For GCs, technology is very much a love-hate relationship. We love using technology and are increasingly reliant on it, even though we hate to admit it. The pressure every business has been under to work remotely is showing us how much we rely on technology to operate, which was a trend that started long ago.

Within the legal function we are now using technology for everything from e-discovery to data mapping and analytics. Even beyond front-end legal work, we are using technology to update our insurance certification or take care of our invoicing and billing. Really, we could not operate as a function without this technology. The question, then, is not whether legal technology will become important – it is already essential to the way we operate – but how it will change what we do, and whether it will replace certain tasks. As far as I can see technology will not replace lawyers, but it will open up new ways of working and allow us to see things that were previously invisible. 

Working within a rather lean legal team means that each person has to draw on whatever resources are available to maximise his or her benefit to the business. I am a certified data protection officer and sit as the designated privacy representative for the Asia region. I’m also a certified enterprise risk advisor, a certified business continuity manager, and have just sat the anti-bribery exams. Having that broad-based training is one way of maximising the range of matters I can cover. The other is using technology effectively.

I estimate that our use of technology allows each lawyer to double their workload, so this is not an inconsiderable benefit to the team. The other big benefit technology brings to our legal work is that it allows us to take a more systematic, joined-up approach to risk. The ability to search documents quickly and reliable is one of the best ways to identify and mitigate risk patterns in litigations, investigations, complaints and a many other areas.

This is a fast-moving area of legal tech and one where we really need to keep our eyes open. For example, investigations require detailed knowledge of the underlying facts, and increasingly sophisticated software is being developed all the time. As lawyers, we have to be very open-minded to the possibilities this software will unlock. We almost have to forget that we are lawyers for a moment and think of it as a data mapping task rather than a legal task.

To use legal tech effectively you cannot be afraid to fail. You have to explore new technologies, launch new programmes and initiatives, and start working in different ways, but you also have to know when to abandon software and strategies that are not effective. This requires a fundamental shift in thinking for most lawyers.

Open yourself to new ideas, trial new software and ways of completing legal tasks, but don’t be afraid to admit that something isn’t right for you. You have to be very careful, because not every technology will suit your use case. Try and test as much as possible before determining whether you can actually implement it for use in the long-term.

When it comes to identifying and procuring new technology, we are fortunate to have a supportive IT function. New software is purchased by IT at group level, but every decision follows close discussions with the various business units and support functions to make sure a product will do or can adapt to what we need it to do. My experience is that IT are always eager to explore new tech and are happy to find things that will make your life easier. Building that relationship with your IT people is essential to getting the right tools. But of course, as GC I also need to be involved in the process because only the front-line legal staff can truly stress-test a system.

While there have been big changes in the market for legal tech, most law firms remain quite conservative here and tend to focus on legal skill sets at the expense of other ways of working. However, there are signs of change. New business models that offer on-demand legal staff or a mix of outsourcing and technology-based solutions at competitive price points are becoming more accepted. Ten years ago no one thought it would work, particularly in this market. Now they are threatening the traditional firms. The lesson here is clear. Both in-house and private practice lawyers must be more receptive to new ways of defining products, markets and clients. Technology itself will not leave us behind, but our inability to adapt to its consequences certainly will.

As everyone knows, life after COVID-19 will not simple return to normal. New working arrangements are here to stay, and that means technology will become an increasingly important aspect of working life.

The number one goal of innovation in our legal team, in an organisation manufacturing basic commodities, is to be able to do more with less – to consistently deliver high quality outputs at lower cost, so we are contributing to improving our organisation’s profit. There’s always pressure to keep costs to the minimum, but there is also a particular risk in needing to do more and more in terms of meeting increasing compliance requirements whilst containing costs.

The second goal is to increase reliability. There are more regulatory requirements to deal with and more things being asked of us, and to do that confidently and efficiently we need to make sure that the information and the processes we’ve got to be able to do that are robust and reliable – so I know that when the CEO wants a piece of information I can produce it reasonably quickly, and we are providing various stakeholders with confidence about our organisation’s governance.

We’re in the early stages of looking to see what new legal technology is available that can successfully meet our needs. I’ve been an in-house lawyer for over 20 years now and am probably one of the longest serving in-house lawyers in Australia. I use a basic, but robust and reliable system which has served us well.

We use a SQL Server relational database for recording and linking all the information we use every day, such as information about matters we are working on, agreements, property details, intellectual property, company details, and external lawyers’ fees, but we are looking to upgrade from this. We have been looking at what there is on the market, and there have been some quite interesting developments in terms of matter management. Overall, our organisation does not have a consistent process for information management, leaving it to particular teams to make their own arrangements.

We have had a lot of growth over the time I’ve been here and we’re a much bigger company now, with more operations, more people, and more issues that need to be resolved every day. We are in a period of rapid change for our organisation.  One aspect of this is the organisation is about to embark on a digital transformation project planned to unlock value, including a focus on the benefits from automation and smart analysis of our financial and operating systems and processes.  We’re also looking at how that works for us in the legal team, to bring it all together over the next probably six months, against the objectives of robustness and reliability that I mentioned before.

We are currently looking at NetDocuments, iManage and a couple of other leading information management systems and are also looking around for matter management systems. What did surprise us was that there was not really one overall, out of the box, comprehensive package available for the typical needs of an in-house counsel team like ours.

We try to keep things as simple as we can, and we prefer just to go out and get something that is going to do what we want off the shelf. Our needs will be similar to many other companies’ needs. Given that we already have a good simple set up, we don’t want to have something new that is of a proprietary nature and forces you to go down a route in doing things their way, that may not align with our preferences, and could provide less functionality than we’ve got at the moment.

A couple of high-level IT leaders I have worked with recently, inside and outside our organisation, have confirmed a contemporary approach is to use out of the box wherever you can.  They also reinforced a strong preference for a cloud-based approach, rather than on premises facilities.

We have quite a free rein in terms of what technology we can onboard within the team. Of course, if it doesn’t work or deliver value, I carry the can for that. To learn about the value of the technology which is now available, we went out and got anecdotal evidence, did research, and then followed up with a few of the aggregator providers about what they would recommend. That led us to talking to some people, getting some demonstrations and forming our views.

I was surprised at the low estimates for setting up this system and migrating our data.  I feared from previous experience that the actual costs could be greater than the optimistic forecasts, so in the budget I’ve put in a more realistic amount than has been suggested for a migration (which of course we will manage carefully). I’ve also said we want to do it in incremental stages, which helps us manage the transition risks.

We’re a small department, who operate in a company that has traditionally run everything very lean. That’s the environment I’ve been working in for a long time with colleagues in the legal team. We evaluate our technology intuitively and based on how much it is actually helping us to achieve our objectives. Having said that, we are building KPIs into our assessment process at the moment as part of our structured evaluation procedure.

When staying abreast of what legal technology is available, organisations such as ALITA are useful and easy to access to corroborate what we’re finding in other places, and help us to test things anecdotally against promotional material or the stated capabilities of the tech.

I’ve followed what’s going on in artificial intelligence relevant to our responsibilities, and I can see where it will have application, but in our case we are a heavy manufacturing industrial company which doesn’t have a lot of low-value, high volume legal work. We leverage our internal expertise with carefully selected external advisors who we are confident will apply themselves creatively and deliver value for us, and while I currently don’t see a big role for AI in our legal team on a regular basis, we’re continuing to monitor its progress. We have used AI in certain cases, for instance during some major litigation, and I was really impressed with the quality that came back from applying AI to our discovery records.  Automation, AI, and machine learning are opportunities we are planning to exploit for our heavy manufacturing business, with an expectation of significant benefits, so we are on the look out for where these sort of opportunities might be there for the legal function also.

COVID-19 and its effects have of course had an influence on the way we are working at the moment.  From March to July, everyone was working from home, and in July we cautiously moved back to offices, following a contingency plan which for us had a ‘team A’ and ‘team B’ that were in the office on alternating weeks.

We are operating throughout Australia, so we have had experience with the different situations in the different states. We’ve had experience with all the video conferencing facilities, and have had a major rollout of hardware and software to people who weren’t using stuff in a mobile way to the same extent as others. In our legal function we’re all equipped with laptops and iPads, and because (pre-COVID-19) we’re often all around the country, it wasn’t a great change for us. The relational database that I mentioned before has given us a really solid framework for our essential information, so that even though the team’s been at home for some time over lockdown, we’ve been able to continue all of that essential stuff without any glitches whatsoever.

Going forward, I think that technology will change the roles of in-house lawyers in a more subtle way than many are predicting. Some tech that we use, such as hearings via video conferences, can be used tactically, and you need to consider that before being pushed down a certain path – should you agree to videoconference or not agree? Are you giving up some advantage if witnesses are not being cross examined in person, or if your representatives are interacting with the court in different ways? This shows that technology needs to be adopted in a measured way, because there are just too many side issues that come up.

Our Annual General Meeting (AGM) was in May, so we had to deal with how we were going to do this in the middle of the pandemic, with the restrictions on meetings. This quickly exposed us to virtual AGMs, but these are still not that straightforward. We did a hybrid AGM, which went well apart from the fact that a third-party tech provider played the CEO’s speech before the Chairman’s speech. It was simple human error, despite numerous rehearsals undertaken and the procedures we had in place.  Most viewers would not notice, but it just highlighted that there are risks in new technology. Next year, I think we’ll probably still do a hybrid AGM, but we will have learned the lessons, I don’t think we’ll move to a fully virtual AGM.

Young lawyers who will have to drive the profession’s use of technology forward should be clear about what they are trying to achieve from legal tech. That’s cost efficiencies, delivering valued outcomes, avoiding surprises, and having reliable information and systems and tools to be able to do the task that you’re responsible for dependably. Everything comes back to that, and that’s what we’re trying to do in order to deliver value for our shareholders. You need to have a mindset that is going to let you understand how you can use the technology and the potential developments to further what the organisation is trying to achieve. You can’t be divorced from the underlying nature of the business.

As the saying goes, “Ask a hundred lawyers and you’ll get a hundred answers”. Ask over a hundred lawyers about legal tech and the picture becomes even less clear. The legal tech ecosystem itself is so fragmented that almost no two GCs have the same thing in mind when talking about their use of technology.

Some companies are, to varying degrees of sophistication, implementing forms of automation or AI to solve legal or contractual issues, others are partnering with law firms to produce software capable of handling very specific issues like ISDAs, CLOs or loan documentation. But those applications of legal tech remain in the minority. Clearly, there is a distinction between legally useful technology and legal tech. Some basic elements of every office’s software suite can be legally useful, though they are not generally badged as legal tech.

The results of our survey show that by far the most common use of legal tech, shared by nearly a third (32%) of teams, was contract management. However, the overall picture is one of a market still in its infancy. Respondents were as likely to use tech to manage relationships with their external firms (17%) or handle invoicing (14%) as they were to do automate legal advice.

Notably, these trends affected companies of all sizes: those employing more than 50,000 people and with legal teams with over 100 staff were no more likely to use advanced legal tech than small to medium-sized organisations. This should come as no surprise. Even companies that specialise in developing very sophisticated technology face the same issues as their less technologically advanced counterparts when it comes to finding solutions for the legal team.

As one respondent representing a Hong Kong-based tech and IT solutions company commented, ‘As a provider of services then of course [the business] will have all this fancy technology, but most companies are much more sophisticated at developing things for clients than for themselves. As a user, as a GC using software to do something, you are in the same box as everybody else.’

Clearly, more money is invested in the revenue-generating side of a business than on its support functions. As experimental psychology has shown time and again, people naturally favour making gains over protecting losses, and businesses seem to be no different.

‘Take a large bank,’ continues our respondent. ‘It may have well over 1,600 lawyers globally. That bank is effectively running a top 20 law firm in terms of its legal staff, and that’s before you even consider its far larger compliance team. Yet when you look at how it is doing its legal work it will be nowhere near as sophisticated as a law firm. To understand why that should be the case you’ve got to consider that the law firm is practicing law as a business whereas the in-house counsel is a cost. Anything that solves a problem for in-house counsel therefore needs to be quantified as a cost saving when proposed to the business, which makes it much harder to justify.’

‘Even the most persuasive pitch for new legal technologies looks unappealing to most businesses because all you’re doing is comparing one cost with another cost: the cost of technology vs the cost of salaries to do the same job. Either way you’re reinforcing the view that you are a drag on the business that will incur costs! It’s not at all true – those are jobs that need to be done, but it’s how people will see it.’

Innate risk aversion when it comes to corporate budgeting is only part of the story, however. Part of the answer to why GCs struggle to acquire technology lies within the legal team itself. First, lawyers tend to be poor at understanding and explaining their technology needs. They may understand their legal needs very well, but this does not necessarily translate into seeing what sorts of tools they need to accomplish that end.

As another respondent pointed out, it also requires a lot of time and no small amount of skill to adequately benchmark legal tech. ‘Even doing the work to see whether an automatic translation service for legal documentation is efficient if automated and whether that can be measured in terms of efficiency gains is not something I would expect many GCs to successfully handle. Lawyers are generally terrible at that sort of exercise, which is a procurement exercise we are just not trained in.’

But – and this is neither the first nor last time this will be said about the subject of legal tech – a change may be about to come.

Over two thirds (68%) of those surveyed said that the use of technology within the legal team had increased significantly over the past five years. Just 5% reported that their use of technology had not increased at all. The bulk (95%) of respondents though that legal tech would end up significantly enhancing the day-to-day operations of the legal team, while nearly three quarters (73%) said they would like to step up their use of technology.

Perhaps a clearer indication of this change is that, for all their cynicism over tech, GCs are not disputing that it has changed the profession – 87% of respondents said that legal tech had already changed the industry to at least some extent. Even more strikingly, 95% of GCs felt legal tech would change the industry in the coming years, with 33% saying that the change would be significant.

Digital transformation is a hot topic right now and DXC Technology is an industry leader in this field. We leverage technological innovations to deliver better business outcomes by driving new levels of performance, competitiveness and lower prices. Put simply, we work hard to make sure other businesses stay ahead of the curve when it comes to technology. 

The legal team has embraced this approach. As [DXC general counsel] Bill Deckelman said, the digital innovation tools that our department has had access to since 2017, [when DXC was formed through a merger of the recently spun-off Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Enterprise Service segment and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC)], represent a unique opportunity to position our legal team as global thought leaders in legal digital transformation.

From the very start of our journey we aimed to do something different, partnering with UnitedLex to help restructure the global legal team. At the time, this was the largest-ever managed services transaction in the legal space. By bringing in new technologies we have developed a far more agile way of working that enables us to cover more ground than ever before. We have created a digital platform housing legal research, templates and advice. This allows us to provide a lawyers on demand service for a range of matters, from documentation to compliance, from litigations to procurement. Supplementing this, AI-based legal tools and machine learning allow us to better predict risks, understand customers’ problems and improve performance.

This technology has undoubtedly improved our efficiency. It can streamline templates and playbooks, assist with negotiations, help with training and rationalise workflows. It also allows each team member to properly track their work in real time so the management team is constantly aware of the progress being made on a matter. This means management can identify gaps in our coverage and move to respond to potential issues faster than ever before.

It has also helped us show management the value our team brings to the company. We can track the value of each matter we are supporting, whether that is by managing litigation risk or contributing to new business. The feedback from business has been very positive. They are able to see that the cost saved or value added by the legal department far exceeds our budget.   

Technology reduces the barriers to collaboration across functions. It can be a useful way of working with various business units to identify pain points, opportunities and solutions. In fact, the new ways of working we have developed have been so successful that we plan to make remote working, at least to some degree, a permanent feature of the way we operate. Technology will not replace lawyers, but it will require a re-imagining of resources, both technical and personal. Legal work will place much more emphasis on the ability to collect, analyse and process relevant data.   

The push to introduce new legal technologies is to be welcomed, but there is still a long way to go. Many of the new tools that have come to market are very complex, do not allow for optimisation, and requires a big time commitment on the part of GCs to fully learn its functionalities. Of course, the more time you have to spend learning a new system, the less effective it is as a cost-saving tool. Team members may also need to repeatedly log in, complete registration forms, or provide other information.

International legal service providers should also consider customising their products to work in Mandarin, or tailoring them to fit local cultural usage. China is a very large market, and enhanced support for our lawyers would be beneficial to both domestic businesses and multinational companies.

There is no doubt that legal technology has helped everyone in the market improve their performance. Most interesting has been the impact it has had on the judicial system. The ability to file lawsuits electronically or attend virtual hearings has proved very successful in China. This is a very important development, especially for employees of multinational companies who are not able to be physically present during the course of a matter. Other developments are even more surprising. While previously it was very time consuming to notarise electronic evidence, we are now able to apply blockchain technologies to preserve electronic evidence.

There are a lot of changes taking place. Our mission in the DXC legal department is to understand these changes, learn as much as possible about the technologies powering them and, most importantly, to be at the forefront of any future change.

Arcadis may not compete (yet!) with Apple in the brand recognition stakes, but in the world of environmental engineering its right up there with the iPhone as the premier player in its space. For over 130 years, from its roots in the Netherlands, where it was an early pioneer in redevelopment of land, water and sea defence systems, the company has grown to become a leading global player in built asset and sustainability solutions, with a workforce of nearly 30,000 people spread over 72 countries.

In the Asia Pacific region, our consultants and engineers are regularly called upon to work on the types of projects that can make or break a country’s future, from protecting against coastal erosion to designing flooding protection systems to advising governments and stakeholders on master plans for smart city developments.

But, as with most global companies that have grown inorganically, there can be regional differences, and one has to be respectful of different ways of doing things. When I moved from my private practice in project finance to build an in-house legal team, I was very conscious that I might be seen as an outsider, someone who should be kept at arm’s length. Crucially, I needed to earn the trust of my new business management very quickly, and the easiest way to do that is to present yourself as someone who’s coming in to try to take their problems away. Going for the low-hanging fruit got me quick wins and showed I was someone who would make their lives easier.

To complicate matters, the Asian side of the business had little in the way of localised legal resource and so my first job was working out what talent we had within the organisation that I could leverage. There were nearly 4,000 people based across the Asian offices, and it seemed obvious that a fairly large number of them could be legal graduates who could find their way around a contract, even if they were not in my legal team.

As a substitute for drafting new personnel into the team, I managed to borrow time from others around the business to help me build a new commercial contract review system – exactly the sort of quick win I was looking for. In the longer term, it was clear that technology was going to have to do a lot of the heavy lifting in the legal function.

As you can imagine, as a built asset consultancy we didn’t have much in the way of pure play legal tech, but like most organisations we have software licences for legally useful technologies. Even a ubiquitous office technology like the Microsoft O365 suite of products contains a large volume of very helpful stuff that can help GCs drive meaningful improvements and build momentum quickly. It may not be at the cutting edge, but it’s an incredibly effective way to build trust. Data visualisation platforms like Power BI can be linked into Excel and the other products in the Microsoft suite to produce clear dashboards. Even something as simple as that can add a lot of clarity and transparency and around what the function is doing to leadership. For example, we now generate automated utilisation reports that show the different client types we have served, the value of the contracts that we’re reviewing and the type of work we’re doing on those contracts. That means I am not only able to keep track of what the team is working on, but can show the business our return on investment or the savings we are making in terms of claims avoided. When you add those numbers together legal no longer looks like a cost.

GCs can fixate on having new systems without first understanding the tools they already have at their disposal. Knowing what you’ve already got is super important for any business leader, and that applies to both our talent management and technology. Ultimately, if you are going to ask the business for money to buy some legal tech it is your responsibility to check whether the same result can be obtained with a bit of research into the products you already own. This also demonstrates that you can use technology effectively to capture value.

When it comes to building trust, nothing is more important for a legal team than showing business colleagues it has their backs. Using technology to develop new and more robust ways of managing corporate governance is one of the best ways to do this. We have automated the approvals and governance processes for new work entirely by putting it all on a digitally-enabled system we coded ourselves in-house. Likewise, all of our governance and reporting records are now maintained through a digital platform that eliminates duplication of records and work streams, or the need to fill in multiple forms to do the same thing. Rather than using a number of operating systems globally that don’t talk to each other, we now have a much more joined up system.

It also helps generate real value to the business. For example, a project sold say in 2016 on the basis of a certain financial performance or risk profile may no longer be adhering to those assumptions five years later. If there’s a delta between the financial and risk performance then and now we can track that digitally through an automated project review process and take action. The upshot is that we’re not just reporting dry data. We’re looking at trends, we’re looking at root cause analysis through the types of claims that come into our business. That data is helping you learn lessons rather than perpetuate risks. That builds trust and confidence within the business and helps make them realise you are a reliable partner.

Everything in its right place

In its simplest form, Arcadis advises clients on their built assets, covering everything from services to manage their space to master planning and business case design. It also operates an architectural business, a landscaping business, a project and programme management business, a ‘pure play’ design engineering business, and a general business advisory and consulting practice that offers analysis, feasibility, delivery and implementation services to a range of built assets. With such a broad portfolio, developing and implementing a digitalisation strategy becomes hugely important.

The enlightened contractors we work with are shifting quickly into the use of technologies. We’re conscious of the pressure that places on us to evolve. We don’t just want to keep up with them, we want to be ahead of the game, selling digitally-enabled consultancy services that allow our clients to do more and better things with the information and analytics we can provide. Whether that involves using drone technology and advanced camera technology to provide remote access for site-owners or decision-makers sitting thousands of miles away, or offering our insight on asset performance through our Arcadis GEN brand, or through platform-led, subscription-based models where our clients can customise the expertise and experience they get from us, technology is going to be at the heart of our future and we have invested in the in-house capabilities and product development skills to deliver.

In short, repetitive tasks are being replaced by focused automated processes and platform solutions across the business, and the legal function should be no different. To maintain relevance in our digital future, we have to stay close to the business and keep our eyes open. But we need to have the bandwidth to keep our eyes open.

For example, it is just not efficient to have a senior in-house lawyer doing mundane contract work. I want my senior lawyers helping the business win big mandates, avoid big claims, navigate new legislative headwinds or develop digitally-enabled, client-facing services. Having them spend time on basic contract reviews is a problem, the solution to which can be using technology to do the same job, or it can be drawing on back-office support centres in markets that have a lower operating cost.

The real danger is using tech for tech’s sake. Digital tools are a big part of driving efficiency, but I’m a believer in a razor sharp focus on legal operations, you also need to look at the general optimisation of your cost and operating model via standardisation, automation and cost efficiency. If you can use technology to get where you need to be then that’s great, but it is a mistake to focus too narrowly on that. Your goal as GC is not having technology, it is ensuring the business gets quality, accessible advice that delivers value for money.

Networking, as any diligent MBA-holder will tell you, is essential for an eye on corporate leadership. But finding the time to network is often the last thing on a busy lawyer’s mind.

How things change.

Several months into lockdown, finding effective ways to network has become the only escape route from sliding into set ways of doing things. ‘Remote work is the future of work’, says Amar Sundram, head of legal for RBS India. ‘That means we need to come up with new ways of forming and building relationship and keeping on top of changes in the way other organisations are doing things.’

Nowhere is this truer than the world of legal technology. For many GCs, keeping up with the pace of new technology was challenge enough. The pandemic has only made that job more difficult. As a result, a growing number of GCs are seeking out new forms of community building, networking and peer learning to help them cope. Suddenly, professional learning networks (PLNs) have become all the rage.

Across Asia Pacific, a raft of dedicated tech networks aimed at training and educating GCs has sprung up, from the Australian legal Technology Association (ALTA) to the Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) in Singapore. These organisations do many things, but all of them aim at a common goal. As Josh Lee Kok Thong, chair of the Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (ALITA), puts it, they ‘encourage lawyers to take learning into their own hands, to be more interested in the technology and other disruptive forces that can affect their work’.

As peer networks become an increasingly important way for GCs across Asia Pacific to engage with legal tech, we canvas some of the leading institutions, and their members, on what it means for lawyers’ engagement with technology.   

Master PLN

Among the largest informal member networks is the aforementioned ALITA, a regional coordination platform that seeks to promote legal innovation and technology initiatives. The organisation launched in 2019 with a bold mission statement to make Asia a hub for legal innovation. It is, says ALITA’s Singapore-based chair Josh Lee Kok Thong, the first truly Asia Pacific wide legal tech forum.

‘This was a great chance to bring together a vibrant ecosystem and show the significant advances in the development of legal innovation and technology in all countries across Asia Pacific.’

‘While each country has its own legal tech networks, we felt the cross-border interaction was missing. We wanted to give a voice to the region, to promote collaboration opportunities across the region. The results so far have shown just how much progress can be made when GCs and thought leaders from different countries work together to share experiences, context and opportunities.’

ALITA has grown rapidly to around 150 member organisations in 20 countries. The membership includes some of the world’s largest law firms and technology companies, as well as universities, think tanks, legal tech companies, and governmental or quasi-governmental organisations. It is also fast becoming a leading platform for the region’s general counsel.

Narae Lee is a Seoul-based lawyer at Bliss Law Office and an organiser at Seoul Legal Hackers, a separate discussion forum for issues arising at the intersection of law and technology. She recently joined ALITA’s steering committee and says the regional focus will be invaluable to the GC community.

‘Legal Hackers is an international organisation, so I already had the benefit of that cross-border perspective. However, when it comes to the use of legal technology there are nuances of context that matter. As counsel in Korea I will have a very different set of pressures, expectations and possibilities to someone based in Europe or the US.’

‘Generally, it’s useful to have a forum that looks at what other people facing these same issues are doing. The best way to learn about legal technology is to speak with others who are using it and know what it can and can’t do.’

Though still relatively young as an organisation, ALITA is already expanding its activities to create what Josh Lee Kok Thong describes as ‘probably the world’s first legal tech observatory.’

‘Just as an observatory contains a set of tools that help stargazers absorb data and information, draw patterns, and observe movement, we are creating a set of tools to help the legal community scan the Asia Pacific region. Above all, we want to make it a live observatory that feeds people with information on the initiatives that are taking place across Asia, so that actionable insights can be drawn.’

These ground-up attempts to share information sit alongside more formal initiatives to develop awareness of legal tech organised by the region’s academic institutions. Perhaps the most advanced of these is The Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) run by the Singapore Management University and the Singapore Academy of Law. FLIP has issued a series of roadmaps on the future of legal innovation in the Asia Pacific region, which were highly praised by the GCs we spoke to for this report.

Australian institutions have also been notable for their activities to promote legal tech. The country’s largest postgraduate legal practice education provider, the College of Law, runs the Centre for Legal Innovation (CLI), a legal innovation and tech think tank focusing on emerging legal practice, future legal tech, innovation and entrepreneurship in the legal industry.

The focus throughout these activities, says CLI executive director Terri Mottershead, is on practical actions, and while CLI is actively monitoring market trends, it is ‘more interested in understanding how to those trends can be translated into solutions.’ For example, CLI offers a programme called Reinvent Legal Business, which looks at the various changes that have been taking place in the industry, covering everything from in-house initiatives to the work being done by law firms and alternative legal service providers.’ One of the biggest shifts across the profession, says Mottershead, has been the growing interest in technology among lawyers.

‘We have seen a real shift in the uptake of technology, particularly in the wake of COVID-19. As part of our Digital Literacy series we are looking at how we can provide support for lawyers to use technology effectively and help them understand how it can be incorporated into their practice.’

CLI, which has branched out from Australia to establish bases in New Zealand and Singapore and, more recently, the UK, does not operate like a traditional network. It offers the bulk of its courses and services for free ‘to help promote the sharing of information’. Recently, it has been devoting more time to vendor-led demonstrations of the newest legal tech from around the world.

‘It’s not intended as a sales pitch’, says Mottershead. ‘It is an opportunity for tech developers to explain the gap they sought to bridge and how they did it, while also giving them a chance to listed to the needs and feedback of end users.’

‘In fact, we have noticed that many lawyers are receptive to seeing how the technology works. The demos have been popular, and we have been holding more and more of them to help meet demand. That suggests to me that lawyers have a big appetite to understand the systems and tools that are available to them.’

Sheldon Renkema, general manager for legal at industrials conglomerate Wesfarmers and the Australia regional co-lead for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), has a similar take on the value of per-to-peer learning in a fragmented legal tech market.

‘One of the great things about CLOC is that you can very easily learn from what others are doing, so that you’re not reinventing the wheel. You are learning from others’ experiences so it’s a really good forum for embarking on that journey, connecting with people who’ve been through similar experiences and being able to benefit from their experience [of] the things that have gone well or not gone well in that specific context’.

‘It’s very difficult to actually objectively assess whether what [legal tech providers] are saying their product or service delivers is actually what it delivers. Being able to leverage the experience of people who have used those products and services to see what the actual output is very helpful’.

Across Asia Pacific, universities and academic institutions are rolling out a variety of courses that bring aspects of IT and computational thinking skills to a legal audience, alongside a much wider number of courses that teach lawyers about the business impacts of tech and innovation. Some, such as the Singapore Management University, have gone further and now offer combined law and technology degrees.

Haebin Lee, research manager of the crypto finance division at Korea-based Block Crafters, agrees, and gives weight to the idea that membership organisations are the best way for GCs to move the industry forward:

‘There should be more a lot more discussion on how we should shape legal tech, and which direction we should take with new technology. That’s what we’ve been striving to do through Seoul Legal Hackers and ALITA: open up a room for free discussion.’

Path of least resistance

Free discussion and knowledge sharing are changing the way GCs learn about and interact with legal tech, but at a certain point this enthusiasm for change hits hard problems. As Nilanjan Sinha, head legal for Indian multinational banking and financial services company ICICI Bank, observes:

‘Legal tech, perhaps because of the mindset of lawyers, is not as disruptive a space as it could be. The problems have been identified, and various solutions have been proposed by service providers. The hope is that as people become more used to using tech and working from home there will be a greater uptake, but there remain obstacles.’

‘Senior management needs to buy in to a particular way of working for new practices to become widespread. As GCs we have a big responsibility to oversee and facilitate that change within the team.’

An even bigger problem, and one identified by many of the regional organisations we spoke to, is that lawyers’ mindsets need to shift before the profession embraces technology. As Sinha notes, ‘It may take time but there will be greater efficiencies on an ongoing basis if we make the effort now.’

There are signs that this resistance to change is slowly fading, however. Josh Lee Kok Thong, himself a millennial, says a new generation of lawyers across Asia is coming to the table with quite different expectations from their predecessors.

‘The millennial generation is going to be key. We are going to hold key decision making roles in organisations, law firms or in-house departments in a few years’ time. Once that happens there will be a fundamental shift in thinking in terms of how legal services are going to be provided’.

Besides which, the writing is clearly on the wall. Technology will play an increasingly important role in how lawyers deliver their advice, whether lawyers like it or not. But more importantly, when it comes to the law, the medium is the message. As Mottershead notes:

‘At the moment, we see legal tech as a tool that assists us in doing things more efficiently, but over time, that will develop or will actually provide different ways of delivering legal services altogether. It will inform decision making processes and create the opportunity for additional or new revenue streams.’

At which point, even the most conservative of lawyers will see their interest piqued. 

Most of our software is built in-house and customised for the legal team’s own use. Using home-grown software has two main advantages. It is obviously much cheaper, and developing our own in-house software means that we can hedge on business costs as opposed to getting them signed off for external technology.

Perhaps a bigger advantage is that internally developed technology can be customised to match systems we are already familiar with. That will ensure other business units can seamlessly work with the platform. Working with customised software is much more intuitive and user-friendly. When you take on technology from external sources there is always going to be a process of learning and testing.

Working with external providers also means the legal team loses some degree of control over the software. For example, a significant provider of due diligence software once decided to shut down its operations in Singapore. We lost access to the whole system and had to suddenly find an alternative provider. This was a major exercise, and it meant we had to get used to the intricacies of a new system at short notice. That is the disadvantage of external providers. You simply cannot pre-empt or control what they are going to do, and even things like maintenance or updates are out of your control.

In a previous role I worked at a public body in Singapore that concerned itself with science and technology, including in AI and other blue-sky technologies. Protecting intellectual property was a huge aspect of that work, and it has taught me that IP is critically important when it comes to developing legal tech. I believe that, especially for bigger companies, it is always good to own the IP on anything you use internally.

However, there are areas of technology where we cannot build our own systems. As you would expect, McDonald’s has a long list of compliance processes to go through. This process involves many people across a number of different teams. It must also synchronise with the compliance checks across the company, so for this type of exercise we are following the policies and systems of the global business.

For pretty much anything else we use our own technology. We have built a document tracking system that checks all our contracts for things like date of expiry and gives us a prompt so we understand where in the contract cycle a document sits. It is also useful in that it tells us which counterparties have we given any limitation or liabilities to.

For the most part, our forms tend to be pretty standard, so while the back end will be specific to each vendor that we are dealing with, the main boilerplates are very consistent. That means we can use software that focuses on tracking documents and sending us reminders. Some of my peers at other organisations are starting to use AI for more cookie cutter stuff such as NDAs, but for us it is still all done by the internal legal team, including paralegals.

Our process for implementing new technology starts with recognising the need for a particular piece of software. Whether that software is going to track contracts, bring in GDPR compliance or handle more complicated work, you need to identify the need within the organisation first of all. We then look at how this can be introduced in a useful and user-friendly manner, drawing up a customisation and implementation plan to help us understand what the software should look like. This latter stage will almost always involve conversations with the IT department.

This has served us well so far, but inevitably we will reach a point where our tech needs outstrip our capacity to produce solutions internally. For example, it will become increasingly important to have software that can supervise and track user data and user rights. These days, everyone wants to know what their data is being used for and to have the right to choose what parts of their data is logged. Having software to keep track of this helps to share that obligation or responsibility with the consumer.

Asia is a very impressive part of the world where people are generally more technologically driven. It is this drive that motivates companies to continuously innovate. Asians are generally early adopters of tech, and customers are very advanced when it comes to embracing new technology.

When I compare Asia to Europe everything is on a much larger scale. The pace of innovation is unprecedented. Technology is being embraced across Asia, but it is China that is leading the way in technological innovation and development. The pace of development in China is particularly interesting.

For example, when it comes to moneyless payments, China is the most advanced market in the world. I rarely need to carry a wallet anymore as everything can be paid for via a mobile phone. Beijing is one of the biggest startup hubs for tech companies and a leading place for AI technology, research and development. Generally, the consumer and enterprise markets are massive, and therefore the potential for developing and implementing tech is apparent.

Ericsson has an established presence in China, where it occupies nearly half the market for mobile systems. In recent times, Ericsson has strengthened its market share by winning 5G contracts with three major operators in China.

The importance of technological innovation has been cast into the spotlight in recent months. Legal teams across Asia have embraced standardised technology to remain connected. We are using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint products. These platforms provide a collaborative area, where teams across the region can work together, for example to review documents. We are considering introducing a new e-billing system when working with our external law firms. From a contract management perspective, we have various repositories for sales and sourcing agreements.

Today, there are contract databases where you can search for templates and find various clauses. The next step will be AI based search engines, where the platform is itself intelligent and an evolving algorithm informs the search results. It is quite amazing to think about the opportunities associated with AI when applied to legal work. We will eventually be able to predict problems before they arise; we will know if something may cause an issue in a contract before finalising a deal.

Despite all the advantages brought by legal tech, going completely digital this year has not always been an easy task. Technology cannot replace the atmosphere of a meeting room or the human connections shared between individuals. Working remotely also makes it more difficult to introduce new employees into an office. You learn a lot from seeing how members of a team behave and react to others.

Nevertheless, technology can also be used to bring legal teams together. Managing legal operations across five countries means video conferences and meetings are crucialPreviously, we spent a lot of time travelling to meet internal stakeholders, customers and suppliers. Travelling would take up a significant amount of time. But since the pandemic, people have adjusted. One positive is that meetings are typically condensed and well prepared. In this sense technology has driven efficiency, or at any rate it has led to people using their time more effectively.

As we look to the future, technology is expected to play a key role in improving legal services, and within the next five years artificial intelligence will play a significant role in transforming the legal profession. As thing stand, it is rarely used by legal teams, but the potential this technology has is revolutionary.

Legal innovation is not only about technology, but the way lawyers operate. Most lawyers used to see an in-house role as a way of having better work life balance – this has changed and so have the expectations around them. To be a legal innovator you need to be a solution provider. Technical expertise is a given, being a solution provider is the next step, and the final and more significant part of legal innovation is being a thought leader.

Even though Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) is a public funded university and a charity, we have leveraged our digital tools very significantly.

When I joined NTU two years ago we were getting contract approvals through email or manually by paper, with several signatories required at the executive committee level. We retooled Adobe Sign, our e-signing platform, to use it, in parallel to e-signing, as an approval workflow system. We were able to do this by using existing licenses, and the new process has been extremely successful and well received.

The lesson is that legal innovation doesn’t always mean spending a lot of money.

The second tool we implemented is Convene, a piece of board management software. We transformed our governance architecture by migrating, as of late 2019, our resolutions, meeting minutes, and corporate instrument documents to this platform. Previously, these documents were circulated by emails. This is still fairly novel for a lot of organisations, and possibly for universities which tend to be slower to adopt certain technologies. We wanted to demonstrate that we could move ahead despite this.

In most organisations, if you need IT support you log a ticket, and someone will get back to you to say “got your ticket”. We realised we could leverage this system as a workflow tool, not only to track case assignment to, or workload of, our legal officers, but to better understand data analytics – the quantity and quality of the work we’re doing. For this we used a platform called ServiceNow, an enterprise workflow tool.

This system was not ordinarily meant for that purpose, the employees that use it are IT, housing and facilities, the construction team etc. but we leveraged on the platform and licences that were already there. We have now gone digital for legal support requests.

We also embarked on legal process outsourcing (LPO) to handle growing contract demands, which you might think would be based in Asia but is in fact based in Europe. Legal innovation is not confined to home locations, especially with our current global situation.

In future we will look to implement a chatbot for legal help, so questions like “How do I get my contract approved?” and “Where do I get a template for this NDA?”  can be processed. NTU has about 10,000 staff at the University and is the number 47 ranked institution in the world according to recent rankings. We want robust systems and processes that match our research and academic standards and ambitions.

Legal tech challenges lawyers to add value beyond what they ordinarily do. The things we were spending a lot of administrative time on are now being absorbed by legal tech, so we really need to show the value that we add. In the context of new legal tech coming in, we would rather preserve headcount and leverage technology than grow headcount, but at the same time, we want to upskill team members so we don’t have to deal with rightsizing when the time comes.  We can say we will invest more in technology instead of hiring more people and add skills we don’t have today.

As lawyers we can still be very traditional in our mindset; we see ourselves as subject matter experts and are typically conservative going into fields we don’t know. Some of the Singapore law firms are now realising there’s a gap in the market and have now started to set up companies as spin offs from their own law firms. They’re limiting those companies to legal tech, with set up of legal tech tools which they can offer to their clients.

But what we need to do as a profession is explore how we work in adjacent fields that are not necessarily related to our subject matter expertise. Over time automation and AI tools will get better, so the question is, what is the gap the lawyer has to fill? Those who are very specialised (like tax lawyers) will continue as before. But what does the other type of lawyer do? What’s different about them? I think they’re the ones who will define the future of lawyering.

I’m certainly not someone others would describe as tech-savvy, but I do believe in the value of digital transformation at every level and am constantly reviewing and re-reviewing tech solutions in the market. For example, some years back, contract automation solutions were generally cost prohibitive, but I have noted that in recent years they have become more cost efficient.

A lot of the legal tech we use is developed in-house. The first project we embarked on is a contract management system we call iCON, which allows internal clients to self-manage ownership and archiving of their contracts while allowing the legal team ease of search and oversight. Auto-alerts can also be customised to remind contract owners on impending contract expiry.

We moved on to develop iASK, a legal services request system. This works like a ticketing system and helps us monitor and track requests from other divisions in a more efficient manner. The status and response times of requests can be tracked, along with history of contract negotiations with specific external parties for reference in new transactions. More importantly, iASK also acts as an internal knowledge database to understand better how certain requests were handled for consistency and facilitate knowledge transfer for new joinees.

Over time, we’ve expanded this to be able to assign requests to different teams within the function such as intellectual property and product regulatory. We are also able to loop in matters from other Canon companies under our supervision in this region. As Canon Singapore is the regional headquarters for Canon sales and marketing business in South Asia and Southeast Asia, this helps us to capture matters carried out not just in Singapore but at the regional level as well.

The latest tech we’ve been working on is called iREG, which is a derivative of iCON. Instead of contracts, iREG will be used to record all licences and certifications that are related to our business and products. The system allows stakeholders to track the status of things like licenses or certifications and trigger actions to be taken. The interface allows stakeholders to easily obtain a snapshot of the business and product regulatory compliance in our region. Users are also able to tag products to specific requirements so that in the absence of a requisite license or certification for any product, red flag alerts are triggered.

We hope to integrate this with our order and shipping system to minimise the risk of shipment of products which may not have fulfilled the requisite regulatory requirements for going to market.

This year, I started overseeing the Quality Environmental Health and Safety function (QEHS) and inherited another in-house developed system called iDOC, a policy management system that allows users to upload new division or company level policies and escalate them for approval prior to the eventual publication and notification to the whole company through an auto-link to our internal company webpage.

At our team level, I advocated some years back the use of what we call the Activity Log System, which is similar to the system law firms use to record their lawyers’ time costs. While there wasn’t then an immediate need for such data, I foresaw the necessity to address matters ranging from internal or cross company charging, tracking productivity at both individual and team level and understanding better the nature of work conducted.

I was fortunate to be able to leverage our IT team’s existing system with minor customisations to suit my objectives.  It took a while for my team members in the region to get used to the concept of keying in time costs. However, I believe in recent years, they have learnt to appreciate the value of this brings. It has also been a useful tool for me in explaining and justifying head count replacements when necessary.

In terms of external resources, we use DocuSign as an e-contracting solution. Our contract volume may be relatively lower compared to other industries and electronic contracting is still curtailed in certain jurisdictions within the region under our care. However, we recognise the value of a tracked electronic contracting process and I wanted to embark on it early.

Collaboration between legal and IT is clearly key in the development of bespoke tools. A critical factor for a successful collaboration is ensuring that we do not take our IT resources for granted (which tends to be the case where internal costs are not so visual). As such, I fully support our IT’s team recent efforts in helping their internal clients visualise the IT resources and cost expended for each project better. They are after all a service provider to us as we are a service provider to our internal clients.

I suppose legal tech invariably leads to a discussion on the use of AI. I have spoken with other GCs who have used artificial intelligence to understand better its practical value. At the basic level, for example in terms of automated contract generation, there is certainly value. However, extending its use to a larger scope such as contract reviews may have differing levels of output value depending on the organisation’s needs and the source data it can provide. There are also concerns of output reliability and risks and responsibility.

A tech-savvy company does not necessarily have a tech-savvy legal team. Nor, for that matter, does it necessarily encourage the use of tech among support functions. But a supportive environment is at least a start. It is refreshing to see that 81% of respondents said their companies were supportive of the use of technology in the legal function. At the same time, 67% thought their companies were more supportive than their rivals. At least 18% of them must be wrong…

But this support has not necessarily translated into financial backing: nearly half (45%) of GCs said that insufficient budget for was the biggest barrier they faced to obtaining technology for the legal team. Knowing what to buy among the many systems available is also becoming problematic, with 73% of GCs either unsure of what technology was available or feeling that there was no suitable third-party tech to meet the legal team’s needs.

There are also cultural barriers to implementing legal tech, sometimes in surprising places. Japan may be the home of everything high-tech, from robots to video games consoles, but its businesses still lean heavily toward tradition when it comes to ways of operating. Angela Yuen, deputy general counsel at JERA, Japan’s largest power generation company comments:

‘In every Japanese organisation there are more layers than an onion. For instance, taking an approval system from paper to electronic format can be a huge task because under the old system of internal approval there will be a large number of steps required at various levels and no one wants to be cut out of a decision.’

‘Furthermore, while people in Japan embrace technology, the legal field has been slower adopting legal technology due to a conservative, careful approach. I think these are two significant factors in why Japanese corporates have been slower to embrace legal technology’.

The long and costly road

When it comes to wish lists for new technology, GCs are looking for either a simple efficiency boost (38%) or readily customisable software (24%). Surprisingly, value for money (15%) and ease of use (10%) were not big concerns for GCs looking to implement new systems. Clearly, legal teams accept the road to tech-enabled efficiency gains will be long and costly.

But the costliest of all solutions, advanced automation and AI, have yet to gain traction with Asia Pacific’s GC community. Only 23% of those surveyed said they were using an advanced tech solution in the legal team, with many deterred by concerns over the cost and reliability of the such systems (29%), difficulties finding the right software (20%) and their own lack of product knowledge (21%).

There was also a healthy degree of scepticism on display. ‘The maturity of AI solutions for legal work is lacking, and I think there is more marketing hype than real AI solutions on the market’, comments Bernard Tan, Asia Pacific managing counsel at Agilent Technologies. There were also concerns that more advanced software would generate more risk for the business. As one respondent commented:

‘There are a number of advanced technology options, but none so far have I found to be absolutely effective. Those that do exist seem to create another layer of liability, which can add to the responsibilities of the legal team. No single tech platform is able to resolve multiple issue, regardless of what their sales teams claim.’

There have, however, been positive experiences. Ivy Wu is head of legal for Greater China at American business-to-business IT service provider DXC Technology. Recently, DXC signed the largest-ever managed services partnership agreement with UnitedLex, giving them access to a suite of advanced legal technology systems.

‘The AI-based legal research translation tools mean we accrue significantly less time and cost penalties when compared to having a dedicated department for this task’, Wu comments. ‘A document can be translated very quickly and will only require a very simple manual double confirm, which is very useful for some litigations, especially international ones which require a lot of translation. The feedback from the business from seeing this data is very positive because they are able to see the cost saved by the legal department is greater than our budget’.

Friend or foe?

GCs may not be using advanced technology en masse right now, but they are keeping a close eye on developments in the field. More than half (55%) were concerned that legal tech would disrupt the in-house job market, while just over a third (38%) felt that lawyers were well equipped to adapt to technological changes within the profession.

But, as Susan Cattell, senior legal operations manager at AMP, concludes, the end game is not lawyers being made redundant, but lawyers learning to do things more effectively.

‘I look forward to the disruption of the industry when we get this right, as when we do, the possibilities of better service to the end-clients, lower cost processes and better managed teams should promote an even better working environment.’

JERA is one of the largest energy companies in Japan but it is also a relatively new company established as a joint venture between Tokyo Electric Power and Chubu Electric Power.

Having a short history has in fact helped us to onboard legal technology. If our company had a history of a hundred years, it would be almost impossible to fundamentally change the way the legal group works because there would be so much tradition built up that the organisation would be very resistant to change. With a new business one finds that nothing is set in stone. We are also fortunate to receive strong support from our ICT group, which is leading the digital transformation of our company.

But even with a young company, doing something new and bringing in a big change is not easy. One must secure budget and buy-in from management. One must also acknowledge the fact that Japan is a very traditional culture when it comes to doing business. Historically, Japanese companies have relied on paper, ink and physical signatures or seals to confirm documents.

However, COVID-19 has forced companies to examine technological solutions and embrace non-traditional working practices. This may have opened their eyes to the possibilities that technology provides, which will lead to a corresponding increase in demand. We are now able to get corporate approval at all levels via electronic confirmations, and paperless working is moving ahead throughout the company.

We are currently introducing and deploying contractual review legal technology. We introduced two [tech providers] for contractual review purposes, one English and one Japanese. I find this necessary as a Japanese solution is needed for Japanese-language documents and an international provider is needed for English-language documents. Some international companies also claim that they have Japanese language adaptability, but the quality is limited because of the nature of AI. Unless they process a huge amount of data, the AI will not grow to a level of capability that satisfies us.

The next area we would like to incorporate legal tech into will be that of workflow management. At the moment, all of this work is undertaken manually; we pick up the phone or receive emails and the consultation starts. In the future we would like to introduce management software to assist this process.

While not all our legal staff are equally eager for legal tech, particularly if they feel learning a new way of doing things will be time consuming, the technology we have introduced so far has proved to be very successful.

We would like to be even more ambitious with the technology we introduce, but we have not got there yet. Take something like document management systems. Transitioning to this type of software is so complicated that we are not sure which supplier is the right fit for us, or whether any company is able to do what we need. We are watching and waiting for the market to evolve.

Naturally, given the company’s size, the legal group’s work is on a global scale, and we need to work with both Japanese and English language documents. The uniqueness of language is one factor as to why Japan does not have as advanced a legal tech sector as other mature economies such as the US or UK. Japan is to some extent isolated from the global market because of this. It is making some headway in catching up, especially due to the COVID situation, and will hopefully progress further.

I firmly believe that the trend of increased legal tech adoption in Japan will continue and we will see an increasing number of companies introducing some sort of legal tech, whether that is document management, contract review or higher-end AI solutions.

We are looking for improvements to our legal technology in most areas. Although I believe we are a bit ahead of the curve in terms of openness to technology adoption, our use of legal tech is limited to contractual review and the contractual review itself – we are talking about relatively standard documents.

If technology advances and other areas can be also processed by legal tech, then the accuracy and efficiency of our work will be significantly higher, which is why we are looking out for new products and evaluating them on an individual basis. Adopting advanced technology to assist the company is one of our top priorities over the foreseeable future.

It’s fair to say that legal operations in Australia has evolved differently to the US, where businesses typically have much larger legal functions with many more lawyers in the organisation. There’s quite a sophisticated supporting structure around all of that which has effectively been brought into the legal operations umbrella. Australia is a little different.

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) in Australia evolved out of a desire to bring together a group of legal staff working at some of the larger companies who had an interest in sharing things that we were learning through our operational improvement initiatives. That included technology but it also included other less tech-focused initiatives aimed at just improving our efficiency and service delivery.

CLOC, particularly in the US, also has quite an extensive array of online resources and online collaboration tools, including some active chat forums where people ask information about what’s happening, and seek insights from other CLOC members that might help them with particular problems that they’re facing or issues they need to solve. In the last year or so, CLOC has also put in place a law firm membership so that external legal service providers can share what they’re doing from an operational improvement perspective.

Legal operational enhancement can be a real challenge if you’re starting entirely from the ground up. One of the great things about CLOC is that you can very easily learn from what others are doing, so that you’re not reinventing the wheel. You are learning from others’ experiences, which makes it a really good forum for embarking on that journey, connecting with people who’ve been through similar experiences and being able to benefit from their experience of the things that have gone well or not gone well in that context.

It’s very difficult to actually objectively assess whether what legal tech providers are saying their product or service delivers is actually what it delivers. Being able to leverage the experience of people who have used those products and services to see what the actual output is helpful.

In my own in-house legal department, we were using an array of technology from the very basic, starting out at the bottom end in terms of core functionality, things like an internal matter management system, which generates data about what the team is doing and feeds into reporting on what we’re up to. We also have a document management system as well, that allows for ready storage of documents.

We’ve built a number of these tools, for example, a self-serve non-disclosure agreement tool that allows people in our businesses – without having contact with a lawyer – to be able to generate and execute a compliant confidentiality agreement. There’s also marketing review tools and a contract review tool that we’ve built and are continuing to evolve. Our objective is to identify processes that our lawyers would otherwise do that are not particularly complex and not particularly strategically significant. And where we can, making use of a tool so that can be done within the business in a user-friendly way that manages the risk.

Going forward, we are exploring the use of more sophisticated tools, particularly more advanced document review technology. The idea is to do an 80/20 review of incoming contracts so that against some key parameters that we’ve identified so that it really helps the lawyers to narrow down their focus on what’s really important in terms of those contract reviews.

We are fortunate in our business that we are relatively free to look at using technology ourselves, although there is some formality in the process. We have to ensure the software we are interested in complies with our data security frameworks, so everything needs to be reviewed by our cybersecurity team to make sure that it is compliant with our standards. The other – perhaps obvious – issue is fitting it into our budget. Aside from these issues, though, there is a fair bit of freedom for us to explore and test different offerings.

I would make the observation that lawyers increasingly need to be at least attuned to technologies and what they do. There’s an open argument as to whether lawyers need to be capable in skills like coding et cetera, my view is that this is probably not necessary but that they at least they need to be familiar with the technologies that are available, and need to be comfortable living with these.

Lawyers who are beginning their careers now are going to be looking at a very different way of practicing in 10 or 20 years’ time, and they need to be adaptable to that. Some have said that what is really important for lawyers is perhaps not so much blackletter expertise but around building empathy and their soft skills development. I think there’s certainly some wisdom in that.

Lawyers across the world like to talk about rubber stamping things, even though few who qualified in the last 15 years will have seen a rubber stamp let alone used one to certify a document. But, as we found out speaking to GCs across Asia Pacific for this special report, when a lawyer in that region talks about rubber stamping something, they often mean it literally.

‘Most documents I deal with require physically stamping,’ lamented one Indian GC. ‘Even if you want to automate some part of that process in the end you will need to get a stamp. That means a trip to another office, a taxi ride somewhere else in the city, a long wait in a queue. All to get that piece of paper stamped.’

India may be notoriously bureaucratic, but the problem was far from unique to that country. GCs from Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and even ultra-efficient Singapore told us of cultures rooted in face-to-face contact, deference to senior decision makers and established hierarchies. As a result, even that simplest of legal technologies, the electronic signature, had failed to take root.

The obstacles facing GCs who wanted to introduce technology felt unmovable. Until a pandemic hit. After nearly a year of lockdown, businesses across Asia have embraced new ways of working.

To understand just how much lawyers have adapted to tech in these strange times, GC magazine teamed up with World Services Group to survey over 100 of Asia Pacific’s leading general counsel. We asked them about everything from the impact of Covid-19 on the legal team’s efficiency to their use of AI, how they find the right software (and the money to buy it), and their expectations of outside counsel when it comes to technology.

We found evidence of a region that is almost uniformly embracing technology, a region where even the most entrenched cultural habits may be coming to an end. But let us not get carried away.

Any discussion of how GCs in the Asia Pacific region are using legal tech is liable to fall into the trap of focusing on culture first. Certainly, this special edition shows much evidence of country-specific traits that are restricting or encouraging the use of technology, but it also shows that GCs the world over are facing the same issues when it comes to technology.

Broadly, there are three steps involved in the acquisition of legal tech, all of which are things lawyers have historically struggled with: Knowing what’s out there; understanding and benchmarking the capabilities vs the cost, and convincing the business that it is going to save time and money. Until GCs get to grips with these procurement-driven approaches to buying technology their successes in finding suitable platforms is likely to remain limited.

On behalf of all of World Services Group, I am delighted to welcome you to the third edition of our GC special reports, looking at the importance and impact of technology on the legal profession.

This issue of the report is indeed a timely one, as at no point in our professional lives has the profound effect of technology been more evident. Since the onset of the pandemic, private practice and in-house counsel alike have universally transitioned to new ways of working largely driven by technology, demonstrating on one hand the adaptability of the profession, while on the other, dispelling tired notions of lawyers as technological luddites.

As the legal leaders featured throughout the report illustrate, innovation – particularly as it pertains to technology – is apparent in every corner of the profession. Just as we saw in the first two editions, neither budget nor business size need to be obstacles to innovating, with much of the counsel-driven development originating from little more than an idea and an opportunity.

Yet as we celebrate the shared successes seen across the legal industry, we must remain cognizant that innovation is a journey on which we will never reach a final destination. And with evolution emerging from every corner, it would be all too easy to rest on our collective laurels instead of continuing to build on the progress made. So, while we look on at the innovators and their accomplishments detailed throughout the report, we should also consider what we can do to foster and facilitate the emergence of the next wave of visionaries, set to take the profession further still.

Here at World Services Group, we want to embody the change that we advocate for. As an organization, we have seen that investing in technology, talent and corporate sustainability best practices that foster social and economic development are essential elements for ongoing business success – all of which represent key commitments I have made for my tenure as Chairman in 2020-21. By taking a strategic approach to our proprietary digital platform, empowering emerging leaders across our network, as well as improving training and accessibility to technology for all our membership, World Services Group is committed to ensuring that we are properly prepared to capitalize on the growing wave of technological innovation, for the benefit of both our members and clients.

In closing, I’d like to thank all of those in the legal community who contributed their thoughts and insights as part of the research for this report. By sharing your own lived experiences along this journey, I have no doubt you will help to shape and inspire the coming generation of leaders and innovators, set to once again disrupt the idea of what it means to be a lawyer.

Ramon Moyano
Chairman
World Services Group

Partner
Beccar Varela

Legal tech is becoming big business in the Asia Pacific region, so much so that the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) has opened a legal tech accelerator. But much of the industry’s focus remains on selling to law firms. For GCs and in-house legal teams, making sense of the myriad systems can be a daunting task.

It is no surprise then that GCs would like to see law firms doing more to help them make sense of the market. While more than half of respondents to our survey (62%) said their external firms were using technology to deliver legal services, under a quarter (23%) said their firms had offered to share information on how technology might benefit their legal team’s operations.

‘Law firms need to demonstrate the value to in-house teams of adopting technological solutions’, noted one respondent, a Hong Kong-based legal manager at an international consumer goods company. ‘Right now, I think the focus of law firms is using technology to improve their bottom line rather than creating value for clients.’

Another respondent, an Indonesia-based head of legal at a large insurance provider, added: ‘It would be great if the external firm could also offer the service of helping in-house teams find the right legal tech solution for their team. They are often far more aware of the trends and services being used in the market so this would really help us understand things.’

Given the clear client demand, it is surprising that law firms are not seeing the opportunity here. Then again, law firms themselves may have a lot to learn. Just 22% of respondents were satisfied with the technology being used by their external firms.

Law firms should take this dissatisfaction seriously – 94% of respondents said it was important for law firms to keep up with new technologies, while 59% said they had started assessing their firms’ use of technology as part of their formal panel review process.

The incentive for law firms is clear. While legal tech is often seen as a disintermediator, disruptor or challenger to the established order, it does not have to be treated as a zero-sum game. As Susan Cattell, senior legal operations manager at Australian financial services company AMP, notes: ‘Clients and law firms have to work together to ensure the right tech solutions have been put into place and that they benefit both parties.’