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In conversation: Samantha Von Hoene, Chief Legal Officer, Enjoy Technology, Inc

GC: Could you tell me a little bit about your path to Law?

Samantha Von Hoene (SVH): Before I went to law school, I was a teacher. I had originally studied engineering, and realised that I had a lot of ability to affect people’s lives as I taught science and math. I worked on that specifically for females; getting involved in STEM education fields is really important. From there I started working with foster youth, and, based on that work, I decided that I would have a larger platform to change the world if I went into Law. When I went to law school, I realised that education reform was something I wanted to do as a pro bono career, but that I wanted to focus on professional growth opportunities and ways to change other industries. So that’s why, in law school, I changed to study and learn corporate and business facing law. That’s also why I chose not to go the traditional law firm route – I really wanted to be involved with people, lives, and working with cross-functional teams, and so that’s why I ended up going in-house.

GC: How did you go from coming into Enjoy straight out of law school to becoming the general counsel?

SVH: That was a big step. While the original plan with Enjoy was for me to work under a GC, that plan quickly evolved into one where I would come in as solo counsel for the company. I took a chance on the small start-up (then only in San Francisco and New York) and more importantly, Enjoy trusted and took a chance on me as a very new lawyer. The company has grown substantially during my time here, now serving partners like AT&T, Google, Sonos, and British Telecoms and operating in more than 50 US Markets and the UK.

From my first days at Enjoy, I did enough of both the tactical and strategic work that they were really able to see the value of having someone who knows the business intimately to grow into that general counsel role, which is what I did. After a few years, I took over as general counsel, and then later transformed into chief legal officer, owning key areas of risk, including cybersecurity/infosec, compliance, trust and safety and legal, in October 2018.

GC: It must have been quite a reward after all the hard work?

SVH: It has been a really incredible journey. I remember how scary and risky it was to go through the entire bar study period in the US without knowing for sure what my job would be, but when I got that phone call from Enjoy, I knew I had such a good family of people there cheering for me. Many Enjoy employees had become friends of mine that knew me and my previous part-time work with the company, so when I got that phone call that said ‘Yep, we want you to come here and start,’ it was pretty awesome.

GC: You’ve taken quite a non-traditional route, to ignore the entire law firm side of it and come straight in-house as a corporate lawyer, rather than from private practice. How did the experience you had compare to that of your peers who might have gone the law firm route first?

SVH: Everyone in law school encourages you to do your five-to-six years at a law firm, to get your experience and then go in-house, because then you’ll be ‘ready’ to go in-house. For me, it was a little different. I immediately realised that I wanted to do something non-traditional; I had a purpose in that I wanted to help change an industry, I wanted to work with teams and to work with great people – I didn’t want to be in a windowless office all day stuck working on meaningless paperwork. So I was very purposeful about the opportunities I took when I was at law school, and those opportunities eventually led me to Enjoy.

When you get in-house, you actually realise pretty quickly that most experience you might have had as a lawyer in a law firm would very quickly evaporate, because in-house is very different. Your audience is predominately key business stakeholders, not firm partners. Business leaders don’t want to read a four-paragraph analysis on an intense legal issue. They want to hear yes or no, the risk associated with the yes and the risk associated with the no, and they want to figure out how their business is going to operate best given the risk analysis you’ve provided.

For me, it was the right choice to go in-house right away because of that experience, and also because of the relationships I’ve been able to build along the way. I think that if I had gone to a law firm immediately, I would have had a lot less exposure early on. Given my current situation, I’ve now had exposure to most large major telcos in the world, in addition to the biggest innovative companies around, getting to talk and liaise with them, to craft and negotiate potential deals with them, and build our internal structures to support such great companies. Its pretty incredible to see what a company like Enjoy can do when they’ve got a strategic visionary leader like Ron and people in place who want to grow to make it happen.

GC: Is there anything you feel you may have missed out on by not working at a law firm first?

SVH: When you choose one path you have by definition not chosen another path and, in my case, I had chosen not to go the law firm route. I think what you miss out on is the mentorship and the ability to have another lawyer right across the hall who can give you real-time advice on that very specific issue that you just worked on. I didn’t have that for a long time at Enjoy. I had to rely on my mentor network, I had to rely on other business-owners in the office saying, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea’, or ‘No, I don’t know why we would do that’, and go with my gut a lot. So it made me stronger in that way. But yes, I think that at a law firm you gain a lot of mentorship opportunities really quickly.

But I would say that the same situation can happen in-house; the issue is that a lot of general counsels have not prioritised it. I am prioritizing it. I offer intern and extern programmes, so people can come in when they’re in law school and get three or four months under their belt with me and my team, so they can understand what it means to work in-house, what it means to work on cross-functional issues as a lawyer, and they can get that real critical balance of experience between legal analysis and business acumen. Once they have that, they’ll be invaluable to any business they want to go into. We’ve seen that time and time again with all my past interns. In order to continue this reach and opportunity for law students, I am helping other general counsels set up intern/ extern programs as well.

GC: What was the time period from when you first got the offer to getting the offer to become general counsel?

SVH: About a year and a half. I knew when they gave me the job offer that no one else was coming in. When they gave me the job offer, they said, ‘We think we’ll make it, we’ve got outside counsel, you’ve got plenty of help, you’ll make it work.’ And it was at that point that I said, ‘Ok, I already know you guys, I’m committed, I’m in, let’s see what happens!’

You come in, you start working and you realise, oh wow, trial by fire, I’ve got to learn this, every day is a new day, every hour is a new challenge – and you learn to swim by being thrown in the pool, essentially. You’ve got to sink or swim. Luckily, at Enjoy, we’ve got an amazing team to say, ‘We’re going to help you swim, we’re going to make you get there, don’t worry.’ But also there’s a lot of pressure when you’re up against the AT&Ts and the other large, major corporations of the world – they’ve got 20+ person legal teams and you’re a year into your role of lawyer and you’re trying to negotiate a big deal or argue some nuanced regulation with them. That’s hard. But I made it work, and once I did that, I was able to move forward with all the key business stakeholders at Enjoy to really help them to understand: this is what I do, this is how I do it, and this is the support I need from you. That’s when I really started to see some major traction, and the jump-start from my transition from sole legal counsel to general counsel to my current role as CLO.

GC: Was there a gap between them saying ‘We believe in you’ and then, on a personal level, you saying ‘I can actually do this’? A lot of the time, believing in yourself can be the difficult part.

SVH: Oh that’s the hardest part, 100%. You can win over the team relatively quickly – you can show them a few great examples of what you do and how you do it and everybody loves you. The hardest part is getting over, as Michelle Obama and others have put it, the imposter syndrome. ‘What am I doing, I’m not supposed to be here, this is not me.’ And that will forever be something that plagues any young lawyer, it will be forever something that plagues young female lawyers. But the truth is that once you prove it to yourself a few times, you start getting comfortable with ‘I can do this and I can do it well’. It doesn’t mean you’re perfect. I make mistakes all the time. But I have a good enough relationship with the people I work with every single day that when I make a mistake, they are my safety net, because they help me figure out what the next step is. It’s really uplifting to have that safety net when you’re young in your career, and making very large-scale moves up the ladder quickly.

GC: Can you tell me about your first time advising Ron Johnson – how was that?

SVH: You know, working closely with Ron, a retail legend, for many that is a terrifying moment because a lot of people have idolised him since his time at Apple, and for good reason. He is an amazing visionary who understands the retail business better than anyone most people have ever met in their lifetime. But I was not in the retail business before going to law school, so for me, I knew him from the outside, as someone who had great ideas and amazing insight. And when I started working with him closely I realised, ‘Oh my gosh, he gets it, and he’s setting a unique and innovative path for this whole company.’

It’s pretty amazing to be able to present and to work with Ron on a daily basis. He is incredibly strategic and also very tactical. He rolls up his sleeves and gets it done. Scary is not the right word. I think it’s empowering to work with someone like Ron. It keeps you professionally engaged, because you either need to continue growing or continue getting better or be on your way out. There’s no room for stagnation when you’re working at a company like Enjoy, or when you’re working for a boss like Ron Jonson. You need to constantly be evolving, constantly thinking about how you are going to approach the next business issue in a way that makes sense for all the risk that is fundamental to the issue, and you need to figure it out. And you’ve got to get it done, at the end of the day. There’s a little bit of scare tactic in there, but more than anything it’s the light of the fire that keeps us all going.

GC: These days, do you see yourself as a lawyer first or as a business person with legal training?

SVH: I’m probably a more of a business person with legal training at this point. I think that that’s a hard answer, because everyone who goes through three years of law school and the bar exam wants to tell you, ‘I’m a lawyer first and I wear my lawyer hat’. But the best in-house lawyers have a really firm and fundamental understanding of the business. So, for better or for worse, I think I am a business-minded lawyer who uses my legal hat but leads with my business strategy and what I perceive as the best path to take given the legal risk within the business.

A year ago, I feel like I would not have said that. But as your business grows, as you scale, when I think about the questions that Ron, our CEO, is asking me, what are the questions that our leadership team is faced with every day, it’s legal analysis and work that goes into those questions but it’s the business mindset that ultimately helps you to make the decision.

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In conversation: Peter Seka, General Counsel, Corporate, Mars, Incorporated

I worked at law firms in Washington DC for almost a decade, where I was a transactional tax specialist, doing mostly cross-border work. I was at Skadden about 15 years ago, when I got a call about an in-house opportunity at Mars, Incorporated. I knew a little bit about Mars, but it was something of a mystery to me. But when I came to speak to them and learned of the international scope and pipeline, I was blown away.

Making the decision to go in-house, I was interested in getting the opportunity to pursue the breadth of subject matters (legal and non-legal) that working for a law firm doesn’t tend to offer. I think going in-house can be a terrific way to diversify your expertise and talents.

When I first joined, understanding the relevance of different legal issues to the wider business was one of the biggest challenges. When you’re in a law firm, by the time the work comes to you, someone in-house has identified the issues, considered the impact on the business, and consulted a lawyer at your law firm. By the time it hits your desk, it’s probably been through a number of filters.

A key part of being a successful in-house counsel is finding ways that you can work with the business to demonstrate your value. Since joining Mars, M&A activity has been a huge part of the business strategy, and I’ve had the good fortune to play a key role in those efforts.

Acquiring Wrigley’s was a huge deal, same with VCA – which led to a whole series of acquisitions in the pet health space. Then we’ve also invested in Kind, which is a health and wellness platform predominantly in the US, but increasing in Europe and elsewhere. On the other side, we also sold Mars Drinks to Lavazza last year – that was the sale of a heritage company, something that we created a number of decades ago and one that was really tough, emotionally, to divest. We’re really pleased to see it in the hands of Lavazza though.

When you think of these types of deals, there’s obviously a huge role for the bankers and finance to play, but there is also a huge role for lawyers. Ultimately, it’s the lawyers who are predominantly negotiating the terms and conditions, undertaking the due diligence, and writing up the agreements. When you work on deals like this, the kind of transformational change that M&A can bring, this is a huge opportunity for lawyers to step up and show to the rest of the business just how they can contribute.

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In conversation: Scott Weber, General Counsel, Lumina Networks

Taking a step back from a big corporate to join a start-up was certainly a big decision!

From my perspective, I was looking at a couple of really key considerations when contemplating this move. One of those, was a desire on my part to continue to learn and grow. When you’re working for a big organisation, it’s natural that you’re going to become siloed – you have an expert on HR, an expert on IP – and it can make personal growth difficult, as they don’t necessarily have the time to teach you or give you the types of assignments that you’d need to expand your knowledge base. They’re the experts and the company needs them focused on being those experts.

I had so many things I wanted to learn – two big ones were HR and corporate securities law – but with such a big company and a defined structure, that wasn’t an opportunity I was probably going to get. By moving to a start-up, coming in as the first lawyer, by default – you’re the guy.

There’s also the excitement of being a part of something from the beginning.

Given the nature of Lumina Networks as a business, they knew that they had to get their legal structures in place properly from the start. There was going to be a host of commercial agreements and structures that were going to need to evolve, not to mention issues with GDPR – in addition to all of the usual legal pitfalls that any start-up company can run into.

At the same time – while it’s an exciting opportunity – it can also be daunting.

I’ve known our CEO Andrew Coward for 15 years now – we worked together at Jupiter Networks before I joined Lumina. But not just from the perspective of wanting to do the right thing by Andrew and the rest of the team – both personally and professionally – when you’re working for a start-up, you can’t ever lose sight of what those people have put in to get the company to where it is now and where we hope to see it going. For them, it’s not just a matter of time and opportunity, but in companies like these – it can be their homes, their livelihoods, their reputations on the line.

There’s always a sense of responsibility – as a lawyer, as professional, as a person – in any role you take. But when it’s in a small start-up business, it’s much more personal.

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Gloria Sánchez Soriano, Head of Transformation – Legal Department, Santander

When our group general counsel, Óscar García Maceiras, joined two years ago, he came with the idea of renovating and transforming the legal department. But Santander as a business is also in a huge process of transformation. Maceiras had a concern that we in our legal department in the market – and I think in many other legal departments – were working the same way that we were 100 years ago. We have legal databases, word processing, some digital resources – but we weren’t doing anything special. So the transformational project he envisioned was not only to implement a range of technologies, but also to foster a savvier legal department, with fewer pain points and better cooperation, coordination and efficiency.

The head of transformation role was created only one year ago. There was a need in our legal department to transform the way we work and to start implementing legal technologies, but also to improve things, not only with technology, but with more measures to improve processes and to take a look at how we work with people in the team – which types of lawyers we need now and which type of profiles we will be needing in the future.

Leading the charge

I’m not running a department with many people that I’m taking care of – what I do involves different people from across the department in each project. Day-to-day, I meet these people for different projects, I also meet providers, I do my own analysis of processes – for example, right now I am analysing a specific department within legal, so I am analysing what they do, how they work, what things they will need to start doing, and which others they need to stop doing.

I also need to go to conferences and seminars, because you need to be in the market talking to many people. Recently, I visited London to see what UK law firms are doing in terms of technology and innovation, as the UK is often regarded as best in class in terms of innovation from law firms.

I’m mostly talking to law firms: to people similar to me, such as innovation directors who have this type of role in firms. But I’m also talking to people in-house who, in addition to their own duties, are in charge of innovation. But the problem in many cases is that these people don’t have a real budget for implementation, or even worse, they don’t have the support from the general counsel or the wider business. In some cases their GC says ‘OK, we need to innovate, but you need to do your own work as well, we don’t have the budget and you need to do it at your desk, somehow’. If you don’t have support, it’s very difficult to do anything.

A work in progress

At the moment, for us, implementation of technology is a process. We are implementing a document management system, which is traditional in law firms but not so much in corporate in-house departments. We also have a contract management system.

We are starting to use some tools to give legal advice, for example chat bots, which our internal clients can use before going to the legal department for repetitive questions or areas where there are clear prescribed procedures, like GDPR. To complement these, we are implementing automated workflows to simplify processes and avoid huge amounts of emails – or as many as possible.

One area where I’d say Santander is really at the cutting edge, is using data extraction and analysis tools.

One area where I’d say Santander is really at the cutting edge, is using data extraction and data analysis tools for specific projects. In particular, we are using this for cases where otherwise we’d need to have a large number of contracts reviewed.

Transforming culture

The reality is that the transformation process is about much more than technology. In my opinion, it’s more about how to deal with culture change and how to deal with people, because in many cases, people are afraid to change, either consciously or unconsciously – and sometimes it’s very, very unconscious.

As lawyers, I think that we sometimes are used to working in a traditional way, to be very secure. This cultural mindset is difficult to change. But I see it as though you are conquering different areas. First of all, you have some people who are more tech savvy and who are more happy to change, so these ones are easier. But then you also have some reluctant people, so you need to try to get buy-in for new ways of working – and more broadly, for change. To do that, you need to do learning activities, you need to involve people in the project, you need to involve people in the development. Also, critical people will tell you things that you were not thinking at the beginning and the little things help you in confronting these challenges – so stakeholder engagement, early and often, is critical.

I think the future relates to being more efficient and leaving out some tasks that will be automated. Today, in most in-house legal departments and law firms, an important amount of the work that is done could be automated.

Moving forward means going back

If you want to automate contracts, you can do it in different ways. You can do that externally, or you can do it internally – but, for that, you need to train people. Training in automation is not coding – it’s a language – but it’s quite similar to coding, so you need to find people who are good at it, people who enjoy doing it, and who have the time, and then you need to organise a team. We subcontract the automation, but we will be having a small team of lawyers and paralegals who are able to create or update templates.

Some of our legal departments in other countries use data visualisation tools – so you need your lawyers to be trained in using these tools, because they are very useful for handling and understanding massive amounts of data. You don’t need your lawyers to be data scientists, but you need them to know how to use the tools and take advantage of them. However, many people who have been working for a long time are reluctant to use these tools – so then it becomes about demonstrating the difference the tools make and getting buy-in.

I think that Santander is doing great things in relation to innovation – we have projects focused on everything from blockchain to machine learning – so as lawyers, we need to understand these technologies, but also provide legal advice for the new questions and challenges that will arise as a business. In that way, we will be considering all of this for the training we need to give to our lawyers and the people we will be hiring in the future, so that we are able to provide legal advice to innovative projects. If you don’t understand blockchain, for instance, it will be very difficult for you to provide advice on it.

Adaptability and creativity will be very important. Being eager to learn is also important. You sometimes find lawyers who think that with what they already know, they don’t need anything more. For me though, that’s the complete opposite of my expectations of the ability they need to have. They need to be learning all the time. But that doesn’t just go for lawyers, that goes for all professions.

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Dr Volker Daum, General Counsel, B. Braun Group

We started using special legal software about five years ago. We work completely paperless and our system is based on open tech – it’s integrated into Microsoft Outlook and is basically a legal case management system.

We have increased the number of lawyers, especially younger lawyers, because we don’t need PAs anymore as a result of our completely digital workload process.

We also use contract creation software. We have about 30 templates we are using, which are compiled from boilerplate, so we only have to change the individual boilerplate and not the complete contract, which gives us standardisation.

We use this software for more complex contracts as well – things like distribution and licensing agreements. The next step will be self-service contracts for simpler contracts, giving leads back to operations, like C2C agreements, which can then be done by a self-service team rather than the legal team. So, for example, if there’s a specific clause that should be used, we are only informed that this clause should be used and we don’t need to see the complete contract anymore.

We’re using software for legal spend, and a software tool for speech recognition – Dragon Naturally Speaking. And we are now working with our next step on workflow tools – we have just recently introduced SharePoint, so we are still assessing whether we are going to use SharePoint Flows, or another tool used in our company’s legal system, which is business project management software.

What we see is that there is a trend towards digitalisation and these things are done by automatic workflows. I hope that email correspondence will be replaced with things like assignments, so it’s no longer unilateral but bilateral that you agree what you should work on.

Keeping the team agile

We have just changed from a departmental structure to a new task-based team structure. In my department, I used to have a compliance department, a patent department and a legal department. I just scrapped the departmental structure and organised into teams.

The new structure gives team members more flexibility, and we are using new agile working methods such as Scrum. It gives more freedoms to the individual, and more responsibility as well. It goes away from the typical hierarchical structure to more self-organised working. It’s not enough to change the work or the way you use digital, you probably also need to change your departmental structure to agile methods because new IT is basically about agile.

In terms of team structure, we have a lean manager here in our legal department and I also want to create a digital legal officer. The legal profession is about five years behind usual business standards – we are not used to processes and other things that are common practice in other departments. In order to be on the same level, we need to advance in legal services. The typical handmade agreement would still be relevant, but the new role of the lawyer is more likely a legal process designer to some extent. The normal functions like fire fighting, corporate governance and compliance will still be in existence, but I would estimate that the typical contract work is going to reduce over the next five years, and be replaced by digital data processes including bots asking and answering questions – because there are already those tools available. This can be – at least for some legal work – disruptive change, and that’s why we concentrate on this: to be competitive in the future. We want to provide services that are still asked for by the company. But this will create and maintain jobs, and may even create future jobs, because it’s not just legal advising anymore – we are part of the process and the value chain.

A digital legal officer probably will not code or programme like an IT programmer, but they will compile software tools with intelligent applications. There are already tools available on the market that allow, on a high level, programming – this can be done by the individual, taking it from IT, which is too slow. We need incremental changes, not wholesale changes every three years or so.

We need to have lawyers who have some affinity to IT to specialise also in IT processes, so some of my lawyers need to be able to at least configure software if not even programme software. I personally can programme – I have learned it. To find lawyers who have affinity to IT is not easy, but we are looking for these skills nowadays when we are hiring lawyers.

Technology that works for us

I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years. When I started, computers had just started and all of the work was paper-based. The communication channels were yellow post, the telephone and maybe some rudimentary email function. Then, things evolved to the point that even a lawyer was the slave of the computer. And what I see coming, and I hope to be coming, is that computers will work for us and not us working for the computers anymore. I hate to see people sitting before a desktop all day and using email chat as the only source of communication. This is not effective, it is not efficient and it needs to change.

The challenge of employing technology is internationalisation. I have 27 legal departments worldwide, and to introduce such tools into smaller legal departments is a challenge. Is the internet speedy enough to train people to adapt technology to local needs, for example? There are legal challenges like attorney client privilege, e-discovery and, of course, EU data privacy.

The main future technology trend, I would think, should be smart contracts. Intelligent, smart contract creation and tools that help us for that purpose, in order to get rid of this standard work.

Another is effective communication. Even Skype for Business and other tools do not really replace personal communication. Often internet bandwidth is not good enough, the quality of the picture is not good enough, so there’s quite a lot which needs to develop in order to replace personal communication and save travel time.

That’s a learning curve in and of itself: replacing personal meetings with virtual meetings. It’s easy to say, but difficult to do. I just tried to have a conference of my main lawyers worldwide, through time zone differences of 12 hours, with five continents and 12 participants. It was almost impossible to have a discussion.

The third one is knowledge management – I think knowledge management, with AI and so on, will change. Typical features in a search function will be replaced – ten years ago, you were looking into books, now the first way to look is to search Google – but this will be more intelligent.

Asking the right questions

In terms of technological innovation, I don’t see the support from the law firms. Everything they offer is to increase their business and not to increase mine. That’s not enough anymore – they need to make my work easier, and not the other way around. This is a typical situation: I have an M&A deal and I am asked to use the law firm’s data room, and adapt to their way of thinking. They are still exchanging emails. So with everything I do, I have to adapt to their system. I am not interested anymore. It’s time consuming. As with many other service providers, they should look at how they give me added value with their offerings – seeing what I need and trying to offer a tailor-made solution for my purpose. They never even ask the question.

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Sarena Straus, Outside General Counsel and Legal Innovation Consultant

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.

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Nina Barakzai, General Counsel for Data Protection and Group Data Protection Officer, Unilever

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.

There is an enormous appetite for doing things in a way that will run efficiently.

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.

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Prof Christophe Roquilly, Dean for Faculty and Research, EDHEC Business School

The use of technology by in-house teams is evolving – particularly compared to what existed a few years ago, two years ago, or even one year ago. Yet still, for legal departments, change is much less quick than in law firms.

Big legal departments are investigating the possibilities and opportunities offered by new technology. There was a survey done in 2017 targeting French in-house counsel, which showed that many needed more software and applications for legal tasks. But at the same time it was more commonly expressed – by more than 50% – that this was not a need at present.

I wouldn’t say there is a kind of collective trend: I think it really depends on the culture of every individual, every lawyer, the culture of the legal department, and the culture of the company itself. But if I look at a period of five years, there is an increasing trend towards a willingness to understand what is happening, what works and what does not work in terms of technology, what the best practices to benchmark for in-house lawyers are – and also to think in terms of investment and return on investment.

I remember speaking to the GC of a very big French company. He said, ‘You know, I’m convinced that some of this technology is going to be very useful for the legal department – but there is a cost, and I need to convince the executive committee, or even the board, that the cost is justified: that we expect a return on investment, so it means cost reduction for the legal department, how we are going to be able to increase the performance of the legal department in terms of service delivery, satisfaction of the clients and also improvement of our own KPIs.’

(Virtual) reality check

Areas in which some in-house teams in France are using technology include legal research and information, case matter management, contracts management and contracts automation, legal knowledge management, and project management. And, of course, e-billing, selection of legal service providers, benchmarking, sharing of the best practices within the legal team – and this is especially the case in big legal departments. Some of them are using predictive justice tools – although it’s very few, it’s just the beginning – and I would say it’s more used by law firms than legal departments.

As far as machine learning and real artificial intelligence go, I think we are still a little bit far away from that. For blockchain, especially for smart contracts, there is a start: for instance, for intellectual property rights management. Some are thinking about the possibility of using blockchain technology to manage the participation of shareholders during general assembly. There is also the smart contract approach of using blockchain technology for contracts between shareholders, for instance to organise the control of the company, or to have agreement provision in the case of share selling. As far as I know, legal departments do not directly use big data analytics, but they can work with some law firms that do.

I think that the particular areas right now where the technology is the most useful are document review, case review administration and case analytics, legal research, document drafting, knowledge sharing and communication. But when you think in terms of legal writing and advising clients, I think that – right now – the effect or impact of the new technology and data analytics and so on is very low.

Some are thinking about the possibility of using blockchain technology to manage the participation of shareholders during general assembly.

When you look at the current legal technology and new legal technology and what they propose in terms of services, it’s moving really fast. But the next steps – more deep learning, machine learning and real artificial intelligence – frankly speaking, will not come within ten years. The creator of DeepMind, which was acquired by Google, said something which was really interesting: when you hear people saying that tomorrow everyone will be replaced by robots, and we will be able to have a full, sophisticated conversation with an artificial agent, he said no: that’s not serious. What is serious is the ability to replace standard analysis and decisions with robots. Analysis further than that, when there is more room for subjectivity and when the exchange between different persons is key in the situation, the Turin stage of artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, deep thinking and so on is not at the right level. We are not there yet.

Redefining value add

One important point when considering the value of technology – something which is happening in some law firms already – is change in the value chain of the legal department.

Typically, you have information entered into the ‘system’ of the in-house team and, at the end, you need to provide a service – advice or a solution. All the segments of the chain, like information gathering, information analysis and treatment, document drafting, due diligence, are going to be more and more digitalised, and done increasingly less by human beings. This means that the skills required for lawyers are going to change, and the quality of the relationship between the client and the legal adviser is going to become more important. Right now, I don’t see any robots directly advising clients because they are not sufficiently sophisticated. But for the lawyer to give good advice, fully understanding the needs of the client and having sufficient time to discuss their analysis with the client – what are the facts, what is the law, what is the content of the regulation, what is the state of the jurisprudence or case law – all of this is going to be done faster, which will leave more time to deliver very high quality advice and service.

The freed-up time can then be used on other important areas. Lobbying is one of them because, surprisingly, in France, the lobbying role of lawyers is not always taken into account by legal departments. Giving the possibility to legal teams to think more about the future of the law in their domain regarding their businesses or the businesses of the company is very important, but you need time to do that. It’s not directly productive, but it can have a huge impact over time. It will also allow departments to take time to train non-lawyers and to increase the global level of the legal education in the company – to reduce the common questions. The other side of that is that there’s also the potential to increasingly automate processes – improving efficiency and quality of services across the board.

Training lawyers of the future

What we need to be doing in the here and now is, when we train future junior lawyers, they need to know how to use data analytics, how to use the new tools which are available on the market, and maybe we also need to train them to understand how algorithms work, even if we are not going to create hordes of lawyers who can code. To understand what it means when you code, and what are the consequences in terms of legal mechanisms, legal analysis, or legal documents, to have fundamental tools to understand what coding means, is going to be very important for them.

The second important point, I think, is to reinforce their soft skills, because the relationship with the core business will be more and more about the quality of the relationship. For instance, what about empathy? Being able to take time to listen to the client, to take their point into account. Knowing that the time you spend for legal research, information retrieving and analysis is going to be reduced and reduced and reduced, if you want to maintain the same revenue for a law firm or the same level of service for a legal department, you need to perform better elsewhere.

As educators, we need to be doing these things. If we do not, we hear from young students who are going to intern for six months or a year, coming back from legal departments or law firms saying, ‘Well you know, we had to work with this tool or that tool, or there was discussion about using a new tool to improve the relationship with the external suppliers, e-billing, and so on, and we didn’t have any clue about what they were talking about.’ Even if you are not convinced, you need to better train your students on these kinds of tasks because they ask for it. There is a demand for it.

Practitioners know better than academics what are the most up-to-date tools they are using in the industry. But I think it’s the role of academics to prepare students to be able to be flexible, reactive and to be able to switch from one tool to another one and to have a global vision, a global understanding of what is happening. And to make them aware that there is a certain level of uncertainty in practice. Usually, when you study law, you do not like that: you like certainty, and the more it is fuzzy or blurry, the less you feel comfortable. We need to prepare them for that.

Technological Darwinism

Now, the question is: is technology going to kill some jobs? I would say, yes of course. Will it promote the creation of new jobs? I think so. Will it change the type of skills required for lawyers? I think it will. I think that the development of these new tools is more an opportunity than a threat if they provoke a change in the business models and the way lawyers deliver their services in the interests of the client. But if some so-called artificial intelligence can lead to weak services and fragile legal advice, then they will be stopped or simply not used. So I think the market will decide and will make a distinction between good stuff and bad stuff.

It seems strange, because sometimes lawyers are perceived as being very conservative, but I can tell you that in France, the legal domain is just after finance in terms of being active in start-ups. I mean, legal tech versus fintech versus other kinds of activity – legal tech is very, very active. Recently, I was surprised to find that that the legal tech that we observed two or three years ago is still alive. Maybe, at the end of the day, you have a Darwinian system where the most adapted survive. You cannot have, for instance, tonnes of companies in France proposing predictive justice because the market is not so big. But I would say that the legal domain is very well placed in France, and could rank well in terms of intensity and innovation; it’s very active. Which is surprising, because lawyers are perceived as being the most conservative compared to some other professionals.

An important objective or challenge is to make in-house counsel more comfortable with the technology, doing demos, sharing success stories, sharing best practices and, to a certain extent, kill the myth that technology is too complicated: that it’s not for you guys because you are lawyers.

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Dr Alexander Steinbrecher, Head of group corporate, M&A and legal affairs, Bombardier Transportation

I would say that at Bombardier Transportation Group, we’re not using technology in the way we could be and should be using it – I would self-critically say that we’re in the bottom third if I look around – but we have taken the decision, as the leadership team in the legal community, to tackle it.

Global application

I see two challenges of employing technology in an in-house legal context. One is budget and the second is that we need software applications that work around the globe. It doesn’t help us if we find the perfect solution for the legal team in Germany – we need to find the global application that the legal team can use in the UK, in France, in Sweden, in Thailand, in the US, in Australia, in South Africa, in India – you name it. It needs to be a software that is so generic that it can be universally used, possibly also in different language settings, because despite being a global firm where English is the company’s language, we still do have local languages used in contracts.

Be brave: think long term

Budget, of course, is always an issue because you need to have a convincing business case. You need to go to the CFO and say, ‘I need the budget of X, I will invest in legal tech applications, and the return on the investment is Z, and Z is higher than X.’ But how do you make that case? I would not like a conversation, which I’m concerned some of my colleagues have had, where the CFO says, ‘Sure, I will give you the budget of X, but then please sign here that you will, in return, reduce the head count in your legal team by 20 or 30%.’ It doesn’t work like that.

I think the return on the investment in legal tech and software application is mid term and long term, it’s not short term. It’s not: you buy this software or this contract generator, or this chat bot and then Peter and Paul can take a hike. It’s not that simple, and if that’s the equation, then the equation will fail and in-house legal teams will not be successful in convincing their CFOs, because they will be shooting themselves in the foot. In the long run, they may have a lower need to hire new in-house lawyers. Even in the mid term I would say that’s doable, but not in the short term. You need to be brave to make the investment, because it’s difficult to predict the yield of return from the investment for the legal team.

Window-shopping for tools… and best practice

I see the benefits of legal tech software and legal tech applications not as a means to cut down on headcounts in in-house legal teams, but as a means for in-house lawyers to be relieved of wasting their time on administrative, repetitive, non-value-add work, so they have more time to spend on brain work where, luckily, software is not yet better than the human brain or the legal mind. I really see it as an enabler to focus more on value-added legal work to support bringing the business forward, so I think we are doing our own in-house lawyer profession good if we find ways to manage our time and our energy better. I’m coming from the perspective of increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and impact of in-house lawyers, rather than just looking for a cost-cutting measure.

Recently, a German law firm showed me a smart contract generator tool. The software asks you questions, asks you to provide information and data and then after 50 questions, you have a fully fledged procurement contract. It’s such an easy approach because a company that develops tech software for lay people came up with this idea and they just transferred this approach, a way of guiding a lay person through legally relevant stuff to create the output, which then is a contract. I see various applications for that, for simple contracts that are really standardised, like non-disclosure agreements, a simple lease agreement, a simple purchase agreement, or a simple labour contract. It can be used for any contract that a company uses on a repetitive basis. So it could be for one company’s licensing agreement, it could be for another company purchasing raw materials, it could be for another company purchasing professional services. Whatever the contract, on a repetitive basis, from Monday through Friday, it can be easily standardised and then created by clicking the mouse, rather than typing letters and numbers for hours, creating and drafting a contract.

85% of the jobs that people will have in 2030 don’t exist today – which is quite frightening.

Another area is copying what service providers have created for end users. For example, one telecommunications company in Germany created an application that you can use if you’re suffering from problems in your WiFi at home. Rather than calling a service line and waiting for 30 minutes hearing lousy music, the app connects to your WiFi router and does some things in the background and tests the connection without you seeing it. If the app (that you can use on your smartphone) detects a problem, it guides you through solving the problem. You don’t have to waste your time on a service line, you’re not wasting money on that call, and you get a quick solution. Something like that could also be used for standard legal questions in a big company that the business asks again and again and again. You just feed the software with information that only a lawyer can give, the software works by itself, the business is supported and they don’t have to phone up the lawyer.

The magic pill that I would like to find, and then eat and swallow, is a software application that we feed with the terms and conditions of our contracts. Based on our project execution experience, the software tells me which are the hot clauses and the cold clauses and, on the hot clauses, what different clauses we have used and how we can improve those hot clauses by learning from our own contracts around the globe. I think we can greatly improve knowledge management when it comes to our own contract execution around the globe.

2030 vision

I was reading the other day that, according to one global consulting firm, 85% of the jobs that people will have in 2030 don’t exist today – which is quite frightening, because it means that only 15% of today’s jobs will survive to 2030. But I would not say that 85% of what I’m doing with my legal team will no longer be done by us in 2030; I see different angles.

There’s one angle where I have the private citizen in mind, and yes I think there will be a huge disruption of how people like you and I, in our private lives, use legal services. I think if you look at the available tools already now, there will be less and less need to engage a lawyer to help you resolve your legal questions and legal disputes.

For companies, by 2030, if they are smart, they will have smaller legal teams but still continue to insource legal services, so they will use less and less external legal advice. I would say that smart in-house legal teams will have managed to develop in-house legal expertise and knowledge in areas where they are no longer dependent on external lawyers, and they can only do that because they are no longer wasting their time and energy on low-skilled, legal administration work. I think it will help the smart in-house legal teams to improve legal quality in areas where they are currently dependent on external experts, so I think it will be tight for external lawyers rather than for in-house lawyers, because there will simply be a decrease in engaging external lawyers.

But not for the real global law firms who make a fortune from global transactions where you need so much more brains and hands than a mid-size law firm can possibly get together. For mid-size law firms, it will be tough moving forward into the future, and you see it already – there’s a big trend of consolidation in mid-sized law firms. I would say that the landscape of law firms will look very different in 2030.

It was acceptable in the 80s

We are quite a conservative profession, at least in Germany, and we are under immense pressure to stop conserving the way we work rather than opening ourselves up to new ways of working. The days where a partner or an associate in a law firm can shift all technical stuff – word processing, Excel, PowerPoint – to an administrator are over with and, sooner or later, there will not be a person who does all that for you and you charge it to your client. I think we all need to step up our technical skills and internet skills and software skills, because our way of working as lawyers, and in-house lawyers, is pretty much the same as in the 1980s –and I don’t think that that’s sustainable.

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Professor Enrique Dans, Professor of Information Technologies and Systems, IE Business School

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.

You start to work in a different way when you understand the importance of data in what we do on a regular basis.

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.