Team size: Six

Have you used AI in your day-to-day work? If so, how useful do you find it?

I sometime utilise AI in my work in order to do some legal research. However, any AI outcome needs to be reviewed, structured, and validated by a lawyer. According to me, AI is like a trainee to help the lawyer by providing first information, but it cannot replace the reasoning and argumentation of a lawyer.

There are numerous generative AI tools available online, but not all these tools are safe or reliable. Our company has built a platform with generative AI tools approved and made available to our company. This means that we should not use the public versions of any of the AI tools (for example, we should not use OpenAI’s ChatGPT, ChatGPT+, or DALLE), and should instead only use the versions within our platform or otherwise explicitly made available to us by our company. This is a way to protect our work and preventing us from using AI public versions.

How do you suggest in-house lawyers build strong relationships with business partners?

One of the tasks conducted by our legal department this year was to increase the recognition of the legal teams and legal support by our business partner in order to build and preserve a strong relationship with our business partners.

Legal teams play a key role in a company’s success, as it leads to greater employee engagement and expertise with the business teams. Recognition is important because it is a key aspect of a strong company culture and quality of work. When legal teams are recognised for their contributions to the organisation, they feel a sense of ownership and will continue to perform at a high level; this builds trust between the in-house lawyers and the business partners.

Among the key actions we have identified, in-house lawyers should adopt a simple language which is more business oriented: we should not talk like a “lawyer” but like a businessman. We should also increase our listening skills and not be afraid to ask questions, as well as be reliable and finishing our projects on time, and act as a business partner and not only as a lawyer.

Internal business groups need to be trained on how to use a legal team effectively. This type of “soft” education may require an up-front time investment but can pay dividends over the longer term, and also help build relationships – for instance set up monthly one hour training or lunch learn sessions.

It is crucial to include in-house lawyers in meetings with the business teams when they are developing new client relationships, products, or tools, to help spot issues at an early stage. We should be part of creating a plan to protect the company from the onset, rather than reacting to issues after they have occurred.

In-house lawyers should also receive training about the business and the tools that the business uses. Our company has a large number of business units, and it is sometimes difficult to spot legal issues without a comprehensive understanding of the business as a whole. We learn through asking questions and trying to gather our own information, but a formalised process or training would be very helpful to the legal team as a whole.

The most important first step is to think of ourselves as part of the business and proactive problem solvers while helping to manage the risk.