About

Team size: 1,000+

Major legal advisers: Allen & Overy, Baker McKenzie, Clifford Chance, Eversheds Sutherland, Norton Rose Fulbright, Reed Smith

In January, Shell legal director Donny Ching wrote to his legal department dedicating 2020 as ‘the year of data and digital’. His legal function had grown 2-3% in the last year due to demand, but it also started to expand in non-legal counsel roles, such as project management and data analytics. A dedicated digitisation manager for legal was also appointed, Richard Martin, while the group’s global legal operations team grew nearly 40% and its business operations centres in Krakow and Kuala Lumpur were up a quarter to more than 100.

‘When you start looking, you find more and more opportunities, and we’re now able to show that things can be done differently or more efficiently,’ Ching comments. ‘We do around 6,000 NDAs globally every year and that’s spread out across multiple countries and multiple departments, but we’re now centralising that in Krakow and Kuala Lumpur. It means the lawyers are constantly questioning what is possible to improve.’

The focus on digital and data comes four years into Shell’s Future Legal 2 programme, an overhaul of the function’s approach to work focused on five foundational behaviours: safety, ethics and compliance; business partnering; co-ownership; networked performance; and ‘improving the work is the work’.

At the start of that programme, Ching set up a technology work stream to allow groups of his staff to scour the tech world for potential products they could use, but came back disappointed. They are progressing with a roll-out of contract management software, however, and are building apps that will allow both lawyers, and the wider business, to access the enormous amount of knowledge and self-help tools the function has generated. ‘We are now trying to get data analytics and are creating a legal business intelligence unit to help us get access to data and present it in visual form,’ he comments. ‘As opposed to waiting to the end of a quarter, we’ll be able to see issues, get insights and make decisions quicker.’

Such insights include real-time updates on legal spend; which law firms the money is going to; as well as the legal costs of certain departments. Ching also expects to gain insights from Shell’s contracts, looking at which clauses are the most contentious and how the legal team can help the business adapt in response to those risks.

Of Ching’s 1,000-plus staff, about 70% are lawyers. The majority of the budget is spent on in-house resources – now about 60%. Appropriate fee arrangements are used in close to 85% of instructions.

The function has also placed a strong emphasis on cultural change, which Ching says is about changing how lawyers think. More than 300 lawyers have also been through a business-partnering training programme, which is about legal being more explicit in what it expects from its lawyers as risk managers.

Ching is also one of the five main GCs driving the profession-wide UK GC diversity and inclusion challenge, which has attracted close to 100 signatories and was announced in March 2019. ‘We’ve been clear right from the beginning and part of the letter we sent was that we don’t want this just to be lots of words, lots of discussions and then nothing comes out of it,’ he comments. ‘A work stream that I’m sponsoring is championing the framework agreement we need to put in place to drive these initiatives, and the incentives and consequences we should we put in place so we have a consistent approach.’