Team size: Six lawyers

The biggest shift in our focus in supporting the business within PwC over the last 12 months has been working with the business teams as they continue to develop the managed service offerings and AI offerings to our broad range of clients, both of which bring new legal and risk challenges. As a team, we have taken the lead to be at the forefront and partner with the business by developing guidance and templates to enable the business to offer services of this nature, as well as ensuring our internal policies and procedures permit use of AI tools where appropriate and reflect the AI environment in which we now operate.

All members of the team are consistently praised for their pragmatic approach in recognising the need to focus on solutions and in helping the business to get to their destination, with a focus on risk mitigation rather than risk elimination. We operate as a true team – sharing our insights, knowledge and simply put, having each other’s back in all we do.

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?

We challenged ourselves to find a technology solution which would allow for easier and more transparent tracking of “open work” within the team, to allow better oversight of each team member’s workload and a direct line of sight for each team member’s current and open work to ensure there was no duplication of effort. We looked at numerous offerings before settling on a simplified “legal front door” solution which has transformed how we are able to track our work. As well as making team one-to-one meetings more focused, it has enabled us to provide better statistics and data in our reports of ongoing work to the line of service lead partners and leadership team in PwC ,as well as demonstrate the value of the legal team. Most importantly, it enables the legal team to ensure that we are focusing our work in the higher risk areas – as a small team we need to be razor sharp in where we focus on our attention.

How have you attempted to bring the legal department closer to your business colleagues?

I fully believe we cannot be lawyers to the business unless we fully understand how the business operates. We have set up a lawyer within the team to partner with each business section to keep close to the business and its strategies. It also means there is an immediate go to lawyer available.

In addition, as the firm builds out on its strategic plans, we ensure that we have a lawyer as a point of contact for those strategic focus points, such as AI and managed services. These lawyers attend the specific business meetings on each of the areas and so know what the business is doing, and we can flag any concerns from our side as early as possible. There is no doubt that this partnering of the legal team with the business is very much appreciated by the business.

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

I have challenged all members of the legal team to use some of the AI tools which, although procured for other client facing teams within PwC, are still very relevant to the type of work that we do in OGC.

Whilst this journey started slowly, each member of the team now uses one of these tools in particular on an almost daily basis, and it has significantly cut the time spent on first drafts of both contracts, documents and emails. The team has spent a lot of time refining successful use cases, practicing prompts, as well as tracking successful prompts for future use.

We expect that our use will only continue as PwC’s AI journey evolves and our first-hand use of some of AI within our own team makes it easier for us to understand and assess the risks associated with AI across the board. It is vital that OGC, as an in-house team, embraces the technologies to our best advantage so we can better support the business and free up our time on the key risk issues that really matter.