Team size: 12 

Could you share an example of a time when you came up with an innovation that improved how your legal team works and did not come at a large expense?  

As general counsel, we need help to track our commercial contracts, so I was looking for contract management software. While doing a digital transformation project, there should be a certain outcome. My outcome was clearly defined, which was to create better efficiency in the legal department, make it easy to use by internal stakeholders, cost-effective, and quicken the turnaround time; limited manual intervention was required as I did not want to increase the work of my legal team; and create the scope for continuous improvement and customisation.  

Since I have a technology bent of mind and a keen personal interest in tech, I came across an internal software used by the IT department. I customised this to create a legal department platform for contract management, so no set-up cost was involved.  

This platform helps Monitor commercial contract requests, create a dashboard, team workload analysis, and feedback from stakeholders on the closure of the request.  

It was easily accepted and appreciated by internal stakeholders as this platform is easy to use, and there is no manual intervention required by my internal customers, unlike some ready-made software packages, which are costly and require filling out forms online to create a request.  

Any digital transformation journey is not a one-time activity but a continuous journey for improvement. 

If you had to give advice to an aspiring in-house lawyer or general counsel, what would it be and why?  

Over the next two to three years, we will witness a wave of change in how our in-house legal departments function, primarily because of technology and digital disruptions. The question is no longer ‘whether to digitally transform’ but more ‘how to digitally transform’ our organisations. Technology provides a competitive advantage; taking advantage of this potential means digitising before your competitor. Legal departments have been slow-paced regarding adopting new technology tools in the past, but today, we can see an increased focus on digital transformation programs. With the virtual platforms taking centre stage, the focus will grow in the areas of automation, AI, and analytics, which will reshape service delivery of corporate legal departments of the future. There will be a shift from traditionally run legal departments to them becoming technology driven. The outcome of the digital transformation will be phenomenal: process efficiency, better performance, cost-saving, better quality output and a higher level of service delivery. Lawyers need to upgrade IT skills as avoiding doing so could result in time and cost spillovers in software deployment initiatives, as often end users without experience in launching such projects keep shifting the goalposts to the chagrin of software developers.  

Any change leads to opening new windows of opportunity to those willing to adapt.