As a team leader, how have you got the most out of your legal department?

What really works for us is the culture of collaboration that Accenture really encourages. I’m not a fan of 100% work from home, which is what a lot of people are pushing for. While teleconferencing and video calling are great tools to have. I still believe that it’s important for a team to physically be together, maybe not every day but at least a few days a week, as that’s what’s going to build and foster your collaboration. Many of our more innovative solutions come from when we’re all sitting together and trying to brainstorm a solution to a problem In our team, we always make it a point to discuss different approaches frankly, depending on who’s offering the solution and what they think, and this has worked extremely well for us. But to do this properly, there has to be mutual respect from the leadership and the less senior lawyers. Team members cannot be afraid to ask questions or contradict you just because you’re the boss.

Did the pandemic lead to a lasting increase in the interaction your legal team has with the strategic plans of the company?

The Philippines was one of the first countries to go into lockdown, and we barely had 24 hours to ensure that we could keep running our projects during the pandemic. We have over 70,000 people in Accenture in the Philippines, and not all of them were equipped to work to suddenly work from home within a day’s notice. The regulations were changing almost daily, and we had to work very closely with our business stakeholders, because we had millions of dollars in contracts that were going to be in jeopardy if we couldn’t continue delivering. Luckily, as a technology company, we had the tools to build automation and to leverage technology to make sure that the same number of people on the team could do more work. So, for me, the biggest offshoot of this pandemic was that my team has transitioned into a much leaner, more efficient, technology-driven team.

And the business appreciates us even more, because we were able to deliver the same quality service without increasing costs. Is it becoming increasingly important for the law firms you instruct to have the same values as your company?

Definitely. At Accenture, we require all our vendors, not just our law firms, to commit to the same equal opportunity practices that we have. We take note of ratios of ethnic background, gender balance, and keep track of how they deal with inclusion and diversity. That’s something that’s very important to Accenture and to our legal department. In terms of where the law firms we deal with can improve, unfortunately, the Philippine legal system is very protective. So only Filipinos can practice law in the Philippines, unlike common law territories, like Hong Kong or Singapore.