Category: Interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everything in its right place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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