Team size: 4+

Focus on: Our technological advancements

Industry and commerce look to technology to substitute, progress or enhance their operations and the legal profession is (and should be) no different. It’s not just in-house legal departments that are demanding this – private practice is realising they need to commoditise some of their standard operations, which is why we are seeing the growth in ‘legal ops’. From an in-house perspective, I see legal technology being a significant catalyst in promoting self-sufficiency within businesses, which is what BEEAH legal is doing. By this, I mean we are developing a standard suite of contracts for each of BEEAH’s businesses, using contract lifecycle management platforms infused with artificial intelligence to ask (through ‘chat bots’) the internal BEEAH stakeholder a series of questions which enables that business unit/subsidiary to produce first drafts of contracts which are relevant to their operations. Built into this AI induced self-sufficiency will also be an escalation mechanism for some of the more complex legal issues to escalate back to Beeah legal. I see ‘business unit self-sufficiency’ as the way that the legal function within businesses evolve because it provides advantages for both sets of internal stakeholders: on one hand the commercial teams develop a deeper knowledge and understanding of their contracts whilst they obtain first drafts of contracts for use more efficiently. The other ‘win’ in using this model is that this frees up the in-house lawyers to focus on the more bespoke and complex legal work, which is what they are best placed and trained to do.

Against that context, there are five areas that BEEAH legal is seeking to employ legal tech. Those areas are contract lifecycle management, entity or subsidiary management, virtual data room and contract repository, litigation and claims management; and board portals for all our boards.

I previously thought there could be one company that could cover all platforms, but my research has shown that I shouldn’t be afraid of utilising a ‘legal stack’ of technology. So, if I go down that route of using multiple technology providers, then my priority will be to ensure the integration of each provider so that they interface correctly with each other and the existing platforms within BEEAH’s business.

Due to this, I am currently doing an extensive due diligence exercise on legal technology providers in the five areas I am digitalising. The second task I am undertaking involves asking for recommendations from my peers who are general counsel who have deployed such technology and the third task I have carried out is reaching out to the tech providers directly to ask for multiple demonstrations to understand their offering (sometimes this spans across several sessions in order for me to fully understand the capability of the platform/product and how it may benefit BEEAH legal; the fourth piece of this puzzle will be getting each provider to have a conversation with my IT department so they can report back to me whether there are any technological and interface constraints and the fifth and final step will be to implement the respective platforms as part of the ‘legal stack’ for BEEAH legal.