Team size: Six lawyers

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

The past year, our team has been faced with the challenge of transforming our support to our organization which has exceeded 80,000 employees as well as the regulatory changes that have been a result of the return to “normalcy” post pandemic. Because of the growth of our headcount and the relative size of our small team, we have had to re-examine our processes, assess which processes can best be automated or which can be outsourced. Regulatory changes and the shift in power in our export zone authority have kept us on our toes to ensure that we are complying with new regulations on work from home, the gig model and new modes of employment and an employee population that has evolved in its expectations for the workplace. We have also been focused on the new businesses which Accenture wishes to pursue have required us to think outside the box and to assist the business in finding creative ways to still deliver quality work to our clients without violating any existing regulations.

Why are in-house lawyers well-placed to drive change in their organisations?

In house counsel are uniquely positioned to drive change and influence decisions in their organizations because they are, ideally, viewed as subject matter experts, trusted advisors and business partners. This being the case, they have a seat at the table along with senior leadership and the other decision makers in their organisations. Moreover, as lawyers, they have a view of both the regulatory and compliance limitations or risks of initiatives to be undertaken as well as the busine ss impact or business drivers of the same. This allows in house counsel to realistically assess the risk profile of decisions to be made, to weigh them against the benefits sought to be achieved and drive risk-aware and business pragmatic changes in their organisations. In Accenture, we are committed to our ESG commitments and legal plays a critical role in ensuring that we meet our commitments on environmental responsibility and reducing our carbon footprint or our commitments to be an inclusive and diverse organisation but that we do so in a manner that is consistent with regulatory requirements as well as our own company values.

The unusual business environment created by the pandemic has been swiftly followed by other shocks. Are you now putting more emphasis on preparing for the unforeseen and, if so, what does this entail?

When lockdown was imposed at the beginning of the pandemic, we had six lawyers supporting an organisation with over 60,000 employees. We were working 14-hour days or worse and realized this was clearly not sustainable in the long run and we would not be able to deliver the quality of support we had prided ourselves on during ‘normal’ times.

Prior to the pandemic, we had already been exploring how we could leverage technology and reduce the dependence on headcount. The pandemic forced us redouble our already existing effort towards automation and leveraging technology. Thus, the Philippine Legal Portal was born. This automated tool that centralizes all requests to the legal team, centralized links to tools, provided a one-stop-shop to our business stakeholders making it easier to work with the legal team and ensured that no request would take too long to resolve or worse, fall through the cracks considering the volume of emails that each lawyer generally receives given the size of the organisation we support.

The Portal or PLP allowed us to do more work in less time by for example, providing automated responses to frequently asked questions, automatic approvals for requests that met a certain set of predetermined criteria. It decreased the time consuming ritual of back and forth emails for legal requests by automating the request process such that no requests would move forward unless requestors provided the information we needed to process their queries. This has allowed us to maintain a lean team which still is able to deliver high performance despite the disparity in our numbers as against the total employee population. Further, our focus has turned to business continuity and the need to ensure that our team is not concentrated in one location. Thus we expanded our team in Cebu so that not all the members of the team is based in Manila. This has proved invaluable during critical moments when our own team members were afflicted by the covid virus and business continuity became an issue.