Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

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.

Posted on

In conversation: Supriya Gogia, Legal Counsel, Asics

GC: Tell me about your role and how you came to be at Asics.

Supriya Gogia (SG): Asics opened its Southeast Asia regional headquarters in 2012 here in Singapore. I joined Asics in 2016. Prior to this, I was working for a retail e-commerce company which was a first mover in the region. After a good run with online retail, I was looking to get some hands-on experience in offline retail as well. That’s how Asics happened. Asics has been in the region for six years. It has expanded exponentially during this period. Asics started off fairly early in Europe, and America, and other regions in the world, purely because these regions were seen to be more health conscious and sports-centric back then. This consciousness came to SE Asia in the last 15 to 20 years or so, and now the fitness industry in Asia Pacific is worth a whopping $16.8 billion – the highest value ever. There hasn’t been a better time to be here.

GC: It must be quite interesting for you – as you said you started in the online retail business and then moved offline – what was that transition like?

SG: E-commerce in Southeast Asia has been very hot for the last five years, as it is elsewhere in the world. The only impediment in Southeast Asia is that regulations and laws catch up slowly with technology. Technology is moving much faster than legislation, and this game of playing catch-up sometimes ends up impacting the industry adversely. In-house counsel need ratification for creative business models that companies are trying to implement; when we go to external counsel, they do not necessarily have black and white advice because the industry is nascent, it’s very niche, and there are very few companies which are acting as disruptors and pushing boundaries. At the same time, jurisdictions are in the midst of formalising relevant legislation, which makes it imperative that we work closely with external counsel as well as government authorities. Regulations in different countries in Southeast Asia keep evolving and it’s important for us to understand if any upcoming legislation is going to have an impact, either positive or negative, on existing business plans.

For me, the move from e-commerce has been very interesting indeed. Offline retail is more traditional, organised and risk averse as compared to e-commerce, even regulations concerning offline retail are better set out. There is a lot to learn as counsel because most consumer retail brands take pride in store concepts and their existence, which means both offline and online sales channels are important for consumers. As such, being in a spot which is ever-changing and still very new is quite challenging, but it’s equally interesting if you want to be an industry expert. My experience has been very fulfilling and I think these skills become advantageous along the way. All companies want to be online – most of them are there already – so it is a very interesting prospect for my personal growth and contribution to the retail industry. Omni-channel experience is something that is likely to become more of a necessity than choice.

GC: Do you have any sense of why e-commerce has exploded the way it has, in Asia specifically?

SG: Yes. I feel the reason for that is: one, Asia has a relatively younger population, compared to other parts of the world. And secondly, I feel that when you talk about the fourth revolution, it is different from the first three because the first three began in different parts of the world – the first one started in Britain, the second in North America and so on, but I feel the fourth industrial revolution – and this is completely a personal opinion – it started all over the globe, all at once. For instance, even if Apple is designing a phone in California, there is a manufacturer assembling it in China. It is a very collaborative revolution, where countries are coming together to give the end product to the consumer. This is what makes Asia very relevant in this revolution because it is not left behind, it is in fact playing a very significant role. This e-commerce explosion is also partly due to cheaper labour costs and strengthening of the manufacturing industry in this region. Because labour is cheaper in Asia, we have a growing service industry which is well equipped to support e-commerce operations and a massive manufacturing set-up. These are industries which give a strong foundation to e-commerce.

GC: Asics is looking to increase presence in other markets in Southeast Asia soon – how do these markets differ from those where Asics is already well-established?

SG: Asia is unique in that sense. Not all Asian countries offer seamless market entry for foreign companies, some economies are closed and protected. When a Japanese company like ours wants to establish a foothold – it’s not free entry. For some countries you either need to partner with a local venture or you need to invest additional capital to be able to engage in industry-specific activities. That said, these markets have immense potential for expansion, with a growing middle class and a surge in awareness surrounding fitness and sporting goods. We work very closely with external counsels in these countries since language can be a barrier at times. The majority of government documents in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand are in local languages which require local expertise to decipher.

GC: As a large, recognisable brand, intellectual property must be of particular concern. Could you talk a little about that?

SG: Yes. Intellectual property is the most valuable asset for any global company – for consumer goods it’s the most important piece of brand management. As I mentioned before, the bulk of manufacturing for consumer goods is done in Asia, and this comes with a downside for brand protection. There could be instances where one factory might be manufacturing goods for different brands, and no matter how well you articulate the liability clauses, how meticulous your contracts are, there is bound to be leakage. Leakage is when original products are leaked through the factories into open markets. Brands also face issues of counterfeit products, which originate from factories which create copies of authentic products. When you operate in a region that manufactures, you have to be extra cautious of these infringements, which are potential high risks for the brand.

GC: Is there anything that you see coming on the horizon that might affect the industry?

SG: I do think the concept of augmented reality is quite intriguing, as well as the trend of pop-up stores – which is quite common in Asia – where you can try a pair of footwear, get the “touch and feel” of the product and use a tablet or iPad available at the pop-up to order that product. The product could be delivered to your address the very same day. You don’t need to stock up inventory, the space required is minimal, which ensures you don’t pay exorbitant high street rentals and human resources involved are far less. I do foresee this as being a popular way to shop for countries where internet penetration is high.

Posted on

In conversation: Crystal Lalime, head of APAC global markets legal, Credit Suisse

GC: Technology in finance is a hot topic – especially here in Hong Kong. What are your perspectives on this and what is Credit Suisse doing in this area?

Crystal Lalime (CL): Technology is changing finance, it is changing banking and, in the process, creating new pathways for Legal to play a role.

Recently, we partnered with a fintech company called Canopy Pte Ltd. What their technology allows is for clients to consolidate their accounts on the automated account aggregation platform, so an individual can manage their whole portfolio from a single platform, which is quite a powerful tool for our clients. We identified a company that we thought provided a very good solution for our clients and took an investment in the company to provide that service to our clients.

This is a major trend in the industry and we are very much a part of it.

GC: Can you describe the partnership approach that Credit Suisse takes to working with start-ups?

CL: With start-ups, you see a lot of interesting technology, but a lot of the times it becomes about who they partner with, where their distribution chain is, what their path to market is and whether there is a really strong use case. As lawyers, we can’t necessarily keep up with the technology development, but we certainly have ideas about how they can be partnered with or integrated into Credit Suisse.

Our approach so far has centred on just that – partnering. A lot of AI technology partners may be attracted to partnering on certain projects with us because of the large data dumps we can provide to train their algorithms, but oftentimes finding a use case that makes sense on the legal technology side for CS and the technology provider can be time-consuming.

GC: When working with start-ups, what role is Legal asked to play?

CL: As we look at these opportunities with start-ups, that also presents new challenges for Legal. Oftentimes, start-ups aren’t as well governed as we’d expect – particularly with the high standards we’re accustomed to operating within. Legal plays a prominent role in advising on the due diligence and sometime restructure of start-ups, which isn’t unexpected – these are M&A deals after all – but the issues which arise can be more varied.

When you’re running a start-up, budget is a huge consideration, but when you’re working with financial institutions – areas like compliance are ones where there isn’t room for error. Sometimes you’ll see that there are certainly the right intentions in mind, but a start-up might employ a junior compliance officer to help them get on the right track – but as you scale up and you’re running a big platform – the compliance may be extremely onerous.

Once a partner is identified, there’s a whole host of further issues for Legal to consider. What are the processes in place for handling data, moving data and protecting data? If we’re co-developing products, who is going to own the IP? What about if there’s interest from other financial institution’s to licence the technology – how do we handle that? It takes a lot of creativity and diligence, as well as constant training and upskilling for the legal teams who may have previously been advising on selling products and are now involved in offering software services. There is a lot of crossover and innovation requiring product and IP legal expertise. We’re not just providing advice on legal issues – advising on strategy.

GC: Being asked to work on projects like this is outside of the typical scope we often hear from GCs – particularly in finance. Have you had to adjust your approach in terms of hiring or training your staff as a result?

CL: That is a real challenge that we face. It comes back to the core values of our GC department, which are legal advisory, legal service provider and strategic adviser. To continue to provide these in a changing environment, it means that we have to be constantly upskilling – and that goes both for myself and for my team.

It also means that I’m more frequently taking stock of what skillsets we have on our team and what we might need to stay ahead – one day it could be looking for a programmer or a computer science person, the next we could be looking at these start-up-style deals, where perhaps we need people specialised in IP or outsourcing – it’s really about constantly staying on top of what we have and what we need.

I think as a broader trend, this is true for a lot of legal departments. The nature of legal work, as much as it stays the same, the applications change and how we go about completing that work is changing too. At the moment, many of the lawyers on my team are working with technologists (e.g. programmers and other platform specialists) – that’s a direct result of a lot of our legal documentation being automated. On the team, you have to have lawyers willing to do what may be perceived as non-traditional legal work and explain to non-lawyers our trade. That goes both ways too – on the other side, we need to have programmers and technologists who are willing to work with lawyers. It’s a paradigm shift and the overlap between technology and legal is growing constantly – and that’s not something I see changing any time soon.

Posted on

In conversation: Randi Ikhlas Sardoni, Head of Legal and Corporate Secretary, Panin Dai-ichi Life

GC: Can you tell me a little bit about your background, how you came to be working in-house, in the financial services industry and at Panin Dai-ichi Life in particular?

Randi Ikhlas Sardoni (RIS): I was born into a legal background family – my grandfather, father, uncles, aunts, cousins, brother, you name it. We hand over books from generation to generation. But that is in the private sector – surprisingly there has been no one working in-house – so I had to take the first step in the family. I only spent a couple of months in private practice, and then I took my career to work as in-house counsel at one of the biggest state-owned banks in Indonesia.

I found out that the insurance sector in Indonesia was growing and offering a lot of opportunities and challenges, and also that there was a scarcity of local talent. With the economy growing and many insurance companies entering the Indonesian market and competing for the same talent, there is a shortage in the market. Now I am at an insurance company, and have fallen in love with the sector.

GC: What are the main challenges of the Indonesian insurance market?

RIS: Indonesia is an emerging market and has high potential for the insurance sector. The main challenge currently is the market penetration. Insurance penetration in Indonesia is still around 2.9% compared to GDP. Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia have much higher penetration.

GC: Why is it so low?

RIS: I think one of the problems is financial literacy, particularly insurance literacy. There is scepticism about the insurance industry in Indonesia. The Indonesian financial authority, the OJK, has addressed this issue and it has required insurance companies to have a campaign for financial literacy, to increase market penetration.

GC: Can you talk a little bit about the regulatory environment in Indonesia?

RIS: The legal team will transform – we are no longer a braking system in the car, but we will become a navigation system. We are shifting our role from the defending player into the playmaker. We have to be able to provide strong legal advice and also excellent risk advice to the board and this ability will help the board to be the one sitting in the driving seat to direct the company. The legal team has to have strategies for providing sound legal input with strong business acumen, in anticipating changing regulations.

In ensuring the fair and supportive regulatory reform, government relations activities must also be addressed. General counsel must act as the advocate of the company by utilising the industry association bargain with the regulator.

GC: Are there any other main business challenges that the company is grappling with at the moment?

RIS: There is an untapped market in Indonesia. To become one of the top five or top three insurers in the Indonesian insurance business, we as a company have to produce a value proposition for prospective customers, cover for all the various social and economic channels, and develop the ability to penetrate the untapped market and create the system of brokerage. Indonesia has such a huge population, with only 2.9% market penetration. Currently many of the population are in a household of mainly generation X and Y. So that will be the focus of the company, and we are helping the company to be able to achieve those goals.

GC: What does your workload look like day to day? What occupies the majority of your time?

RIS: As the general counsel of the company, I am of course the subject legal matter expert. Currently, legal issues are still dominating the daily workload. However, standardisation of legal work and IT have helped users to have faster and more immediate attention from the legal department. So aside from the helping with the legal issues, we are currently in the process of designing a platform for stakeholders to have their wholesale legal needs met in one IT application, in one single window.

We are asking our stakeholders what is their expectation of the legal department, and then, in a couple of years, we will have that kind of application.

GC: What has been the highlight of your in-house career so far?

RIS: Probably experiencing a fast-track career compared to my peers in the market and the industry. Despite being part of the millennial generation, the board has entrusted me to serve them with the company secretary function and also with the counsel of the company. I think I certainly understand that this responsibility has to be managed properly, and also as currently we are in the spirit of the Asian Games, I am co-opting the energy of Asia tagline to the legal team – that youth spirit. My team are the problem-solvers, and we operate as a start-up legal team within the company.

GC: What does your legal team look like?

RIS: We currently have a lean, but highly effective legal department. Currently we have three lawyers – one who is responsible for corporate legal and secretarial, another responsible for government relations, and another for litigation respectively.

GC: What has been the most challenging moment of your legal career so far?

RIS: We are currently helping the company to embrace a new era, and we are also repositioning our place from legal advisory to business advisers. We are now really trying to create initiatives that translate that vision of legal and business advisers. We are trying to really listen to the business units and respond to them. We are now even thinking about having an internship programme into the business units, so that the legal team have experience in the business unit. After that, they will go back into the legal team with the proper knowledge – not only sitting at the desk doing the legal job, but really knowing what the business person is doing and experiencing for a certain period of time.

GC: What have been the major challenges or activities for you and your legal team over the past year?

RIS: One is always about digitalisation. Everyone is doing this, and we are now also expecting to be able to adapt and support the company in the digitalisation process. Technology has been a topic of conversation within the industry. We are in the age of the digital disruption, financial technology disruption, and now people are looking at insurance technology (instech). So that will also be something that we have to be able to adapt to, and also help the company to compete with that.

In terms of regulation, insurers have to be ready to spin off their Sharia units, as required by the 2014 insurance law. We have to submit the blueprint for the spinoffs by 2020, and they have to have spun off by 2024, so this is becoming a hot topic of conversation everywhere in the industry. We have to be able to ensure that the process of spin off is running smoothly and successfully.

Now, the issues relate to how to ensure that when the spinoff company is independent from the holding company or the conventional company, it will be competing with the other Sharia companies in Indonesia, and not with the conventional company.

There will be a lot of discussion about how to also train the financial advisers. Currently, we have financial advisers that hold two licences, a conventional licence and a Sharia licence. But after the regulation takes effect, they have to advise just the conventional or just the Sharia businesses. So these are will be several things that have to be taken care of and discussed properly.

GC: What else have you got coming up on the horizon over the next 12 months or so?

RIS: The next 12-24 months will also be about how to simplify the insurance process, to help society increase financial literacy, so people will be able to understand an insurance product properly. We all know that there is so much complicated language, so we have to able to simplify that language into more commonly understood language for society. I think that will also be the process over the next 24 months.

Posted on

In conversation: Dominic Gyngell, general counsel, Speedcast Industries

GC: How did you get to your position at Speedcast?

Dominic Gyngell (DG): I had been at BT for 13 years when I got approached by Speedcast in 2014. It was really interesting because it was telecoms-related but a much smaller company with big ambitions. It had achieved impressive growth, the company had been around in some form since 2001 but it was only when it was listed on the Australia Stock Exchange in 2014 that it landed on its feet and started to grow an aggressive international strategy.

GC: Were you involved in the company’s listing?

DG: I joined in early 2016 post IPO – it was a steep learning curve for me. I am involved in continuing disclosure obligations in Australia and since then we’ve done a number of things including two more equity raisings in Australia and a refinancing programme where we moved our debt from Australia to the US market.

GC: How have you grown the legal team in that time?

DG: The legal team was small at first, there were just three of us when I joined. Since then we’ve expanded, we have 15 lawyers globally. We provide satellite communications to some pretty remote parts of the world, operating in over 100 countries and with offices in 40.

Our largest markets are the US: we do a lot of work for the US government, large energy companies such as ConocoPhillips. We do work in Southeast Asia and Africa, and dealing with regulators and governments in the US is very different from working with businesses in Myanmar and Kazakhstan. It really varies.

GC: How is the legal team structured?

DG: We are organised regionally, we have a team based in the Americas, one covering EMEA and one in Asia.

GC: What does your job look like on a day-to-day basis?

DG: The role is very diverse: this week I’ve been dealing with labour disputes in Brazil, new customer contracts, board meetings in Angola and Sydney, a property deal in Peru, whilst balancing all the day-to-day operations. Every day is different. My job has changed a lot since I joined when we were a $200million company; today we have revenue of 1 billion US dollars. We’ve gone from 300 staff to 1500 in that time. We’ve got a lot more sophisticated. A big part of my job is working on M&A; we’ve done 15 deals since 2012. We acquired our most recent company last week – one of our largest competitors in the US, Globecomm. They operate in 100 countries.

GC: What sectors do you cover?

DG: Speedcast has four main divisions: maritime, which includes providing telecommunications services to cruise ship operators around the world, and commercial maritime, which covers smaller vessels. Energy is our second biggest division – our main customers are offshore oil and gas companies. We are increasingly serving governments, as well as the military, mining companies and NGOs.

GC: What are the biggest challenges on the horizon for you over the next 12 months?

DG: Compliance continues to grow – we are seeing a lot of change with regards to ethical compliance. Anti-corruption, bribery, regulatory compliance, all remain key issues for our type of business. We have just done a large GDPR programme in Europe, and I expect to be dealing with increasing data protection legislation.

From an internal perspective, we are focusing on integrating the 15 new businesses we have acquired. A large part of this is bringing together different teams, and this will be a challenge getting our systems aligned and dealing with cultural issues.

GC: Have you introduced technology within the legal department?

DG: We’ve just launched a programme to digitise all of our customer contracts onto a single database that can be accessed by the whole legal team and operations. For the first time, we can get centralised data on all of our larger customers and our supplier contracts. We deal with dozens of bids and contracts around the world so we have also automated our approval processes, so that they are all on one system.

Posted on

Tom Johnson, General Counsel, Federal Communications Commission

I have always been attracted to public service. A number of my colleagues from my time at Gibson Dunn had gone on to serve as solicitors general in state attorneys general’s offices. Those offices provide unparalleled opportunities, such as the chance to argue appeals and challenge areas in which the federal government has exceeded its powers and placed onerous regulatory requirements on the state. So I was very grateful to have been offered the opportunity to work in the West Virginia solicitor general’s office.

In 2017, I became the general counsel of the FCC. I’m primarily responsible for two components – reviewing Commission rules and orders to ensure they are legally sustainable, and defending those actions in court. I also oversee units that deal with fraud and bankruptcy issues, as well as various internal issues like employment matters. In West Virginia, I supervised four or five attorneys at any given time. Now, I oversee a team of more than 70 lawyers, so I’ve had to focus a lot more on learning how best to allocate my time, how best to delegate, and who are the best people to delegate various issues to.

I came into this position with very much a generalist understanding of administrative law and appellate law. And while I had done some communications work in the past, I definitely rely on staff to brief me on particular areas that require a lot of technical or substantive expertise. But one benefit of bringing a generalist perspective is that I’m in a good place to understand what sorts of questions and issues a judge might have and how they will approach reviewing a particular Commission action, and to ensure that what we’re doing is likely to be upheld in court.

I think the first few weeks in the role were probably the most challenging – you really inherit a whole world when you come into a federal agency, and so the early days are occupied with learning new names, learning people’s responsibilities, and learning the various practices and processes at the agency. Once you’ve had some time to reflect on that, then you can start to think constructively about what’s working, what’s not working, what you’d like to change and what you’d like to improve.

Along with one of the new deputies that came in with me, I spent a lot of our early weeks scheduling meetings, both with different team leaders from the office of the general counsel, as well as with our stakeholders in the agency. That meant they could put a face to a name and we could show that we could learn about what they were doing and also how we could improve the relationships between the office of the general counsel and other offices within the agency. We have tried to create an open door policy so that folks who have pressing issues can come to us directly. That’s the way in which we tried to immerse and integrate ourselves early on.

We have tried to create an open door policy so that folks with pressing issues can come to us directly.

Oftentimes, the perception of a general counsel, whether it be in a federal agency or in the private sector, is of someone who has the unfortunate responsibility to say no a lot of the time, and that person takes on a reputation for impeding progress within an organization. I think that a GC certainly needs to be aware of the legal prohibitions, and there may be times when they need to say no, but that person should also think of themselves as a facilitator, to help further the agency’s mission consistent with the law. In the gray areas, the general counsel needs to be clear in articulating what the various legal risks are, but to also help the organization achieve its objectives.

Unlike in the private sector, we don’t have the option of using outside counsel to represent us for particularly challenging or time-intensive matters. That’s part of the challenge, but it’s also part of what makes the job exciting. At the FCC, we have our own in-house litigation division, so that’s different from some agencies, who rely exclusively on the Department of Justice to handle the cases that end up winding their way to court. It allows us to be more holistic in how we approach legal problems, evaluating at the outset whether the rules or the orders that we’re adopting are easily sustainable – with one eye towards what sort of arguments we can make if they are challenged in court.

Another consideration is that attorneys in private practice divide their time amongst multiple clients, but when you work for the government, your client is ultimately the people. This means there’s much more focus on how the positions you’re taking will serve the public interest as a whole – not only in the case in front of you, but also long after you’ve left office.

One benefit of being in a management position working for the state is that it allowed me to be a lot more entrepreneurial. The attorney general was very receptive to attorneys coming up with ideas of how best to further the state’s interest, even if that meant initiating a law suit in federal court to challenge federal rules as unlawful. Because we had a lot of authority and ability to think of creative solutions, there was also a lot of trying to stay on top of legal and political developments in the news and trying to ascertain how we could best further the agenda of helping the people of the state when the federal government passed a rule that could adversely affect their interests.

Another thing a general counsel in federal government can do is focus on institutional issues that will affect the agency – not only in your time – but also in the future. There are some perennial issues that agencies encounter, like: how do we fund our programs and activities, how do we manage documents and data collection preservation? While these are not issues that take up a majority of my time, they are mission critical, so they are opportunities to think through how to set processes and procedures in place that will be consistent with both our legal obligations but also introduce efficiencies into the organization so that future people who come into my position will benefit.

Looking ahead, the increasing complexity of the modern administrative state will mean that general counsel are going to need to be much more interdisciplinary and also conscious of what their counterparts are doing in other agencies. There are a lot of areas where agencies share jurisdiction, where jurisdictions overlap, where consultation is required by law, or where review is necessary before action can be taken. So it’s increasingly important for general counsel to know what those requirements are, who to call at other agencies to get things done, and who the different stakeholders in the process are.

General counsel are going to need to be much more interdisciplinary.

I also think that keeping on top of technological developments is going to be important. The tools that lawyers are using to do their work are constantly evolving, and the role that social media is playing in government messaging is evolving. And in the private sector, with respect to a lot of the entities we regulate, oftentimes the law may not evolve quickly enough to catch up with technological change. These factors are going to present challenges for lawyers to exercise good judgement in determining how existing laws apply to new technological developments and unforeseen situations. The answer in a lot of these cases will be for the federal government to get out of the way of competition and technological developments that are occurring.

There are two pieces of advice that I would like to give other attorneys.

The first is to be flexible in your career path and open to taking risks when a new opportunity comes your way that excites you. I would never have believed it if you had told me a few years ago that I would be deputy solicitor general of West Virginia, and then general counsel of the FCC, but those opportunities have been both a really enjoyable and rewarding experience, and I would encourage other lawyers to do the same.

The second is that it’s really important to cultivate a reputation for integrity and excellence among your peers starting in law school, because those are the people who one day are going to be in a position to speak to your character and your qualifications if the right opportunity comes along.

Posted on

Michael Stein, General Counsel, Live Ventures

I graduated law school during the dotcom boom and quickly determined that I wanted to be part of that excitement. But by the time I got to Silicon Valley, it was 2001 and the bubble was crashing. I landed on my feet in 2005 at DLA Piper, where I spent almost half of my career, culminating in a partnership in the corporate group. While at DLA, my practice focused primarily on representing public companies in SEC reporting and corporate governance matters, and M&A and capital markets transactions.

Early on, I had a sense of wanting to go in-house: I viewed an in-house role as being more than a transactional lawyer; you delved deeper into the business and the position required you to become more practical and solutions-oriented, more of a decision-maker, in my mind. I secured my first in-house position at Caesars Entertainment, which was the perfect transition for me. Caesars’ global legal department was comprised of many lawyers from large law firms and had a general counsel with a strong presence and sense of team and practicality. While at Caesars, I practiced primarily in areas in which I was most comfortable, including SEC reporting, corporate governance, and capital markets (equity and debt) and M&A transactions. I worked closely with the finance and treasury departments, advising them on legal issues relating to Caesars’ more than $20bn of debt, and advised Caesars Interactive Entertainment on various corporate matters and acquisitions. At the same time, I was able to learn how in-house practice differs from that of a law firm.

Next, I was presented with the opportunity to become deputy general counsel at Everi Holdings. Going from a large company to a smaller one presented new learning experiences for me. I became much more intimately involved with the board and senior management and had to deal with a much broader set of legal and business issues. I was also directly responsible for managing more people, including lawyers and non-lawyers. In addition to advising the board and senior management directly on issues with which I was intimately familiar, such as SEC reporting, corporate governance, and debt-related legal issues, I also played a large role in managing litigation and advising the company on issues relating to human resources, intellectual property, and customer and vendor contracts. My role at Everi also allowed me to work with senior management to implement and improve various business processes throughout the company.

In early 2016, just as I was getting married, I received a call from DLA, offering me the opportunity to return to the Washington DC area as a partner in their corporate practice. I accepted the partnership and the chance to return to my home state of Maryland. While my return to DLA presented me with a plethora of challenging and complex legal issues in a short period of time (including representing a private-equity backed company in a $400m raise, immediately followed by a $500m IPO and a $3bn refinancing of the company’s debt), my law firm experience was exactly as I recalled. With my first baby on the way, maintaining the ever-elusive work-life balance was even more difficult. On top of that, I yearned to re-embrace the different challenges provided by an in-house role. The opportunity at Live Ventures allowed my family to return to Las Vegas and was exactly what I was seeking – a general counsel role with a small-but-growing public company.

Soft skills play a much larger role in-house than they do as outside counsel.

Live Ventures is a public holding company that operates multiple businesses in different industries, including two retailers (Vintage Stock and ApplianceSmart) and a carpet manufacturer (Marquis Industries). Understanding a company’s business is crucial to any in-house role, and Live has three of them. Our subsidiaries operate independently and often with wide latitude, so the biggest challenge is integrating myself with senior management, both here at corporate and with our operating companies. I need to ensure that the business people know that I’m here to help and advise in any way I can, including navigating the challenges of being part of a growing public company.

For those considering going in-house, I suggest that you round out your legal skillset. At a firm like DLA, you’re focused on mergers and acquisitions or capital markets transactions, for example, and if you have an issue regarding a commercial lease, you reach out to a real estate colleague. At Live, I’ve worked on more commercial real estate leases in the past few months than I had in my entire career. So if you’re at a large law firm, it’s really about trying to find that odd project, embrace it, and try and use it to your advantage to learn something new. I know it’s challenging with the way larger firms are structured, but I think that broader skillsets translate better for in-house positions.

The other challenge, particularly for the general counsel role, is learning how to manage people – both up and down the organization chart. It’s not something they teach you in law school or at a law firm, but soft skills play a much larger role in-house than they do as outside counsel. Oftentimes, for me, applying appropriate soft skills presents the most challenging part of the role. You can’t talk to HR the same way you talk to opposing counsel, or the same way you talk to your own outside counsel, or the same way you speak to your CEO and CFO.

Also, ivory-tower-thinking doesn’t have a role in-house. It’s almost as if you’re apologizing to a business person, and saying, ‘Look, I’m sorry we’re talking about this in this manner but unfortunately we are talking about a theoretical legal issue here, and this is something that may come up down the road depending on what direction the company takes.’

In-house practice is very different from firm practice – you must be practical and find solutions.

Law school teaches you how to analyze issues, research, and write memos, but there’s very little practical training. Law firms provide some of that practical training – teaching you how to draft documents and negotiate, for example. In-house practice is very different from firm practice – you must be practical and find solutions; you are an adviser of risk and counselor to the business team. A lot of outside counsel claim they are practical and business-oriented, but the reality is the business team does not want to be negotiating every word and obscure provision where there is little risk. Finally, you must be able to communicate in a crisp and precise manner, using language the business team understands. Long emails and memos are not going to make you a successful in-house lawyer.

At Live Ventures, we don’t have a panel. Selection of outside counsel is relationship-driven: relationships developed by senior management, the board and myself. I learned a long time ago that you hire the lawyer, not the firm. A firm may have a great reputation, but if the lawyer’s not practical and helpful and is unable to communicate in a concise manner, then the firm’s reputation doesn’t matter. It always amazes me that lawyers think they are building relationships by billing their clients .1, .1, .1 every time they touch a matter. I see those bills and cringe, because that tells me that the outside counsel does not view us as a collaborative partner – we are simply a revenue source. Alternative fee arrangements are something we now look at on every new project – and we expect our legal counsel to do the same.

I believe companies that can continue to bring work in-house will do so (although some companies have taken steps in the opposite direction). I think the larger, elite law firms are appropriate for larger, more complex companies, and bet-the-company transactions regardless of a company’s size. But those of us working in smaller, budget-conscious companies who come from a sophisticated outside counsel practice can leverage our own expertise in-house and our own relationships. Elite firms serve a purpose, but I think there are plenty of lawyers who have previously practiced at those firms, yet bring the same capabilities and quality advice at a much better rate; these are the lawyers we seek out.

Posted on

Stacy Cozad, General Counsel, Spirit AeroSystems

I think there are a lot of lawyers who have a vision of their career when they first start out, but I was not one of them. I didn’t have a plan to become a general counsel, for example. I simply had the good fortune of meeting the right people at the right time and being open to new challenges. My career path has been about the people that I’ve met who have been my advocates and promoters along the way.

I started my career clerking for a judge who is now the US Senate Majority Whip, John Cornyn. He was someone who really valued his staff’s views and insights, and I wanted to be a courtroom lawyer in front of judges who respected me like the judge I worked for did.

But as I said, my path has been about the people I’ve met along the way. It was for its people that I chose to go to Southwest Airlines to be head of litigation. Southwest is an airline that was founded by a lawyer (Herb Kelleher) who made it his mission to ‘democratize the skies’ in the US – to make it possible for everybody to be able to fly. I was fortunate to have been a part of that for over nine years.

The opportunity at Spirit AeroSystems arose, and again it was due to a prior relationship – somebody I worked for in the past recommended me for the job. Spirit was an opportunity to go from an airline to an air structures manufacturer, getting to be a part of a global business with operations in the UK, France and Malaysia, as well as multiple places in the US.

To come to the general counsel role was a big leap for me, and I was fortunate that in the past I had had a very diverse litigation practice that included, for example, corporate governance issues. Also, in private practice, I had worked as part of the defence team for CEO Kenneth Lay in the Enron litigation in the US, which was, of course, a huge changer of basic corporate governance tenets. At Southwest Airlines, I also got to do a lot of regulatory oversight, corporate investigations and the integration of another airline. All of those things were very helpful for prepping me for being GC, at least in terms of the legal role.

The best advice I could have given myself is that I don’t have to learn everything today.

But the biggest leap was the business, and going from an airline, which is essentially customer service, to aerospace and defence manufacturing. That was an enormous learning curve, and remains so. I read everything I could get my hands on before I got here about the industry. There were people within Spirit who I reached out to, to learn what we do and how we do it – for example, taking tours of our manufacturing facilities, walking through the plant floor to see what we make and talking to the people who make these aircraft structures, and also spending time digging in with our corporate controller to learn the very different financial and accounting aspects of a manufacturing business versus an airline.

At the time, the best advice I could have given myself is that I don’t have to learn everything today. In the first few months I was here, I felt that I needed to know everything right away and, in all of the work that I did trying to learn as much as I could, I neglected myself. Have a plan for all the learning that you need to do, but make sure you are making time to sleep. Taking the job meant moving my whole family to a new city. I have children, and I did not sufficiently take into account what that transition would be like for us on a personal level. So I think you have to learn that you don’t have to know it all on the first day. Have your plan and make sure you take care of yourself in the process.

The things that I find most rewarding really centre around people that I’ve had the privilege to lead who have gone on to do tremendous things in their careers or try new challenges. I’ve been most proud of the teams that I’ve put together and the smart people on those teams. On the flip side of that, the most challenging moments have been ‘people moments’ – learning how to adapt and work with people who don’t operate with the same core principles and values as I do. It’s really tough to stand on an island alone, but sometimes you have to do it. At Spirit, we’ve just begun the journey of shifting our culture and our values, so those most challenging moments are learning that not everybody yet has bought into those core values and principles, and having to learn how to influence people to get on board.

Fortunately, the single most valuable thing that contributed to my view of leadership was the leadership program that I went through at Southwest Airlines. I was actually the first lawyer to go through it, and it taught me the importance of having a core set of principles and values and instilling them in people across your business, so that everybody is operating from the same set of guidelines in making their business decisions. I think that’s no different from understanding your company’s risk appetite or strategy – if you don’t know what those things are, you don’t know the framework for the decisions that you need to make.

There are non-traditional legal service providers that you can couple with a law firm.

Since I’ve been here, I have expanded my leadership to our compliance team, I have taken on our global contracts team, and I will be taking on the information security team – the chief information security officer we’ve just hired will report to me. As you see the general counsel role expanding to really influence business strategy, I think it will also expand to have more leadership of some of these non-legal areas because of the interconnectedness of them. Most businesses will benefit from a general counsel who has some oversight and an intimate involvement with all those other foundational elements of the business.

There are other things throughout my career that helped prepare me for my job at Spirit. I had stepped into my role at Southwest Airlines at a time when e-discovery was just coming into effect, and so I was able to be pretty innovative in the leadership there in getting us to a sophisticated state in our litigation practice. Coming to Spirit, I would say I’m bringing innovation, but it’s not new things; all of the things that I did at Southwest I’m bringing here now. Spirit just hadn’t had the opportunity or the need to get current in the same way.

For example, I have started doing something that’s pretty common in our industry, but wasn’t common at Spirit, which is unbundling the legal services. We’re not hiring law firms for every aspect of a litigation matter or due diligence, for instance, because there are non-traditional legal service providers that you can couple with a law firm, which are a lot more cost-effective. We’re bringing in things like technology-assisted review and artificial intelligence, which started in e-discovery and now we’re expanding over into revamping our contracts management. If you can use tools like AI to help you gather more information about your state of compliance and contracts management, then you’re going to equip your lawyers to deliver much more efficient and practical legal advice.

I think this represents a broader trend. I’m surprised we still have as many very large law firms as we have. At Spirit, we do hire large multinational law firms, but I am personally a fan of smaller practices that I think deliver better value for the client, depending on the matter. There are times when you need a firm with a global presence, but I continue to believe that we’re going to see more boutique-style law firms that really understand their clients’ need for practical advice that furthers their business goal. And I really think we’re going to see more service providers in this area where we’ve unbundled various things. There are companies that are not law firms, but which have lawyers you can use on a project basis with your law firm partners on matters – sort of an ‘à la carte’ menu where you can piece together what you need. More law firms will, I hope, start to see the benefit of partnering with those non-traditional service providers.