
In Conversation
For nearly two decades Chek Tsang Foo has supported information technology companies in their push to develop new tools for business. Now senior vice president and general counsel at NTT, he reflects on legal tech’s step into the mainstream.
When I moved in-house around 20 years ago I knew I wanted to work in the IT industry. The pace of change made it the most exciting place for a lawyer to work, and I have been in the front row ever since. While many of the business technologies we use on a daily basis have evolved rapidly, the technologies enabling support functions have been much slower to take off. Until now.
Onboarding legal tech used to be a matter of trial and error. The technologies on offer felt like a solution looking for a problem, and while there was a lot of interest surrounding legal tech it was difficult to make a concrete use-case for what was available. In the last few years, new systems for contract management and document discovery have appeared on the market and are now extremely helpful for in-house legal teams.