Focus on: in-house counsel progress

Traditionally the role of the legal department of any organisation has been mainly to look after the legal risks in the development of its functions or objectives, to advise the board of directors and the administration in any matters that require a legal judgment and to supervise the lawsuits in which the entity is a party or has an interest.

In recent years the world has experienced profound changes that have had effects at all levels. Climate change, pandemic, digital transformation, and a series of other political, social and economic events throughout the planet have significantly impacted the objectives, priorities and the way in which people and organisations work.

Does this change the role or function of legal departments? In my opinion, the role remains the same, in the sense that we must continue to alert the legal risks faced by our organisations and provide legal advice within them. But what clearly changes are the focus, as has happened many times in the past, and more undoubtedly the way in which we carry out our function, especially due to the emergence of new technologies and forms of remote and hybrid work. The latter is not something new either, but what makes it different is the speed and magnitude of the changes brought in by the digital transformation accelerated by the needs derived from the pandemic.

It means that we lawyers will be replaced by artificial intelligence or other technological developments? I would answer no, since human judgment will be very difficult to replace by an algorithm for making decisions that require qualitative criteria. But obviously the way to arrive at these decisions may be greatly eased with the data or the processing and crossing of background information that new technologies provide us.

Hence, rather than thinking about replacing lawyers with robots, what we must do is invest in an association that allows us to extract the best of both. And to achieve this, I believe that the key is permanent training and adaptation. Lawyers cannot stay away from new technologies, but rather we must be interested, learn to use and get the best possible result from them for the benefit of our own work and of the organisations that rely on our legal advice.