Can you talk briefly about what makes your in-house legal team so effective in supporting The Crown Estate?

The reason we are a great in-house team is because of our full alignment with the business, which allows us to support it so efficiently. What we are trying to do as an organisation at The Crown Estate is to build shared and lasting prosperity for the nation, which translates to an extremely broad remit for us in the legal team. Historically we have been viewed as a real estate business, but over the last 25 years, we have played a massive role in building the offshore wind sector in the UK. We are focused on accelerating deployment responsibly in a way that balances competing technologies in an environmentally sensitive way. The legal team supports all of these activities.

Beyond that, it is our job as lawyers to help businesses navigate difficulties in the right way. We are, I would say, an excellent example of a legal department doing that correctly.

When employing legal tech within your team, what have been some of the complications in getting it to the point where it is improving your support of the business?

Legal tech has evolved an awful lot in recent years, and a great deal of innovations have happened in just the last year. But for in-house legal teams, finding the right technology to support its processes and the wider goals of the organisation remains a challenge.

One of the main problems is that there is so much out there that simply working out what will give you what you need is a major hurdle. Then to get it to the stage where it is helping you, various factors need to be considered . You have to decide what tech you want and identify how it is going to help the business and the legal team, then build your business case–actually explain how it will reduce work and improve the efficiency of the business and the legal team as a whole. Even after receiving approval from the business, you have to invest time in making sure it is implemented; install the technology, roll it out and then encourage the business and the team to actually use it. I think the payback on tech is longer than a new team member, because it takes longer to get it to work.

Technology can have great benefits–just look at the difference that the wide acceptance of e-signatures has had on the way businesses operate–but it is not as simple as just adopting technology and improving efficiency.