InView Digital Magazine for in-house legal professionals | Issue Two

T H E C O M M U N I T Y FO R I N - H O U S E L E G A L P R O F E S S I O N A LS TO L E A R N , C O N N E C T & S H A R E

From the creators of LawVu

What it takes to be an award winning in-house legal team

ISSUE 02

CONTENTS

INVIEW

Contents

Technology 28 – It’s meant to be: the marriage between contract and matter management

Feature: Leadership 6 – How to be a thriving legal team 12 – How to build your legal team 42 – What is legal leadership?

Feature: Wellbeing 14 – A journey with wellbeing, an interview with Grant Pritchard

17 – Legal tech enabling well-being and flexible working

38 – An open letter to lawyers, from technology

68 – Why you should adopt a legal workspace vs a point solution

Mindset 36 – Risk-tolerant lawyers 78 – Lawyering doesn’t have to be boring

Future 37 – Creativity and the law 62 – Bringing legal into the 21st century 76 – What would a business do?

18 – Roadblocks to mental health in lawyers; the 5 Ps

20 – Being in the business of fear 22 – Just ask, just listen

Feature: Diversity, Equity & Inclusion 30 –

Make equity your priority

32 –

An interview with Aubrey Blanche

Feature: Artificial Intelligence 50 –

AI: The backbone of an intelligent legal platform

54 –

The changing legal landscape: How AI is helping to redefine roles in legal

Value 24 – The value of legal operations with Gerald Char

59 – Legal doesn’t need to be left behind 2

Innovation 40 – Thinking outside the box 45 – Working smarter

Career Development 46 – The rise of the t-shaped lawyer 70 – Sowing the seeds for a successful legal career

Insight 56 – Making the move in-house: five key lessons from the first five months

66 – Transforming data into insights 74 – Make metrics your weapon

Business 26 – Creating a business case for legal tech 64 – In-house counsel in an entrepreneurial business

72 – Down to business

EDITOR’S LETTER

INVIEW

Editor’s Letter Dear Reader, It’s been six months since we published our first InView magazine, and I’m delighted to report that our community has flourished. What began as an idea to build a global in-house legal community is now a burgeoning reality thanks to you, our valued members, who are reading, contributing, and connecting across multiple time zones and industries.

The goal of InView is to provide a platform for in-house legal professionals to share, connect, and learn, a forum that helps in-house teams to prove their value to the business while also breaking down some of the silos that hinder communication, and working together. I believe the discussions we’ve had and are continuing to have with our InView community champions, contributors, members, and the industry at large, are resulting in positive steps being taken.

In this issue, as well as looking at traditional topics from a non-traditional perspective, we delve into issues that are both provocative and uncomfortable – lawyers’ wellbeing, creating healthy and equitable work environments and the use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) in the workplace – the aim being to kick-start important and necessary conversations.

Mental health is particularly relevant as the world continues to endure and adapt to the current pandemic.

The past 18 months have not been easy – for anyone – but it seems to me that legal teams are willingly yet often silently bearing the brunt of the load (from a corporate perspective), dealing with volatile markets, more risk and less resources, stressed C-suites and greenfields that have not been walked before.

“Are you okay?” “How are you coping?” are the kind of questions we’ve normally shied from asking our colleagues, but as we navigate our way through these uncertain times they are particularly relevant. Also relevant is how we can create more equitable teams and workplaces that reflect our changing societal mores.

At InView we maintain that in-house legal teams are a little bit heroic – coping with enormous workloads, embedding in the business teams, and achieving more with less.

Is there a dream state scenario for these hard working teams? I like to think so: helping them leverage data and technology; automating routine tasks to enable them to do their best work; working with the business to achieve better business outcomes. Every in-house lawyer I know is at heart an innovator, creative and problem solver. As one of our team put it, “they are trained to solve complex legal problems, not to be purveyors of time.” Now would be a good time to allow technology to let in-house legal do what they do best.

Despite the challenges of the last year-and-a-half, I am excited by the changes within our community and the conversations that are taking place. I feel we are making progress and that is extremely encouraging. Long may it continue.

I hope you enjoy this second issue of InView, that you learn something new and appreciate the thoughtful insights from our collective community. Our aim is to facilitate community and peer to peer learning, to encourage good banter among like minded individuals, and to promote fresh, contemporary content. I encourage you to connect with each other on LinkedIn, in person or via Zoom.

We have an open-door policy so if you have something you’d like to share with the InView community, please get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.

Thank you,

Sian Simpson sian.simpson@lawvu.com

3

FEATURE: LEADERSHIP

INVIEW

Our team & contributors 1

2

Many hands make light work.

This magazine was put together by the following people: 1. Sian Simpson

3

4

EDITOR

2. Connor Amor-Bendall

SENIOR WRITER

3. Heather Kidd

SUB-EDITOR

4. Emily McCormick

5

6

DESIGNER & ILLUSTRATOR

5. Chris McGavin

WRITER & LAWYER

6. Ali Meredith

INVIEW CONTRIBUTOR

7. Tim Boyne

7

8

INVIEW CONTRIBUTOR

8. Megan Elizabeth Gray

INVIEW CONTRIBUTOR

9. Bríd Heffernan

INVIEW CONTRIBUTOR

10. Nick Bliablias

9

INVIEW CONTRIBUTOR

10 Disclaimer The views expressed in InView are those of the author and, except where clearly indicated, are not to be taken as those of or endorsed by LawVu Limited. No responsibility whatsoever is accepted by LawVu Limited for any opinion or information contained in InView.

4

Copyright All rights reserved. Any form of reproduction of any content without the permission of LawVu Limited is strictly prohibited.

INVIEW

Find us online

5

The Airways team (L-R) Christina Hopovihi, Claire Adams, Helen Doukas, Katie Bhreatnach, Rachel Choy, Kate Johnston, Sarah Alderson

INVIEW

FEATURE: LEADERSHIP

How to be a thriving legal team

by Connor Amor-Bendall

Katie Bhreatnach, the GC at Airways, New Zealand’s In-house Team of the Year, shares what it took to receive the accolade.

Airways in-house legal team won the title of NZ In-House Team of The Year at the Australasian Law Awards 2021, with judges commenting on the way they “played a crucial role in the unprecedented challenges of 2020” whilst looking after their team and dealing with complex litigation and divestments.

Katie Bhreatnach holds the positions of General Counsel and General Manager of Customer and Regulatory Partnerships at Airways. She is also a Director of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, Atua Matua, and St Mary’s College Ponsonby. Since joining the Airways in-house legal team in 2019, Bhreatnach has overhauled the legal team’s ways of working to create better performance through tech adoption, the tracking of KPIs and metrics, bringing on new talent, and building a cohesive team of leaders. It is notable that this happened whilst leading the legal function and customer and program management teams through the troubled times of the Covid-19 pandemic, which for Airways included a 98 percent drop in revenue.

Does leading a thriving legal team take constant work?

What steps does your team take to maintain its drive?

There’s a saying that leadership is a journey, not a destination; that’s fundamental for me. As a people leader, you’re never fully formed. All good leaders are constantly reflecting on what they need to do to be more effective and what they need to bring to any moment of personal interaction or transaction.

In terms of our team, I think that’s true for all people whether people leaders or otherwise. We’re about building out safe spaces where people can bring their full selves to work. It’s about developing frameworks for how people 7

FEATURE: LEADERSHIP

INVIEW

can engage and check-in. We use two check-in tools at our team meeting, one is a wellbeing check-in tool and the other is a tool for sharing if you’re in a comfort zone, learning zone, or stretch-panic zone. Everyone in the team uses the tools to share with others where they’re at, which creates an opportunity to explore in broader conversation.

In the most recent level four lockdown, we realized we had to change our expectations, as half of our team have young kids. My expectation was that they were only operating at 50 percent capacity. I knew people were struggling so I decided we would just lean into this and make sure it runs all right. We adjusted to the circumstances.

Can you elaborate on the comfort, learning, panicstretch zone tool?

What role does communication play in achieving and sustaining a thriving legal team?

You can use it to say, “This week, I’m 20 percent in comfort, I’m at 50 percent in learning, and 30 percent in panic.” That’s an okay mix, but with maybe too much panic. But if someone determines that they are in 50 percent panic mode, you know they need help. On the flip side, if someone says they’re mostly in comfort mode, they need some stripes because they’re probably bored. When you’re managing lots of busy people who operate quite independently, it’s a useful way to give a sense of where people are at. Not just as the leader of the team, but for everyone. For instance, you can see if someone is in panicstretch mode and if someone else in the team has the capacity to help them out.

If you want people to want to build a good team you need to build trust, and you need to build openness. If you want people to be open with you, you need to create a context in which they feel comfortable doing it. If you want a deep connection, you need to connect outside of the working context; get to know people for who they are. What drives them? What’s important to them?

It also allows you to genuinely connect with people, by meeting them where they’re at. It’s an easy way for someone to let me know if they aren’t doing so well because they’ve been in lockdown for 43 days, or their dog died. It also creates a space where people can grow and develop at the pace they need to, led by their interests in legal development.

Why do you think Airways won the New Zealand In-House Team of the Year award?

The first thing is that the team had a hugely disruptive year in that they had to support the business to work differently in order to be able to continue to stand up our training program, which was set up nationally digitally online in a matter of weeks. The actual nature of the work and having to do that in an incredibly challenging context, without significant litigation, and the breadth and depth of the work, was super impressive.

Secondly, the culture the team has built. When I started, they were very reactive and only working on the stuff that mattered the most. They knew they wanted to change but they couldn’t figure out how. The organization has had to shift. Some of this adjustment was about taking individual responsibility, by having autonomy over oneself and one’s work. And commanding a step back rather than just being reactive and doing everything for one hour.

For the team to get to where they wanted to be they got tools, systems - such as LawVu - and processes in place to help.

They also strategized around how to be a better team and what behaviors they needed to leave behind or do differently. They are a proud team now who really like one another and work to be very supportive of each other.

8

I create tools and frameworks that allow frequent habits of checking in and being open. Someone started on the team recently and was blown away because for the team it is second nature to us. For instance, often someone will say, “I’m not feeling mentally well today,” and no one will blink an eye because we have that level of openness with one another.

People won’t talk if they don’t feel safe, so you need to demonstrate to people that they can be open and create safe spaces to do so by role modelling. I took a couple of days off recently and said, “I’m not going to be a great leader this week. I’m going to take some time off and recalibrate.” A lot of the team took some time off themselves in response.

People won’t talk if they don’t feel safe, so you need to demonstrate to people that they can be open and create safe spaces to do so by role modelling.

What’s your advice on people prioritizing what needs to be done and what can wait a few days if they need time out?

An important part of being a leader is being deeply insightful and aware of ourselves. Every job I’ve done has meant I’ve been considered important and essential, yet every time I’ve left things have been fine. I say that because it is important to realize that you’re dispensable, that things will go on without you. That tendency to overwork is something you need to come to terms with about yourself.

Way back when, you used to have a job for life. Now, your network is your job for life. Have a good reputation, be a

FEATURE

Katie Bhreatnach, General Counsel and General Manager of Customer and Regulatory Partnerships at Airways.

good person, help people out when they ask; that is your insurance policy. My other piece of advice is, don’t forget that your job won’t keep you warm at night or on weekends.

It’s important to have a life outside of your job.

they are such a natural fit for one another. Often in business and in law, you solve a problem by selling, unifying people, developing a strategy, and using technology to execute.

Tech or legal ops is the enabler of that execution.

Whatever form that takes for you, it will make you a better person, lawyer, and more balanced as a leader. I approached it from a mātauranga Māori perspective, that you need to have balance in your life.

Based on that, what is your response to lawyers who say they are lawyers and not technologists or businesspeople?

What role does legal operations play in achieving and sustaining a thriving legal team?

Legal operations or technology is the enabler, not the endpoint. Legal ops offers the ability to achieve something you want and is a huge enabler of proactive, highperformance legal teams. A Harvard academic, Lawrence Lessig, wrote a book entitled ‘Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace’ in which he says that law and technology are very similar. His thesis is that you’re constrained or enabled in life by four things: laws, norms, your budgets, and architecture (architecture being technology).

Technology is either a constraint or an enabler. It will stop you from doing something or it will enable you - as will the law. They are very similar in that way, and I think that’s why

I would say technology is a more important part of our lives than ever, perhaps even less important now than it will be in the future. Lawyers didn’t use to use email, they used faxes, and when I started law school, you hand-wrote assignments. Now lawyers use email as their primary form of communication rather than faxing. The question really is, does technology enable you to do your job as a lawyer?

How does your legal team maintain transparency with the ELT and the wider business?

We do monthly KPI reports which go to the ELT. These have data analytics metrics that we report regularly as well as discursive stuff regarding highlights on things that have been delivered. The metrics are taken from LawVu but are anecdotal as well. They tell the story about the

9

FEATURE: LEADERSHIP

INVIEW

change mandate, and it was immediately clear to me that there were things we could change to improve the situation for the team. We built our culture and our values together, and those are not things I would have written down on a piece of paper or that I bought from my previous job. They needed to be made collectively in order to meet the goals of the organization and people. I’ve worked with lots of great teams and none of them are the same as each other.

That is because there’s a diversity of thought created by different people and their needs which come into play.

What was the underlying strategy that drove you and made Airways an award-winning team?

value that the legal team is adding. We have a business plan we deliver to over the year and report against that as well. For instance, one of the strategic objectives the legal team is delivering to this year is about lifting commercial capability outside of the legal team.

We report on what was actually done in that month, whether it’s a training session - to basically share knowledge and expertise with other people - to help them be more effective. I’ve found that people at Airways are very engaged with training programs, they are keen to learn about particular areas of the law they have exposure to.

Does having a hybrid role allow you to have better access and ability to get things done?

Having a seat at the table where decisions are made (from my perspective as someone who is able to advocate for the legal function at Airways) is essential for a legal team to do well in the organization. As a legal team, being in a cross-functional business group with other teams offers up benefits that our ELT didn’t expect. For instance, the breadth and depth of exposure to things going on in the business that they have. As a lawyer, the more you understand the business and what’s going on, the better your legal advice will be. They really benefit from that.

For me, I’m across a lot of different things that are going on, and that knowledge gives me the opportunity to influence.

What motivates you to do more than business as usual?

As a leader, I’m driven by the fact that leadership is a journey, not a destination. As a motivator, I like solving problems. When something’s not working, I like to find a way to do it better or differently. I came into the role with a 10

We diagnosed ourselves and then challenged ourselves to be the Best Legal Team ever (BLT). When our goal was to be the BLT it was the natural progression. If you’re motivated to achieve what you need to do to be the BLT, then you believe you are. If you aim for the best, and you build a plan to get there and do those things, you will be the BLT. Our WhatsApp group is even called BLT.

Have you made mistakes, either personally or as part of the team, you’ve had to correct?

I constantly make mistakes. My youngest daughter came home from school recently and said, “Mum, I had a great day. I made a mistake so my brain grew.” It’s trite, but I agree with the sentiment that the best learning comes from failing. Our team constantly makes mistakes and shares the learnings. We give each other the freedom to fail.

All of us have colossal failures, and when they happen, the time you take to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and recalibrate, is where you can ask “what can I take out of that?” Sometimes people stay down for quite some time, whilst others (classic entrepreneurs) can pick themselves back up and say, “oh well, that didn’t work, let’s try it this way.” The ability to do that is a great gift and something to keep working towards.

What are mistakes lawyers typically make?

There is a large degree of subjectivity when it comes to legal outcomes against which I would caution. For instance, if I’m negotiating a deal on the other side of you, who is someone else to come along and say I could have done better? At the time, it might have been the best I could have done there. Sometimes people can make a technical mistake. The nature of being an in-house lawyer is being a generalist. You don’t know everything, you know a lot about some things and a little bit about a lot of things, and that’s okay because that’s what you are. It’s important to learn when you don’t know enough and you either need to get someone else to help or an expert on board. Some things are high-risk and need some insulation like external legal advice, professional indemnity insurance.

INVIEW

People do a marketing campaign and it’s not overly effective, but they don’t necessarily beat themselves up as much as lawyers do if they make an error. So, when you make a mistake ask yourself, “is it really that bad, and is there something I could do to learn from it?”

One of the biggest mistakes people make, in my experience, is not getting help when they’ve made a mistake. If you’ve messed something up, tell someone and get some help to fix it. Don’t try to hide it and drive yourself crazy worrying about it. When I started at Airways we made a big mistake with insurance. I remember ringing my CEO and senior peers and him saying, “the first good thing about that is you’re telling me.” That is the right response any good leader will give you. The next thing you should do is declare that you will do everything you can to try and fix it.

If you’ve messed something up, tell someone and get some help to fix it. Don’t try to hide it and drive yourself crazy worrying about it.

What are your thoughts on the legal profession in its current state?

I’m endlessly impressed by the disruption that’s happening in the market. People used to fight to be able to work flexibly. When I had children, people told me my career was going to go down the toilet. None of those things are rules anymore and the same is going to continue to be true.

There are a bunch of lawyers in our team that have families or other interests on the side. I just co-founded a start-up with someone, one of the lawyers in Christchurch has their own business on the side.There aren’t any rules around this stuff. It’s an exciting time to be a lawyer, the profession is more diverse than it’s ever been, the in-house community is larger than it’s ever been, and no business will question the value of having lawyers within the organization.

Lawyers need to stop seeing themselves as determining legal risk and move into a place where they help the business navigate risk more broadly, where legal risk is one component. One of the dilemmas people face in organizational design is where they want hybrid roles with a legal component. A lawyer can bring their understanding of ESG, sustainability risk, or political risk into a broader role. This helps an organization to establish what it needs to know about risk, to drive innovation, and to grow. Inhouse lawyers need to turn up the dial and realize that the skill set they bring combined with other things is a powerful force for good that will be increasingly sought after by business.

Exploring legal leadership Contributed by Emily Moore, Senior Lawyer and InView community member

What legal leadership means to me Legal management is a rank, legal leadership is a choice. Having seen both, in my experience a good legal leader does two things. They look for ways to build trust, and they serve their function by clearly communicating their value to the wider organization.

Erring towards trust A good legal leader looks to build trust with those they lead, yet this is not the same as inherently trusting everyone. It’s about a willingness to create relationships of trust unless there is a good reason not to.

Legal leaders build trust by demonstrating their willingness to support and protect those around them, whether that’s their team (although a leader doesn’t require a formal team), other colleagues, or the organization as a whole. It’s a given that building trust also requires legal leaders to be authentically human.

Communicating value A good legal leader knows the value of their function, and can clearly and relevantly communicate that value to their team and the wider organization.

They understand that communicating the value of their work is just as important as doing the work itself. Communicating the value of their work isn’t simply a branding exercise, it’s about serving and protecting their function. It’s about training their organization in how best to engage legal services (making the legal team members’ lives easier) and positioning the function well to receive the organization’s support in return.

11

LEADERSHIP

INVIEW

How to build your in-house legal team

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

Choosing a team that works in harmony whilst also playing to individual strengths in any profession is no easy task. This is particularly true when building an in-house legal team as juggling personalities and skill sets are at odds with the legal demands of the organization itself.

We talk to Helen Doukas, Head of Legal at Airways, and Shaun Plant, Chief Legal Officer of LawVu, about how they build out their legal teams.

Plant is an innovator at heart, and sees the building of his legal team as an “opportunity to create something new and innovative, and to redefine what a lawyer does within a company or in house role.” His vision is concurrent with the theory of a T-Shaped lawyer, believing that individuals should be able to combine their interests and skills that lie outside of the law with their day-to-day work.

Imagine a lawyer who has a passion for technology solutions working closely with the IT and development teams? Adding technological value but also gaining a clear vision of any compliance, regulatory, or privacy issues that may arise. Or perhaps a lawyer has an affinity for marketing and communications and is involved in campaigns and creating content which allows the legal team to be on the front foot as regards potential external risks the marketing material may cause. Fostering a team culture where lawyers feel they can play in other parts of the business allows for an in-house team that is more laterally integrated with the organization, which in turn means more efficient, proactive legal solutions.

“It’s about delivering added value to the organization,” says Plant. “And it isn’t just turning around a contract in a certain time, it’s providing those other skills that you have an interest in that can help teams grow.”

Doukas highlights the nexus between process and culture, and how creating a thriving in-house team requires a foundation where the lawyers themselves have opportunity and transparency in their roles.

12

“You have to make people feel like they have a structure, they have transparency, they have triage,” she says.

“That creates more space. Coupled with development opportunities and, of course, team bonding and celebrating success, you create a really nice culture and team.”

First and foremost, Doukas points out the obvious - that structure and process are key to the healthy functionality of an in-house team. Part of the process is transparency - having data and information recording systems in place so that work can be picked up by anyone. Lawyers are notorious for working on paper and in their heads.

Embracing legal workflow technologies means that information is not siloed, and matters are handled much more efficiently.

Once this process is established, it’s important to integrate with the wider business and be an enabler for achieving the business strategy. For the in-house team to work proactively and have fruitful relationships with their other business units, they must understand what it is their company does, where it is going and help it get there.

Legal knowledge and application skills are no longer enough to be an effective counsel for an organization.

What sets an in-house legal team apart is if they prioritize listening to and meeting the needs of their clients and establishing the legal team’s priorities, goals, and targets around these needs. Try being proactive rather than reactive.

Individuals create a team, and the soft skills of the lawyers themselves are a huge factor in how an in-house team operates. When hiring for your in-house team, consider if the individual will work well with the team. Are they collaborative, show initiative, and do they demonstrate the ability to make good judgment calls, especially under pressure? Yes, lawyers need to have an extensive understanding of the law, but they are also in the business of people and as such need to work well with others.

Being part of a thriving in-house team that serves an organization you align with can be an incredibly rewarding career. As Doukas points out, creating a culture where lawyers feel valued and that their work contributes to their client’s needs, allows people to find purpose.

And according to Plant, by harnessing lawyers’ crossdisciplinary strengths, “there’s a better way to be a lawyer and a legal team.”

craggy range Best Vineyard in Australasia

craggyrange.com

INVIEW

14

INVIEW

FEATURE: WELLBEING

A journey with wellbeing An interview with Grant Pritchard

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Heather Kidd

Grant Pritchard is working to improve mental health within the legal profession.

He is President of the In-house Lawyers Association of New Zealand and Customer Legal Business Partner at Spark New Zealand. He helped establish and lead Spark’s mental health community and program. Pritchard also established the Headfit Foundation, aimed at transforming how we talk about and address mental health at work, and the HeadFit Awards, New Zealand’s first national workplace mental health awards program. We talk to him about his journey in the workplace mental health space.

around us at work or beyond who might be struggling.

The first step is be aware of the people around you at work.

Trust your ‘Spidey senses’ – if you don’t think someone’s doing OK, don’t ignore that. Remember that being there for a workmate doesn’t mean you’re providing a clinical role or need to solve all their problems. Think of yourself as a caring listener and a ‘bridge to support’.

Where did your mental health journey begin?

Because our wellbeing is dynamic and subjective, it is important that we don’t just focus on initiative-based responses. You can’t just run a lunch-and-learn on resilience and think you’re done. It’s about culture change, about recognizing this is not a tripping hazard in a workplace where you staple the carpet down or put up a sign. We can do more. We can listen to our people and take a holistic view in creating a workable strategy that meets their needs. This also means that we need to better understand the acute and systemic internal and external pressures that can be facing the firm environment and the in-house team environment. How can we identify and address unhealthy pressures? How are we creating skills and confidence in our team members so they can effectively navigate stressful situations?

My real introduction happened in Australia when I lost a close workmate to depression and suicide. Prior to that, when I was 16, I lost a school friend. With my workmate Lucy, I didn’t recognize at the time that she wasn’t OK. It made me reflect and ask myself what more I could have done - what I could have said differently and how I could have better supported her. We all have moments when we’re confronted by things that we’re not ready for. And we have choices in terms of how we respond. That doesn’t mean blaming yourself. For me, it meant asking myself how I might be better equipped to identify if someone around me was struggling and take appropriate steps to support that person.

As a leader, what’s your advice when people encounter someone who is struggling? What is the best way of being there?

At the interpersonal level, when a person is not doing well it’s about not just leaving it. In Kiwi culture, we can be very reserved – especially at work. We don’t want to be nosy, and it can get in the way of us being there for the people

Law is a notoriously high-pressure job. How do you rate lawyers’ mental health?

There are a lot of variables, a combination of your working environment, the people surrounding you at work and how they roll, your team culture, and the specific stuff on your plate, both at home and at work. While I don’t think lawyers’ mental health is necessarily much poorer than it was five or 10 years ago, our younger lawyers are starting to say, “How am I right now? It’s not okay, I can’t stay in this mode.” We’re starting to better understand the pressure performance curve and make healthier choices about how we manage work and stress.

Mental health impacts us all yet there’s a stigma attached. How can we change this and better support our people?

There are two aspects. First, better equipping our leaders and people managers to support staff who may be struggling. Imagine if you were in a state of mental 15

FEATURE: WELLBEING

INVIEW

distress and the response from your leader was, “You’re not coping. Why don’t you take a few days of stress leave?

I’ll get someone else in the team to pick up your important projects and work.”

Instead, we need to listen to the staff member, ask them what supports they need, and ask them which work they feel confident continuing (if they need to change how they’re working to support their recovery). It also means respecting the person’s privacy and agreeing with them how and whether you’ll talk about their situation with the wider team. Being open about mental health challenges creates a positive culture around mental health (and can help teammates understand why certain changes are being made in the team), but this needs to be handled carefully and only with the consent of the person concerned.

Secondly, the onus is on us to take a holistic view of wellbeing and work. How we work, how organizations are structured and how we deliver a thriving workforce.

If we only focus on addressing individual instances of poor mental wellbeing, we can miss important common themes and structural or systemic issues that are creating challenges for mental wellbeing. If we want sustainable performance at work, we need to put wellbeing at the center. By designing a healthier way of working and taking a systems-based approach, we can fix the work and not focus solely on band-aiding the person.

Can you explain the importance of role modelling in a team?

Role modelling healthy behaviors means doing what you expect your team members to do. Because of our Kiwi culture, much is unspoken within the workplace. When it comes to workplace mental health and wellbeing, your team will watch what you do – not just what you say. This is why role modelling from leaders is so important. By role modelling healthy behavior at work, you signal that wellbeing priorities and initiatives are authentic and give your team members permission to participate and follow your lead.

By designing a healthier way of working and taking a systems-based approach, we can fix the work and not focus solely on band-aiding the person.

16

What role can in-house lawyers play in promoting wellbeing for private practice lawyers?

In the legal context, in-house lawyers can be a risk factor or a protective factor for the wellbeing of our private practice counterparts. In-house lawyers have a role to play, and demonstrate leadership in this space, by taking a ‘healthy briefing’ approach with their supporting law firms. This means having open conversations about capacity and prioritization, setting clear expectations on work product – and above all, setting realistic deadlines for work. It also means calling healthy working expectations to private practice lawyers if we start seeing things like emails turning up at 3am.

What would you say to organizations that are just starting on their workplace mental health journey?

Creating mentally healthier workplaces is ultimately about improving workplace culture. This is a journey, not an excursion and we’re aiming for progress, not perfection.

It’s OK for you to start from where you are – listening, acting with humility, and learning from other workplaces who are leading in this space. Above all, be encouraged.

Know that by taking positive steps to improve mental health in your workplace, you’re doing the right thing for your people.

WELLBEING

INVIEW

Legal tech enables wellbeing and flexible working

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

Legal tech does more than just streamline your in-house team. It enables flexible working.

Flexible working can improve employee wellbeing. For lawyers, flexible work arrangements require digitization as integrated workspaces allow teams to collaborate and work online in real time.

Research shows that flexible work schedules create higher levels of job satisfaction and less absenteeism, along with reduced rates of turnover. The simple yet radical act of giving employees the power to choose their hours and/ or work from home when the need arises can positively contribute to their wellbeing.

You might not immediately make the correlation between flexible working and legal tech software as it is not one of the main benefits we generally tout. It’s a by-productbenefit of a streamlined and centralized workspace.

Digital legal platforms such as LawVu allow legal teams to have all of their matters, documents, contacts, tasks, and other metadata stored in one secure cloud-based location.

Permissions can be shared with other team members, allowing lawyers to work in real time from different locations. While this isn’t particularly revolutionary, for lawyers who are used to carting around stacks of confidential files, it allows them to work in an entirely new way.

Katie Bhreatnach, the GM of Customer and Regulatory Partnerships at Airways, is a believer in the benefits of flexible work. “My experience in having a genuine commitment to flexibility is that you get engaged dedicated team members who are committed, well rounded, and productive.” Throughout her career, Bhreatnach has seen colleagues sacrifice roles on great cases or take part-time paid work (that required full-time equivalent hours) in order to guarantee a level of flexibility that enabled them to have a life outside of work.

So how does flexible working enable wellbeing? The study, Work Schedule Flexibility: A Contributor to Happiness,

notes a negative correlation between life satisfaction and the time spent at work, commuting and away from family and social life. Bhreatnach notes that flexibility allows for transparency, people can have a fulfilling job whilst being there for their family or personal commitments. “We are all whole people and work is only one part of our lives,” she says “Having interests and balance that keeps your wairua (spirit) strong contributes to the person you bring to your working day.”

Three lawyers in Bhreatnach’s team have the option to work remotely, flexibly, and part-time. The full-time lawyers also work flexibly and remotely. It’s important to Bhreatnach that “people are not undervalued because of working part-time or flexibly”. That their position, remuneration, and the quality of the work they are given are not impacted by being part-time or remote.

Having interests and balance that keeps your wairua (spirit) strong contributes to the person you bring to your working day.

Working remotely isn’t without its challenges, however, especially during Covid-19 lockdowns. “We approach it with empathy and understanding. Just like we do when any of the people in our team are having challenges in their work or personal lives,” says Bhreatnach.

Legal technology has allowed them to work centrally on the cloud, with easy access to files and the ability to digitally pick up and swap work between one another.

The key takeaway from flexible work in Bhreatnach’s eyes is that it allows people to bring their whole selves to work.

“Regarding them as a whole person creates a great culture, a nice place to work, and motivated, committed and supportive team members.”

17

FEATURE: WELLBEING

INVIEW

Roadblocks to mental health in lawyers; the 5 Ps

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

Wellbeing is the desired state, but it is not a destination, rather something that needs constant work to obtain. Every individual’s wellbeing is dependent on so many factors, their emotional, physical, social, spiritual, occupational, and financial health constituting how they feel.

For those with particular stresses in one area of their wellbeing, this can throw other aspects of their balance offkilter. Imagine someone who is fulfilled socially, financially, and physically, but is suffering immense stress at work which puts their emotional health at risk. This is often the case with lawyers.

As The Law Society of South Australia notes, surveys on mental health from across the globe have reported that depression and other psychological issues are comparatively high amongst the legal profession. Being Well in the Law, a report from The Law Society of New South Wales, NSW Young Lawyers, and Australian National University, states that “solicitors and barristers exhibit higher levels of psychological distress and disproportionately higher experiences of depression than members of the general population.”

18

Why is this? On the surface, lawyers present as successful, intellectually stimulated people who take immense pride in their work. To the outside population, they ‘have it all.’

Yet this very pride and the subsequent facade a lawyer presents could be instrumental as to why we are seeing higher rates of mental health issues amongst legal professionals.

The revered Australian report on depression in the legal sector, Courting the blues: attitudes towards depression in Australian law students and legal practitioners, by Sydney University’s Brain and Mind Institute in conjunction with the Tristan Jepson Memorial Foundation, illuminates this.

It concludes that lawyers are hesitant to seek support with mental health and that they question the effectiveness of mental health professionals. The survey found that even if lawyers were faced with depression, some would not seek help.

Grant Pritchard, President of In-house Lawyers Association of New Zealand, believes that there are entrenched traits within lawyers which can make it harder for them to be vulnerable. He calls them the Five Ps. Our first P is Power Dynamic. Lawyers bear significant power and responsibility in upholding the law, and that can sit like a weight upon one’s shoulders. The reality is that lawyers work in the business of risk, and can be

INVIEW

laser-focused on meeting client needs and never letting their clients down. When a lawyer loses a court case or is unable to prevent their client from exposure to specific legal or business risks, it can be hard for them to simply go home at the end of the day and forget about this. Another power dynamic affecting lawyers is in their interpersonal relationships at work – especially within the legal team itself. The team dynamic and culture can be a significant risk factor or protective factor for individual lawyers within the team. It is really important to create an equitable, positive and high-trust culture for everyone in the team, regardless of their role or position.

Power can become ego, which leads us to our second P, Persona. Lawyers are typically required to present an aura of confidence, authority (and potentially combativeness, as the situation requires). Sometimes at work it can feel like you need to wear a mask, and this can get in the way of being genuine and honest about how you’re really doing.

This mask is especially strong for lawyers, and it can get in the way of us asking for help early or accepting that we have human needs and limitations.

This brings us to our next P, Personality. Although lawyers are working in the realm of risk, fear, and consequence, they can feel like they need to maintain a positive outlook and persona, a ‘we can do it’ mentality for their clients, despite the doubts or challenges they may be facing.

Things break under too much Pressure, which is our next P. The responsibility we discussed earlier comes hand in hand with an immense pressure; to win, to predict risk, to be a superhero. Mitigating risk means thinking in the mindset of the worst possible outcome, the what ifs.

Knowing the potential ramifications a client is exposed to intensifies the personal pressure upon the lawyer to deliver.

Some level of stress and pressure is healthy, but we need to

FEATURE: WELLBEING

take a considered approach to this so that we can maintain performance without lawyers burning themselves out.

Perfectionism, our final P. Lawyers are often Type A thinkers, they like to be armed with all relevant information to any matter, ‘winging it’ will not suffice. Yet this very desire to triple check every semicolon does not always serve the lawyer, it can cause anxiety over their work.

Perfectionism is a double-edged sword – helping lawyers to create high-quality work, but also potentially harming their wellbeing if not kept in check. It is critical that lawyers get a better handle on what ‘good enough’ looks like, and letting go of unhealthy perfectionism is key to this.

Wellbeing should not be seen as separate from being a lawyer. Compartmentalizing our mental health and failing to see the inextricable links between our work life and wellness can undermine our wellbeing at work and home.

Comprehending how the Five Ps impact us as lawyers, allows us to take ownership and make changes that foster better wellbeing. As Being Well in the Law frames it “compartmentalizing wellbeing turns mental health and wellbeing into an individualized problem, implicitly assigning responsibility and liability to the person as a ‘sufferer’ (or, worse, having the person reduced to a diagnostic label).”

If we better understand and address the individual, team and organizational risk factors and opportunities for our lawyers, we can start intentionally creating healthier relationships with each other and with our work. This starts with listening to our people and creating a culture where we acknowledge that legal work can be stressful and high-pressure, being more aware of how our legal training and traits can impact our wellbeing, and empowering our people to look after themselves and look out for the people around them.

19

INVIEW

FEATURE: WELLBEING

Being in the business of fear

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

It may seem a bit blunt, but you could see lawyers as being in the business of fear. The very role of a lawyer is to mitigate fear and manage risk – to identify and address every potential problem. Lawyers can be seen as risk-averse, conservative, and competitive, but such labels don’t paint the full picture.

We sought to find out about the mindset of lawyers and how this can affect their wellbeing.

Grant Pritchard, President of the In-house Lawyers Association of New Zealand, wants to create a healthier relationship with work for lawyers, both in-house and in private practice. He believes that “being in the business of fear” has a lot to account for when it comes to the wellbeing and mindset of lawyers.

From the first year of law school, lawyers are taught to be skeptical, to be able to identify risk and ramifications from a distance - to be predictive, analytical, and critical.

These are qualities that make good lawyers, but this way of thinking can permeate into one’s personal life.

“You are the company you keep,” is an adage that has rung true across history. It appears in the 16th-century publication of ‘English Proverbs and Proverbial Phrases: A Historical Dictionary’ by GL Apperson as: “Tell me with whom thou goest, and I’ll tell thee what thou doest.” The saying resurfaced in 17th century as “de dime, con quién andas, decirte he quién eres” in Miguel de Cervantes’ famed novel, ‘Don Quixote’. This maxim rings true when it comes to lawyers, research showing that those long hours spent in the office with lawyers can reinforce creating similarities in personality.

‘Herding Cats: The Lawyer Personality Revealed’, authored

by Dr Larry Richard of Managing Partner Forum, delves 20

into common personality traits amongst lawyers that differ from the general public. Richard found high levels of skepticism amongst lawyers, consistently averaging around the 90th percentile. The study noted: “If the profession attracts highly skeptical individuals, these skeptical lawyers will be skeptical not only when they’re representing a client but in other roles which might actually require lower levels of skepticism.”

Skepticism is well-suited to adversarial encounters such as litigation and contract drafting but isn’t so helpful in situations requiring trust, acceptance, and collaboration.

And when skepticism extends into a lawyer’s personal life, it can cause cracks in relationships by eroding trust with those around them.

Another trait Richard identified as high in lawyers is urgency. This is characterized by “impatience, a need to get things done, a sense of immediacy”. Low scorers tend to be patient, contemplative, measured – in no particular rush – whereas the excellent lawyers in Richard’s study scored significantly higher on this trait than the general public.

Urgency, like skepticism, is very useful in the practice of law as it contributes to efficient, productive lawyers who get things done. Yet it has a negative side outside of the legal bubble, with urgent people being perceived by others as curt and poor at listening. “The potential downside of this trait emerges most significantly in interpersonal relationships,” says Richard.

The most relevant trait to the wellbeing of lawyers that the study identified is “sociability”. The average sociability score for lawyers was 12.8 percent compared to an average of 50 percent for the general public. Sociability is the desire to interact with others and a comfort level in initiating new close connections. Lower scorers aren’t necessarily antisocial, instead preferring to rely on existing relationships with friends, spouses, and family rather than actively fostering new connections. Lower scorers are also

INVIEW

The most relevant trait to the wellbeing of lawyers that the study identified is “sociability”. The average sociability score for lawyers was 12.8 percent compared to an average of 50 percent for the general public. more inclined to spend time on intellectual, informationdense issues instead of social, connection-driven interactions.

This isn’t surprising information if you consider that law is an intellectual, logical and rigorous profession that doesn’t place much emphasis on matters of the heart. The adulation of intellect and success is woven into the fabric of

the legal profession, and this mindset can get woven into the lawyers themselves.

So how does the research on traits like skepticism, urgency, and low sociability relate to Pritchard’s statement on lawyers being in the business of fear? These traits will vary from person to person and can be significantly influenced by the professional and working environment.

As people adapt and grow to be a great lawyer, these traits can be strengthened and become more apparent.

Pritchard believes that acknowledging and being more open about these traits can give lawyers the power to make healthier choices about how these traits appear at work and home. And to intentionally minimize or avoid traits that aren’t serving them well outside of the workplace.

“We can thank a healthy degree of skepticism, perfectionism, and urgency for creating great lawyers,” he says. “It’s up to us to better understand these traits, to recognize their downsides, and to turn down the dial on them for the betterment of our wellbeing and personal relationships.”

21

Just ask, just listen

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

Humans are often referred to as ‘the social animal’. We have evolved to function best in groups, relying on each other for protection, to forage effectively, and to reproduce. There is another benefit we gain from cohabitation, however, one far less rational but just as crucial, and that is social connection.

Scientist Matthew Lieberman poses in his book ‘Social’, that the human need to connect is as fundamental to us as food and water. Think of the saying ‘they broke my heart.’ Although we’ve always referred to the pain of losing someone as an analogy to physical pain, there may be more truth to that statement than metaphor. Pain caused by social interaction is valid and manifests in us, mentally and physically. Without a sense of belonging, connection, and community we are not well. Understanding this allows us to nurture the relationships in our lives for our own mental wellbeing, and for others.

22

Lawyers experience disproportionately high levels of psychological distress and depression compared to members of the general population, due to a multitude of reasons, such as the high-stress and responsibility for others that comes with practicing law.

“Just ask, just listen” is a phrase that Grant Pritchard, President of the In-house Lawyers Association of New Zealand, uses when discussing mental health conversations and how we can better support those around us. He stresses that by reaching out and letting others know they are not alone can make a world of difference, even if you don’t feel like you have the right answers.

In a legal environment, “just ask, just listen” looks like checking in on your workmates. It can be easy to focus solely on work-related issues when checking in on a colleague, but it’s important to recognize that our lives incorporate both our work and personal worlds. Our work world can impact our home world, and vice versa. Gone are the days when we can just tell our people to “leave

INVIEW

FEATURE: WELLBEING

your personal life at the door”. Many effective workplace wellbeing programs are starting to recognize this by taking a more holistic approach to supporting staff wellbeing.

Checking in on your fellow lawyers and workmates is vital.

If you know your colleague has a particularly full plate, or they have something going on at home that may be causing distress, just regularly checking in and asking “how are you feeling?”, “how are things going at home” or “can I help with anything?” gives them permission to share how they’re doing or ask for some help. It could make the world of difference to them.

So, how can we be better listeners and more effectively check in on each other? Checking in might be a bit nervewracking to start with, but it will get easier as you practice and build confidence:

• Prepare and pick the moment. Make sure you’re in a good headspace, ready to genuinely listen and able to give as much time as needed. Choose somewhere they might find private and comfortable for a chat, and figure out what might be a good time for them to talk.

• Know your role. If you’re checking in on a workmate, your job is to listen, care, and signpost them towards appropriate support. When you check in on a workmate, they might tell you that they’re not doing OK. Your role is never to diagnose, be judgmental, fix them or give a long list of ‘dos and don’ts’. Your role is to listen, encourage and signpost them to the right support if required. Remember: you’re not the support - you’re the bridge to support.

• Ask how they’re doing. Be relaxed, friendly and caring.

Help them open up by asking questions like “how are you feeling?” or “what’s life been like for you?”. If there’s something specific that has changed that you’re worried about, you could mention this to them, like “You don’t seem like your usual bubbly self at the moment. How are you going?”

• Be OK with rejection. When you check in with someone, they might not be ready to talk, or might not want to talk to you. If they don’t want to talk, that’s OK. Just let them know you care about them and that you’re here for them if they ever want to talk. You could ask if there’s someone else they’d rather talk to.

• Listen, listen, listen. If they want to share how they’re doing, listen actively and with an open mind. Take what they say seriously. Try to avoid interrupting, judging or rushing the conversation. You can acknowledge that it sounds like things have been tough for them. Don’t worry if there are moments of silence. Being there with them and listening is the most important thing. Ask open questions so you can better understand how they’re doing. For example, “How are you feeling about that?” or “How long have you felt this way?”

Just let them know you care about them and that you’re here for them if they ever want to talk.

• Encourage positive action. You could ask what they’ve done previously to get through situations like that, how they’d like you to support them, or if there’s something they could do for themselves right now. If they’re in a situation that might need specific support (for example, if they’ve been feeling really down for more than two weeks) encourage them to see a health professional or support service. You could offer to help them get connected with someone who might be able to help them work through their situation.

• Check back in. Put a reminder in your diary to call them in a couple of weeks. If they’re really struggling, follow up sooner. Ask how they’ve been going since you last talked.

Ask if they’ve found a way to manage their situation (and don’t judge if they haven’t). Stay in touch, encourage and be there for them. Genuine care and concern can make a real difference.

Our ability to connect has been stretched by the Covid-19 pandemic, with lockdowns restricting our physical connections often to a single household. Our normal human behavior has had to change, so as our physical connections have been limited our ability and desire to connect digitally has flourished. Platforms such as Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams are providing a platform to enable not just productivity, but a workplace community and a forum for caring and kindness.

Sending somebody a quick “how are you doing today?” message has never been easier. Although digital connections can’t completely replace the physical, they can reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation – maintaining a sense of community around us at work and home. For our colleagues still working from home as their countries fight the Covid-19 virus, staying socially connected is a fundamental support for their mental wellbeing.

We all have a role to play in creating communities and workplaces that foster a better mental health culture.

By simply listening, caring and checking on the people around us at work and home, you are already being part of the solution.

23

INVIEW

VALUE

The value of legal operations with Gerald Char

by Connor Amor-Bendall

Legal ops explained, by a legal ops expert.

Gerald Char witnessed the birth of legal operations and has now become a bonafide expert in the field. He is a Legal Operations Senior Specialist having worked as the Legal Operations Manager at HP for 16 years, and more recently Twilio. We pick Char’s brain as to the state of legal ops and ask him to outline the benefits one can convey to a business when pitching a legal operations role.

According to Char, the point of legal operations as a function is to harness information to drive value and set strategic priorities. These value-adds span the wider business.

“Firstly, legal operations provide value by creating financial discipline as data and metrics give in-house teams greater clarity on business spend and return,” he says. “This, in turn, gives a greater understanding of the business and allows the CFO to see financial leaks, plug the holes and create profit.

“Efficiency is an obvious value-add as legal operations forecast and automate legal tasks, giving lawyers back time in their busy days and reducing the need to outsource high-frequency, low-value work. With a legal operations team streamlining lawyers’ administrative tasks, the legal team is much more efficient.

“Another hidden benefit provided by legal ops is the bridge between legal and finance. Attorneys typically don’t love numbers and legal ops professionals take the tasks of budgeting and invoice tracking off their hands whilst maintaining a positive relationship with finance.”

Char also says value specific to the legal time lies in building credibility by having accurate numbers, targets, and reporting, which means the function can be true to their word. This ties into planning, using data to create strategic goals, realizing where resources are best utilized and what work should be outsourced. Data is power.

The final benefit Char stresses is that legal operations allow the legal department to act as a business partner 24

Char stresses that legal operations allow the legal department to act as a business partner rather than a reactive function. They have data, insights and forecasting to add to business planning. rather than a reactive function. They have data, insights and forecasting to add to business planning.

Larger organizations can easily show the benefits of having a legal operations function, yet smaller companies need to manage the risk of expecting too much too quickly. As Char explains, “cost savings and synergies take a while to get; be careful to manage the expectations.”

Char has seen legal operations build out amongst young companies with unrealistic expectations. “Expectations need to be reviewed and clarified to make sure the function has time to deliver on what it can.”

The legal operations maturity model helps to establish a well-functioning legal ops team. For instance, determining key milestones such as when processes are implemented, the designation of a hierarchy of roles within the team, and the automation of manual activity.

Char says an organization should allow at least two years for a mature and robust legal operations function to emerge. This function will be key to business and influence upper management as it saves resources, implements better systems, and ultimately saves time and money by automating processes. Legal operations will also gain the respect of the legal team itself as all the time they spend liaising with other business units provides insight into what the in-house team actually does, thus breaking down the legal silo.

Creating a business case for legal tech

by Bríd Heffernan

If you’re not sure how to convince your business to pay for the implementation of legal tech, we’re here to help you create a business case that will pique the interest of your CFO. Building a solid business case for legal tech requires communicating the value and return on investment for the business. While this will differ for individual legal departments, there are four universal measures that apply to every legal department and their organization.

Time savings and increased efficiency Modern matter management systems harness automation and templates to speed up contract creation and lowvalue, high-frequency work. Evidence from comparing

26

processes shows that without automation, legal teams are spending 3x as much time creating a matter, 10x more time creating a report, and 2x as much time searching for information.

One of our clients formed a new in-house legal team a few years ago. With an annual operating budget of $237 million in 2017 and a workforce of over 800 people, the in-house team faced a large diversity of legal work, tight deadlines, and a high volume of requests for advice. Their General Counsel felt the team was spending too much time triaging files, and they needed something that would allow them to focus on the actual tasks instead of the admin required to get a file underway.

The client implemented a single platform to assist with legal workflow and matter management, the intention being to provide the team with more visibility, leading

INVIEW

If the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘why’ of a litigated matter is stored across email inboxes, shared drives, and Excel spreadsheets, staying on top of this data is arduous and easily mismanaged. to greater efficiency. Upon implementing technology to streamline their processes they reported that they were immediately aware of the advantages of having all moving parts working together and could clearly demonstrate at least one hour saved per legal team member per week.

Productivity Accurate data governance and discipline around processes allow the team to be more efficient. By implementing technology, a 10-person legal department tells us they can demonstrate a conservative 10 percent efficiency gain across the entire legal team, which adds up significantly when you work out your colleagues’ hourly rate.

McKinsey reports that employees spend 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information. In a platform that contains your matters, contracts, and documents, searching for information shouldn’t take more than 5-10 seconds to find the document you are looking for.

Risk management Lawyers are in the business of risk management, especially in-house lawyers who act as the watchdog for their organization. Therefore, an important part of your business case to implement legal tech is highlighting the elevated risk management practices that digital workspaces enable.

A digital workspace handles all legal matters, requests, issues, and contracts that pass through legal’s hands, giving you centralized, captured data. Aside from ensuring that key dates are never missed, digital workspaces will also assist you to manage all of your obligations, undertakings, and event project management.

Without visibility and data, the ability to proactively manage any associated risk becomes exponentially harder, if even possible, and the resulting consequences can be both detrimental and irreversible. If the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, and ‘why’ of a litigated matter is

BUSINESS

stored across email inboxes, shared drives, and Excel spreadsheets, staying on top of this data is arduous and easily mismanaged. Establishing a system of record for all matters eliminates risk by centralizing all data and your team gains insights, efficiency, and security in having a one-stop-shop for all things legal.

Metrics and data-driven decisions Data has multifaceted benefits for a legal department and organization. When looking at legal through the lens of predictive (or prescriptive) analytics maturity, in-house legal departments are generally working from a place of hindsight. That is, looking back at what has previously happened. It’s the same place other departments were decades ago.

We describe a metrics journey as moving through the stages of hindsight, through to insights, foresight, and eventually to the optimum stage of amplified intelligence and automation. This is where your data can not only see the future but be focused to proactively contribute to the important strategic decisions being made within your organization.

To create a convincing business case for legal tech, one should propose how the use of metrics can improve the legal team in line with the business’s strategic goals. For instance, data can be used for legal work prioritization, reducing external legal spend, risk management, and automating and streamlining manual processes.

What ties these four selling points together is that legal tech creates ROI for both the legal team and the business itself. Document generation significantly reduces time otherwise spent manually doing these tasks, a central place for all data reduces time spent searching for information, and an online workplace allows for real-time collaboration. Sharing the ROI that tech will bring to your legal department is speaking your CFO’s language.

Bríd Heffernan is the Senior Director of Global Sales at LawVu. She is also a qualified Irish and Australian lawyer with a penchant for doing things better and smarter.

Since transitioning from legal practice to legal technology she has been fortunate to work with some of the most impressive #legaltech innovators in the world in the areas of practice management, investigations, eDiscovery, and legal operations.

27

It’s meant to be: the marriage between contract and matter management

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

The marriage of matters and contracts is a long overdue union. While the two are often interlinked in a corporate legal environment, the processes and systems used to track both are separated. Such a marriage presents an opportunity for a more efficient workflow, better oversight of legal obligations and preparedness for disputes.

Let’s define matters as a piece of work that the legal team owns and progresses, and a contract, in this circumstance, as a written agreement that two parties have agreed to and understood the terms of. The contract, in the case of in-house law teams, is a live document crafted by offers and counteroffers to come to an agreement between two parties. A contract is an end result of a project, and during its creation it is a living document that passes through many hands. There is often a lot of valuable information around the parties’ intentions which has been created before it hits legal’s desk. It is essential that this information is captured and made visible to those tasked with either drafting the contract or managing its ongoing operations post execution.

Historically, contract management software exists to edit, track changes and versions, and monitor an approvals 28

process of the document. This software also provides data around expiry and execution dates relating to specific contracts. However, it is disconnected from the contextual side of the job, the legal tasks performed in order to get the contract to signature. Think engagement with the represented party, negotiation with the opposing lawyer and party, meetings within a legal team to delegate tasks and find a solution to the contractual negotiation at hand.

Matter management software exists to help lawyers do their job to the best of their ability. It does this by streamlining the opening, progression, management and reporting. The key benefits of matter management software come down to visibility (both within legal and in the broader business), time savings in the opening and intake of new matters, the establishment of a central location or “the single source of truth” for all matters, and the ability to proactively manage costs and thereby ultimately reduce legal spend. The importance of the visibility piece cannot be overstated: the legal team should know who is working on what and should have the history of matters to hand, while their business colleagues who have asked for legal help should see who is progressing their work and its status without resorting to follow-up emails.

Software like LawVu marries the established efficiencies of matter management software with contract management, creating a further standardized and automated process which improves staff productivity and helps to manage

TECHNOLOGY

INVIEW

Having a technology system that holds both matter and contract management services saves time - which, as we all know, saves money. workloads. In a situation such as a tendering process, where in-house teams are presented with a mammoth contractual task, this software reaps significant rewards as it saves time. Time which can be better spent on negotiations with the client, internal decision-making with other business units and leaders, and executing the lengthy approvals process of a contract. Or, better still, on other work! In this case, having a technology system that holds both matter and contract management services saves time - which, as we all know, saves money.

The union of these two also creates a more streamlined knowledge management and sharing system. Rather than spending time trawling between SharePoint sites and shared drives searching for information, one system equals one source of truth - where contracts and matter are stored. The importance of this relates to the risk that contracts present.

Shaun Plant, Chief Legal Officer at LawVu, says: “At any one time, organizations have millions of dollars in contractual terms that have rights and obligations which must be fulfilled.” Better oversight of these contracts can be obtained by pulling these contractual documents out of a vacuum and into an agile system that legal teams use every day. Covid-19 has highlighted this need, making companies realize the importance of having oversight of their legal obligations and standing with clients.

Yet another benefit of this marriage regards disputes.

Disputes require evidence - and evidence comes from good matter and contract management. Without it, disputes can end up where no corporation wants to be, in expensive and time-consuming litigation. Good matter and contract management practices mean recording interpretations of what has been said and agreed on between parties. It means filing emails and documents related to matters and having all relevant contractual information filed and stored.

It is best to prepare oneself for the future.

The sum of all this is that the marriage of contract and matter management improves staff productivity and business systems and ultimately leads to gains in ROI. For a company dealing with tens of thousands of matters and contracts a year, this union seems like a match made in heaven, and one that shouldn’t be overlooked in the legal technology decision-making process.

A role on the rise?

General Counsel spearheads an organization’s legal department, tasked with providing strategic advice and legal depth. However, the change that modern business demands from in-house legal has left this role stretched, bringing into question if a strategic legal leader is required. Cue the Vice President of Legal.

The gap between the legal department and the rest of the organization has been highlighted in technological changes resulting from the pandemic’s impact. The necessity for the legal department to transform itself with its organization has become pertinent, the transition of legal from the use of email as a workflow system to a technological system crucial. The key to implementing this change comes down to leadership at vice president level not General Counsel.

The hands-on nature of GCs’ role leaves them little time to think about operational efficiency, advocate for a tech budget, define KPIs, implement systems of record, and create efficient interfaces with the rest of the business. They are in the unenviable position of needing to fulfil two roles in one; providing strategic oversight to their legal department and being closely involved in the daily legal proceedings. GCs in their current form could well be placeholders keeping the seat warm for the VP of Legal. It’s a role which in its ultimate form will take over running of the legal department from GC. The VP of Legal, or an equivalent title, needs to exist. The role will, and should, supplant General Counsel at the top of the legal department pyramid to give organizations the greatest opportunity to mitigate risk and improve overall business performance.

29

30

INVIEW

FEATURE: DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION

Make equity your priority Aubrey Blanche Aubrey Blanche describes herself as someone “who has always been preoccupied with fairness”. Her journey began as a grad school dropout in Silicon Valley. “I didn’t realize that was trendy,” she jokes. However, Blanche is no quitter and soon landed a job in tech.

It was there, as a queer, disabled, Latina woman, she couldn’t find her community within her organization and so decided to draw on her academic background to “social science a solution”.

Blanche trialed data-driven recruitment processes to unstitch bias and successfully recruited 33 percent more women for her organization. The rest is history. She took the tech world by a DEI storm, working for Palantir Technologies and Atlassian.

Blanche is now the Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, and Founder & CEO of The Mathpath, as well as having advisory roles with Joonko, Seed&Spark, Vector Center, and Onramp.

Equitable design The philosophy of equitable design is about enabling individuals to create more equitable outcomes for their organization by looking at their daily practices and asking, “how can I make this more equitable?”

This will differ per individual. If you are CLO or CEO, it may mean designing an organizational equity strategy, or if you are a mentor it may look like ensuring that the time you give to a mentee from a majority group is matched by time spent with someone from a minority or discriminated group. If you are a legal operations analyst, it could mean making a conscious effort to collect DEI data from all groups to ensure your processes aren’t discriminatory.

According to Blanche, consciously creating equitable processes helps organizations move towards places of diversity.

31

An interview with Aubrey Blanche Aubrey Blanche is leading the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion conversation by calling for equitable design within organizations across the tech world. She shares her experience and knowledge of how to truly create inclusive and diverse businesses by having equity as your priority.

Aspiring to have an equitable organization that fosters inclusion and diversity is one thing, genuinely actioning it is another. Realizing the benefits your people and organization will reap from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is the first step, creating a realistic plan for equitable business outcomes is the next. Aubrey Blanche, Senior Director of Equitable Design, Product & People at Culture Amp, shares her expertise as to how an organization, and subsequently in-house legal teams, can embrace and action DEI. Getting executive buy-in, harnessing data for equitable decisions, and organizing and coordinating grassroots efforts.

A common misconception regarding DEI Blanche has discovered is that “people hold it to a lower degree of rigor or a higher degree of rigor than is appropriate”. Some 32

simply think of DEI as having conversations or education, and although that’s a piece of the puzzle, DEI should be a strategic business priority. This means having aligned leaders who are well-versed or willing to learn about creating equitable organizational outcomes and have agreed to collect data on DEI. On the other hand, it is important to remember that DEI is aiming to reconcile historic and systemic inequities, which doesn’t translate to quarter-on-quarter improvements.

Metrics and data are important to track progress but, as Blanche says, you should not expect “a 1000-yearold problem to be solved on a quarterly earnings report cadence”.

DEI can seem complicated or overwhelming. How can we focus our efforts?

There are two ways. One is to collect data and focus on where your data tells you there are gaps or the biggest opportunities for improvement. People tend to start DEI programs by focusing on gender, but that has a lot of downsides as it generally means that straight, White, cisgender, economically privileged women are the ones who will benefit from those DEI programs. It’s not to say that those women don’t face barriers that should be removed, but perhaps they don’t face the most barriers.

INVIEW

I would look to your data to tell you who’s having an inequitable experience. They tend to be racially minoritized folks, disabled people, and caregivers, and it’s those three groups which need more support. We’ve often seen successful programs have pivoted to focus on those employee’s experiences.

Regarding focus, it relates to the idea of equitable design, asking what are you doing already in your job that you could change to do more equitably. For example, I often see this with recruitment in the legal profession. If you’re hiring and require that someone’s previously worked at a top-tier law firm or start-up, what you’re saying is, “I’d like to inherit discrimination with that.” The reason being is those systems are discriminatory. Solutions to this are being more open about the types of candidates you’re considering in a hiring process, making sure interview panels are balanced, thinking about whether the clauses in your employment contracts are abusive or not, or going above and beyond to mentor or coach an underrepresented teammate. There are many different ways equity work could show up for one person, and that all depends on what they’re doing day-to-day.

What are some of the mental health issues that go hand and hand with DEI work?

It is something that’s come up increasingly over the last couple of years, we’ve seen huge burnout and mental health challenges with people being isolated and in lockdowns during the pandemic. Mental health both overlaps and doesn’t overlap with DEI, or it creates some complexities. Some people would consider mental health challenges as part of the disability bracket, but that varies from person to person. It comes to the layer of DEI work where we’re dealing with trauma and equitable experience.

I generally look to measure those things in the context of disability, starting with data and making sure you’re measuring folks’ wellbeing or disability status, as tackling mental health is usually a mix of both. Culture Amp has a wellbeing template with validated surveys and benchmarks which I highly recommend.

Also, ask questions about people’s workload, energy level, and mental health. It’s especially important to be transparent with people about why the data is being collected and how you’ll use it when discussing mental disabilities or mental illnesses, which are highly stigmatized. Trying to create that trust and safety with people is key to getting good data. What we’re also seeing is that employees are changing their understanding of their social contract with their employer. While it’s not necessarily their literal contracts, there’s a higher expectation that the company do something to manage their mental health or at least conduct their operations in a way that isn’t knowingly burning out their employees.

FEATURE: DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION

Candidates are asking those questions. Doing something as simple as getting rid of global scope roles so people aren’t working all hours of the day could be a mental health change an organization makes. When thinking about mental health, you need to be surveying and collecting data to understand where the mental health and wellbeing gaps are for your organization.

What data should organizations be collecting to support DEI work?

Organizations need to collect diversity as well as inclusion and equity data. Companies are often just collecting diversity data, which is what we call demographic information (counting heads). While it is super important to be able to identify different areas of inequity in experience or process for folks, diversity data alone is not sufficient.

We then have the equity and inclusion data from surveys as well as from objective processes. Inclusion is that subjective survey data and equity looks at the gap between different demographic groups of both the subjective survey data and process data. You need to be collecting all three of those pieces of information to understand where you have gaps and where you have areas of strength within the organization. All three of those pieces need to be minded: Diversity is demographics, inclusion is experience, and equity is the gap in between the experience of different groups.

Diversity is demographics, inclusion is experience, and equity is the gap in between the experience of different groups.

How can organizations use data to set targets?

There’s a difference between long-term and short-term target setting. Regarding the long term, I generally suggest aiming to reflect the population where your team or where your organization is. Other companies tend to use labor force availability, which is an easier target, but if we want to focus on correcting historical inequities we should shoot for population-level numbers. Regarding the short term, setting more achievable targets is important. As most of this data doesn’t move very quickly, when setting shorterterm targets aim to build yourself simple math-based models.

Set targets based on what you can attain in a particular year and calculate that into an outcome.

It’s important to hold a north star of trying to get to 33

INVIEW

Grassroots DEI work within an organization Grassroots DEI initiatives within an organization are the likes of employee-led representation groups or events that are often based on ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, religion, or other identities. They are a great way for people to get some momentum going within their organization around creating change in an area they are passionate about.

Blanche’s advice for any grassroots efforts is to “focus on things that meaningfully shift people’s experiences at work”. It’s easy to get caught up in hot political ideas, but these can lose traction if you aren’t focusing on elevating employee experiences. Whilst celebrating cultural events like International Women’s Day is great, running a workshop for women on how to advocate for themselves in the performance review process will have tangible results, helping women get pay rises and promotions. Grassroots initiatives empower people by giving them a direct line into the making of advocating change.

Using data to drive executive buy-in for DEI work Data is crucial to create executive buy-in for DEI. Blanche describes external data as proven facts from studies by the likes of McKinsey and Deloitte. “Showing the way that cognitive diversity - which stems from a variety of identities and life experiences - leads to superior sort of team and innovative outcomes.” These external facts/data are what align people to a DEI business priority and drive motivation.

Internal data is what your organization collects through people surveys. New data is surfacing that shows employees (especially Gen Z) want more investment in DEI compared to their millennial, Gen X, and Boomer peers.

Blanche points out that internal data will show gaps within an organization. The optimal way to gain buy-in is by mixing internal and external data. Some leaders won’t need convincing, but for legacy leaders who aren’t ready to lead in a modern organization, data is key.

34

population-level representation whilst being realistic about the opportunities you have to create change within a given year. Also, set a target that is a leading indicator of overall progress. For instance, Culture Amp has a target this year around increasing BIPOC representation in senior leadership to 30 percent. That includes new hires as well as promoted employees, so we’re able to calculate that back into an expected overall representation by the end of the year. We can control new hires. We want them to be a more balanced distribution than our previous hires.

This is an equitable design practice, and it is how we make progress globally.

How can data help with accountability for progress?

It’s common to hear companies say they’re not where they want to be. There’s progress to be made everywhere, but it’s easy for leaders to say that and do nothing. By setting targets, collecting data, and sharing those transparently with the organization, leadership has to acknowledge if they didn’t make the right investments or aren’t prioritizing DEI work. Ultimately, they’re going to be more accountable as to explaining why a target wasn’t achieved. People say if it’s not measured, it doesn’t matter in business. This is one of those instances as accountability and transparency come from data collection.

How can we use data to support grassroots efforts?

Data is important as it’s so easy to be scattered with grassroots efforts. Use the data you’re collecting to identify one or two priorities of the group and make sure enough people are aligned with them. A great example of this is with employee resource groups (EGRs) which should have a set of metrics they’re tracking. At Culture Amp, each of our ERGs has one to two subjective inclusion measures for their community. Camp Out, which is our community for LGBTQ-identified folks, has a mission to create belonging for queer employees. They’re tracking the belonging score for LGBTQ employees as well as overall membership in their group. Higher-level DEI work should lean on data to determine how grassroots efforts can use that same data to focus their efforts and have an impact.

Why should we avoid looking for a culture fit?

Culture fit is basically institutionalized discrimination.

It’s like this intractable morass of unconscious bias that doesn’t mean much of anything. I ask, “what specifically do you mean by culture fit?” If someone can’t define not only the qualities but also the way they measure those qualities, it’s super fuzzy. The other reason the concept of culture fit is super damaging is that it is inherently anti-diversity of all types. When you tell your brain to look for a fit, it’s automatically going to sort out anyone different.

All that research, all that knowledge we have about the fact we want to bring different types of people together, culture

INVIEW

fit ultimately undermines that. The implicit statement is that hiring for “culture fit” lowers the overall quality of your hires and your team’s performance.

Where are you on your DEI journey? What are you thinking or learning about currently?

The topic I am most deeply immersed in now is thinking about new ways to understand disability and accessibility.

Seventeen percent of the estimated global workforce identifies as or is disabled. However, a percentage of functionally disabled people may not identify as disabled because there’s so much stigma around being disabled.

When you think about that, it’s one of the largest historically excluded groups.

Accessibility is such a useful frame for how we think about all different types of exclusion. There’s a concept that everyone is either disabled or no one is disabled because we can all be disabled situationally or for short periods.

I’ve been using that framework to think about mental health and caregiver status and experience. How does having caregiving responsibilities intersect because you need to care for someone with a disability? Or how does that remove your ability to do something else? And how do we make that still equitable and possible for you? Disability and accessibility are conceptually useful analytically and intellectually. I’m seeing more companies beginning to consider the experience of disability in their DEI programs.

People say if it’s not measured, it doesn’t matter in business. This is one of those instances as accountability and transparency come from data collection.

We often hear that companies can’t find anyone diverse when they’re hiring. What do you say to that?

I will say that it takes more work. But are you doing the work? For example, if hiring is network-based, are you creating incentives for your staff to participate in diversifying their networks? Are you creating a candidate value proposition that is appealing to a wide variety of people? Are you creating a work environment for your existing underrepresented staff that makes them want to talk positively about their experience working with your company? I won’t argue with the mathematical fact that underrepresented people are harder to find, but to say they do not exist is a convenient excuse to avoid accountability for creating equitable outcomes.

FEATURE: DIVERSITY, EQUITY & INCLUSION

This sounds harsh, but we live in a White supremacist culture, and it’s highly likely that almost everything you’ve built your business on prioritizes White people. Change all of that before you say you can’t find people of color. Almost everything about your business has likely been optimized for abled folks, so maybe think about changing things for disabled people before you say, “I can’t find them.” It’s entirely possible they may not want to be found by you.

How do you change the way you show up as a business, in processes, and as individuals to become a more attractive target for people from underrepresented groups? They are looking for places where they can grow and be supported, but you have to be confident you can create that experience.

Can you talk about the importance of language and words in DEI? Language is incredibly important because it shapes our reality. Language comes laden with not just its literal meaning, but its inherited cultural meaning. For example, calling a meeting a ‘powwow’ is disrespectful to Indigenous people in certain parts of the world. Why not just say “meeting”? People often say, “why are you censoring me” or “you’re policing my language”, but the reality is that you have an option to not be a jerk and choose a more inclusive language option.

I think language can be one of the most difficult things to change. I’m a huge fan of not using ‘guys’ as if it is gender neutral. Just because people use something as if it is gender-neutral doesn’t mean it is. For example, the medical profession considered itself gender neutral for hundreds of years, yet women and non-binary people were not well served by it.

We also have to be thoughtful about the origins of language. For example, the term ‘diversity of thought’ was a phrase that came about to undermine DEI efforts, drawing away from diversity of identity and lived experience. In fact, I very much try to avoid the word ‘diversity’ for this reason. For people? Underrepresented or historically marginalized. Teams? Balanced or equitable.

I usually tell people who are looking to update their language, to start with written language. It’s so much easier to fix something in an email or Slack, and once that is consistent work on your verbal language. My current focus is the word ‘crazy’. We say it all the time, but it is incredibly ableist. I’ve told my team I’m working on that so they will give me feedback. It’s okay to ask for people to be your accountability buddies. We’re trying to change language because it’s not always simple, but it is important.

35

MINDSET

Alex Petrie, Senior Legal Counsel, at James Hardie.

Risk-tolerant lawyers

by Connor Amor-Bendall

InView Champion Alex Petrie is reframing the narrative of in-house lawyers. As Senior Legal Counsel at James Hardie. Petrie believes lawyers can get a bad rap,“while often accused of being risk-averse, I think lawyers are pretty risk-tolerant.” When your very job is to identify, analyze and mitigate risks you become skilled at establishing the most efficient way for a business to move forwards in a risk-tolerant fashion.

Changing this perspective requires better integration of legal teams into the business. Petrie noted that demand generally outstrips supply, creating backlogs of legal requests and lawyers who are rushed in actioning them.

The business can free up the legal team’s capacity by implementing technology that creates more efficiency and redirecting work to standardized resources (templates, self-serve sites) or also in outsourcing work.

business value. Doing this requires identifying risks, then eliminating, substituting, isolating, or controlling them.

Some call this “putting out fires before they begin.”

We now know that giving lawyers more capacity creates more effective corporate firefighters, but how can individuals help with this process? “Balancing communication and information” is Petrie’s advice. As in-house counsel, you can be inundated with meetings, letters, documents and take on too much information without prioritizing which matters are most important.

Petrie says “the key is being involved at a very high level at a very early stage in business conversations/projects/ ideas and then being able to identify if there are any potential legal workstreams.” He likens this to the way a funnel-web spider creates trip lines in its web. You want to create direct lines of communication that will “vibrate” when legal investigation is required.

Giving the legal team capacity means that they can have more human interactions with the business. In-house counsel can take the time to demonstrate how they aren’t operating as the department of no, but simply finding solutions that are legally safe and commercially viable.

In saying this, Petrie does note the importance of having your finger on the pulse of the business. Sharing this knowledge within the legal team helps in-house counsel to better understand the business, to identify risk, avoid repeating past mistakes or near misses, and apply best practice which has been successfully applied elsewhere previously. As Petrie said, it is a balancing act of communication and information.

Ultimately, the legal team wants to be a trusted guide and confidant to their business, both protecting and enabling

So, next time someone describes lawyers as risk-averse, remind them, we are simply risk-tolerant.

36

INVIEW

FUTURE

Creativity and the law

by Connor Amor-Bendall

The words “law” and “creativity” are rarely found in the same sentence. Law evokes intellectual, logical streams of thought while creativity is colored and abstract. There is an assumed dissonance between being creative and being a lawyer, which is a belief we think should be challenged.

EY defines creativity as “the ability to produce new and original ideas, connecting concepts in unique ways to create different solutions”. EY notes that creativity drives innovation and is crucial for business success, as human imagination and vision can separate a business from the rest.

Megan Elizabeth Gray, Associate Counsel at Condé Nast, believes there is a nexus between creativity and the law.

Alongside her legal work, Gray is also a writer. “Creativity, I believe, is bringing into existence that which previously did not exist,” she says. Her point is sage and drives to the very core of her argument that law is a creative practice.

To be a lawyer is to be a problem solver. It is having the ability to create a new way to fix an issue, to come up with a viable solution. Innovation is a foundation of a lawyer’s work, creating ways to solve a client’s problems within the constraints of the law. Lawyers are given a black and white set of variables, the law, and societal norms, yet within those parameters, they aim to find the grey area. “There’s so much latitude, there’s so much scope for creation,” says Gray. And it is this creation which advances societies and businesses alike as continual legal issues arise requiring evolution and creativity to create progress.

In Gray’s opinion, in-house legal environments require a creative approach as the nature of working within a wider organization gives lawyers greater free rein to assist the business to accomplish its goals. Law firms are generally more structured due to the hierarchical and precedentdriven nature of private practice, meaning lawyers have less flexibility to think outside the box.

Gray likens her job to doing a complex logic puzzle, saying, “I feel that creativity is perhaps one of the most, if not the

most, important ingredient in being able to solve issues that arise for business.”

So why isn’t this perspective more commonplace in the legal profession? Forbes declares creativity to be a critical component of a successful entrepreneur: “Successful entrepreneurs act as the perfect amalgamation of creativity and business.” Is a lawyer, like an entrepreneur, not also an advocate for a business, driving it forward through problem-solving? In fact, a lawyer’s biggest asset is their ability to prevent issues before they arise. Therefore, a lawyer like an entrepreneur, should be innovative and possess an amalgamation of business savvy and creative thinking.

Gray’s journey with creativity began later in life when she found her passion for writing. As a student and junior lawyer, she was very purpose-driven, with every action relating to her goal of being a lawyer. “I thought creativity didn’t play a role in achieving that,” she says.

Her viewpoint changed when writing ignited her creative passion and provided immense value in her life. She began to see correlations between creative thinking and the law and realized that being able to tackle problems from a unique angle makes a truly great lawyer.

Everyone is innately creative and has the potential to foster creativity in Gray’s eyes. Yet the intellectual approach of law school doesn’t always value or encourage creativity, which means many lawyers don’t pursue that side of themselves. Her advice for lawyers who want to become more creative thinkers is to follow their curiosity and find something that allows their creativity to flourish. For Gray, this is writing: creating new syntax, prose, and paragraphs, means time stands still. Finding a creative outlet, from dance to animation to pottery, can help ignite your creative mindset, which in turn can be applied to your legal work.

According to Gray, law needs a rebrand. It is a complex, challenging profession that requires problem-solving and creative thinking, but from the outside it is perceived as rigid and dull. If the latitude law presents were more widely understood, more creative thinkers might find themselves intrigued by the thought of a legal career, which offers so many unique paths.

37

An open letter to lawyers, from technology

by Tim Boyne

Dear in-house lawyers, Technology and lawyers - we don’t seem to click. In fact, we’re a classic case of opposites who attract, and who also drive each other crazy. We need to work on our relationship, which is why I’m penning this letter. I want to tell you how I’m feeling, and I hope that somehow, together, we can figure out how to change things for the better.

However, before we can move forward constructively, there’s something we need to address. I’ve been ingesting articles written by your “thought leaders” and it makes for disturbing reading. It seems we’re being pitted against each other. Apparently, some people are trying to make us enemies. You’re being told I’m coming for your job, that you’re replaceable. It’s not true. Our relationship isn’t about expendability, it’s about synergy.

38

I’m good at helping with the things that should be easy and automatic. If it’s a predictable process, I can help. If you want to gather and structure vast quantities of information, pick me. If you need to search through or understand that information, I’m here for you 24-7-365. Sure, you can do some of this stuff without me - but it won’t be easy - and I gather you don’t like doing it anyway.

You, on the other hand, can do things I’ll never be able to do. What you have and are good at are the things people value most of all. Emotions. Instinct. Empathy. Talent.

Compassion. Creativity. You can take different ideas and combine them to create completely new ideas. You can strategize. You’re exceptionally good at helping people.

But doing all of this takes time - the most precious resource known to your kind. It seems odd to me that

INVIEW

you’re so willing to waste it. The data tells me you’re busy and getting busier. This means more time wasted doing the things you have to do and having less time to do the things you want to do. What you’re doing doesn’t scale.

Without wishing to brag, you need my help.

Rather than continuing with our dysfunctional relationship, I suggest we call a truce. Let’s find time for each other.

And who knows, if we do this right, maybe one day we will learn to love each other.

I hear you say that technology is the future of the in-house legal team. You talk about integrating digital tools, with modern ways of working, and how this will allow you to make data-informed decisions, collaborate better as a team, evidence the value of legal to the business, and be more efficient and more accurate in the legal work that you do. You’re saying all the right things but I’m not sure you mean them. I get the feeling you’re scared of me.

The first step should be about us making time to work together. I know how busy you are - your workload is not for the fainthearted - but any successful relationship requires time and effort from both parties. That is what I am asking from you.

Implementing new technology isn’t easy because it requires learning new skills, adapting to new ways of working, and navigating new systems. Essentially, it’s about embracing change. Change is the pathway to improvement and if you want to enjoy the advantages that technology can provide, our relationship must change, step up a gear. We need to go from casual dating to being fully committed to one another. Trust me, I’ll make it worth your while ;-).

Yet deciding to do things differently isn’t going to be enough...Successful change requires ongoing management, as with any successful relationship.

Successful change is established by taking a long, hard look at your goals. What do you want? What can we achieve? How do we get there?

I’ve got a few suggestions to help improve our relationship: • Firstly, we need a solid foundation to build upon.

Get your ‘system of record’ in place. You call it Matter Management. Use it to capture as much data about what you and your human colleagues are doing. That will change the way you and I talk forever, for the better. Data is my love language. We can use it to track our progress and make

TECHNOLOGY

improvements over time. It’ll be challenging to change, but the most important one.

• Understand your “why”. Use the data and your knowledge and experience to identify your most pressing needs. Who is putting you under the most pressure? Why are they so stressed? What are they trying to achieve?

Keep asking questions until you’re certain you understand their problems as deeply as you understand your own.

Then come back and talk to me and together we can figure out how to make their legal problems go away as simply as possible. Simple is good. For example, I could automate a 16-step process and give you back hours every week.

Or even better, the process may force us to realise this process is silly or redundant; let’s just not do it anymore.

• We also need time to reflect and take stock, and we need to tell our story to make us accountable to ourselves and others. We need to think about the stories we want to tell and use them as the basis for the reporting and analysis I can do for you, which ultimately makes you look better to your organization. Go us.

• Always be selling. Sell the benefits that I can bring to the legal team and to the wider business. Remind yourself of your key objectives and you will reap the rewards of investing in change. Change management is benefits led.

• Keep it consistent. Try to find commonalities across your different types of work. Templates allow for consistent processes across the team. From an insights’ perspective, consistent data structure allows for apples versus apples comparison.

• Keep the set-up simple initially, and start using me - properly, with intent and discipline - and once you have identified what the predictable benefits will be. The sooner you start, the sooner you get real feedback from both the legal team and the wider business. The pain points of your current approach will continue to grow if you are waiting for the right moment because that moment may never come, similar to waiting for inspiration to strike - when lighting strikes twice, am I right?

• Just do it. Take the leap. Have faith that things between you and I will work out for the best. It may not be love at first sight, and there will be bumps along the way, but you and I are meant for each other.

So, what do you say? Shall we do it? I’m ready when you are. I’m waiting for you to give me a chance. I promise that one day you’ll look back and wonder how you ever thought it would be possible to go through life without me.

Yours, Technology 39

Thinking outside the box Embracing creativity as an in-house legal professional

by Chris McGavin

Pier Luigi Lucatuorto joined the industrial automation powerhouse Modula as their first in-house General Counsel. From his first day, Lucatuorto sought to disprove the perception that lawyers aren’t technical people, and in the process shifted that viewpoint from problematic observer to proactive problem-solver and business enabler.

At Modula, Lucatuorto was inspired to match the innovative approach taken by other departments within the company. He wanted to be seen as a key function within the business as opposed to merely a risk mitigator, and he was able to achieve this by implementing an innovative approach, promoting teamwork, mutual support, and knowledge exchanges with other departments. These innovations gave him a greater understanding of the company overall, from its culture to commercial process and goals.

This approach is particularly important given that innovative companies, industrial automation tech in Lucatuorto’s case, provide a constant stream of novel and

40

unforeseen problems to their General Counsel and quite often in areas in which there isn’t any developed law. Or, according to Lucatuorto, these issues “force a General Counsel to think outside the box or even without any box”.

Because of this, Lucatuorto believes an in-house legal professional should adopt an approach similar to non-legal professionals. Moving away from a strict ‘just-apply-thelaw’ mindset has enabled him to face the challenges of an industrial automation company in an agile and innovative manner.

At the core of Lucatuorto’s approach is the belief that creativity is the best value-add an in-house General Counsel can have. His creativity comes in the form of the solutions he provides, going so far as to completely reframing the role of GC. Lucatuorto is continually looking to fuel his creativity and draws inspiration through consultation with other colleagues, and ensuring he takes a proactive part at meetings where business development, intellectual property, and R&D strategies are discussed and reviewed.

It was this thinking that made Lucatuorto realize that as a General Counsel he needed to face challenges and drive his team with a holistic view of the business. In other words, reframing the role of GC from an administrator who oversees legal staff to an agile and open-minded

INNOVATION

INVIEW

Moving away from a strict ‘just-apply-the-law’ mindset has enabled him to face the challenges of an industrial automation company in an agile and innovative manner.

leader whose mission is to shift the legal team’s function in terms of culture and mindset to be an integral part of the business.

The benefits of this approach have been immense, resulting in increased recognition and understanding of his role by his colleagues who don’t have a legal background.

This has further enabled Lucatuorto to provide outsidethe-box solutions that better suit the business processes and context at Modula. All of which increases buy-in from key stakeholders and enables him to continue to innovate and match the constant rate of evolution of a disruptive tech company.

Lucatuorto’s final piece of the puzzle is utilizing legal tech to augment his processes. Greater efficiency helps to improve operations, increase productivity, and allows for less time to be spent on lower-value tasks. The result of implementing high-quality legal tech solutions is more time for creativity and innovation. “With less time spent in research, verification and repetitive activities, General Counsels are able to deliver fast decisions and to concentrate on the real added value of a legal department,” he says.

Lucatuorto’s story is a good illustration of the opportunities for in-house legal professionals to move into positions of thought leadership. There is a wealth of knowledge to be gained and value to be added from matching the rate of development and innovation in other departments. Much can be gained from following his example and thinking outside or maybe without the box.

Legal Project Management Legal Project Management (LPM) encompasses traditional project management practices in, you guessed it, a legal lens.

Shaun Plant, LawVu’s Chief Legal Officer was integral in designing Project Management Institute’s (PMI) definition, tools, and processes for the Legal Project Management community of practice. PMI defines a project as a “temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result.” If we apply a legal lens, let’s say it is any ‘matter’ proceeding with a defined time frame, scope, and resources.

The easiest way to define LPM is the creation of a defined project methodology, or shall we say matter methodology, that is broken down into four stages: initiation, planning, execution, and closure. Initiation determines the client’s needs and required engagements. Planning defines the scope, deliverables. Execution is the delivery of the project to milestones and budget, whilst mitigating any issues that arise. Closure improves delivery capability and client experience by capturing best practices and lessons learned.

Plant believes LPM helps lawyers to understand their clients’ needs and creates them a fit-for-purpose solution, by upending the traditional approach of incremental billing and producing a lengthy document of legal advice that may not serve the client.

“No one wants to pay for legal services”, says Plant.

LPM considers this by focusing on providing a legal service, not just finding a solution, whatever the cost. It regards the processes involved with client relationships; internal decision-making, stakeholder management, and communication. Every client engagement is a business service and the LPM process puts a handbrake on lawyers burning through their clients’ cash.

41

Kate Sherburn, Senior Legal Counsel, at Who Gives A Crap.

INVIEW

LEADERSHIP

What is legal leadership?

An interview with Kate Sherburn & Theo Kapodistrias No amount of future thinking and planning can prepare us for the reality of a situation, just as it can’t guarantee a foolproof plan. As such, the pathway to becoming a legal leader looks different for every individual, requiring unique skills and situations.

What constitutes legal leadership? One thing we know for sure is that it’s more than just legal depth, a culmination of hard and soft skills that result in a person who can effectively lead their legal team. Embracing digitization is as important as emotional intelligence. Communicating the value of legal to the ELT means as much as your ability to be creative and agile in your response to problems.

Bearing that in mind, the pathway to being an in-house legal leader is unique for every individual, despite sharing the common goal of being a GC or CLO. Kate Sherburn and Theo Kapodistrias discuss their journey to become legal leaders, the skills they think constitute a great legal leader, and offer advice for junior lawyers who have their eyes on the coveted positions of GC and CLO.

Did you always have the vision to become a legal leader (GC, Senior Legal Counsel)? If not, when did you decide you wanted this position?

KS: I knew from very early on that I wanted to work inhouse. I had taken a year off during uni to work as a paralegal in an in-house legal team and I loved every minute of it.

At that point, I wasn’t aiming particularly at legal leadership, however as time went on and I found myself in a role I loved, working at a company I felt very passionate about, that next step happened quite organically.

TK: When I entered the in-house legal space, I thought it would be excellent to try and figure out the path for becoming a legal leader and what it would mean to be in such a position. I think as I learned more about what it was like to be an in-house lawyer and the progression potential, the idea of being a GC or Chief Legal Officer was really

appealing and exciting to me. I wanted to prepare myself to potentially head in that direction.

What personal and professional attributes do you believe helped you move from in-house counsel to the GC position?

KS: The ability to build relationships is a big one. When you’re advising the team, trust is such an important factor - and that all starts with your relationships. Looking at the bigger picture - seeing where legal fits within the business as a whole and not as a standalone function - means we grow with the business.

TK: There were a few key skills: communication, collaboration, and strategy. Communication is a skill I am particularly passionate about. I believe it is one of the key things individuals need to continually work on to ensure they use their speaking and writing skills to assist others and to share complicated concepts in an easy-tounderstand format. Collaboration is an important skill as it is critical to work with others when in an in-house legal position, especially when you’re the General Counsel. It is so important to have open discussions with every other department as it is critical to have a trusted relationship with everyone who will need your support.

What advice would you give to in-house counsel with their eyes set on the position of GC or other legal leadership roles?

KS: Everything is a learning opportunity. Look at those that you admire and see what they do. Take on smaller leadership roles such as running a legal or cross-functional project, and gain experience on the job.

TK: It is important to understand the type of role that would excite you and what is required in it. Most senior legal positions encompass more than just technical legal expertise, also strategy, strong commercial acumen, excellent collaborative skills, and communication.

It’s important to develop a broad set of skills and take advantage of any learning opportunities which may be available. Other useful things are finding a mentor who 43

LEADERSHIP

INVIEW

you can speak with and learn from, and learn about other people’s journeys and what was right for them to get the opportunities available to them.

Does the responsibility that comes with being a legal leader require a skill set beyond legal expertise?

KS: Definitely. A technically excellent lawyer can still struggle with leadership. In the same sense, you don’t have to be the most technically excellent lawyer to be a brilliant legal leader. But you do need that excellence in your team somewhere, and you have to have enough knowledge to understand what the experts are saying and to know when you need to bring other people in. You must also be a great communicator, be open to new ideas, learn to listen really well, and above all, be approachable and trusted.

TK: Legal expertise is one thing, but being a legal leader requires much more. Dealing with internal and external stakeholders is essential, particularly because the role involves speaking with and working with so many people.

A technically excellent lawyer can still struggle with leadership.

How do you maintain a growth mindset?

KS: I try to learn something from everyone I meet.

I’m open to new ideas and love hearing about what others are doing. Not just other legal teams, but other businesses or teams outside of legal that might be finding better ways to do things. I am always open to being told my view is wrong, provided someone can show me why it’s wrong.

TK: It almost feels like second nature in an in-house position as there is always so much learning and development with every new issue you come across.

It is so important to always aim to be the best version of oneself, and to find opportunities that will stretch you. I find that saying yes to opportunities that present themselves to me has been an excellent way for me to learn and develop myself further.

What things did you do, show, prepare or prove in order to move up and become a GC? KS: I showed I was aware of my gaps and that I wanted to work on them. That was a conversation that started well before I was looking to move up into a more senior position. I’m constantly reassessing what skills I need to further develop and then seek assistance in developing them.

44

Theo Kapodistrias, General Counsel, at Upguard.

INNOVATION

Working smarter

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

Contract law was a headache for Electra Japonas, so she fixed it.

Electra Japonas is not afraid to break the mold, or more specifically create change in the incredibly traditional legal profession. Japonas is the co-founder and CEO of The Law Boutique (TLB) and co-founder of oneNDA, companies she created to find solutions to the “dysfunctional area of contract law,” as she bluntly but confidently states.

Contracts are a hindrance in Japonas’s view. Yes, they are completely necessary, but they are complex, often convoluted documents that create tangible headaches for their users and lawyers alike. Early in her career, Japonas worked in commercial and contract roles that leaned heavily on relationship management with commercial suppliers, the business itself, and of course the legal team.

In the context of fostering and nurturing relationships, contracts acted as a hindrance.

In the context of fostering and nurturing relationships, contracts acted as a hindrance.

Japonas moved across industries from Space to Tobacco and Entertainment but continued to find herself frustrated with the way lawyers deal with contracts. She says she developed a “constant conflict between what I was meant to do and what I thought was instinctively right, which was to build relationships. But contracts were not conducive to do that in the way that they were structured.”

Her frustration lay in the obvious inefficiencies of law, and the time in-house lawyers spend on menial tasks when they could be adding strategic value to the business.

“We can be sitting at the driving seat alongside the C-suite, advising them on things that are really going to matter, because as a lawyer you are uniquely placed in an organization,” says Japonas. Lawyers have what she calls a map view over the organization, combined with a brain that can quickly and effectively measure risk.

Something had to give, so Japonas created a solution, establishing the world’s first legal optimization company,

The Law Boutique (TLB). Japonas’s vision was to create a company that offers outsourced end-to-end contract management and legal operations services, freeing up the legal team from administrative red-lining work to focus on delivering value.

She didn’t stop there, however. Next on Japonas’s to-do list of reinventing the wheel was to analyze the contracts TLB was dealing with, and understand what is requiring the most legal time. She found that 63 percent of their agreements were NDA’s, but only seven percent of their revenue came from these agreements. In Japonas’s words, “a ridiculous amount of volume for very little return.” It seemed that creating bespoke NDAs was creating more trouble than it was worth, cue another problem that needed a solution.

In her brainstorming, Japonas took to LinkedIn to garner interest in creating one standard NDA across the legal industry and quickly received 35,000 views on her post.

It was then she knew she was on to something. With the vision of “empowering the legal community to create an NDA document that we all adopt as our own,” the company oneNDA began.

What is most perhaps most fascinating about oneNDA is not the solution it created (albeit that is a huge achievement), but the way it came about. Lawyers are incredibly adversarial, and as Japonas says “you often only find yourself talking to another lawyer if you are negotiating or settling a dispute.” Yet, oneNDA touched on a pain point shared amongst many lawyers and created the rare event where they took a peer-to-peer approach to find a solution.

A steering committee was formed with lawyers collaborating from private practice giants: Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Ashurst, Gilbert + Tobin, Norton Rose Fulbright, and Linklaters to name a few. Not to mention inhouse counsel from Google, Coca-Cola, Barclays, HSBC, UBS, and Deliveroo. One standardized NDA document was agreed upon to drive efficiency, and after feedback from a wider pool of 1000 lawyers, established for use. Japonas’ takeaway from this situation was that “if we took a step back and out of that adversarial environment in which we find ourselves, I think we can do some really amazing things together.”

45

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

INVIEW

The rise of the T-shaped lawyer

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

The term “T-shaped person” was first coined in a 1991 London newspaper editorial discussing jobs in computing.

The concept was that a T-shaped person has a particular depth of knowledge on a topic (being the vertical stroke of the T) and a breadth of knowledge on supporting disciplines that allows for collaboration (the horizontal stroke of the T). Although originally conceived to describe technology professionals, the term T-shaped is also pertinent to lawyers.

Fast forward to the 21st century where technology has revolutionized the traditional business process and demanded that lawyers possess multi-disciplinary skills to best meet their clients’ needs. But how? Lawyers are traditionally conservative when it comes to change due to the risk-adverse nature of their profession. As Michiganbased attorney R Amani Sathers commented: “They are considered laggards and luddites when it comes to any changes that might affect their practices.”

What are these non-traditional skills on the top of the T? Firstly, it is an array of soft skills, such as cross collaboration, innovative thinking, emotional intelligence, communication, project management, leadership and complex problem solving. Then there are the technical skills such as technology, data analytics, security, and commercial acumen.

This demand for an additional ‘T’ of knowledge boils down to the increasing demands of clients and the wider business world. Lawyers who can harness technology are able to provide efficient and more cost-effective services.

Possessing commercial knowledge allows the lawyer to have a genuine understanding of their client’s industry in which legal assistance is required. Couple this with soft

46

skills and you have a lawyer who is far more capable of aligning themselves to client needs, and helping them achieve better business outcomes.

Lawyers of the 20th century were I-shaped. The demand was simply for them to provide deep legal knowledge tailored to each client in the belief that every situation was unique. There was no requirement for lawyers to have a technological skill set. In fact, most had secretaries who would type their thoughts and even emails.

These days, clients are demanding a higher level of technological competency from their lawyers. They have no desire to pay by the six-minute increment for work that is started from scratch when technological systems can be embedded to create more efficient processes.

Data analytics allow lawyers to learn from their work, to tailor existing solutions to clients rather than working from scratch on every case. There are companies already revolutionizing traditional legal work practices in this manner.

But with today’s large firms cutting support staff, and paralegals some of the first to go, lawyers with technological skills are now able to hit the ground running, and are in high demand.

What exactly does technology in a legal context entail?

E-discovery, document automation and management, data storage and analytics, practice management and workflow software such as LawVu.

Data analytics allow lawyers to learn from their work, to tailor existing solutions to clients rather than working from scratch on every case.

D Casey Flaherty, Corporate Counsel at Kia Motors America, implemented a technology audit for legal firms that worked with Kia. The audit uncovered a lack of basic technology competence in lawyers, which in turn resulted in an unnecessary cost to the client, in this case Kia. The older generation of lawyers, who grew up before the integration of the computer and the internet into our everyday business practices, largely impact these findings.

However, millennial lawyers also show traits of technology avoidance. Law students tend to be more technology averse than, say, commerce students. Their field of study is literature-heavy and traditionally has not required anything other than developing a legal skill set. These old-school traditions need to change.

Mark Cohen, a lecturer at IE Law School, says the digital age “is reimagining the provider-customer dynamic and transforming how goods and services are bought and sold”. The legal industry is no stranger to this change and must adapt to a client-centric, tech-enabled model of work. Cohen says companies that have embraced a digital model have a stronger commitment to improving customer experience, access and loyalty by efficiently harnessing data.

Law students tend to be more technology averse than, say, commerce students. Their field of study is literature-heavy and traditionally has not required anything other than developing a legal skill set.

Ultimately, a T-shaped lawyer can work horizontally and is able to take on more responsibility, managing their own projects and providing leadership within the legal department. As individual roles are changing within legal departments, having this ability to work horizontally is crucial. One only needs to look to General Counsel now requiring deep legal knowledge, and the ability to steer, strategize and align a legal team to wider business objectives.

47

NURATRUE You’ve listened to your favourite song 1,000 times.

But we guarantee you’ve never really heard it.

Experience revolutionary Personalized Sound at nura.co

50

INVIEW

FEATURE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Artificial Intelligence: the backbone of an intelligent legal platform

by Ali Meredith

Whether you like it or not, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is here to stay and it is revolutionizing bulk legal work through automation. We delve into the birth of AI and how it can be harnessed to serve lawyers.

Creativity and innovation are at the core of human existence. Throughout history, we have invented technologies that have completely transformed our world.

From the plow to the wheel to the combustion engine; time and time again humanity has found itself on new frontiers of science, and society has adapted around these advancements. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the invention that will cause the biggest changes to our 21st-century lives, as it poses to automate jobs and industries. But what exactly is AI, and should we be rushing to embrace it?

The term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ was coined in the 1950s but it didn’t enter our vernacular until much more recently.

When we talk about AI, we’re referring to a non-human machine (that’s the ‘artificial’ part) that thinks as a human would (the ‘intelligence’ part). An image of humanlike robots living among us, ending civilization as we know it often springs to mind when people visualize AI, whereas, in reality, we needn’t be concerned. AI will likely never manifest to end humanity, however, for us lawyers it will still significantly disrupt our working lives. Here’s how.

One of the greatest shifts to the legal profession our generation has seen is the growth in demand for legal services from large corporations, and the resulting influx of lawyers into in-house roles to support that cost-effectively.

In the years leading up to the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008, Am Law 200 firms went on a hiring spree. At the time, legal software was rudimentary and so the provision of legal services was very manual. The growing economy 51

FEATURE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

INVIEW

meant that large corporations were consuming more and more legal advice, and the best way to win and profit from that work was to amass many top graduates from elite schools to complete the work.

When the GFC hit and the economy began to shrink, the demand for legal services was still there, but the budget was not. Corporations were no longer willing to pay such high rates for junior lawyers and instead began to grow their in-house teams and reduce their reliance on law firms. Large corporations today typically have teams of technology-savvy and commercially minded inhouse lawyers tasked with managing their external legal spending. A 2020 Thomson Reuters LDO survey into the demand for legal services during the pandemic shows that controlling those costs was identified as a high priority for the vast majority of legal departments.

Not all legal work is well suited to outsourcing, and corporations with a large in-house team can be selective about the types of tasks they choose to send externally.

This work often consists of a high volume of standard ‘run the company’ tasks that the team cannot scale to absorb themselves, alongside a smaller portion of bespoke ‘bet the company’ work that requires very specific legal expertise.

AI will most notably impact our daily lawyering by making us more efficient.

The Thomson Reuters LDO survey demonstrates how the demand for legal services from within corporations does not always align with what is passed on to law firms.

Law firm respondents reported a drop in demand for legal services during 2020, but that drop was not shared by clients who were inundated with work that “required an in-depth knowledge of their businesses and a very quick turnaround”, making it unsuitable for outsourcing.

For the legal work that is still being outsourced, while a traditional law firm may be the client-facing provider, in reality, the high volume and low complexity nature of the work, coupled with the very competitive market for providing legal services, means that the firm is probably not delivering those services in an entirely manual way anymore. How is this possible, when just a few years ago we relied so heavily on human power?

The most simple explanation is that advances in computing power and the cloud have made it feasible for software to use AI to complete some of the steps that a junior lawyer would typically take to complete a task manually.

52

Once cloud-hosted servers became readily available at an affordable cost, software provided through web applications hosted on the cloud began to be accepted as an alternative to locally installed software. This allowed legal software providers to take advantage of the availability of much greater power to create systems that could handle the complex operations needed to incorporate AI into software.

AI will most notably impact our daily lawyering by making us more efficient. For example, a lawyer can use a contract review system to analyze a contract in just a few minutes when they’d previously have taken much longer to print the document, highlight the key provisions, and then type their comments back into a summary. Time savings are priceless to an individual lawyer and legal department that are inundated with work, as such the potential for increased efficiency is very positive.

These AI-powered systems cannot complete legal tasks entirely automatically but instead, focus on using a lot of computing power to automate the most mundane parts of the task. A good example is finding a change of control provision in a contract. A human who was going about this task would need to know what a typical change of control provision looks like, what it is that makes it a change of control provision rather than something else, and then methodologically read through each page to find a provision that matches.

A system completing this task takes a similar approach.

First, it collects many examples of the change of control provision that it uses to determine the common characteristics of the provision. It then stores this set of criteria as an algorithm. When it needs to review a contract, it uses the algorithm to find the patterns that are common to the provision and systematically applies this algorithm to each paragraph in the contract until it finds the provision which matches.

In this scenario, using AI system to find provisions in contracts rather than doing so ourselves has disrupted our lives as lawyers, and when applied en masse will disrupt the legal industry as a whole. From an in-house consumer’s point of view, we still have a lawyer providing legal services but we have significantly reduced our demand for that lawyer’s time by redesigning the process, albeit relying heavily on a system to do so.

A 2018 LawGeex experiment pitted their AI-powered contract review system against lawyers reviewing the same agreements. In that study, the system completed the review of five contracts in 26 seconds with an accuracy of 94 percent, whilst the lawyers took 92 minutes with an average of 85 percent accuracy. On the first impression, this study seems to paint a rather grim picture for lawyers,

Key areas in which AI will be most visible to lawyers are the tasks that are low in complexity and high in volume. which is unfortunate because it is not reflective of how AI systems work in practice.

While we can expect systems to expedite certain parts of the process, infusing them with enough intelligence to make lawyers entirely redundant is not realistic, but more importantly, it is not desirable. In short, the most valuable thing to the client is not an entirely automated solution or an entirely human solution, it’s an educated and intelligent lawyer augmenting their processes with a smart system to save time when it makes sense to do so.

The key areas in which AI will be most visible to lawyers are the tasks that are low in complexity and high in volume. Contract review, e-discovery, and legal research are good examples of tasks that have the potential to be completed much more efficiently with intelligent systems.

The review of executed contracts necessary for M&A due diligence has already been made much more efficient by

contract review systems that can analyze huge quantities of contracts at speed. Analysis of pre-execution contracts is also an area to watch. According to Forbes, “companies are developing AI systems that can automatically ingest proposed contracts, analyze them in full using natural language processing (NLP) technology, and determine which portions of the contract are acceptable and which are problematic.”

A much more contentious use case is in the potential use of systems to predict outcomes in court proceedings. By analyzing data from past cases, systems can theoretically utilize supervised machine learning to forecast future results. Whether we’d want them to is a different question.

For those of us who work in-house, we are perfectly placed to take advantage of the benefits of intelligent systems, both in-house and in the work that we outsource to law firms. In-house legal teams are not selling their services back to the business by the hour and so any system that can help them work more efficiently is an easy sell. Asking external counsel to implement the same systems to reduce the cost of the services they’re providing is a more difficult proposition. To get the most from law firms we need to empathize with the change we’re asking from them and hold ourselves up to those same standards we’re imposing.

53

FEATURE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

The changing legal landscape: how AI is helping to redefine roles in legal

by Ali Meredith

Why do people choose to become a lawyer?

For some, it is the dream of changing the world through human rights law, for others it is the desire to make their mark in business, working in high profile mergers and acquisitions. Whatever the intention, most students are drawn to the law by the academic challenge it presents, the logic and strategic thinking it demands, and a chance to make a real impact on a said community.

Where previously a team of junior lawyers would have manually reviewed documents for discovery, now they can use e-discovery systems that incorporate AI.

Yet the reality for many practising lawyers is that much of their daily work is spent on mundane and repetitive tasks, especially for juniors. Legal Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems stand to shake things up, as AI has the potential to automate low-value, high-frequency tasks and create efficiency.

Where previously a team of junior lawyers would have manually reviewed documents for discovery, now they can use e-discovery systems that incorporate AI. These systems allow them to review a sample of the total set of documents and extrapolate their findings over the remainder. Due diligence for mergers and acquisitions is another area that benefits from AI, where previously lawyers would have manually read every contract, they can now use systems that ingest the contracts, automatically review each one, and flag those that are likely to contain risky clauses.

Corporations have customarily sourced their legal services exclusively from elite law firms, but this is beginning to change. Over the past decade, technology has gradually improved and many tasks that did require outsourcing to firms can now be completed much more quickly with intelligent systems.

These AI systems are not advanced enough to make lawyers entirely redundant and likely never will be, rather they aim to create more efficient work practices. AI systems excel in automating the aspects of a legal task that are repeatable and require little thought, for example, machine learning can work quickly to find key pieces of information in emails, contracts, or other documents.

54

Cost savings from utilizing advanced legal software systems can be enormous when they’re applied to the right case, and so their availability has put more and more pricing pressure on the legal market. Consequently, law firms are having a tough time competing for spots on top corporate panels against competitors who are utilizing systems to drive down their prices. Barclays significantly changed how they conduct their panel review in 2018.

“Being a good technical lawyer is now not enough,” says

INVIEW

Lawyers will always be the critical component of legal teams, but because the ambit of legal services is now far broader, they need to develop a different set of skills to those that they had previously.

Stephanie Hamon, Barclays Managing Director and Head of External Engagement in the publication The End of the Panel Review.

Barclays now assess prospective legal service providers against a broad range of criteria such as innovation and diversity and other corporations are following their lead.

Where previously, the competition was limited to other elite law firms, a study published by Worldwide Legal Research shows that corporations are extending invitations to a wider range of legal service providers including individual counsel, barristers’ chambers, and alternative legal service providers.

The Big Four are notoriously early adopters of up-andcoming technology. The Financial Times details that they have begun to make their weight felt in the legal tech space by handpicking executives from successful legal tech start-ups to join their ranks. This tactic is paying off, as in April, Deloitte won a position on Vodafone’s legal panel alongside the law firm Latham & Watkins. When discussing the adoption of legal tech in The Financial Times, David Edelheit, Chief Digital and Transformation Officer at UnitedLex, put it bluntly, “Legal professionals that hold on to the old way of doing things are offering up their lunch in the process.”

In this environment, law firms have little choice but to respond. 2021 has seen many top-tier law firms publicly invest in technology solutions, hire technology experts for new AI projects, or launch their own technology solutions.

Allen and Overy have recently hired their largest cohort to date into their legal tech incubator, Fuse. Clifford Chance has set up their own suite of automated documents to help start-ups with their legal solutions and Baker McKenzie is hiring experts in machine learning and the law to lead a project with their AI partner Spark Beyond. These ventures are much more than virtue signaling, they are

FEATURE: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

a real investment in technology and they present real opportunities for commercially minded lawyers to change the legal landscape.

A legal services team that hasn’t explored technology, and consists entirely of traditional lawyers will be ill-equipped to implement a complex data-driven system. Just as we’ve adapted in-house teams to use new systems and to work more closely alongside colleagues in other business units, the most efficient legal service providers have a diverse team of technologists, project managers, data scientists, software developers, and solution engineers who work alongside the lawyers. The value of these professionals lies in their skill-set and ability to rethink legal processes, implement intelligent systems, and manage legal projects at scale.

Communicating across domains is challenging, and so throwing together a bunch of lawyers and a couple of technologists at the last minute won’t produce the best results. Rather, lawyers and technologists need to listen to one another. For instance, creating a process that is more compelling and efficient than your competitors’ needs a lawyer who can explain how a legal process works to a technologist, who can then map the process, and find the parts which can be automated, and find the best tools to do so. While a lawyer doesn’t need to know the inner workings of a software system, and a software engineer doesn’t need to know how the regulation applies to a particular use case, to deliver a seamless service both need to build up a basic understanding of the other’s domain. It’s only by this type of collaboration that teams will be equipped to deliver a sustainable solution at a competitive price point.

Becoming a ‘T-shaped’ and technology-able lawyer has never been easier. For lawyers working in-house, a good first step is to spend some time talking to people in other areas of the business such as marketing, sales, strategy, or data. Ask about the tools they use, and how they implemented them. Connect with the legal tech community by following some legal tech thought leaders on LinkedIn or Twitter, and do some research into the types of legal tech systems that are available. A great place to start is by following Artificial Lawyer which has excellent coverage of key legal technology players and events. Another fantastic resource is Legal Evolution which has a wealth of high quality and well-informed content on the state of the market.

55

Making the move in-house: five key lessons from the first five months

by Megan Elizabeth Gray

What is the transition like when moving in-house? We take a look at the early months.

Making the move in-house is every private practice lawyer’s dream, right? Shorter hours, less stress, more predictability. But what if the transition is a little trickier than expected?

When I moved in-house, it was after nearly 10 years in the corporate transactional team at a Magic Circle law firm in London plus a lengthy maternity leave with my first baby coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic lock down in England. I figured, if I could handle all of that, I’ve got this.

Cue surprise.

There is an expression that is very apt. It’s called “drinking from the fire hose.” This is how it felt. There were so very many people to meet and so very much to learn.

On my first or second day (blurry memories), my boss (who I will say is just fantastic) ran through about 15 “projects” 56

(or “matters” or “things” – still unclear about the in-house terminology) that were within our “remit” (or “work load” or “someone has to do it so why not us”). As I tried to keep up, taking notes frantically, questions swirled through my head like... But which should I work on first? What are these deadlines? Who are these for? Where do I start?

Lesson One Start where you are. Just go for it. Dig in, read what’s there, apply your brain. It may not fit neatly within what you’ve done in the past, or be as structured, but you must back yourself to figure it out. As author Marie Forleo said, everything, in fact, is “figureoutable.” And when you’re feeling overwhelmed, take a deep breath, and, if nothing else, acknowledge the incredible learning experience you are having.

A few days passed and I remember still feeling overwhelmed. I felt like maybe this was a bit more than I bargained for. I made peace with the idea that if the “soul” purpose of this job was to get me on a new path outside of

INVIEW

Be there to be there. As an in-house lawyer, you are not a collection of the hours you bill, but rather of the contributions you make.

INSIGHT

Lesson Three Ask the questions. Ask all the questions you have. Ask the question even if you believe everyone else knows the answer. (Chances are, they don’t.) Asking questions is the way to uncover what’s really going on, and also what may be in your blindspot (ie, what you don’t know you don’t know). Every time I hear, “Good question,” which is often, I think to myself, “I am on the right track here.” And don’t forget that your asking questions could also awaken ideas in others.

law firm life, I was okay with it. But was I? In the back of my mind, I also had a vision of myself, many years in the future and still at my current company, speaking to law students about my career and how I felt like I wanted to quit within the first couple of days and how grateful I was to stick it out for the career successes and joys it reaped.

My confidence expanded. I could see how much I was growing, professionally as well as personally. I began to push past what felt like fear and offer my view on something, even if I wasn’t completely sure. I could see how people were looking to me, coming to me, for what I thought.

So I spoke to my grandmother to ask for her time-honored wisdom. She and my grandfather were immigrants to America from the former Yugoslavia, and had more than their fair share of challenges. She told me about one job my grandfather had, early on, as a chef in New York. He arrived for his first day of work and the restaurant’s manager told him, “Here’s the menu, here’s the stove, here’s the food – the rest is yours.” That was it! My grandfather came home that night saying he couldn’t do it. But, he willed himself to try. Just try. He did, and he later ended up laughing about his initial reaction after he learned the job and realized how capable he was at doing it.

Lesson Four

Lesson Two It’s okay not “to know” at first. Write it on a post-it note: No one knows exactly what they’re doing, either. As humans we tend to want to avoid (or run from) situations that make us feel uncomfortable. We like our comfort zone because, well, it feels comfy. It doesn’t push us, or force us to grow. A good friend suggested to me, “What if you just sit with your discomfort for now?” In other words, what if I just acknowledged the discomfort, allowed myself to feel uncomfortable, and stuck with it anyway? Imagine what beautiful transformations could occur! I embraced this new attitude as I willed myself to go with the flow (not always easy for a lawyer) and see where it took me.

Cue surprise, again.

I began to feel in a bit of a groove. In connecting with others and taking little actions I felt were right, I gained confidence. I began to know who was in what team, and what team did what, and what to focus on as priorities.

I forced myself to speak up when I didn’t know and approached my work as I believe a detective would approach theirs: be open to receiving all information, do the background research, and ask the questions you feel you should ask.

Be there to be there. As an in-house lawyer, you are not a collection of the hours you bill, but rather of the contributions you make. Contributions can be measured both in the practical outputs as well as every time you open your mouth to offer a view or an opinion. This is the value in-house lawyers bring. This value is about progress, not perfection. You don’t need to offer perfection; you need to offer movement, well-considered views, and an ability to get things done.

Now, a few months in, I am really enjoying it. I enjoy being able to use my brain power to help the business solve problems and further our strategic goals globally. I love feeling like an integral part of a large team comprised, in addition to lawyers, of people in other areas of the business, each bringing their own expertise and experience to bear.

Lesson Five Communicate efficiently. Identify for yourself the purpose behind any communication you are delivering and synthesize your message accordingly. The business most wants clear, finely tuned, practical, and consciously distilled advice, and is trusting the legal team to provide it.

Being relied on in this way as in-house counsel feels like a privilege, and I am excited to see where this journey takes me.

Megan Elizabeth Gray is a lawyer, writer, and advocate for women. She is currently Associate Counsel at Condé Nast, after ten years in private practice at a top global law firm. She is mum to Lilly and on her last day of maternity leave published her first book, Enjoy Your Life: Thoughts for Awakened Daughters from Concious Mothers. All proceeds are donated to domestic violence charities.

57

Your loo roll can change the world It's true! Our comfy loo rolls are made with 100% recycled fibres or sustainable bamboo, aren't wrapped in plastic, and help provide clean water and proper toilets for people who need them.

B Corp™ certified for environmental impact

50% of profits donated to charity

Order at whogivesacrap.org

100% plastic free rolls & carbon neutral shipping

VALUE

Legal doesn’t need to be left behind

by Connor Amor-Bendall

Nicholas Bliablias is a Senior Legal Operations Executive at LawVu, and previously a law firm partner in private practice. He believes the intangible nature of legal outputs is largely responsible for the legal function being left behind by the organization.

Legal output - work produced by in-house teams, law firms, and attorneys alike - is cerebral, and as a result can be perceived as being unquantifiable. For example, where an automobile manufacturer knows they can produce 25 cars in “x” days, a legal team may not have the same data as to how long a contract will take to negotiate or litigation may last. There are often no quantifiable benchmarks to say contract negotiation typically takes a week or that an employment dispute takes one year. This ties back to the incarceration of legal data and the need to change that.

It is Bliablias’ opinion that data is the solution to this problem. Specifically, the capturing of historical data and using it as a benchmark to make reasonable estimations of the amount of time a particular matter should take.

He says many industries have already introduced such a system, where a fixed price for legal work is determined before engagement, limiting any further invoicing above the agreed price or hourly rate. Legal departments could benefit from taking this approach with their own internal work.

Bliablias highlights a subtle but significant distinction between the optics of in-house teams and private practice.

Law firms bill their clients for the time it takes to complete a project. In-house teams are serving, usually, one client - the organization in which their department sits. This means that usually there is no “client” to pay for the hours of time private practice attorneys spend on a matter.

While attorneys who are in-house and in private practice are equally striving for perfection in their work, in-house teams are also striving for efficiency. Contract turnaround times and the early resolution of pre-litigation matters, as a business decision, are examples of this. There is another characteristic inherent in these examples. They are datarich and quantifiable.

Law firms were early adopters of tech, from practice management software to legal research tools. Clients were

dissatisfied with the price of legal services so software that enabled lawyers to work more efficiently was crucial in allowing them to provide the same level of service but in a more efficient manner. “This sounds kind of ridiculous, but rather than walking down the hall and going into a big law library and sifting through a bunch of old dusty, heavy books, we could just make two or three clicks on a computer and get the same answer,” says Bliablias. The result? Billing a client for one hour of research as opposed to ten.

On the other hand, having one client has left in-house teams at a disadvantage in adopting tech to streamline their practices as they didn’t necessarily have to worry about clients refusing to pay their bills. Yet lo and behold, the organization doesn’t want to be wasting money on an antiquated, inefficient legal department. The tide is turning as in-house teams integrate digital workspaces, matter management, e-billing, and contract AI. But until we use these tools to harness data and analyze insights, in-house teams won’t meet their optimum efficiency.

“Legal isn’t a cost-center. It’s a cost saving.” These are the wise words of Bliablias, who believes that if we use numbers to educate the business on what legal does, we can change the way it is perceived. Data can show reduced turnaround times, estimates of potential liability based on historical performance, litigation cost savings, and many other ways the legal function saves the resources of the business from multiple perspectives, including financial, human, and reputational. It may not be directly making the business money, but it’s saving them from a potential legal bill down the road.

“With a for-profit business, the idea, generally, is to make money,” says Bliablias “Your CFO wants to see numbers, that’s their job. That story is better told through a dashboard that quantifies the reduced amount of time certain contracts close or how much money the team has saved on litigation rather than a verbal explanation.”

According to Bliablias, the legal department needs to recognize that they can be more than just a legal partner, also a business partner to their organization. If they adopt the mindset of not only avoiding risk but figuring out how to elevate the business, a better relationship with the C-Suite will inevitably ensue. Harnessing data to create benchmarks, more efficient practices and shed light on legal’s operations, is taking actionable steps towards being a business partner.

59

Introducing our InView champions Our community champions program follows the lives of legal ops leaders leading the charge and the change in their organizations, hearing, in their words, what they are practising, what change they are making and what they are thinking about.

Know someone who would make a great champion? Nominate them by emailing: inview@lawvu.com

60

We explore the following themes with our champions and community:

Insights Business Technology Remote Collaboration

Value

Trust

Mindset

Change

Innovation Working

Balance

Communication

Career Development

INVIEW

CHAMPIONS

Dr Pier Luigi M Lucatuorto

Alex Petrie

Violet

Dr Pier Luigi M Lucatuorto is driven by legal-tech innovation, with a PhD in IT Law. He is the GC, Corporate Secretary, and Supervisory Board Member at Modula S.P.A, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of automated storage and warehousing systems.

Alex Petrie’s bread and butter are the infrastructure and property industries.

As the Senior Legal Counsel at James Hardie Building Products APAC, Petrie is passionate about process improvement for both the legal team and the business.

Violet is our figurative community leader.

She embodies the curiosity to explore, think deeply and be a provocateur.

She holds the space for in-house legal professionals to be innovative, create opportunities, and calls forth new schools of thought which nudges the industry forward as best practice is created.

Jason Xu

Kate Sherburn

Shaun Plant

Jason Xu loves the intersection between in-house legal and tech. You’ll find him streamlining ways of working as the Legal Operations Specialist and Junior Corporate Counsel at Veolia Australia and New Zealand.

Kate Sherburn is the Legal Beagle (Senior Legal Counsel) at the growing Australian start-up, Who Gives A Crap. As the sole in-house counsel to the company, she wears many hats and is incredibly skilled at getting the job done.

The fearless CLO here at LawVu, Plant has a wealth of project management and governance knowledge that he harnesses to revolutionize the typical GC role into a valued business partner, aka CLO.

Theo Kapodistrias

Helen Doukas

Stephen Drysdale

Theo Kapodistrias is fascinated by the intersection of the law and our data and privacy. He is the General Counsel at UpGuard, a cyber security company.

Kapodistrias is also a passionate keynote speaker and loves to provide training to help emerging leaders be seen, heard, and make an impact.

Helen Doukas is passionate about legal acting as a valued business partner, maximizing organizational performance.

She is Head of Legal and Regulatory at Airways and has helped to steer the business through stormy skies as the aviation industry felt the brunt of the pandemic.

Stephen Drysdale is the Lead In-House Counsel at Zuru Group, a billion-dollar Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) company. Drysdale works across time zones and markets, managing a team in Hong Kong and New Zealand.

61

FUTURE

INVIEW

21st century legal with Jason Xu

by Connor Amor-Bendall

Legal departments are changing, and with it, a new breed of lawyer is on the team, bringing legal technology, new ways of working and more efficient processes. A growth mindset and openness to all things digital and change is critical for future success, and relations with the rest of the business.

The legal profession is no anomaly to this change, although sometimes it likes to think so. Legal AI and workflow systems now exist that have the capacity to change the way we practice law, creating more efficient and accurate legal practitioners.

Change is inevitable, no matter how much we resist it.

Technological advancements of recent decades have reshaped society on a macro and micro level. The way we do business has become digitized. Covid-19 has changed and accelerated everything three fold, which has made us the most technology enabled workforce ever.

When faced with a lawyer who is averse to change, Xu has found it helpful to highlight the benefits that come with embracing change while also pointing out the disadvantages of remaining the same and operating from a place of stagnation. He says: “By explaining the logic behind the change and the benefits that’ll arise for the legal practitioner themselves as well as the broader business, I’ve been able to not only convince but motivate and even excite the lawyer-est lawyer to embrace change and be more agile.”

Jason Xu, the Junior Corporate Counsel, and Legal Operations at Veolia Australia and New Zealand, is all about embracing change to become a more agile legal practitioner. He talks about learning to be uncomfortable, skill sets for the modern lawyer, and lawyering better.

Change in this circumstance is often to do with technology.

“Businesses have become increasingly technologically agile and operate in the digital space,” says Xu. “The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated technological adoption as companies were forced to learn how to work effectively

62

INVIEW

FUTURE

digitally. What this means for lawyers, and particularly in-house legal teams, is that they need to play catch up. If the company is driven by digital solutions, its legal team needs to be able to both understand how the wider business operates and adopt legal technology that is as efficient.”

According to Xu, a good example is how Veolia’s utilization of legal artificial intelligence to review low-value, mundane contracts in minutes, has created significant time savings and given the legal team more time to focus on high-value, more complicated legal matters.

The instant and most pronounced effect of technological change on the legal profession is an increase in efficiency.

Defined as achieving maximum productivity with minimum wasted effort or expenses, efficiency in actuality will help the legal department to achieve maximum productivity with little wasted - not least - effort or costs. This is especially important in a world where in-house legal teams are being asked to do more with less.

Leveraging technology can be simple, and at little to no cost. Xu points out that basic changes to increase productivity can be as simple as building a legal request intake form on Slack or Airtable, using free tools like ‘Grammarly’ to help with checking for grammatical/typing errors in Microsoft Word and Google Docs, or harnessing LawVu to optimize the legal team’s workflow and pipeline.

“Once the legal team or business is ready, you can look towards legally tailored solutions that meet the logistic pain points of the team, such as matter/contract management and digitization, or e-billing. Then perhaps go down the path of integrating legal AI such as contract review software that aids the actual legal work itself.”

Xu also says, “lawyers need to learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” In other words, it is easy to find comfort within the logic and the confines of the law, yet

Jason Xu, Junior Corporate Counsel, and Legal Operations, at Veolia.t

this does not always serve the best interests of the wider business or clients. “For the legal team to deliver value, they must adapt to digital ways of working and realize that relying on email as a workflow tool, printing file after file and refusing to harness automation, is doing their clients and organization a disservice.” The hard truth is no one wants to pay for a manual task that could be automated and save valuable time.

“Becoming technologically proficient will not be easy for every lawyer, and it falls on organizations to provide training for their legal team.

What can be done on an individual level, however, is changing one’s perspective to one that is open to change.”

Xu’s passion for pushing oneself to be uncomfortable is the mindset that best serves change. “The reality is that operating in one’s comfort zone is often operating in a state of stagnation. When the nature of your work is to serve a client or business, seeking out ways to provide better services is crucial.”

What it means to be a lawyer today is vastly different to what it was 30 years ago. As such, recognizing the need to embrace technology to be more efficient, accurate and best serve one’s clients, is paramount.

63

Stephen Drysdale, In-House Counsel at ZURU

In-house counsel in an entrepreneurial business

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

The working lives of in-house lawyers and private practitioners are markedly different.

What about the differences between the role of an in-house lawyer in an entrepreneurial business and a standard corporate?

Lawyers like process. They often operate in a hierarchical environment with a clear delegation of responsibility and a pathway to follow, both in their everyday legal proceedings and their career progression. Whether working in private practice or in-house, a hierarchical structure of roles generally exists that allows junior lawyers to slowly edge their way deeper into the waters of responsibility.

Being a lawyer in an entrepreneurial business, however, turns this model on its head. When Stephen Drysdale, 64

In-House Counsel at ZURU (the multi-billion dollar toy company), joined the company straight out of law school, he was thrown into the deep end. Reporting directly to the CEO and COO, the usual sign offs and ‘hoop jumping’ that most lawyers need from the department to get things done, didn’t exist. As such, things move much more quickly, which Drysdale puts down to the nature of the entrepreneurial family business. “The founders have their teeth into everything, they want to know what’s going on,” he says. “They’re across the commercial side of things and they’ll jump on sales calls.”

When working for a business that has a founder involved, their passion and personal investment creates a different sort of work environment - one where the expectation for the capability and enthusiasm of their employees is ever-present. Where a large company run by a board of directors may be primarily concerned with the balance

INVIEW

Where a large company run by a board of directors may be primarily concerned with the balance sheet, a founder will care for the continuous quality and improvement of their product or service, and in ZURU’s case being the best and biggest toy company in the world.

sheet, a founder will care for the continuous quality and improvement of their product or service, and in ZURU’s case being the best and biggest toy company in the world.

What does this mean for the lawyers of an entrepreneurial business? It creates an environment where the in-house team is expected to add value to the wider business. As Drysdale says, it’s “getting involved in the weeds of the business”. The legal team will always have their primary tasks to manage regarding contracts, compliance, and risk, but the founders don’t want to know about that.

Rather, they want to see the legal team being proactive, finding ways to add value, save costs or mitigate the risk that isn’t the stock standard legal tasks.

For ZURU, that added value is in intellectual property (IP) protections - the legal team is constantly dealing with the counterfeit of their products. This means actively taking down counterfeit listings off Amazon, seizing counterfeit assets or dealing with counterfeit production. Ultimately saving the company money and market reputation, which is highly valued by the executive team. As Drysdale describes it, “making sure you zone in on the key priorities to the executive level and driving those home, while in the background achieving everything else (standard legal content) that needs to be done.”

Those expectations for value also require proactive individuals. Because entrepreneurial businesses are fast-moving and high-growth, it means process and order aren’t always present. To mitigate risk before it exacerbates into a legal issue, an in-house lawyer

BUSINESS

can’t wait for work to land on their desk. “I go sniffing actual work out,” says Drysdale. “Looking for work and understanding how the business works and where there are risk profile exposures. If you sit in that legal silo, you’re doing a disservice to the business.”

Another unique aspect of being a lawyer in an entrepreneurial business, is the way in which teams operate. Drysdale is based in Auckland, New Zealand, but most of his team are in China, including his 2IC, ZURU’s IP portfolio manager. Being part of an innovative and fast-paced company means harnessing and accepting technology to improve ways of working. ZURU demonstrates this in their early adoption of remote working.

Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic tipped the corporate world on its head, with companies forced to rethink the typical bums-on-seats mandate, smaller and more agile companies had realized the benefits of a remote work environment some time ago. While these benefits ultimately mean more satisfied employees, they also require employees to be on board with embracing technology and working in a digital age. For instance, ZURU uses LawVu to streamline their in-house legal team’s work.

The legal team itself may look different to that in a big corporation. They often operate more laterally and with far more responsibility handed to junior employees. This can be confronting as they don’t have the protection of more senior lawyers to defer to. Drysdale was approached by the founders of ZURU directly during his first week, quickly learning that this was the new normal. These lateral teams also embrace non-typical skill sets in their staff.

For example, Drysdale’s 2IC has a degree in translation yet manages the company’s global IP portfolio. She joined the company through the graduate program and moved to legal. Drysdale says: “She’s probably the biggest asset in that team to date. By considering people with a nonlegal background for roles that don’t require a practising certificate you are widening the pool of talent you can hire from. People who have diversity and experience ultimately strengthen the team.”

Bearing in mind the expectations to provide value, to be proactive, embrace technology and to work laterally, an entrepreneurial in-house lawyer needs resilience above all else. Entrepreneurial businesses are on a ride of risk and reward, and they can be chaotic for those along on the journey. “It takes a certain resilience to deal with the amount of crap that’s coming at you all at once, and from multiple directions,” says Drysdale. He wouldn’t change it for the world.

65

Transforming data into insights

by Connor Amor-Bendall

Data expert Ben Payne explains getting from data to insights in the in-house legal team.

law, and this variety of experience gives him an invaluable comprehension of how businesses of different industries can use data to their advantage.

Data, information, knowledge, insights. Without an explanation it isn’t clear how to distinguish the difference between these terms.

Payne has broken down the insights triangle for us, providing clarity as to the steps required to obtain insights for an in-house legal team.

Ben Payne is the data and analytics guru at LawVu, and his forte is taking clients on the journey of harnessing data to end up with business insights. Payne has worked across multiple sectors, from power to dairy and now in-house

First is data, which is raw information. Data could be a number, a color, a letter, a binary yes/no answer. Although we constantly produce and record data, it cannot be understood without context.

Insights

66

Insights is the ability to connect the dots between disparate information and knowledge enabling understanding. Insights allow for knowing how something works on top of how it works.

Knowledge

Knowledge is information that has been organized and processed to convey comprehension and expertise as to how something works.

Information

Information is data that has had context applied, making it both meaningful and useful.

Data

Data is conceived of as symbols or signs. It has no meaning or value because it is without context and interpretation.

INVIEW

Context creates information. For example, once we know the number seven means seven matters or seven contracts, we understand what the data represents.

Making connections between information leads us to knowledge. We can organize information and see what is happening.

Insights provide the ability to connect disparate pieces of knowledge - think connecting the dots - to understand why something is happening. Insights allow us to predict future happenings.

As an example, a vendor has multiple claims regarding a product defect: this is knowledge. If the legal team can use data to understand what is causing this defect to occur, that’s insights. The legal function can then take efficient action, such as suggesting to the company that it change the manufacture of that product to create one that is more viable and that will prevent future claims. This is of benefit to the company, saving it from potential future losses.

Essentially, insights allow going beyond merely fixing issues to preventing them.

Insights also tie into two key metrics, the speed of decision-making and the efficacy of decision-making.

As businesses move up the pyramid of data, information, knowledge, and insights, they can make decisions faster and more accurately.

Payne points out that making a business decision based upon data such as numbers is hard. “The efficacy of decision-making is probably going to be quite poor as well because you’re taking guesses as to what’s happening.”

As we go up the pyramid to information, things are not much better. You have more context as to what the numbers mean, but that isn’t enough.

Speed of decision making

Insights

Knowledge

Data

Information

Efficacy of decision making

INSIGHT

Insights provide the ability to connect disparate pieces of knowledge - think connecting the dots - to understand why something is happening. Insights allow us to predict future happenings.

Once a business reaches the knowledge stage, there’s an acceleration in speed and efficacy of decision-making as you have more clarity. Dashboards may inform a legal team of how many contracts are open or how many disputes are being logged.

At the insights stage, decisions are being made at optimum speed and efficacy. Returning to our product defect example, if you are armed with the knowledge as to why disputes keep arising and what is causing such a defect, you can eliminate the problem.

Payne says most in-house legal teams he deals with are only operating in the “information” phase, meaning they are reactive rather than proactive and not nimble in their decision-making.

A huge driver of an in-house team’s motivation for moving to the insights stage is to demonstrate their value to the business. Operating at an insights level means you can say “last month we closed x amount of disputes, saving x dollars of potential liability”. Arming yourself with this level of information means the business will start to see its legal team in a different light - rather than being a handbrake, you become a business partner.

“The legal team can start guiding the business beyond just contracts and lawsuits to ‘if we can enforce these decisions, we won’t have these disputes, and we can reduce overload and make strategic business decisions around contracts agreements’,” says Payne.

During your in-house team’s insights journey, it is important to clearly distinguish the goals you want to achieve as a team and as a company. Think about which decisions you’re aiming to make on a daily, monthly, or quarterly basis are dependent on insights. Without direction, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that is recorded and readily available to be processed as insights. Having a purpose allows you to filter what is relevant in your in-house team’s direction.

67

INVIEW

Sam Kidd, Founder and CEO, at LawVu.

Why you should adopt a legal workspace vs a point solution

by Connor Amor-Bendall

Legal leaders are unknowingly creating a headache for themselves by adopting multiple point solutions and inadvertently having to use, manage and integrate multiple software platforms into their business.

Technological advancements are supposed to make life easier - which they do - but the integration and adoption of digital solutions can cause problems. Imagine managing and using multiple point solutions during your day-to-day work - that’s a migraine - and the reality for most legal operations teams.

Legal operations as a role is still in its infancy; in-house teams are embracing and coming to terms with this new role. The general purpose of legal operations is to create efficiency, streamlining the high-frequency, low-value work 68

done by in-house legal teams, allowing lawyers to spend their time and energy on more important things.

Yet the conception of the legal operations era has come with a feast of niche legal point solutions, from document management, contract management, and e-billing software, which all create more accurate, efficient legal operations. At the outset, the onboarding of these legal point solutions to an in-house team seems like a foolproof idea, but the reality is that managing multiple tech platforms can be convoluted and inefficient.

An ecosystem of standalone technologies makes it near impossible to integrate them, firstly, to collect structured data, and then report across the various tools in a meaningful way. It’s a common mistake to think that different tech tools can talk to each other, as Instagram and Facebook do. Those apps are owned by the giant Zuckerberg entity, whereas novel legal tech solutions are generally independent and not configured to share data or interact with other platforms.

INVIEW

TECHNOLOGY

There are third-party BI tools that can do this, but this requires significant configuration and the onboarding of another point solution. With an end-to-end platform approach, seamless data is sharing across the platform, which can easily be surfaced within the same platform to drive better decision-making and easier reporting.

Lawyers On Demand has added to this narrative, saying, “Avoid too many point solutions. A perennial challenge across all functions – not just legal – is to ensure the shortterm solutions don’t consistently override longer-term strategy.”

According to Sam Kidd, LawVu CEO, the true value lies in a platform that has modules designed to a) work together, and b) specifically tailored to in-house lawyers. “People in a legal operations role often get stuck with onboarding and training tasks as various point solutions are implemented across the team. Yet spending time training people to use multiple interfaces is creating redundant work when you could use one.”

Data collection, management, and tracking are a huge benefit that comes with using one technology platform.

Kidd describes legal data as unquantifiable, “This also feeds into the fact that legal is probably one of the largest collectors of data across the enterprise but, equally, probably one of the largest incinerators as well. here is so much information that isn’t being collected and reported on.”

This incarceration of legal data is a huge issue but ironically it presents a huge opportunity for the optimization of the legal team. If legal could understand their key metrics and create a data journey, the team can pivot from being a reactive business unit to a proactive one.

Security is also strengthened by the use of a single-source technology platform. Legal teams hold incredibly sensitive company information regarding litigation, employees, employment issues, and sensitive IP, which ultimately is a risk. Protecting this data is critical, especially when it is vulnerable and stored digitally. Point solutions are generally secure software tools, yet the risk lies in the internal compliance required to manage multiple security statuses, bug fixes, and software updates. With a platform approach, you get integrated and consistent end-to-end business processes throughout all modules in the platform, saving your security team a massive headache and eliminating human error risk.

This brings us to customer support. When dealing with multiple point solutions you inevitably end up dealing with multiple providers, which can cause issues down the line.

Although vendors promise legacy products they have

Lawyers On Demand has added this narrative: “Avoid too many point solutions. A perennial challenge across all functions – not just legal – is to ensure the short-term solutions don’t consistently override longer-term strategy.” either merged with or acquired, there can be disjointed customer support for these products as they weren’t designed to work harmoniously with their platform. This can cause migraines for troubleshooting, onboarding, training, and maintenance in the future.

Scalability is another point to consider when deciding to integrate into one platform. As discussed, security and customer support can be cumbersome with multiple providers, which means as your legal team scales in size, your work scales in volume, or the data you’re storing scales... it becomes difficult to scale multiple providers at once. Having one tech solution provider sets the legal team and business up for growth and expansion.

Lawyers don’t like change. They are already time-poor, and being risk-averse are naturally hesitant to adopt new technology. You only need to look to the fact that most law firms and in-house teams are still using Microsoft Outlook as their workflow tool. As such, change management is a crucial consideration when integrating legal technology into an in-house team, and it seems obvious that expecting lawyers to adopt and use multiple point solutions is no easy feat. Human capital is crucial to any business. As such, when implementing systems ease of adoption and end-user usability is paramount and should be key considerations.

The reality is that a business needs to make the decision when integrating technology on what is best for them. In the early stages of any industry, foresight is not always apparent. Taking the time to understand the pros and cons of using multiple point solutions allows any organization to make informed long-term decisions for their legal team.

69

CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Sowing the seeds for a successful legal career

by Megan Elizabeth Gray

Your career, like your life, will not be linear.

Instead, it will be a squiggly line of triumphs and defeats, maddening upsets and jubilant successes. Even if you believe you are “on the path” – to partnership, to the next promotion, to whatever – you never know what might be around the corner or how you’ll feel tomorrow.

For these reasons, think of your career as planting a garden. Sprinkle the seeds along your journey on fertile ground where they can be warmed by the sun. Tend to them carefully, nourish them, and adjust the conditions if necessary. Later, at a time unknown and unchosen by you, those seeds will sprout and provide you with the green shoots of new life.

Your career as a lawyer can be nurtured in much the same way. You start off equipped with a legal education and hopes for the future. Along the way, you cultivate knowledge and experience and, even more crucially, relationships. You build relationships with colleagues and clients, you push yourself to attend events, no matter how inconsequential, to network with other lawyers or industry professionals because they could, one day, lead to your dream job.

In your career, the key point of planting seeds is connection – true connection with other people. Genuine connection (rather than the superficial kind) creates an environment for new ideas and opportunities to flourish. If you come to a crossroads in your career, for example, where you find yourself feeling unfulfilled and wanting a change, it is your connections you can turn to for advice, support, encouragement, and help. Each connection represents a whole universe of possibilities.

The best way to develop such connections is by putting yourself and your energy out there and seeing what sticks.

For example, if you plan to attend a networking event, set a goal of having a real conversation with three people to permeate the layer of formalities and learn about their 70

goals and who they are trying to be in the world. Be sure you exchange at least names to find each other on LinkedIn or email addresses. Then, be sure to follow up with them: send them a short message and let them know how much you enjoyed the chat (or any message that is authentic to you). Personal messages go a long way; each of us wants to know that we matter.

C

M

Another way to maintain connections is by putting the effort in overtime. This could take the form of an occasional email or phone call or engaging with their posts on LinkedIn. An in-person conversation over coffee or lunch would also be beneficial. Look, too, for how you can be supportive or offer help to your connections. Showing kindness and generosity raises our collective energetic vibration, from which we all benefit. The aim is always a two-sided, mutually fruitful relationship.

When I was a young lawyer, I attended a Lawyers’ Business Development Club meeting hosting a GC roundtable. I remember being intrigued, listening to each person speak about their career journey, wondering what in-house life would be like at a publisher, a fashion company, an investment bank, a football club, and so on. Afterwards, I dutifully introduced myself to everyone and exchanged business cards. The next day I emailed each of them, thanking them for sharing their story with us. I never forgot those lawyers. Seven or so years later, the woman I was in awe of, who worked at the publisher, is featured in a diversity and inclusion video alongside me. I sent her a message. She has a new job. She replaced my current boss as General Counsel when he left to join my current company. She tells me that she and my boss caught up recently, and she told him how lucky he was to have hired me. I assured her that I was the lucky one.

These connections – the seeds we plant – usually grow slowly over many years. When they have been tended to and exist in strength, they will always be there when you look to them. One day, you will look back on your career and appreciate that the efforts, big and small, you made along the way all contributed to growing yourself a garden rich with camaraderie and collaboration. And you will have yourself to thank.

Y

CM

MY

CY

CMY

K

Format

Small Leather Goods Suki Clutch Grace Wallet Sebastian Wallet Stucco Deer Nappa

Style

Colour

BUSINESS

INVIEW

Down to business An interview with InView champion Helen Doukas

by Connor Amor-Bendall & Sian Simpson

InView champion Helen Doukas, Head of Legal and Regulatory at Airways and previous Senior Legal Counsel at Uber, shares with us some of her legal best practice. Her savviness in harnessing legal capabilities to provide not only legal advice but upskilling commercial acumen is worth reflecting on for every in-house legal team.

How can in-house legal help the wider business on a day-to-day basis?

We help the business achieve its goals by helping drive sustainable and lower risk commercial outcomes. It’s not just a legal strategy that we’re driving, it’s partnering with the organization to shape the commercial strategy with something that’s sustainable and longer term. I see us helping to unlock opportunities.

I think the job of an in-house lawyer is to act as a bit of a funnel. People don’t want to hear every piece of legislation and what it has to say in every section; nobody cares. A lot of my job is doing the thinking, internally and behind the scenes, and then coming up with a one-liner or one paragraph that’s relevant to people. When I was on secondment at Microsoft, which was my first in-house experience, I received a good piece of advice from a lawyer. He said: “People don’t want to hear your thinking; people just want the answer.” He made everything look so effortless, so this piece of advice was a bit of an ah-ha moment for me.

What are the key functions of legal as a resource to the organization that everyone should know?

There’s the obvious: giving legal advice, helping with contracts, helping navigate disputes, helping manage

72

litigation. Outside of that, it’s helping avoid disputes and problems that arise. You do that through upskilling, on both legal and, in some cases, broader commercial matters.

Legal upskilling is expected and welcomed by organizations. While this is critical, I think as in-house lawyers we can offer more than this. For instance, by the time someone has been a lawyer for a few years, particularly a contract lawyer, we’ve experienced heaps of deals and negotiations, from start to finish. Often, we’ve been in the trenches in those negotiations.

With this comes experiences around negotiating, structuring deals, knowing what can go wrong (contractually and commercially) and how to avoid it, and other commercial tactics. While we certainly don’t claim to have the skills of project or commercial managers, I think it’s beneficial for an organization to be open to the value of a legal team that helps upskill commercial acumen as well as providing purely legal advice. Another example would be helping shape and protect an organization’s brand strategy through trademark and other IP experience.

Taking advantage of our broader skill set helps make the most of your in-house function.

At Airways, we rolled out a structured business learning program that responds to key organizational risks and training needs. It focuses on improving understanding of legal obligations, provides tips to avoid issues in the first place, and gives guidance on what to do when they do arise.

A related point is that our experience can also be used to shape or structure a deal or strategy from the outset.

The earlier you engage legal, the more we’re involved in the preventative advice and structural advice, and the more effectively we can pre-empt and mitigate legal issues or other risks that may arise.

INVIEW

73

INSIGHT

INVIEW

Make metrics your weapon

by Tim Boyne

In business, strategy is king. It is the bridge between a vision and reality, creating a roadmap to achieve desired outcome. Legal teams need strategy too, to align to the wider business’s objectives and for their own internal growth. Crucial to the formation of a viable strategy is business insight and metrics which allow for analysis of what needs to change and what the future can hold.

Legal teams are not known for their collection and analysis of data, they have typically been reactionary in their approach. Asking for an analysis of how the team is performing, with quantifying data, is often met with a scramble for spreadsheets. Reframing legal’s relationship with data and metrics allows them to move from reactionary to pro-active and to strategize effectively.

There are further reasons that an in-house legal strategy is pertinent, to do with workloads and, of course, Covid-19.

In-house legal teams have been under immense pressure

74

during the pandemic, not only have they frequently been asked to take on additional work as companies moved from outsourcing to insourcing to manage legal spend, but they’ve faced the cutting eye of CFOs seeking to reduce company costs.

In fact, workloads for in-house legal teams are expected to increase by approximately 25 percent over the next three years, in a time when legal teams are already being asked to do more with less. When faced with this impending workload and the scrutiny over the cost of the legal team, metrics can allow teams to be informed and operate from a position of knowledge. Data allows for a greater understanding of a legal team’s position and reduces risk in future decision-making.

It’s time we introduced our analytics maturity model. This is a tool we use to assess where an in-house team is in their metrics journey. They could be operating in four stages: hindsight (reactionary), insight (presently), foresight (pro-actively), or in amplified intelligence & automation (intelligently). The goal of legal technology is to take each in-house team along this journey to a point where they can harness machine learning and cognitive intelligence to make informed decisions for their team.

We like to think of metrics as a weapon. Legal can be likened to the shield of an organization, but with metrics on their side, they can become a sword.

The first step in this journey is locating the legal data.

People are often daunted by this task, thinking that without data engineers they cannot capture, track and analyze data. In fact, the legal data is all there, it just needs to be captured in a system of record. Legal technology has the capacity to capture the data as an underlying activity in a way that also improves productivity whilst structuring, surfacing, and using the data.

We call this the data engine. By working on one central platform and recording every matter, contract, file, task, and person involved, this information can be analyzed by machine learning and churned out as a data set.

These data sets inform us as analytics and can be used to establish universal best practices such as KPIs from metrics, organizational playbooks, templates, benchmarking, and assumed value stories.

For those who are wondering, what do we mean when we talk about “data” and “metrics” and how are the terms distinct to “measurements”?

Data is raw information. According to PWC, a measurement is a data point in a single point in time. It doesn’t need to be 100 percent accurate or eliminate all uncertainty; it simply reduces uncertainty based on one or more observations.

A metric is defined as a data point in context. Metrics convey information at one point in time relative to another point in time, or data about one organization relative to another organization. Metrics are more useful than measurements because they provide context to support decisions.

This is where it’s clear to see the benefits of having structured data collected in one place where it can be surfaced and used for metrics, bringing value to the numbers.

We like to think of metrics as a weapon. Legal can be likened to the shield of an organization, but with metrics on their side, they can become a sword. Metrics allows the legal team to serve the business, harnessing knowledge to become a more effective function and one that can look to the future with relative certainty.

75

What would a business do?

by Alex Petrie

76

INVIEW

If you ran the legal department like a business, would it look the same?

If you ran the legal department like a business, would it look the same? It all starts with the product. Any successful business sells a product that is valued by a market. If it is not valued by the intended market, it doesn’t necessarily mean the product is not good. It could mean the product is not being marketed as well as it could be, ie the market is not seeing the value that it offers. Equally, or alternatively, you may have a misalignment in the product understanding, ie people may be using or wishing to use the product for purposes for which it was not designed or intended – thus creating a misalignment of expectations.

Product Alignment Get your product right and align with your market. You don’t necessarily need a service level agreement (SLA) but something like this is a great start; just like a product comes with technical specifications, warranty, and terms and conditions of sale, you wouldn’t have a business selling its product without those things. An SLA doesn’t need to be prescriptive; it could be value based. For example, it doesn’t need to say, “We will respond and resolve your request within X days.” It could say, “When you need legal support we will prioritize your request based on risk, importance to the business, strategic alignment with business goals, and urgency. Based on the above, your matter will be addressed relative to the other requests we have received, etc, etc. Like Batman or Mary Poppins, we may not be there when you want us, but we will be there when you need us.”

Part of success here is being open and honest about what is possible and can be reasonably achieved having regard to your resources and the demands on them. Any person in sales will tell you that one of the worst situations they deal with is when the product doesn’t do what it says it does on the tin or is being short-supplied to miss delivery dates.

Demand Management – Demand Outstrips Supply Critical to meeting demand is understanding your supply capacity and distribution model which dictates how quickly you can produce, in what volume, and how fast. Get this wrong and you have a constant short supply. Can you imagine a business operating without an ordering software platform? It seems insane! Yet only recently have legal departments really started to embrace software to assist with managing ‘orders’. But of course, orders in a system then need to be linked with production and distribution to identify when that order can be supplied; and if the production line is at full capacity, there is a substitute opportunity cost to get that product manufactured earlier in time. And this is where product alignment is key. If you

FUTURE

establish strong relationships with your customers and have set clear expectations around order placement and fulfillment, you are far more likely to deliver in full and on time and have happy customers. This is aspirational rather than wholly achievable in my experience - I’ll take incremental improvement!

Supply Focus – High Value Product and Efficiency Ultimately, the objective of a business is to deliver shareholder value. As a legal team, your shareholder is the business and the departments are your market. Take for example a business which, like most legal departments, is: (a) selling product as fast as it can make it; (b) the product is highly price elastic, so if you increase the price demand drops off massively (for legal there is obviously no cost at the point of usage hence I make this rule); and (c) if you cannot increase production in the short term to boost sales, how do you increase value? Well, try and increase the profit margin. For example, if you have a range of products, focus on producing the higher margin products. What about the lower value? The first question is: “Is this even a product legal should be selling, ie is this a market we wish to play in?” Just because legal sells it currently doesn’t mean it should sell it or that it is the only department that can. A lot of in-house ‘legal work’ could be done by non-lawyers or by other means. This leads to another obvious way to increase profit, which is to drive efficiency gains to cut the per unit cost of production.

This can be about resource allocation (right bums on right seats doing the right work), cutting wastage/replication, standardization, and substituting capital for labor (where it is more efficient to do so).

Ask yourself, does this work need a lawyer? Just because we have too much demand, are more lawyers the right answer? It might be, it might not. Why are my lawyers having to ask for basic details to assist? Why are my lawyers spending loads of time managing ‘orders’ rather than executing them? Why are my lawyers doing loads of admin and reporting? Why are my lawyers correcting grammar, formatting, commercial details drafting? Should legal be doing this work and if so, could it be done by non-lawyers, more heads, lower cost, faster turnaround? I hazard a guess that there are efficiency opportunities if you look for them.

Legal Disclaimer This is really a thought exercise, and the above is by no means perfect and of course one can pick holes left, right, and center. But in my experience, I have found the greatest successes I have had is when thinking this way.

I’m not saying this will work for everyone or anyone, but it works for me. Next time you are wrestling with the legal department operating model, perhaps ask yourself, what would a business do?

77

MINDSET

INVIEW

Lawyering doesn’t have to be boring

by Connor Amor-Bendall

Studying law versus practising it can be confronting, the reality of practice is not as exciting as one may have hoped. How can we change this?

The law is fascinating, inextricably linked to every aspect of our lives. The law is the foundation of governance, which is the social contract that binds us all. As famously declared

by Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in a functioning democratic society this very governance is determined by the general will of the people.

As people are born free, in Rousseau’s opinion, any subordination to a government must be based upon a social contract and laws that are freely accepted. He insists on the sovereignty of united individuals seeking the most suitable form of governance and laws to fulfill their basic needs as the very formation of laws both constrain and 78

protect us. Essentially, the rule of law determines how we live from the moment we are born. When upholding the law, it is critical that there is a separation between the state and the legal system otherwise the lines of freedom are blurred.

This very concept interests many curious minds, especially those who understand that the work of upholding the law is fundamental to society. As an example, the New Zealand government deemed lawyers to be an essential service during the Covid-19 lockdowns.

The thing is, for the academically inclined, the complexity, importance, and the link between law and society is bewitching. Pondering how society operates can be a fascinating subject to study... Yet the reality of a lawyer’s daily life is often a far cry from the academic sport of law school. Many young lawyers become disenfranchised as they are tasked with reviewing seemingly insurmountable piles of files and contracts. The lofty dreams they held

INVIEW

while in law school, of implementing change and making their mark constructing a better social contract for us all, are left in tatters.

Shaun Plant, LawVu CLO, says, “I think most (young) lawyers get frustrated as they’re finding the practice of law to be boring. It’s been five years and then they turn up in their suit, they’ve got their files, their way of working... and it’s quite dull. What do they do? They’ve invested so much time getting there.”

It doesn’t have to be this way. Law fundamentally is and can be a fascinating practice that provides variation, mental gymnastics, peaks, and troughs for any lawyer.

In order to spend one’s time on the juicy legal work, it is necessary to rethink ways of working and streamline monotonous tasks.

Jason Xu, Junior Corporate Counsel, and Legal Operations at Veolia Australia and New Zealand, was confronted with the mundane once he graduated from law school.

He remembers his first day in private practice, receiving a stack of papers and being tasked with reading and analyzing them. His immediate response? There must be a better way of doing this. He took it upon himself to scan the files and used OCR to digitally search the file for relevant words and clauses. It was only a little thing, but it saved him hours of manually reading and highlighting pages of paper.

Xu says junior lawyers are frustrated. “We see things that could be done better. We get disheartened and start to become jaded.” In the hope of changing the way things worked within Veolia’s in-house team, Xu introduced LawVu and contract AI to create more efficient and accurate processes.

Although the change wasn’t initially welcomed with open arms, in time, as the legal team warmed to a different way of operating, the benefits of these new technologies began to show. “Everyone got excited about the fact that we were having AI reviewing monotonous, low value, crappy contracts which no one enjoys doing,” says Xu. “It freed up our time to learn more about what we actually like about coming to work every day by actually doing the juicy stuff that’s more complicated.”

Technological change can be confronting but it presents opportunities to give lawyers back significant amounts of time, thus freeing them up to work on more complex, problem-solving type work that satisfies and stimulates their minds. As Xu says, “I think a large part of making lawyers enjoy their work and making people see lawyers as fun, is about reducing the more unenjoyable aspects of legal practice so there’s more time and space to do the things they like.”

Collaboration is key Colin Levy is a technology enthusiast and a practising lawyer of 11 years. He has worked primarily in-house at companies of varying sizes and in industries ranging from manufacturing to technology. Having considered what it means to be a great client-centric lawyer, a service provider and a tech user, he believes that all require a commitment to collaboration. “I am biased towards being a collaborator, partly because I think it is the function of an effective in-house lawyer to work crossfunctionally and not work in a silo.”

Collaboration between different functions is a key benefit of tech integration. Levy believes technology can empower lawyers and other functions to provide and share knowledge regarding the status of matters and contracts “but also allowing other functions to collaborate on matters, for example in the contracts arena, technology can allow for speedier review of contracts and/or getting a handle on the status of contractual matters”.

Knowledge sharing is a great example of techfacilitated collaboration. By harnessing data and subsequent metrics, legal functions can gain clarity over whether they are receiving routine requests, in what area of law (contracts, NDAs), and from which business units.

Levy says legal technology’s ability to facilitate collaboration and automate high-frequency, routine, low-value legal tasks can alter the business’s perspective on the in-house legal team.

The end goal is a legal team that works proactively, and by being on the front foot is aware of where the business is at and where it is going. Collaboration between the wider organization and legal is the key to achieving this.

79

INVIEW

Become a contributor The InView community has big plans for 2022, and they include you. InView is a platform where you can share stories and opinion pieces that demonstrate your leadership and legal operations knowledge and experience, or your business experience.

We’re looking for quality ideas and provocative, contemporary insights to help in-house lawyers and legal operations personnel to position themselves exactly where they should be: at the heart of every successful business.

You don’t have to be the world’s greatest writer, we have a team for that. What we are looking for is people with strong ideas, a unique angle, and a contemporary and thoughtful world view.

We are looking for content that fall under these topics: Insights Business Technology Remote Collaboration

Value

Trust

Mindset

Change

Innovation Working

Balance

Communication

Career Development When you write for InView, you’re helping grow a community of like-minded professionals by sharing your expertise and knowledge. This is your chance to champion the industry and share the incredible work you do.

Pitch your ideas to – inview@lawvu.com 80

Tonic Waters & Mixers

by East Imperial.

eastimperial.com

INVIEW

History of in-house counsel

by Connor Amor-Bendall

The law.

Steeped in tradition, court robes sweep the floor, calling for conformity.

White wigs adorn the crown of judgment alike a helmet, the Crown’s court-room army.

Yet what hides underneath these black drapes, these accolades?

Individual journeys, two am evenings studying till they had exhausted every last neuron in their contract addled brains red line dreams await.

Perhaps an inclination for creativity, a natural business savvy? Not every lawyer dreams of ‘your Honor’ being regimented into the vernacular they speak.

82

In-house counsel, for too long shrouded in mystique, the path into capitalism touted as weak.

Times change, this belief is too, as we take off our conventional-tinted glasses and see the nexus between law and business offers a game of mental gymnastics for those who do seek.

In the era of the fax machine, our prestige began to grow, now in the era of a global pandemic, our value is finally shown.

Disrupted markets, rising seas, nationwide lockdowns, political tensions between the west and the east.

When business is not certain, agility is key, your in-house counsel is your captain, steering you through unruly seas.

INVIEW

Subscribe to InView inview.lawvu.com/signup

©2021 LawVu Limited, All Rights Reserved

83