Category: Interviews

Not the usual route

I started my career as a prosecutor, working with government for several years before I accidentally fell into an in-house role. I started my in-house career as counsel at a mid-sized medical management company that was working off a technology-based platform. Because I’d worked there first as a lawyer, I got interested pretty early on in process optimisation and streamlining.

From there, I worked in big pharma for 12 years, undertaking a lot of self-initiated projects, which is where I started to see opportunities for improvement and optimisation. I intentionally sought out projects that looked to restructure the way we were handling things, particularly through streamlining and automating processes.

That led me to becoming one of the founding members of a legal incubator that started at Boehringer Ingelheim. I was part of a group of five or six people from around the world who worked in the legal department – though not necessarily lawyers – trying to operate at a high level and find what we could do within the organisation in the innovation space. That got me meeting a lot of other people in the legal innovation industry, while seeing what was out there and what was still missing.

Incubating ideas for better business

For the internal legal incubator I helped set up at Boehringer Ingelheim, the notion wasn’t actually to implement anything – the notion was to go out there and explore what was outside the organisation and available outside in other spheres of the legal world, but also to explore internally and discover some really out-of-the-box and interesting solutions that might help the organisation with certain internal needs.

They tried to pick a cross-section of people from a legal organisation – lawyers and non-lawyers in different parts of the world – and said ‘come up with ideas’. We all ended up with our own pet projects in what we were focused on and there was a lot being done as individuals to then bring back to the team. But above all, we were told to structure it however we wanted to.

It was essentially an idea machine and then up to the organisation to say ‘Do we want to implement those ideas?’

As far as we could tell, it was the first of its kind. When we started to go out and talk to people about it, there was a lot of excitement. Lots of organisations focus on innovation, but we had never heard of it being initiated by the legal department, particularly from the viewpoint of those who were looking really strictly at what the in-house legal department was doing. To add to that, I don’t think a pharmaceutical company is at the top of the list when you consider who is going to be thinking outside the box!

Filling a need

What innovation means and what makes sense depends on the kind of organisation you are working with and what their needs are. It could be something very small or something very big, but I think it’s a very individualised decision, rather than a lot of what is being marketed out there. Put simply, out-of-the-box solutions aren’t always for everybody.

As a consultant, I’m not aware of anyone else that is defining themselves this way. Certainly, there are many other organisations who are competing and innovating in the legal tech space, but to look case by case at an organisation’s needs and ask ‘How can we do this differently? How can we think about this differently?’ in order to create innovative solutions – I don’t really know anyone else who is focused on it in the way that I am. Which is to say, I’m not out there marketing a tech solution. There are companies who do that and have the expertise for it. I am more focused on the needs of the company I’m working with. That might be a technology solution, but to me that’s usually going to be one piece of a bigger puzzle.

I think all companies want to be innovative and want to do things better, but I also think that when people have talked about innovation in the past, they are trying to tick a box as opposed to really thinking about what it means for them. For example, the place where companies struggle in a big area that I worked in would be transactions – and if you are really looking at doing something radical in the transaction department within a larger organisation, it can take a lot of work to get there. It can also frequently involve major corporate culture shifts, and a lot of the time somebody is interested in talking about it and I think they are interested in doing it, but the reality of implementation might not be there, or the cultural change required to make the changes is not possible either.

I don’t believe innovation for the sake of innovation is necessarily appealing. Often when people are talking about innovation in the legal space, they are solely considering technology. The challenge is to think more broadly – and not just about buying a ready-made solution out of the box, but instead weighing up what you can do with an organisation to differentiate how you provide legal services.

For me, the bottom line is that tools don’t replace people – someone still needs to be responsible for the process. A tool is out there if you need things that monitor turnaround time, ageing and expirations, but you fundamentally need good people to do the work. But those people, too, are changing. When you look at the legal industry, it is changing rapidly, but you’re also looking at lawyers who are coming out of law school with a different mindset and skillset than those who emerged 20 or 30 years ago.

Looking forward

We keep talking about innovation in law firms, but I think we thought it was going to be further along in some areas than it currently is. I believe it plays a huge part, but I think the more interesting conversation is about where you cannot replace lawyers with technology. A big piece of that is on the counselling and ethics side. I don’t think it is going to be as easy to replace an ethical determination and counselling with computers, as it is to automate an NDA.

All we have really seen in terms of legal innovation tends to be on the technology side. My sense regarding the in-house team would be the role of the CLO growing to become someone in the legal department who is more in charge of operations. Somebody like that would be well suited to try and implement the innovation teams in-house. By and large, law firms are significantly behind the curve. They are still doing things the old-fashioned way, and I think there is tremendous room for improvement and optimisation in law firms in particular.

GC: What are the main themes running through Unilever’s use of technology?

Nina Barakzai (NB): Firstly, that tools should help us work more efficiently; secondly, implementation is a journey and we must see benefit; and thirdly, technology is disruptive but helps us build our professional competence as an in-house legal team supporting the business.

GC: Can you give any examples of technology initiatives used at Unilever?

NB: At Unilever, there are numerous technology initiatives spread across different business functions. We aim to be at the top of the list when it comes to talking about tools to help us work more efficiently. Some parts of our business use blockchain for certain types of activities; others have introduced a chatbot with machine learning to continuously improve the systems they use. Legal is building knowledge management tools to get to a single source of truth – a lot of the technology we’re using, because we’re operating at scale, supports us when we need to have information held reasonably accessible so that everybody can rely on them.

Implementation of this new capability is an ongoing journey to embed benefits and continue to develop and improve our processes and contract management. For example, Procurement implemented a contract lifecycle management tool. During that implementation phase, we found that the learning process was as much about adjusting to the realities of the software, as it was about doing what we needed to do. We have general terms and conditions and smarter contracting to tailor the generic terms, where appropriate. Internally, this shrinks contract life cycles, to deliver a consistent, end-to-end, contract automation process.

GC: What are some of the challenges of rolling out new technology?

NB: There is an enormous appetite for doing things efficiently. It’s obviously challenging if we’re in 190 countries and generate 190 country contract processes along the way. We have about 80 preferred partners worldwide who are working alongside us, who design things with us. That creative engagement is absolutely vital, because we design processes with our partners and us in mind. Together, we make space for collaboration.

Some of the billing that we get with our preferred external law firms has been adjusted so that we both can work within those formatted structures, and we use platforms that are well established in the market. Our focus is to help ourselves and our partners manage how we work together, so that we know when they are getting certain information, and we know how to keep everything running smoothly. We’re working, adjusting, enhancing, improving and making it more efficient.

For some, anything new is a challenge to understand, learn and embrace. Others ask what will make life easier and want it immediately. There’ll be others who like to experiment and gradually incorporate new tools into their activities. We may not always have the luxury to deep-think every activity because sometimes we have to deliver advice and work with the business to execute specific outcomes. I think everybody goes through this type of experience at some stage. But I haven’t found anybody who doesn’t use any technology yet. I’ve found many people who are using lots of different technologies in lots of different ways, which I think is thrilling.

From my perspective, I like working with technology that is disruptive. It means I get to experience exciting developments as part of my work, with the added benefit of making my life easier. I think everyone who is in a fast-paced environment works to stay relevant and up to date, or risks disempowering themselves or being less effective. I’m conscious that not everyone thinks of these things in the same way or with the same enthusiasm. Working with technology needs to be made accessible. It’s easy to switch people off by making them feel they are somehow less capable because they cannot work a particular system, application or device. That doesn’t mean they’re bad lawyers, it just means they may need to have the information presented in a way that they understand.

GC: What does new technology mean for you?

NB: I’m tuned into how I can make better use of technology because that’s my work: I want to be able to handle data responsibly all the time, every day, every minute. I will always look for tools that keep me up to date and enable me to deliver privacy advice smoothly. Staying up to date means doing constant professional development. Practice makes perfect, but add in CPD and it reinforces the professional drive to stay up to date to do the best job for your clients. I want and enjoy doing a better job for my clients, so I work hard to understand the environment in which my clients are operating. Clients are doing more with more data, and that brings scale and complexity. I need to understand that.

One of my tasks is to help design control solutions in a privacy context. If there is a quick, easy way of determining whether, say, control 623 is more relevant than control 17, when working with, say, hundreds of controls, that will help me. People are more likely to make errors when operating in teams, running at speed to deliver cybersecurity and privacy controls. If internal advisers are on the move in factories or out in the field looking at tea crops, raw materials and other front-line activities, how do we make sure that they can see privacy advice and have information in bite-sized chunks, at their fingertips? So, just as in our everyday lives we look at platforms like YouTube to see how to work the cooker or to understand instructions for flat-packed furniture, we are making more video blogs and developing alternative ways for the business to access information on legal, privacy and cybersecurity topics. I’m looking at how to make things available via mobile, on devices. A key requirement is to make sure these alternatives work across multiple jurisdictions, making it easier for people to learn from the materials and leverage their own skills.

GC: Is there any technology you would like to have in future?

NB: Looking forward, I would like an AI bot for developing what I nickname a ‘privacy university’. People may think up creative ideas for dealing with privacy needs in their business areas; others may feel anxious that, although they are experts in one or more areas of law, they don’t have a good grasp of privacy laws. My hope is that, through the use of technology, my colleagues can ask a simple question all the way through to a more complex query. A privacy bot that can give a quick answer, in a tailored business context, could help a colleague along an entire spectrum of knowledge, simply by being a starting point for additional resources. Colleagues can work with confidence, knowing where to look and who to ask. My task in privacy is to help change their inner thought of ‘I don’t know what the question means’ to a feeling that they know where to get guidance, get help in understanding the question or, better still, find an answer that can be tailored and made relevant for the issue on which they are working.

People tend to see technology as something that will allow them to get rid of the parts of their job that they don’t like – that they find repetitive, cumbersome or boring. Equally, it’s seen as something which will allow more efficiency and allow the opportunity to concentrate on the interesting parts of their job. In the past, this might have meant something as simple as word processors or automation. But now, all of a sudden, a computer can not only automate, but a computer can learn. That means you can start giving the computer a number of cases, and it starts building rules and logic on its own. Not exactly on its own – of course you need an algorithm that allows it to learn – but after a while, it learns. It can recognise different things, something in a picture or certain clauses in a contract – as soon as you provide it with enough data for the computer to learn, there are seemingly few limits on what could be achieved.

A new paradigm

This is a totally different paradigm. We are not talking about automation anymore, we are talking about something that can learn and, in many cases, can learn in a much more efficient way than a human. That changes the question, and this is something that most people have not yet realised.

Google, right now, is using machine learning and artificial intelligence to manage all the electricity consumption at its data centres. You might say, ‘This is Google, Google is not a regular company, they are on the cutting edge,’ but this is happening in more and more places.

It’s being used right now to identify tumours in medical imaging. Consider this: when a physician is looking for tumours manually, they can be given hundreds of images to search through – even though it’s a relatively routine task, the volume means that things can be inadvertently missed. So instead, an algorithm is being used to do it, and it’s already learnt to spot tumours better than physicians.

Eliminating uncertainty

I think a difficulty with technology is that when people don’t understand how it works, it can be disconcerting. But if people can develop a sense of what’s going on and understand the basics of how these things work, then it’s going to help with uptake and use. You don’t need to be a mathematician. If you follow the concepts of what it is – even in a nutshell, without getting into the nitty gritty details – you realise that machines don’t make mistakes. They don’t miss things. And things that are absolutely normal in humans don’t happen in machines: their perception is better, their senses are not relative, and they don’t get distracted.

The first time you jump into an autonomous vehicle, for instance, you keep thinking, ‘Well I’m not sure if the camera is going to see that, or the light, the reflection, the speed of reaction.’ And then you realise: no. As soon as you put the machine in charge of it, the machine is able to see 360°, they have immediate reactions, they don’t get distracted, they don’t look at their cell phones, they don’t get road rage.

Data analytics

Analytics is really exciting. I’m still amazed by what you can do already – understanding what your customers do, or think, or express. We have a crazy amount of customer interaction points – it’s not just that someone goes to a store and buys something or receives a service or a product. Now customers speak up on social networks, they provide opinions, they complain, they sometimes praise our products or what we do. So we have a crazy amount of moments that can be analysed. Right now, an algorithm can understand irony – when you tweet something that’s ironic, there are algorithms that can start to approximate and understand that it’s not really a compliment, it’s more like a complaint. Right now this is being deployed primarily in marketing – but there are a host of potential applications for this type of technology.

In my role, I’m extremely interested in how lawyers adopt innovation, because some time ago, lawyers used to be very traditional: they were kind of laggards.

In some places, we’re seeing that lawyers are using machine learning when examining contracts – instead of examining contracts one by one, every single clause, which used to be done by a lawyer, now it’s being done by an algorithm, because the legal terms and the legal language tends to be very well defined because it’s specifically written to avoid ambiguity.

As a lawyer, you used to trust your paralegal to go through the databases and find the relevant cases related to the one at hand. Now, lawyers have started to trust an algorithm to revise old cases and precedents and so on. They trust them much better than they trust human paralegals, because they realise that they can compare the text word by word, meaning that they don’t miss details. They can even revise all the cases heard by a particular judge and get to know about the biases of that judge in similar cases – which is something that a human assistant might not be able to do, or that might be able to do only by intuition.

I’ve been working with the Spanish Ministry of Justice in connection with the modernisation of justice in Spain. I also teach law students at IE. These two roles expose me a little bit to the realities of justice. Work is being done on ‘algorithmic justice’ for petty thefts and things that are repetitive – the possibility of being able to come up with a first verdict, of course allowing the two parties to appeal if they don’t agree with the verdict, but releasing many human hours that could add value in more complex cases. All the things related to an insurance claim, traffic problems when there’s no victims, etc. All these could be very well examined right now, with the current state of technology, by algorithms. You could ask one insurance company to negotiate with the algorithm of the other and get into an agreement, only bringing the human lawyers in if they are really required. That could take away a significant part of the burden for lawyers right now.

Behind the magic curtain

I think the key aspect here is to get people to see this as a natural thing, as something that should not get them scared. Google understood a while ago that machine learning was going to be fundamental. Three years ago, their CEO, Sundar Pichai, talked about machine learning as something that will change the world to the same amount and the same intensity as electricity or fire changed the world. This is a lot to say. So, how do you go from understanding that to getting your organisation to understand that? He put together a very ambitious programme to teach it to all the staff. And all the staff means all the staff – the clerical staff, the people that work in search, the people that work in every single part of the value chain in the company. What happened? Innovation flows much better when people are able to see machine learning not as magic, not as something that someone with a magic wand goes ‘Ping!’ and it starts working, but as something that flows from the data.

You start to work in a different way when you understand the importance of data in what we do on a regular basis. In our day-to-day issues, we don’t pay much attention to storing the data in a proper way and being respectful to how this data is being stored. As soon as you start creating a conscience about data and storing it the proper way – because later on it will provide us with a lot of value add, because you’re going to analyse with algorithms – you’re going to be able to go and find patterns. This is important because then things change in a corporation.

But most corporations are not doing that. Most companies are just using this idea of innovation, machine learning, coming up with algorithms etc, in just one aspect of their corporation – the innovation department or the machine learning department, or something like that. When you only do that, it is much more difficult to change an organisation.

Environmental factors

I think it’s better when a law professional is adapted to the environment. The environment is becoming influenced by technology all the time now – we do many things with technology that we didn’t used to do three years ago, and it’s changing amazingly fast. The legal profession has to relate to that and has to adapt to that. It brings up new opportunities: what happens if there’s a misunderstanding when I talk to my voice-enabled home assistant – what type of legal issues are there? And besides understanding these new cases, they need to understand how this is influencing the way they work, or the way they provide their services.

All of us will be able to talk to machines – most likely, kids will start programming in kindergarten. So what happens when these kids grow up and some of them become lawyers? They will be checking out an algorithm and understanding what the algorithm is doing, even creating their own algorithms. Right now, if you think about the latest version of iOS, it provides you with the possibility to tell Siri: ‘When I use this word or this command I want you to do this, this, this and that. I want you to open my GPS, and give me the directions to my office because I want to see where the traffic jam is, and then play this on Spotify…’ – and you can activate all that with a single voice command. What are we doing? We are creating algorithms.

When I came to Volkswagen two years ago, I started auditing how we were handling cases and legal topics in our organisation, and I learned that in this field we were taking a bit of a classical approach. We didn’t really have a system in place that could embrace all of the legal queries, legal contracts, and everything else which comprised the work of the legal department. My impression is that while a lot of lawyers use new technologies and devices, we often do so in a way that replaces the old functionality without truly embracing the power of technology.

A one-stop shop

I proposed that we should implement a legal management system so that we would have all of the data – contracts, agreements and everything else you can imagine – connected to legal services and outcomes in a single system. Each employee in the company has access to the system and can submit legal queries. As an administrator of this system, I can delegate specific tasks to a lawyer in my team. But what is important is that the internal clients submit all the necessary data into the system so we don’t lose time calling each other or sending emails – everything is there in the system so we can render the legal advice. The same happens with the legal opinions, legal questions – internal clients can submit a query, and then I seek the right person in my team to respond. We have different response times based on the urgency of the query. You can access the system from any place – it’s online in the cloud, so my team can work from home or while travelling on business.

At the moment, the system is a database, but we are working with a legal tech start-up to test the addition of artificial intelligence solutions in a specific module that will create agreements for our internal clients. There will be no lawyer needed: you will just submit all the necessary data and the algorithm will prepare the agreement for you. We think this will streamline the process.

Benchmarking

Our system gives an opportunity to benchmark the work of my lawyers – how much time they need to respond, and how many queries they receive – you can extract this data from the system. I even have statistics. It helps to have an overview of the workload of the lawyers, so I can see how many cases they are dealing with and their response times. It also gives me a nice view of what issues are particularly complicated, and which we find time-consuming.

The lawyers in my team are very supportive of the system. Even those with less of a technical acumen are gradually adapting to this technical revolution, not to mention those who grew up in the digital age who adapt on the spot.

The costs of changing the paradigm

The challenge was to get the specific budget for the implementation. Convincing the management board was actually the first milestone for me – just to get the money and to convince the decision-makers that this was something we should do – because for them it’s also a change in the paradigm. We are quite a big organisation, with lots of departments and lots of different systems, and we wanted our system to be connected directly to our finance system so we could also track some standings and combine agreements with the invoices. The whole phase of implementation was quite troublesome, and it required cooperation with external IT advisers and our internal IT department, and a whole testing phase. We also had to provide training for the employees outside of legal, because previously it was easy for them – they were just grabbing a phone and calling a particular lawyer. Now they had to do it online without any support. So the beginnings were not easy, but now everyone has gotten used to it.

When thinking about technology, I tend to look for stuff from outside my company, to the people working in legal tech. I also try to be active in the legal tech space in Poland, and am vice chairman of the German-Polish Chamber of Commerce Legal Tech Commission. We meet every two or three months to discuss what’s going on in the legal market, and it’s very important for me to exchange opinions with my peers from other big corporations in Poland about how they use legal technologies to tackle problems, and what solutions they are using.

Getting ahead

Very often, if I’m writing a bid for legal services and want to cooperate with external counsel, I ask them if they are using any technological tools that can support me, or whether their legal advice can be rendered in a better structured way, or if there is the possibility that they will provide me with the necessary data direct into my system. For me, if a law firm could show that they have some legal tech solutions supporting their services, that would be an advantage.

I know that the big names are working on new technology, but my experience is that although it is cascading from the headquarters, there is not that much success in this field yet. I know that there are some Magic Circle firms that are even giving free office space for start-ups, and are creating and cooperating very closely. I think that this is happening in the Polish market, but it’s still not very common. It is a hot topic, everyone is talking about it, but then when you ask about the implementation, or what kind of tools people are using, it’s still at the early stage.

I believe that within the next two or three years we will see more technological disruption happening: more companies offering those services and more in-house counsel looking for those services on the market. It is growing and it will change the legal landscape. To be successful in the market, you have to be an early adopter, you have to be at the forefront, because otherwise you are just a follower.

We talk about external lawyers always being part of the project team. A very good example is due diligence when you are buying a property or making an acquisition. Now there are really good legal tech tools in place, which can analyse a lot of documents so that the lawyers can focus on giving more client-oriented advice. They can be closer to the client, and closer to their businesses rather than just sitting and analysing papers and, for me, that’s the biggest positive aspect of technological evolution and disruption.

Balancing the personal with the efficient

Some lawyers in my field have this feeling that we are losing the personal touch with our clients, and that we are just putting systems and technology in place. I think if you are working for a law firm, then that’s the most important thing – if I like a particular lawyer, I will work with them regardless of which firm they are working with because I know them, I know they’re a good professional and very responsive. But lawyers need to wear many hats – they need to be lawyers, they need to be project managers, very often they need to be psychologists and mediators, and this is the value that they add to the business. So if they can leave some of their work to algorithms and deal with the client instead – understand their business and their challenges – then that’s important, I think, from my perspective as GC.

In corporate legal departments, I think that technology can create an additional layer between the lawyer and the internal client. But I think our role is a little bit different: we are not looking for the client, clients are looking for us; we always have sufficient jobs to do. So from this perspective, I think it can optimise our work because then the internal client will think: ‘Do I really need to ask this question, maybe I can find it somewhere else, maybe they have a directory of frequently-asked-questions, maybe there are some common agreements which I can use and download from the system without contacting the lawyer.’ It’s easy to just take the phone and call a lawyer, but if you have to put some data in the system and think about it, then you might think, ‘Maybe it’s not a really big issue for me or maybe I don’t really need the legal support.’ In short, in internal legal departments, technology can help us to focus on where the real problems are, and devote our time to the legal issues which are really essential or which add value to the company.