a loss of business.

Finally, workload and the need to deliver high-impact work that supports the business in achieving commercial objectives, only 52% of General Counsel believe their legal departments are effective in delivering value to business according to the EY Law Survey.

No-code helps General Counsels make the transition from business blocker to a business enabler. In-house legal teams have a way to turn their legal services into self-service applications – and by doing this make their advice and knowledge accessible 24/7, anywhere. They can manage frequently occurring requests and processes, like evaluating the risk of a new commercial counterparty based on a set of pre-defined logic, or producing a non-disclosure agreement. Their colleagues are then able to proceed with commercial activities, incorporating legal advice as part of their processes. The end result: business decisions are accelerated towards achieving positive business outcomes.

By creating digital workflows with a no-code app builder, legal teams take their manual legal work and turn it into something measurable. This transition – from offline and manual, to digital and quantifiable, means legal teams have access to previously unknown analytics, like how many requests are made of their team and in what legal area. By tracking data across legal processes, legal teams are equipped to analyse the data, improve processes and achieve faster outcomes.

Reducing the ROI bar for legal apps

In-house legal teams struggle to get the time, money and resource to address the recurring, manual tasks that simply need to be done. This is partly attributed to the reasoning that using the company’s IT resources to build such tools does not provide enough return on investment (ROI). In other words, this manual work is an obstacle, but not a big enough business obstacle to generate enough of an ROI to divert resources to solve. The ROI bar is too high.

By enabling in-house legal teams to quickly and easily build digital applications that automate this routine work, no-code enables the digitization of challenges which were previously “not worth it”.

No-code reduces the ROI bar for building digital solutions, enabling GCs to secure the buy-in from the C-Suite to provide their teams with powerful digital apps that improve the day-to-day running of the team.

Customer-centric legal services through design thinking

Sketching an idea out is an efficient way to test a hypothesis early on, which is why the visual appeal of no-code strikes a chord with so many solution designers. To make the most of visualization of problems, many teams that deliver services have embraced design thinking.

Design thinking is a methodology that helps teams build customer-centric products that make an actual difference for the end-user. This approach combines desirability, viability, and feasibility, and works through a series of cycles of brainstorming and reviewing to create the solution that alleviates user pains and delivers genuine value.

And the trend is becoming popular among legal teams, who embrace design thinking to deliver impactful improvements that are geared toward the end-user. Working in iterations, legal teams make a series of incremental adjustments to their services, each iteration raising clients’ accessibility to the legal services they need in everyday work.

Legal information thus becomes more digestible, and the streamlined workflow helps drive digital transformation faster, ensuring market competitiveness.

Many in-house legal teams were quick to embrace this new paradigm. The in-house team at an Australian telecoms company, Telstra, uses design thinking to enable answering queries in a set timeframe. Meanwhile, international law firm, Linklaters, enhanced the way it performs due diligence activities in structured finance transactions using design thinking. Additionally, the legal team at Atos, a French tech company, uses design thinking to improve contracting and deliver higher-value services to clients.

But the real acceleration happens when design thinking is coupled with no-code. No-code enables teams to quickly and easily build applications to test hypotheses. They do not have to commit to a big IT project, but rather can build, test and iterate quickly, ultimately enabling them to deliver the best product which solves the biggest pain points for their users.

No-code and employee engagement

No-code allows all teams across a global corporate to do more meaningful work. By removing manual, low-value tasks, no-code helps all employees focus on the parts that have a higher impact on individual, team and overall performance.

In turn, employees start to think differently about their work, putting more flare into high-impact, strategic activities. This reinforces engagement, which is proven to boost productivity and lower turnover.

According to a 2013 Gallup meta-study that included 1.4 million employees, engaged employees report a 22% increase in productivity and a decrease in turnover of up to 65%. And the 2017 Smartsheet study reports that 89% of employees see automation as the driver of their higher efficiency. So, let us look at some of the ways in which you can help employees across teams feel more engaged and productive by introducing no-code:

Immediate results for legal trainees

By removing the manual, time-consuming and repetitive tasks that often get landed on a trainee’s desk, no-code improves the quality of legal training.

Scaling under limited budget for the legal team

As we have seen in the use cases above, no-code enables legal teams to drive the change and optimize internal workflows that concern all parts of the organization. Cutting down the time spent on manual tasks and re-focusing on higher value activities, legal teams scale their efforts even under the limited budget, helping other teams do their job more efficiently as well.

Enabling commercial teams to act faster

No-code helps create better communications and touchpoints with the rest of the business. It automates parts of their relationship building efforts with clients for contracts, agreements, T&Cs and other largely standard forms – all available 24/7 on a self-service basis.

Better use of resources for the IT team

IT teams are pressured by incoming requests from other departments to deliver services across an increasing number of technologies. With no-code, IT teams transition from builders to advisors, at least for some projects. As employees start building customized apps for their own purposes, IT teams turn to higher-value development, acting as support and providing guidance over databases and integrations, while encouraging innovation from domain experts.

Back to strategic advising for GC

GC can use no-code to reclaim their role as strategic advisors, on par with other forward-looking C-suite roles. Rather than spending most of their time on “firefighting”, GC can equip their team with the tools to be more efficient, while being an active leader driving digital transformation across the business.

Data and analytics for C-suite

No-code is a toolset that delivers efficiency, innovation and creates fresh value, all with a rapid ROI. It helps reduce capital cost invested in IT and reduces risk by removing the need for major IT upgrades or technology stack changes, all while having the ability to track data and usage needed to make informed business decisions.

Chapter 3. No-code in practice

In this section we look at actual use cases and how in-house legal teams benefit from automating recurring tasks. We cover:

• Virtual legal assistant
• NDA generator
• Employment contract generator
• Data breach reporting assistant

While no-code can support specific and strategic use cases, its biggest impact in terms of improving operational efficiency lies in automating highly frequent requests at all levels of complexity.

The opportunity no-code automation presents to legal teams is huge given 87% of legal department leaders believe their teams spend too much time on low-value, manual tasks.

Virtual legal assistant

Every day in-house legal departments need to filter, manage and respond to dozens of incoming requests for assistance all the time. Often, these requests are ad-hoc and brand new, other times they are frequently recurring. From creating and reviewing agreements such as NDAs to addressing operational issues, responding to these requests is manual and time-consuming. And yet, there is a huge potential to standardize and automate this work, enabling the legal team to manage large volumes of work, act quickly and deliver advice to not slow down commercial projects.

With a virtual legal assistant built on BRYTER, legal teams can build their own self-service tool to reflect their processes, service levels and risk appetite. Through a customizable and interactive interface, the legal team specifies exactly what information they need about a given request. Non-legal colleagues, employees or any other end-user can provide the information, and the decisioning logic is then applied to filter, manage and where applicable, respond to the request.

Using BRYTER, in-house legal teams can automate the production of standard documents, like NDAs or employee contracts using templated self-service applications. Here, the business user is guided through a step-by-step process to tailor the document to their requirements. Once the draft is finished, it can be automatically uploaded to the relevant system and/or an approval process can be automatically triggered.

Through this workflow, the legal department maintains full visibility over all documents created and, once approved, can integrate signing flows using DocuSign for a true end-to-end solution.

All incoming legal requests are automatically tracked, equipping the legal team with valuable insights on demand for and priority of legal requests. For example, the frequency, type and origin of requests can help legal teams to make more data-driven decisions around business needs and risks.

NDA generator

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are one of the most frequently entered into contractual agreements. From an operational perspective, each NDA seemingly requires undivided attention. To avoid outdated templates, erroneous drafts and to ensure overall compliance, in-house lawyers often need to check each NDA, which translates into a highly skilled team of experts forced to repeat very repetitive, manual work. Automating this contractual process represents a quick and easy win for in-house legal teams.

With no-code, legal teams can use a visual, drag-and-drop editor to easily create a workflow that automates the creation and signing of NDAs, from end to end. The team uses their expertise to define the logic behind the decision-making, ensuring each NDA drafted comes with the most relevant paragraphs, using the proper format, with the correct styling all without having to manually check each single NDA (unless of course they included an escalation process for certain NDAs).

This no-code solution works as a vanguard that reduces the need for manual labor for the highly skilled in-house legal team and unclogs the organizational workflow. This translates to higher productivity for the legal team, more time to focus on higher priorities, and the opportunity to deliver error-free services to their commercial colleagues and the company, taking an active part in digital transformation and accelerating the business progress at large.

Employment contract generator

Despite the perfect match between the company’s hiring needs and the accessibility of a global talent pool, remote hiring has put a strain on legal and HR teams’ operational capabilities.

Each new employee brings along local specificities that need addressing. Potential employee misclassification, compliance with local labor laws, employment contract creation, payroll and taxes become a significant burden on the already thinning budget of legal teams.

In addition, legal teams need to draw up offer letters and contracts that cover a broad range of cooperation arrangements. This involves relying on previous cases, which translates to time spent searching for previous similar scenarios. And this manual work costs time, is prone to errors, and portrays the legal function as a bottleneck to digital transformation and efficient operation.

With no-code, legal teams can automate the largest portion of their manual efforts, leaving time for the more complex employment law issues. In terms of employment contracts, legal teams can create a decision-making algorithm that automatically produces compliant employee contracts, based on the information provided.

In short, legal teams determine how the no-code mechanism does the decisioning, instead of having to do decisioning repeatedly themselves.

Data breach reporting assistant

While data protection is high on the list of priorities for global corporates, the 2021 EY Law Survey found that 65% of General Counsel lack the data and technology they need to effectively respond to a data breach, fueling risks related to data privacy and overall compliance.

Lacking reliable solutions, in-house legal teams often rely on manual work and Excel spreadsheets as a way of tracking potential data breaches to signal cases of non-compliance early on. But given the breadth and complexity of regulatory frameworks, chiefly GDPR, this manual labor is prone to errors and can lead to costly, reputationally damaging data breaches.

No-code allows in-house legal teams to build a risk-scoring mechanism that is able to take into account complex rules and warn of data breaches in a fast and reliable manner. Taking one step further, a data breach assistant can automatically provide suggested steps to help triage the consequences of data breaches, allowing the company to act fast and document all the steps in a centralized audit trail.

And given its flexibility and the fact that it is built without using coding, legal teams can customize the data breach risk assessment to incorporate company- or industry-specific rules, regulations and best practice, in order to ensure maximum coverage of potential data breaches, warning responsible departments in real time and enabling them to act fast.

Chapter 4. No-code vs low-code

The pandemic has revealed the scale and impact of inefficient processes and obsolete ways of work. Companies had to stay connected and act even faster than before to market development and customer requirements. Amidst the urgency to deliver services to clients, it has become clear that custom apps delivered by in-house IT teams are not a sustainable option in the long run.

Why are no-code and low-code important today?

As in-house IT teams focus on product-related features, business experts in legal, finance, compliance, and operations need to look for mass-produced apps. While these apps are robust and reliable, they cannot exactly meet the company’s specific needs, leading to pitfalls in operational workflows.

Meanwhile, budget constraints require domain experts to either outsource parts of activities to external counsel or carry out tasks manually. This repetitive work leads to errors, often resulting in non-compliance and missed opportunities, and lost deals.

As a result, more and more business experts turn to low-code and no-code to build apps and shorten time to value for clients. It should come as no surprise that according to Gartner, 65% of application development will be low code or no-code by 2024. Similarly, it’s projected that 75% of companies will integrate low-code and no-code solutions into their existing tech stack.

With the no-code paradigm, domain experts can deliver digital innovation without having to wait on expensive and lengthy IT-driven projects. App building and workflow automation created with no-code allow team members to build digital tools at speed. That skill was previously the preserve of software engineers. Now, it helps expand their role, develop new skills and grow service offerings.

What’s the difference between no-code and low-code?

Low-code is visual-focused development where technical users build applications through a drag and drop UI, but with some coding knowledge required. Essentially, low-code is targeted towards developers: a way for those skilled in programming to program faster.

In terms of benefits, low-code platforms reduce the amount of traditional hand-coding and so accelerate business productivity as a result. However, there will always be a need for a technical person to help, since most automation projects will need some coding sooner or later.

The advantage of low-code over traditional programming is that it allows developers to avoid repetitive chunks of code or manual coding. Instead, developers can focus more on the architecture of the solution. They can also prioritise the strategic aspect of the application, while the low-code platform takes care of the grunt work.

Also, low-code platforms typically come with integrations and security features preconfigured, much like no-code. This allows developers to build reliable applications faster, without having to wait on security or integrations specialists for assistance.

However, low-code requires technical know-how to truly enable scalability or cater to highly specific processes.

Similar to low-code, no-code is also designed to expedite the automation process. But, no-code requires no knowledge of any programming language to build the tools. No-code is targeted towards anyone – from citizens to business experts who want to benefit from digitization.

Rather than forcing them to depend on IT, no-code turns domain experts into solution designers, through an easy-to-use toolset that enables experts to create self-service solutions that communicate in the same language as the in-house client.

In terms of daily activities, no-code tools allow anyone to participate in building applications that automate, rationalize and improve how tasks are performed. Helping to automate repetitive tasks, it frees up legal professionals to focus on key issues and value-additive tasks.

How did no-code and low-code develop?

While the low-code/no-code paradigm is increasingly popular, the concept itself has existed for decades now.

Take Microsoft Excel, which is one of BRYTER integrations and one of the most widely used enterprise resource planning (ERP) software pieces out there. Its popularity lies largely in the fact that it lets anyone make complex business decisions with as little as a click. Similar no-code platforms, including Shopify, Typeform, and WordPress have all empowered people to build online shops, forms, and websites without ever having to learn to code.

Since the early eighties, when the desktop PC arrived, business leaders were worried that the world would run out of programmers as the number of computers in use exploded. For them, the codeless design was a must.

Then came the rise in the volume of code as applications bloomed into complex, storage-hogging beasts. As each enterprise developed its own applications, these efforts started to require large, dedicated teams of managers, coders and 24-hour troubleshooters. This was not a sustainable effort as megabytes became gigabytes, then terabytes of code and data.

The need for businesses to solve problems faster, improve customer experience and increase operational efficiency has since brought no-code firmly into view. And while no-code has gained momentum in recent years, it was back in 2009 that IT industry analysts at Forrester and Gartner first began discussing a class of “citizen developers”. Their insights include the key notion that no-code is not defined by a level of syntax-like knowledge, but business understanding, skill level and users’ personal drive to achieve a result.

Low-code vs no-code automation

While low-code and no-code solutions appear to be similar, there are some key differences you should bear in mind when choosing how to empower your business experts. Ultimately, both approaches help shorten time to value and empower experts in the organization to drive digital transformation and deliver reliable services efficiently: the question is only which approach works better for your particular needs.

So here is a rundown of key differences between low-code and no-code:

No-code jargon explained

The advent of new technologies has brought about a handful of new terms that companies should get acquainted with to make a better decision when opting for their new development paradigm. Here is a quick glossary of key concepts related to no-code automation and no-code platforms.

• Artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is both the theory and the practice of using and building computer systems that perform tasks that normally require human intelligence. It is used in speech recognition, decision-making, visual perception. AI ranges from spam filters on email to robots suggesting personalized healthcare plans.
• Digital transformation. Digital transformation is a paradigm in business management that promotes the integration of digital technologies into all parts of a business, reshaping the way business has been traditionally done.
• Hyperautomation. Hyperautomation is the end-to-end automation beyond RPA that combines complementary technologies (e.g. AI, RPA, machine learning) to augment business processes to help users carry out tasks faster.
• Low-code. Low-code is an approach to building software that reduces the amount of coding needed. However, the user still needs to have some coding skills. Whereas no-code allows anyone to build tools, low-code makes it easier for developers to build software.
• No-code. No-code is a software development approach that requires zero coding knowledge from the user. At the same time, no-code lets users build powerful apps through an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop editor. While low-code helps software developers build apps faster, no-code enables domain experts to build digital applications.
• RPA. RPA or robotic process automation is a form of business process improvement. The user defines a set of instructions for the (ro)bot to perform and thus automate recurring and repetitive tasks. While no-code and low-code, RPA is geared more towards mimicking repetitive, basic interactions.

Chapter 5. Limitations of no-code

As with any approach, no-code is not a solution to all problems. While no-code improves most processes and services, there are two scenarios where no-code alone is not the optimal solution.

First, no-code, or any automation for that matter, is not a good fit for complex, bespoke, strategic work. This is precisely the sort of work that should not, and cannot, be automated. This work requires a legal professional to consider it on a case-by-case basis.

Second, there will reach a point where the complexity of the scenario requires some custom software solutions on top of the no-code application. For example, where different parts of the infrastructure need to communicate among themselves, some amount of custom code is necessary. Linking these sources together and making the inputs and outputs flow from process to process can require extra steps beyond no-code.

The right no-code platform should have integrations and APIs that help expand the scope of no-code, helping link to other data sources and applications that can extend functionality across a business and its data footprint. But in that case, working alongside an IT team or software developers is necessary to bring these data points together at the right point.

Even with BRYTER, some functions or processes may need coding to deliver information or link to a particular process that spans a business. Integrations and APIs help expand BRYTER beyond its own engine, helping link to other data sources and applications that can extend functionality across a business and its data footprint.

Integrations and APIs help expand BRYTER beyond its own engine, helping link to other data sources and applications that can extend functionality across a business and its data footprint.

While a large portion of in-house legal work can be standardized, and therefore automated, there will always be complex, strategic and bespoke work that requires individual, manual attention.

Chapter 6. Getting started with no-code: resources

Industry insights

Building a case for no-code app development for your next project | How legal workflow automation transforms legal departments | How does document automation work

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Mega guides

What is Legal Operations? | Workflow Automation for In-House Legal | General Counsel’s Guide to No-Code

No-code, implemented

Tech Data achieves up to 95% time savings with no-code | How KPMG built State Aid Assessment App | PwC‘s Digital Success Story | How Fieldfisher leveraged no-code to help clients align with new standard contractual clauses | How Ashurst took on ESG rules with no-code apps |

Experts’ take on no-code

Bernhard Fiedler, Partner at Norton Rose Fulbright: Innovating like a startup – as a global law firm | Marcel Ritter, General Counsel at Telefónica: Keys to a successful digital transformation | Simmons and Simmons innovation and legal team: Use legal tech to stay on top of ESG reporting requirements | Hanno Daniel, CMO at Navacom IT Solutions: From an idea to COVID testing center serving 1600 people/day in 2.5 weeks

Want to learn how to build self-service apps without any code? Grab your copy of our no-code guide for in-house legal teams and build your first app already today.