Team size: Three

What are the most significant cases or transactions that your legal team has recently been involved in?

Our most significant challenge in the past 12 months has been integrating three businesses. It involved harmonising business processes and contracting models across three different supply chains for our 3,500 customers. We have had to think differently, removing risk and simplifying contracts and processes where possible, keeping independent retailers’ needs central to our thinking.

We have also focused on legal operations, optimising how we, as a legal department, deliver legal services to the business. Post-acquisition of Costcutter by Bestway Retail, we have been on a journey to understand the drivers and building blocks of the enlarged business. Our three main focuses have been building consistency, driving efficiencies and value-add in the delivery of legal advice.

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

The pandemic required a hand-in-glove approach with the operational side of the business that hadn’t been there before. Since the pandemic, the legal team has played a central role in operational efficiency and commercial effectiveness initiatives, often leading the way in innovation.

Looking forward, what technological advancements do you feel will impact the role of in-house legal teams in the future the most? Which have you found most useful in your legal team?

Like most in-house teams, demand for legal services is increasing faster than our resources. Legal technology has been invaluable in delivering more with less and will increasingly impact our legal department in the future. Our primary technology solution is HighQ, which we deploy and are continually improving as a legal hub, an estate portfolio management and as a governance, risk and compliance platform.

There has been much talk about AI for years, and finally, it is maturing into the product promised for so long. With very few exceptions, over the years, we have been shown a lot of AI by legal tech start-ups that are nowhere near as capable as claimed. We now see platforms that deliver highly capable AI solutions, particularly contract review and eDiscovery. It is exciting to imagine how, alongside qualified lawyers, we can remove the burden of routine, repetitive, and volume work, multiplying the output of the consultative, high-touch work that adds value and keeps in-house lawyers engaged.

There is much discussion about legal technology, but technology is simply a tool, and legal design is more critical for me. There is a need to combine design thinking and systems thinking to really understand the problem first and design a better solution. Then, once they have a solution, legal technology can be used as a tool to implement the solution. Without legal design, all that will happen is that a flawed process will be automated.