Month: December 2020

Most of our software is built in-house and customised for the legal team’s own use. Using home-grown software has two main advantages. It is obviously much cheaper, and developing our own in-house software means that we can hedge on business costs as opposed to getting them signed off for external technology.

Perhaps a bigger advantage is that internally developed technology can be customised to match systems we are already familiar with. That will ensure other business units can seamlessly work with the platform. Working with customised software is much more intuitive and user-friendly. When you take on technology from external sources there is always going to be a process of learning and testing.

Working with external providers also means the legal team loses some degree of control over the software. For example, a significant provider of due diligence software once decided to shut down its operations in Singapore. We lost access to the whole system and had to suddenly find an alternative provider. This was a major exercise, and it meant we had to get used to the intricacies of a new system at short notice. That is the disadvantage of external providers. You simply cannot pre-empt or control what they are going to do, and even things like maintenance or updates are out of your control.

In a previous role I worked at a public body in Singapore that concerned itself with science and technology, including in AI and other blue-sky technologies. Protecting intellectual property was a huge aspect of that work, and it has taught me that IP is critically important when it comes to developing legal tech. I believe that, especially for bigger companies, it is always good to own the IP on anything you use internally.

However, there are areas of technology where we cannot build our own systems. As you would expect, McDonald’s has a long list of compliance processes to go through. This process involves many people across a number of different teams. It must also synchronise with the compliance checks across the company, so for this type of exercise we are following the policies and systems of the global business.

For pretty much anything else we use our own technology. We have built a document tracking system that checks all our contracts for things like date of expiry and gives us a prompt so we understand where in the contract cycle a document sits. It is also useful in that it tells us which counterparties have we given any limitation or liabilities to.

For the most part, our forms tend to be pretty standard, so while the back end will be specific to each vendor that we are dealing with, the main boilerplates are very consistent. That means we can use software that focuses on tracking documents and sending us reminders. Some of my peers at other organisations are starting to use AI for more cookie cutter stuff such as NDAs, but for us it is still all done by the internal legal team, including paralegals.

Our process for implementing new technology starts with recognising the need for a particular piece of software. Whether that software is going to track contracts, bring in GDPR compliance or handle more complicated work, you need to identify the need within the organisation first of all. We then look at how this can be introduced in a useful and user-friendly manner, drawing up a customisation and implementation plan to help us understand what the software should look like. This latter stage will almost always involve conversations with the IT department.

This has served us well so far, but inevitably we will reach a point where our tech needs outstrip our capacity to produce solutions internally. For example, it will become increasingly important to have software that can supervise and track user data and user rights. These days, everyone wants to know what their data is being used for and to have the right to choose what parts of their data is logged. Having software to keep track of this helps to share that obligation or responsibility with the consumer.

Asia is a very impressive part of the world where people are generally more technologically driven. It is this drive that motivates companies to continuously innovate. Asians are generally early adopters of tech, and customers are very advanced when it comes to embracing new technology.

When I compare Asia to Europe everything is on a much larger scale. The pace of innovation is unprecedented. Technology is being embraced across Asia, but it is China that is leading the way in technological innovation and development. The pace of development in China is particularly interesting.

For example, when it comes to moneyless payments, China is the most advanced market in the world. I rarely need to carry a wallet anymore as everything can be paid for via a mobile phone. Beijing is one of the biggest startup hubs for tech companies and a leading place for AI technology, research and development. Generally, the consumer and enterprise markets are massive, and therefore the potential for developing and implementing tech is apparent.

Ericsson has an established presence in China, where it occupies nearly half the market for mobile systems. In recent times, Ericsson has strengthened its market share by winning 5G contracts with three major operators in China.

The importance of technological innovation has been cast into the spotlight in recent months. Legal teams across Asia have embraced standardised technology to remain connected. We are using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint products. These platforms provide a collaborative area, where teams across the region can work together, for example to review documents. We are considering introducing a new e-billing system when working with our external law firms. From a contract management perspective, we have various repositories for sales and sourcing agreements.

Today, there are contract databases where you can search for templates and find various clauses. The next step will be AI based search engines, where the platform is itself intelligent and an evolving algorithm informs the search results. It is quite amazing to think about the opportunities associated with AI when applied to legal work. We will eventually be able to predict problems before they arise; we will know if something may cause an issue in a contract before finalising a deal.

Despite all the advantages brought by legal tech, going completely digital this year has not always been an easy task. Technology cannot replace the atmosphere of a meeting room or the human connections shared between individuals. Working remotely also makes it more difficult to introduce new employees into an office. You learn a lot from seeing how members of a team behave and react to others.

Nevertheless, technology can also be used to bring legal teams together. Managing legal operations across five countries means video conferences and meetings are crucialPreviously, we spent a lot of time travelling to meet internal stakeholders, customers and suppliers. Travelling would take up a significant amount of time. But since the pandemic, people have adjusted. One positive is that meetings are typically condensed and well prepared. In this sense technology has driven efficiency, or at any rate it has led to people using their time more effectively.

As we look to the future, technology is expected to play a key role in improving legal services, and within the next five years artificial intelligence will play a significant role in transforming the legal profession. As thing stand, it is rarely used by legal teams, but the potential this technology has is revolutionary.

Legal innovation is not only about technology, but the way lawyers operate. Most lawyers used to see an in-house role as a way of having better work life balance – this has changed and so have the expectations around them. To be a legal innovator you need to be a solution provider. Technical expertise is a given, being a solution provider is the next step, and the final and more significant part of legal innovation is being a thought leader.

Even though Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU) is a public funded university and a charity, we have leveraged our digital tools very significantly.

When I joined NTU two years ago we were getting contract approvals through email or manually by paper, with several signatories required at the executive committee level. We retooled Adobe Sign, our e-signing platform, to use it, in parallel to e-signing, as an approval workflow system. We were able to do this by using existing licenses, and the new process has been extremely successful and well received.

The lesson is that legal innovation doesn’t always mean spending a lot of money.

The second tool we implemented is Convene, a piece of board management software. We transformed our governance architecture by migrating, as of late 2019, our resolutions, meeting minutes, and corporate instrument documents to this platform. Previously, these documents were circulated by emails. This is still fairly novel for a lot of organisations, and possibly for universities which tend to be slower to adopt certain technologies. We wanted to demonstrate that we could move ahead despite this.

In most organisations, if you need IT support you log a ticket, and someone will get back to you to say “got your ticket”. We realised we could leverage this system as a workflow tool, not only to track case assignment to, or workload of, our legal officers, but to better understand data analytics – the quantity and quality of the work we’re doing. For this we used a platform called ServiceNow, an enterprise workflow tool.

This system was not ordinarily meant for that purpose, the employees that use it are IT, housing and facilities, the construction team etc. but we leveraged on the platform and licences that were already there. We have now gone digital for legal support requests.

We also embarked on legal process outsourcing (LPO) to handle growing contract demands, which you might think would be based in Asia but is in fact based in Europe. Legal innovation is not confined to home locations, especially with our current global situation.

In future we will look to implement a chatbot for legal help, so questions like “How do I get my contract approved?” and “Where do I get a template for this NDA?”  can be processed. NTU has about 10,000 staff at the University and is the number 47 ranked institution in the world according to recent rankings. We want robust systems and processes that match our research and academic standards and ambitions.

Legal tech challenges lawyers to add value beyond what they ordinarily do. The things we were spending a lot of administrative time on are now being absorbed by legal tech, so we really need to show the value that we add. In the context of new legal tech coming in, we would rather preserve headcount and leverage technology than grow headcount, but at the same time, we want to upskill team members so we don’t have to deal with rightsizing when the time comes.  We can say we will invest more in technology instead of hiring more people and add skills we don’t have today.

As lawyers we can still be very traditional in our mindset; we see ourselves as subject matter experts and are typically conservative going into fields we don’t know. Some of the Singapore law firms are now realising there’s a gap in the market and have now started to set up companies as spin offs from their own law firms. They’re limiting those companies to legal tech, with set up of legal tech tools which they can offer to their clients.

But what we need to do as a profession is explore how we work in adjacent fields that are not necessarily related to our subject matter expertise. Over time automation and AI tools will get better, so the question is, what is the gap the lawyer has to fill? Those who are very specialised (like tax lawyers) will continue as before. But what does the other type of lawyer do? What’s different about them? I think they’re the ones who will define the future of lawyering.

I’m certainly not someone others would describe as tech-savvy, but I do believe in the value of digital transformation at every level and am constantly reviewing and re-reviewing tech solutions in the market. For example, some years back, contract automation solutions were generally cost prohibitive, but I have noted that in recent years they have become more cost efficient.

A lot of the legal tech we use is developed in-house. The first project we embarked on is a contract management system we call iCON, which allows internal clients to self-manage ownership and archiving of their contracts while allowing the legal team ease of search and oversight. Auto-alerts can also be customised to remind contract owners on impending contract expiry.

We moved on to develop iASK, a legal services request system. This works like a ticketing system and helps us monitor and track requests from other divisions in a more efficient manner. The status and response times of requests can be tracked, along with history of contract negotiations with specific external parties for reference in new transactions. More importantly, iASK also acts as an internal knowledge database to understand better how certain requests were handled for consistency and facilitate knowledge transfer for new joinees.

Over time, we’ve expanded this to be able to assign requests to different teams within the function such as intellectual property and product regulatory. We are also able to loop in matters from other Canon companies under our supervision in this region. As Canon Singapore is the regional headquarters for Canon sales and marketing business in South Asia and Southeast Asia, this helps us to capture matters carried out not just in Singapore but at the regional level as well.

The latest tech we’ve been working on is called iREG, which is a derivative of iCON. Instead of contracts, iREG will be used to record all licences and certifications that are related to our business and products. The system allows stakeholders to track the status of things like licenses or certifications and trigger actions to be taken. The interface allows stakeholders to easily obtain a snapshot of the business and product regulatory compliance in our region. Users are also able to tag products to specific requirements so that in the absence of a requisite license or certification for any product, red flag alerts are triggered.

We hope to integrate this with our order and shipping system to minimise the risk of shipment of products which may not have fulfilled the requisite regulatory requirements for going to market.

This year, I started overseeing the Quality Environmental Health and Safety function (QEHS) and inherited another in-house developed system called iDOC, a policy management system that allows users to upload new division or company level policies and escalate them for approval prior to the eventual publication and notification to the whole company through an auto-link to our internal company webpage.

At our team level, I advocated some years back the use of what we call the Activity Log System, which is similar to the system law firms use to record their lawyers’ time costs. While there wasn’t then an immediate need for such data, I foresaw the necessity to address matters ranging from internal or cross company charging, tracking productivity at both individual and team level and understanding better the nature of work conducted.

I was fortunate to be able to leverage our IT team’s existing system with minor customisations to suit my objectives.  It took a while for my team members in the region to get used to the concept of keying in time costs. However, I believe in recent years, they have learnt to appreciate the value of this brings. It has also been a useful tool for me in explaining and justifying head count replacements when necessary.

In terms of external resources, we use DocuSign as an e-contracting solution. Our contract volume may be relatively lower compared to other industries and electronic contracting is still curtailed in certain jurisdictions within the region under our care. However, we recognise the value of a tracked electronic contracting process and I wanted to embark on it early.

Collaboration between legal and IT is clearly key in the development of bespoke tools. A critical factor for a successful collaboration is ensuring that we do not take our IT resources for granted (which tends to be the case where internal costs are not so visual). As such, I fully support our IT’s team recent efforts in helping their internal clients visualise the IT resources and cost expended for each project better. They are after all a service provider to us as we are a service provider to our internal clients.

I suppose legal tech invariably leads to a discussion on the use of AI. I have spoken with other GCs who have used artificial intelligence to understand better its practical value. At the basic level, for example in terms of automated contract generation, there is certainly value. However, extending its use to a larger scope such as contract reviews may have differing levels of output value depending on the organisation’s needs and the source data it can provide. There are also concerns of output reliability and risks and responsibility.

A tech-savvy company does not necessarily have a tech-savvy legal team. Nor, for that matter, does it necessarily encourage the use of tech among support functions. But a supportive environment is at least a start. It is refreshing to see that 81% of respondents said their companies were supportive of the use of technology in the legal function. At the same time, 67% thought their companies were more supportive than their rivals. At least 18% of them must be wrong…

But this support has not necessarily translated into financial backing: nearly half (45%) of GCs said that insufficient budget for was the biggest barrier they faced to obtaining technology for the legal team. Knowing what to buy among the many systems available is also becoming problematic, with 73% of GCs either unsure of what technology was available or feeling that there was no suitable third-party tech to meet the legal team’s needs.

There are also cultural barriers to implementing legal tech, sometimes in surprising places. Japan may be the home of everything high-tech, from robots to video games consoles, but its businesses still lean heavily toward tradition when it comes to ways of operating. Angela Yuen, deputy general counsel at JERA, Japan’s largest power generation company comments:

‘In every Japanese organisation there are more layers than an onion. For instance, taking an approval system from paper to electronic format can be a huge task because under the old system of internal approval there will be a large number of steps required at various levels and no one wants to be cut out of a decision.’

‘Furthermore, while people in Japan embrace technology, the legal field has been slower adopting legal technology due to a conservative, careful approach. I think these are two significant factors in why Japanese corporates have been slower to embrace legal technology’.

The long and costly road

When it comes to wish lists for new technology, GCs are looking for either a simple efficiency boost (38%) or readily customisable software (24%). Surprisingly, value for money (15%) and ease of use (10%) were not big concerns for GCs looking to implement new systems. Clearly, legal teams accept the road to tech-enabled efficiency gains will be long and costly.

But the costliest of all solutions, advanced automation and AI, have yet to gain traction with Asia Pacific’s GC community. Only 23% of those surveyed said they were using an advanced tech solution in the legal team, with many deterred by concerns over the cost and reliability of the such systems (29%), difficulties finding the right software (20%) and their own lack of product knowledge (21%).

There was also a healthy degree of scepticism on display. ‘The maturity of AI solutions for legal work is lacking, and I think there is more marketing hype than real AI solutions on the market’, comments Bernard Tan, Asia Pacific managing counsel at Agilent Technologies. There were also concerns that more advanced software would generate more risk for the business. As one respondent commented:

‘There are a number of advanced technology options, but none so far have I found to be absolutely effective. Those that do exist seem to create another layer of liability, which can add to the responsibilities of the legal team. No single tech platform is able to resolve multiple issue, regardless of what their sales teams claim.’

There have, however, been positive experiences. Ivy Wu is head of legal for Greater China at American business-to-business IT service provider DXC Technology. Recently, DXC signed the largest-ever managed services partnership agreement with UnitedLex, giving them access to a suite of advanced legal technology systems.

‘The AI-based legal research translation tools mean we accrue significantly less time and cost penalties when compared to having a dedicated department for this task’, Wu comments. ‘A document can be translated very quickly and will only require a very simple manual double confirm, which is very useful for some litigations, especially international ones which require a lot of translation. The feedback from the business from seeing this data is very positive because they are able to see the cost saved by the legal department is greater than our budget’.

Friend or foe?

GCs may not be using advanced technology en masse right now, but they are keeping a close eye on developments in the field. More than half (55%) were concerned that legal tech would disrupt the in-house job market, while just over a third (38%) felt that lawyers were well equipped to adapt to technological changes within the profession.

But, as Susan Cattell, senior legal operations manager at AMP, concludes, the end game is not lawyers being made redundant, but lawyers learning to do things more effectively.

‘I look forward to the disruption of the industry when we get this right, as when we do, the possibilities of better service to the end-clients, lower cost processes and better managed teams should promote an even better working environment.’

JERA is one of the largest energy companies in Japan but it is also a relatively new company established as a joint venture between Tokyo Electric Power and Chubu Electric Power.

Having a short history has in fact helped us to onboard legal technology. If our company had a history of a hundred years, it would be almost impossible to fundamentally change the way the legal group works because there would be so much tradition built up that the organisation would be very resistant to change. With a new business one finds that nothing is set in stone. We are also fortunate to receive strong support from our ICT group, which is leading the digital transformation of our company.

But even with a young company, doing something new and bringing in a big change is not easy. One must secure budget and buy-in from management. One must also acknowledge the fact that Japan is a very traditional culture when it comes to doing business. Historically, Japanese companies have relied on paper, ink and physical signatures or seals to confirm documents.

However, COVID-19 has forced companies to examine technological solutions and embrace non-traditional working practices. This may have opened their eyes to the possibilities that technology provides, which will lead to a corresponding increase in demand. We are now able to get corporate approval at all levels via electronic confirmations, and paperless working is moving ahead throughout the company.

We are currently introducing and deploying contractual review legal technology. We introduced two [tech providers] for contractual review purposes, one English and one Japanese. I find this necessary as a Japanese solution is needed for Japanese-language documents and an international provider is needed for English-language documents. Some international companies also claim that they have Japanese language adaptability, but the quality is limited because of the nature of AI. Unless they process a huge amount of data, the AI will not grow to a level of capability that satisfies us.

The next area we would like to incorporate legal tech into will be that of workflow management. At the moment, all of this work is undertaken manually; we pick up the phone or receive emails and the consultation starts. In the future we would like to introduce management software to assist this process.

While not all our legal staff are equally eager for legal tech, particularly if they feel learning a new way of doing things will be time consuming, the technology we have introduced so far has proved to be very successful.

We would like to be even more ambitious with the technology we introduce, but we have not got there yet. Take something like document management systems. Transitioning to this type of software is so complicated that we are not sure which supplier is the right fit for us, or whether any company is able to do what we need. We are watching and waiting for the market to evolve.

Naturally, given the company’s size, the legal group’s work is on a global scale, and we need to work with both Japanese and English language documents. The uniqueness of language is one factor as to why Japan does not have as advanced a legal tech sector as other mature economies such as the US or UK. Japan is to some extent isolated from the global market because of this. It is making some headway in catching up, especially due to the COVID situation, and will hopefully progress further.

I firmly believe that the trend of increased legal tech adoption in Japan will continue and we will see an increasing number of companies introducing some sort of legal tech, whether that is document management, contract review or higher-end AI solutions.

We are looking for improvements to our legal technology in most areas. Although I believe we are a bit ahead of the curve in terms of openness to technology adoption, our use of legal tech is limited to contractual review and the contractual review itself – we are talking about relatively standard documents.

If technology advances and other areas can be also processed by legal tech, then the accuracy and efficiency of our work will be significantly higher, which is why we are looking out for new products and evaluating them on an individual basis. Adopting advanced technology to assist the company is one of our top priorities over the foreseeable future.

It’s fair to say that legal operations in Australia has evolved differently to the US, where businesses typically have much larger legal functions with many more lawyers in the organisation. There’s quite a sophisticated supporting structure around all of that which has effectively been brought into the legal operations umbrella. Australia is a little different.

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) in Australia evolved out of a desire to bring together a group of legal staff working at some of the larger companies who had an interest in sharing things that we were learning through our operational improvement initiatives. That included technology but it also included other less tech-focused initiatives aimed at just improving our efficiency and service delivery.

CLOC, particularly in the US, also has quite an extensive array of online resources and online collaboration tools, including some active chat forums where people ask information about what’s happening, and seek insights from other CLOC members that might help them with particular problems that they’re facing or issues they need to solve. In the last year or so, CLOC has also put in place a law firm membership so that external legal service providers can share what they’re doing from an operational improvement perspective.

Legal operational enhancement can be a real challenge if you’re starting entirely from the ground up. One of the great things about CLOC is that you can very easily learn from what others are doing, so that you’re not reinventing the wheel. You are learning from others’ experiences, which makes it a really good forum for embarking on that journey, connecting with people who’ve been through similar experiences and being able to benefit from their experience of the things that have gone well or not gone well in that context.

It’s very difficult to actually objectively assess whether what legal tech providers are saying their product or service delivers is actually what it delivers. Being able to leverage the experience of people who have used those products and services to see what the actual output is helpful.

In my own in-house legal department, we were using an array of technology from the very basic, starting out at the bottom end in terms of core functionality, things like an internal matter management system, which generates data about what the team is doing and feeds into reporting on what we’re up to. We also have a document management system as well, that allows for ready storage of documents.

We’ve built a number of these tools, for example, a self-serve non-disclosure agreement tool that allows people in our businesses – without having contact with a lawyer – to be able to generate and execute a compliant confidentiality agreement. There’s also marketing review tools and a contract review tool that we’ve built and are continuing to evolve. Our objective is to identify processes that our lawyers would otherwise do that are not particularly complex and not particularly strategically significant. And where we can, making use of a tool so that can be done within the business in a user-friendly way that manages the risk.

Going forward, we are exploring the use of more sophisticated tools, particularly more advanced document review technology. The idea is to do an 80/20 review of incoming contracts so that against some key parameters that we’ve identified so that it really helps the lawyers to narrow down their focus on what’s really important in terms of those contract reviews.

We are fortunate in our business that we are relatively free to look at using technology ourselves, although there is some formality in the process. We have to ensure the software we are interested in complies with our data security frameworks, so everything needs to be reviewed by our cybersecurity team to make sure that it is compliant with our standards. The other – perhaps obvious – issue is fitting it into our budget. Aside from these issues, though, there is a fair bit of freedom for us to explore and test different offerings.

I would make the observation that lawyers increasingly need to be at least attuned to technologies and what they do. There’s an open argument as to whether lawyers need to be capable in skills like coding et cetera, my view is that this is probably not necessary but that they at least they need to be familiar with the technologies that are available, and need to be comfortable living with these.

Lawyers who are beginning their careers now are going to be looking at a very different way of practicing in 10 or 20 years’ time, and they need to be adaptable to that. Some have said that what is really important for lawyers is perhaps not so much blackletter expertise but around building empathy and their soft skills development. I think there’s certainly some wisdom in that.

Lawyers across the world like to talk about rubber stamping things, even though few who qualified in the last 15 years will have seen a rubber stamp let alone used one to certify a document. But, as we found out speaking to GCs across Asia Pacific for this special report, when a lawyer in that region talks about rubber stamping something, they often mean it literally.

‘Most documents I deal with require physically stamping,’ lamented one Indian GC. ‘Even if you want to automate some part of that process in the end you will need to get a stamp. That means a trip to another office, a taxi ride somewhere else in the city, a long wait in a queue. All to get that piece of paper stamped.’

India may be notoriously bureaucratic, but the problem was far from unique to that country. GCs from Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and even ultra-efficient Singapore told us of cultures rooted in face-to-face contact, deference to senior decision makers and established hierarchies. As a result, even that simplest of legal technologies, the electronic signature, had failed to take root.

The obstacles facing GCs who wanted to introduce technology felt unmovable. Until a pandemic hit. After nearly a year of lockdown, businesses across Asia have embraced new ways of working.

To understand just how much lawyers have adapted to tech in these strange times, GC magazine teamed up with World Services Group to survey over 100 of Asia Pacific’s leading general counsel. We asked them about everything from the impact of Covid-19 on the legal team’s efficiency to their use of AI, how they find the right software (and the money to buy it), and their expectations of outside counsel when it comes to technology.

We found evidence of a region that is almost uniformly embracing technology, a region where even the most entrenched cultural habits may be coming to an end. But let us not get carried away.

Any discussion of how GCs in the Asia Pacific region are using legal tech is liable to fall into the trap of focusing on culture first. Certainly, this special edition shows much evidence of country-specific traits that are restricting or encouraging the use of technology, but it also shows that GCs the world over are facing the same issues when it comes to technology.

Broadly, there are three steps involved in the acquisition of legal tech, all of which are things lawyers have historically struggled with: Knowing what’s out there; understanding and benchmarking the capabilities vs the cost, and convincing the business that it is going to save time and money. Until GCs get to grips with these procurement-driven approaches to buying technology their successes in finding suitable platforms is likely to remain limited.

On behalf of all of World Services Group, I am delighted to welcome you to the third edition of our GC special reports, looking at the importance and impact of technology on the legal profession.

This issue of the report is indeed a timely one, as at no point in our professional lives has the profound effect of technology been more evident. Since the onset of the pandemic, private practice and in-house counsel alike have universally transitioned to new ways of working largely driven by technology, demonstrating on one hand the adaptability of the profession, while on the other, dispelling tired notions of lawyers as technological luddites.

As the legal leaders featured throughout the report illustrate, innovation – particularly as it pertains to technology – is apparent in every corner of the profession. Just as we saw in the first two editions, neither budget nor business size need to be obstacles to innovating, with much of the counsel-driven development originating from little more than an idea and an opportunity.

Yet as we celebrate the shared successes seen across the legal industry, we must remain cognizant that innovation is a journey on which we will never reach a final destination. And with evolution emerging from every corner, it would be all too easy to rest on our collective laurels instead of continuing to build on the progress made. So, while we look on at the innovators and their accomplishments detailed throughout the report, we should also consider what we can do to foster and facilitate the emergence of the next wave of visionaries, set to take the profession further still.

Here at World Services Group, we want to embody the change that we advocate for. As an organization, we have seen that investing in technology, talent and corporate sustainability best practices that foster social and economic development are essential elements for ongoing business success – all of which represent key commitments I have made for my tenure as Chairman in 2020-21. By taking a strategic approach to our proprietary digital platform, empowering emerging leaders across our network, as well as improving training and accessibility to technology for all our membership, World Services Group is committed to ensuring that we are properly prepared to capitalize on the growing wave of technological innovation, for the benefit of both our members and clients.

In closing, I’d like to thank all of those in the legal community who contributed their thoughts and insights as part of the research for this report. By sharing your own lived experiences along this journey, I have no doubt you will help to shape and inspire the coming generation of leaders and innovators, set to once again disrupt the idea of what it means to be a lawyer.

Ramon Moyano
Chairman
World Services Group

Partner
Beccar Varela

What have we learned since March 2020? For Amar Sundram, head of legal at RBS in India, it is that talk of lawyers being an uncreative species was greatly exaggerated.

‘We are now seven months into the pandemic and the main myths about lawyers have been broken. The myths that we are not adaptive, that we do not take risks, that we are averse to technology – they have all disappeared. Lawyers have found that, when faced with necessity, they can take to new tasks as well as any other professional group.’

Our survey of over 100 of the leading counsel across the Asia Pacific region showed that less than a fifth of legal teams (18%) felt their output was significantly affected by the pandemic, though the bulk of respondents (73%) had experienced some level of disruption.

For many legal teams, the pandemic was an unexpected experiment in working remotely. While over half of legal  teams (59%) had a prescribed remote-working policy in  place before the pandemic hit, and almost all (95%) felt  such a policy was necessary, this was scant preparation  for having the entire team work remotely for weeks at a time.

Marcus Clayton, general counsel and company secretary at leading Australian integrated construction materials producer Adelaide Brighton Cement (Adbri), reflects on the early days of lockdown:

‘With a very lean team to start with, working from home through COVID-19 and splitting the legal team into Team A and Team B made it much harder to produce the expected outcomes, [particularly as] demands increased. We were all to work longer and harder in difficult circumstances to achieve a lesser product than before.’

Many survey respondents pointed to a similar problem, noting that in the early days of lockdown they had been expected to meet more challenges with fewer resources. As one respondent, a legal director working at a large industrials company in Singapore, commented:

‘While demand for regular commercial advice has tailed off somewhat, we have had to contend with an increased number of requests for regulatory advice. At the same time, there has been a huge increase in the number of online meetings, with some of these taking up the entire day. Managing this challenge of growing demand under such unusual circumstances has been particularly difficult.’

Others pointed to the lack of connectivity in the legal team, and the difficulty of ‘discussion, deliberation and evaluation of the finer points of a matter’ while working remotely. Some felt that the organisational support for remote working was still lacking, with one Hong Kong-based general counsel at a consumer electronics company commenting:

‘A documented remote working policy has worked well for us. However, it will only work if home infrastructure allows employees to work remotely. It is more than simply providing a laptop. This has not been a problem with the lawyers in the legal team but has been a problem with support staff.’

The A and B Team

While talk among GCs has turned from “business resilience” to “business resurgence”, few expect their return to normal to be synonymous with a return to the office. Staff may be returning on a team by team rotation, but a growing number of companies have started to think about how they can operate a remote working policy as their default setting.

To do this successfully they will have to deal with the issue of cyber security. As Pulin Kumar, senior legal and compliance director at adidas India, notes:

‘In today’s environment a lot of things are system driven, and once you have a system driven environment then everything has to be connected. It is almost a given that for remote working to succeed information must be highly accessible. The data will flow to far more places and people, so the security checks in place need to be robust. This is a matter for IT teams, but it is also a matter for legal and compliance teams. Employees’ understanding of compliance has to be updated to account for the mass shift we are seeing toward working from home.’

Respondents to our survey echoed this, pointing out that remote working had exposed their companies to enhanced cyber security risks. Over a third (36%) felt the biggest risk came from loss or theft of confidential business information. As one GC commented, ‘Sensitive data and applications are now being accessed through non-secure networks. Businesses need to give this some more thought, and will likely have to invest more time, effort and money to strengthen their IT infrastructure.’

Of course, when it comes to new ways of working, not all legal work is created equal. Work involving insurance claims relating to physical infrastructure, anti-bribery and fraud investigations, or due diligence in the context of an M&A where virtual data rooms are required are all exponentially more difficult to do remotely. As Nancy Wei, associate legal director of Skechers China comments: ‘Remote working is really helpful non-litigation scenarios. For litigation issues, I tend to choose face to face meeting to discuss the facts of the case and collection of evidence.’

A pandemic in numbers

But perhaps we should not dwell on the negatives. One of the most surprising things about the lockdown has been the ability of many businesses to function as normal. Likewise, legal teams have managed to weather the storm successfully. Nearly a third (27%) of respondents to our survey felt their efficiency had improved, while a similar number (24%) said their output had in fact increased. Being on call 24 hours a day does have some advantages….

Another positive has been the invigorating effect remote working has had on legal teams. As Amba Prasad, vice president and head of legal services at Indian construction and engineering conglomerate Larsen & Toubro comments:

‘COVID-19 has shown that the remote working can be efficient despite the challenges of management and the interplay of work related to teams based in different locations. Scaling up our technological infrastructure in a timely manner aided this transition.’

Aside from helping the legal team find new ways to operate efficiently, he continues, the pandemic has had other benefits. ‘It has brought the team together in a manner that was never before seen. Caring and sharing between team members has really become an embedded practice.’

This much is clear from our survey. Fully 31% of those we spoke to said employees within the legal team were happier with their current out of office setup.

While most GCs felt remote work had been a positive thing for the legal team, there are questions of whether the same established structures can endure over the longer term. Bernard Tan, Asia Pacific managing counsel at Agilent Technologies, comments:

‘I don’t think there is an immediate negative impact to productivity as we have the necessary working culture, processes and technical infrastructure that enable work to continue on a remote basis. The concern is more about long term engagement issues and whether, as a legal team, we are able to continue to exert the necessary influence and engagement with internal clients if we work on a 100% remote basis perpetually.’

The solution to this ongoing question will likely involve increased spending on technological infrastructure and enhanced cyber security protocols, but it will equally depend on the approach taken by lawyers. As Nancy Wei concludes:

‘It is going to be a case of legal teams learning new and more flexible ways of doing things. We need to communicate more efficiently and effectively, especially when facing up to balancing business opportunity and risks. Trust among team members is going to be very important in facing up to this uncertain situation.’

With nearly three quarters (73%) of respondents saying the expect remote working to increase over the coming months, pressure on GCs to find ways of dealing with uncertainty is going to be with us looks set to become the new normal.

Legal technology is something we have been exploring long before COVID-19 arrived, but the current pandemic has certainly forced us to fast track projects that we had been planning for the future. I would not say that we are using sophisticated systems – in our market sector it is not necessary to be at the cutting edge – but we have found ourselves using much more technology.

At the beginning of this pandemic there were obstacles to overcome, because we just didn’t know what to expect. No one knew how long the ‘work from home’ situation would last, but I don’t think anyone expected it to last for so long.

As general counsel and compliance officer for the entire food group at Pilmico, I am essentially managing legal work throughout the region. This can be difficult, especially as I am dealing with a range of jurisdictions with different laws on a daily basis. There is no real legal or regulatory alignment across the ASEAN region, which is certainly an obstacle to introducing new tech-enabled processes.

Most legal tech innovations I have come across have originated in Singapore. This is of course partly the result of Singapore’s strong culture of innovation, and the generous funding available for such initiatives, but it also depends to some extent on the regulatory environment. For example, Singapore recognises e-signatures, while countries such as Indonesia do not. As such, a platform which is supposed to lighten the burden by implementing e-signatures is not much use to a business that has a pan-Asia Pacific footprint.

From an operational perspective, things can get even more tricky. Remote working has impacted our operations throughout the Asia Pacific region, which means we not only have to focus on tools that can help our employees at headquarters in Singapore, but for all our staff across various markets.

Over the past few months, technology-driven developments and initiatives designed to make working from home easier have been prioritised. We have rolled out a new console system within the team to help us manage legal files. This has been very useful in making sure we retain and track important documents. This system was initially going to be introduced in the second half of next year, but we fast-tracked the initiative to help assist the transition towards working from home.

The experience has helped me see that in many areas we were still working in a very traditional way. For example, I would review a Word document, send it via email to the other party for review before receiving a marked-up copy for further review. When you look at documents being reviewed in this way, you end up creating many drafts and different versions of one document.

Being forced to adopt new solutions has certainly shown me that it is not the only way to do things. Even something as simple as Google Docs can help solve this issue, but I am increasingly interested in exploring the more sophisticated solutions that are available, such as a one-stop-shop that assists with drafting, reviewing, signing and retaining documents, as well as assisting with contract templates.

The biggest impact technology has made during the lockdown is in terms of how we share information and knowledge. We are now using virtual meeting platforms on a daily basis, sometimes several times a day. I suppose that shows that, for many tasks, there is no substitute for personal contact. We still need to discuss and exchange ideas, but perhaps the way in which we deliver our services will continue to evolve. However, I would say that we now spend more time interacting with our colleagues outside Singapore than ever before. If anything, the inability to travel has brought the wider team closer together. 

‘If I’d lived in Roman times, I’d have lived in Rome.’

John Lennon’s famous words when asked by a journalist why he was living in New York, then the cultural and economic centre of the world. In 2020, a growing number of tech investors that have relocated to Beijing are giving a similar answer.

President Xi Jinping has outlined a plan to make China a world leader in advanced technologies, investing more than a trillion dollars into key industries. Even without this state support, the country’s tech sector is on an upward swing. Investment in its artificial intelligence (AI) sector for the first half of 2020 has already surpassed US$9bn, making China one of the leading global players in the field.

Following China’s lead, tech companies across Asia have seen a boom in investment. Many of the region’s fastest growing businesses – Hong Kong’s WeLab, Singapore’s Synagie, India’s GoBolt – are led by charismatic, tech-savvy entrepreneurs.

The region’s legal industry, often seen as a bastion of conservative values, is now waking up to the challenge of technology. Singapore now houses one of the largest legal tech accelerator programs in the world, Chinese courts have become world leaders in the use of technology, and even less mature markets have turned to technology as a way of bypassing their stretched legal systems.

To find out why the region is proving to be such a fertile ground for legal innovation, and how this is impacting in-house counsel, we spoke to general counsel who are making the most of legal tech.

State aid

States across Asia Pacific are jostling for position, with substantial sums being spent by governments aiming to achieve legal technological pre-eminence. Already, legal tech initiatives region-wide have ridden on the crest of this wave. For example, Indonesia has made amendments to laws affecting legal tech, for instance by introducing a list of certified Indonesian e-signature providers. India has huge domestic demand for legal tech as it looks to boost efficiency in what is still mostly a pen and paper legal system.

Increasingly, the more established corridors of business are looking to capitalise on this success. Stung by the rising number of high-profile tech companies looking to list outside the region, the Singapore Exchange (SGX) has started offering grants to help fast growth businesses cover the legal and regulatory costs of their listings. In a similar move, Hong Kong’s financial secretary Paul Chan Mo-po has set aside HK$50bn (US$6.5bn) in funding to support greater innovation and technology development in Hong Kong.

In April 2020, the Government of Hong Kong announced a HK$35m LAWTECH Fund to assist law firms and chambers upgrade their IT systems. As Jerrold Soh, assistant professor of computational law at Singapore Management University (SMU), explains:

‘Hong Kong’s approach is similar to Singapore’s in that it is driven by external demand, but their focus is more on the mainland China market, especially technology related to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). For instance, a comprehensive electronic dispute resolution, arbitration and mediation platform was constructed out of Hong Kong to assist the
BRI’.

Taken together, these initiatives suggest a regional trend, but the Asia Pafic tech market is anything but a unified field. It is, says Jerrold Soh, a market preoccupied with solving domestic rather than regional problems, and nowhere is this truer than in China.

‘Domestic demand is the key driving force for Chinese tech companies, many of which are not so much interested in attracting outside investment. They really are just building their own topologies, and the same rule applies in the
legal tech space.’ ‘There are so many new tech startups, firms and applications that are being built there. Not only are these companies becoming significant players, but they are changing the way we think about the law. You can have an entire dispute resolved on an app, powered by WeChat. That is something incredibly exciting in the legal field that is being driven by Chinese tech and innovation’.

While many of even the largest tech companies remain unknown outside the PRC, they boast user bases that would be the envy of a Silicon Valley unicorn. They are also becoming increasingly sophisticated, adds Ivy Wu, head of legal for Greater China at American business-to-business IT service provider DXC Technology.

‘In the time I have observed the development of legal tech in China, I have found that in both litigation and non-litigation products the technology has developed amazingly quickly. For non-litigation software – for example, for document management and review tools – Chinese technology is now more advanced than anything available internationally. There are suppliers focusing on contract management processes and internal process approval on legal documents which have proved to be very effective, as has software aimed at the record keeping of signed agreements.’

Nancy Wei, head of legal for Skechers China, says the rapidly maturing domestic tech scene offers legal counsel greater flexibility when it comes to resourcing legal matters.

‘We use a mix of both international and domestic Chinese technology in our team. For our database systems we use internationally known suppliers that have been active in the market for several years. However, for contract management we select local suppliers who may or may not have international experience, but who, in this area, tend to provide systems that are more user-friendly for the Chinese market’.

Kenji Tagaya, general counsel executive officer and head of the legal group at JERA, Japan’s largest power generation company, says it is common for large organisations to look to both domestic and international providers.

‘We introduced two [tech providers] for contractual review purposes, one English and one Japanese. I find this necessary as a Japanese solution is needed for Japanese-language documents and an international provider is needed for English-language documents.’

‘Some international companies also claim that they have Japanese language adaptability, but the quality is limited because of the nature of AI. Unless they process a huge amount of data, the AI will not grow to a level of capability that satisfies us.’

A home-grown revolution

It is not just the rise of domestic tech firms that is changing the way GCs operate. Increasingly, legal teams across the Asia Pacific region are looking to develop their own IT platforms before turning to external suppliers.

Carl Watson, general counsel for Asia at design and engineering consultancy Arcadis, underlines the value this brings to the legal team.

‘What I would say is that you don’t know what you don’t have until you look… There’s a whole volume of very helpful apps that you’re paying for anyway, but you probably don’t even know it; I’ve always been quite interested in what’s available and then optimising these sorts of technologies.’

‘Demonstrating value through use of simple technology tools to provide dashboard insight into what we’re doing [is] how I got the ball rolling in the very early days. I think it’s about building trust and identifying tools that were available without needing any great investment’.

Faz Hussen, general counsel and director of government relations at McDonald’s Singapore, has found similar benefits in harnessing existing technology within the legal team.

‘Using home-grown software has two main advantages. It is obviously much cheaper, and developing our own in-house software means that we can hedge on business costs as opposed to getting them signed off for external technology.’

‘Perhaps a bigger advantage is that internally developed technology can be customised to match systems we are already familiar with. That will ensure other business units can seamlessly work with the platform.’

Turning to the results of our survey of over 100 legal teams across Asia Pacific, it seems that this message has yet to find a mass audience. Only 9% of legal teams are currently looking internally to develop tech solutions, while 83% of teams are looking to tech vendors for readymade or bespoke solutions.

Nonetheless, homegrown legal solutions are finding champions at the largest companies. Sheldon Renkema, general legal manager at top-10 ASX listed diversified conglomerate Wesfarmers, has worked to introduce a number of self-service tools into the legal department, including a non-disclosure agreement tool that allows commercial teams to generate and execute a compliant confidentiality agreement.

‘Our objective is to identify processes that our lawyers would otherwise do that are not particularly complex and not particularly strategically significant. And where we can, making use of a tool so that can be done within the business in a user-friendly way that manages the risk’.

Creating tech solutions internally can also act as a catalyst for the creation of a culture of open-mindedness and creativity within teams, which can pay dividends in other areas. As Bernard Tan, Asia Pacific managing counsel for US-headquartered analytical instrumentation manufacturer Agilent Technologies comments, ‘It is important that we don’t just follow corporate-wide technology projects. We need to create a culture of innovation and digitalisation within the legal function itself, and that means we need a sort of skunkworks for the legal team itself to develop and pioneer new tech.’

Chek-Tsang Foo, group deputy general counsel of NTT Limited, has followed this ethos, working with legal colleagues to create a suite of proprietary legal tech solutions, including a contract risk scoring tool for contracts. The next few years, he says, will be transformational for legal teams.

‘Legal tech will not just change how fast we work, but what we work on. As technology matures, routine and repetitive work can effectively be automated. This frees up bandwidth for internal lawyers to do more complex work that requires more creativity.’

‘It will allow us to spend much more time on things like negotiations, resolving complex matters and proactive legal risk management. The in-house team may also start to provide new areas of value to the enterprise, leveraging the legal team’s skillsets and attributes. The future is also what we create, with the help of legal tech. Perhaps technology will help solve the modern in-house counsel’s struggle for sufficient bandwidth.’

Inflection point

For GCs across the world, 2020 has been a year of learning to work remotely. As DXC Technology’s Ivy Wu puts it:

‘COVID-19 has totally changed people’s lives and changed the way workplaces operate, and people have spent a long time adapting to a work from home lifestyle. This will have big implications for the uptake of legal technology.’

‘In recent years, legal innovation has mostly benefited law firms and companies, but we are now seeing a trend toward traditional legal venues embracing technology. Courts are encouraging lawsuits to be filed online, and there is a push towards virtual hearings. Legal technology has made things more efficient for all players in the legal system, and those effects will continue to grow.’

JERA’s Tagaya adds: ‘Until now, Japan has had a tendency to believe in paper, ink and physical signature or seal. But now that COVID-19 has forced companies to examine technological solutions and embrace non-traditional working practices, it may have opened up their eyes to the possibilities that technology provides, which will lead to a corresponding increase in demand and thus growth of this sector’.

Julien Bergerat, head of legal and chief compliance officer for Nghi Son Refinery and Petrochemical (NSRP), a joint venture to build and operate the largest petrochemicals refinery in Vietnam, is an old hand when it comes to working remotely.

Before moving to NSRP in 2019, he held senior positions in Kuwait, Qatar, Switzerland and France. The ability to access legal information on demand has now become an expectation, he says:

‘We are living in a world where technology cannot be avoided, and the legal profession is no exception. Contract management, document automation and storage, legal research and, more recently, client relationship management and data and contract analytics tools are used by legal professionals as a matter of course’.

‘Over the last decade, legal technologies have given the profession opportunities to improve its overall efficiency and the tools to adapt to agile and challenging working environments. The lower cost of hardware, improved ease of use of software and increased mobility have allowed for easier means of communication but, most importantly, they have enabled lawyers to work from almost any location extremely efficiently’.

But it is not just the demands of remote working that are changing the way legal teams operate. The pressure to do more with less, never far from the minds of GCs, has suddenly become one of the main priorities of businesses fighting to cut costs in a time of crisis.

Benjamin Teong, associate counsel for legal operations at Lazada, one of South East Asia’s largest e-commerce companies, sees adapting to this change as an increasingly unavoidable part of managing a legal function.

‘For in-house counsel, the scope of the work and its complexity is increasing, but we are being forced more and more to work with leaner teams and really maximise the manpower that we do have. There is pressure to achieve more creative and innovative outcomes for the company’.

‘We have tools that are specifically geared toward ensuring that we work efficiently and avoid low-value work as much as possible. We have a workflow management tool, which tracks any work requests to the legal team, allowing us to manage it from the time that we receive the request until the request is fulfilled, and to prioritise issues that are more pressing’.

Off-the-shelf solutions

Across Asia Pacific, GCs are finding that the simplest technologies carry the most impact when it comes to changing the way their teams operate. For Dimas Nandaraditya, general counsel of Indonesia-based Traveloka Group, this relatively simple software has proved to be a quiet revolution.

‘Adopting a new technology requires time and managing multiple vendors and software for our business processes can be cumbersome, therefore we prefer out-of-the-box solutions.’

‘We adopted software that sends regular reminders on when a contract or license is due to expire, which means lawyers no longer need to go through all documents one by one to assess the relevant expiry date or manually send reminders to the relevant stakeholders. The technology itself is rather simple but its impact is very significant: it makes our lives easier’.

There is, adds Nandaraditya, a degree of skepticism toward more advanced forms of legal tech, such as machine learning. ‘Basic AI functions such as e-discovery or automated diligence are starting to get traction, but I doubt that they will be widely available in the next one to two years.’

Jeremy Ryan Chua, general counsel of JAC Liner Group, one of the largest bus companies in the Philippines, has a similar take: ‘Artificial intelligence can assist in gathering data and narrow down possible decision-making choices, it cannot replace the intuition, on the ground experience, and foresight of a seasoned lawyer’.

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, while the potential of advanced legal tech continues to excite the region’s GCs, it has so far failed to gain any real traction in legal teams. Josh Lee Kok Thong, chair of Asia Pacific wide legal tech forum ALITA, remains optimistic.

‘The technology is really improving. One example is ROSS Intelligence, which recently rolled out a free Google Chrome extension. Users can plug in the case that they want to review, and the system will instantly pull it out. Tools like this will change how in-house counsel behave.’

‘The next generation of AI technologies will help lawyers start to write and craft opinions. This will be a game changer because it helps spark the inspiration process, it eliminates writer’s block and enhances the cognitive abilities of lawyers. Building on this, the technology is a game changer. It will allow lawyers to gain new ways of thinking and new insights they may not have seen before.’

This should come as no surprise. As Per Hoffman, vice president and head of legal affairs and sourcing for North East Asia at Ericsson, comments:

‘China is huge, so when it does something the volume it does it with and the impact that has on markets are all huge. AI will be the thing that will come into legal areas. Today you have contract databases where you can search and find various contract clauses. But the next step after that will be AI. China has one of the most advanced AI research and development environments in the world, so for lawyers that is the place we will look to for change.’ 

When I moved in-house around 20 years ago I knew I wanted to work in the IT industry. The pace of change made it the most exciting place for a lawyer to work, and I have been in the front row ever since. While many of the business technologies we use on a daily basis have evolved rapidly, the technologies enabling support functions have been much slower to take off. Until now.

Onboarding legal tech used to be a matter of trial and error. The technologies on offer felt like a solution looking for a problem, and while there was a lot of interest surrounding legal tech it was difficult to make a concrete use-case for what was available. In the last few years, new systems for contract management and document discovery have appeared on the market and are now extremely helpful for in-house legal teams.

These improvements have little to do with technological development – after all, similar systems have been available to businesses for many years – they result from the growing recognition in-house counsel are a viable market for software vendors’ products services. With the growing economic significance of in-house lawyers as a consumer group, the market has finally moved to develop solutions that meet our needs, which are very different to those of law firms.

For in-house lawyers technology has to be easy to use. It needs to work with other systems and align with existing work workflows, and it has to give functionalities that are fit for purpose. All this needs to be backed up by high-levels of support in terms of training and other assistance. In short, in-house lawyers are not looking for off-the-shelf solutions, we are looking outcome-oriented vendors who are able to work collaboratively to meet our needs.

This collaboration needs to begin at the concept and design stage of a piece of software. Knowing the pain points GCs face, or what does and does not work within a typical company environment would help a great deal in making a system that is fit for purpose. For GCs, the price of a system is not just the cost of the license fee. It is also the time spent customising the software, the effort that goes into implementing the software, and the change management and project management requirements that come with it. We have gone through this cycle many times in the past, so we are extremely aware of it.

At all large businesses the legal team works in an ecosystem. This means when we are purchasing external legal tech, we are looking for products that can scale out. Contract management tools, for instance, can be used for other things. That makes a huge difference in terms of bang for your buck. We are really looking to leverage company-wide platforms.

The other big development I have seen in the legal tech space is a growing awareness among GCs that they need to take control of their team’s transformation. Legal tech is not always about finding external solutions. Often, it is just as important to look within. Currently we are looking at leveraging company-wide platforms as a set of collaborative tools that we can use, ideally with no need to integrate any foreign software or systems into our own ecosystem. We are also leveraging enterprise systems and customising them for our requirements. These systems may not have been designed to meet our needs, but they can nevertheless be extremely useful. It is all about being creative and experimenting with the technology you have available to you.

In the same vein, we have also developed tools within our own function. For example, my in-house legal team created a contract risk scoring tool three years ago. We use it to provide a numerical risk rating to contracts, assessed against our internal legal risk policy and tolerances. We have also built in a traffic-light feature based on the ratings. The tool has since been incorporated into the region’s enterprise deal assessment system, which takes into account assessments from other functions as well.

With all these developments, the next few years look set to a transformational period for legal teams. Legal tech will not just change how fast we work, but what we work on. As technology matures, routine and repetitive work can effectively be automated. This frees up bandwidth for internal lawyers to do more complex work that requires creativity. It will allow us to spend much more time on things like negotiations, strategic planning and resolving complex matters. That is cause for optimism. Perhaps technology will help solve the modern in-house counsel’s struggle for sufficient bandwidth.

For GCs, technology is very much a love-hate relationship. We love using technology and are increasingly reliant on it, even though we hate to admit it. The pressure every business has been under to work remotely is showing us how much we rely on technology to operate, which was a trend that started long ago.

Within the legal function we are now using technology for everything from e-discovery to data mapping and analytics. Even beyond front-end legal work, we are using technology to update our insurance certification or take care of our invoicing and billing. Really, we could not operate as a function without this technology. The question, then, is not whether legal technology will become important – it is already essential to the way we operate – but how it will change what we do, and whether it will replace certain tasks. As far as I can see technology will not replace lawyers, but it will open up new ways of working and allow us to see things that were previously invisible. 

Working within a rather lean legal team means that each person has to draw on whatever resources are available to maximise his or her benefit to the business. I am a certified data protection officer and sit as the designated privacy representative for the Asia region. I’m also a certified enterprise risk advisor, a certified business continuity manager, and have just sat the anti-bribery exams. Having that broad-based training is one way of maximising the range of matters I can cover. The other is using technology effectively.

I estimate that our use of technology allows each lawyer to double their workload, so this is not an inconsiderable benefit to the team. The other big benefit technology brings to our legal work is that it allows us to take a more systematic, joined-up approach to risk. The ability to search documents quickly and reliable is one of the best ways to identify and mitigate risk patterns in litigations, investigations, complaints and a many other areas.

This is a fast-moving area of legal tech and one where we really need to keep our eyes open. For example, investigations require detailed knowledge of the underlying facts, and increasingly sophisticated software is being developed all the time. As lawyers, we have to be very open-minded to the possibilities this software will unlock. We almost have to forget that we are lawyers for a moment and think of it as a data mapping task rather than a legal task.

To use legal tech effectively you cannot be afraid to fail. You have to explore new technologies, launch new programmes and initiatives, and start working in different ways, but you also have to know when to abandon software and strategies that are not effective. This requires a fundamental shift in thinking for most lawyers.

Open yourself to new ideas, trial new software and ways of completing legal tasks, but don’t be afraid to admit that something isn’t right for you. You have to be very careful, because not every technology will suit your use case. Try and test as much as possible before determining whether you can actually implement it for use in the long-term.

When it comes to identifying and procuring new technology, we are fortunate to have a supportive IT function. New software is purchased by IT at group level, but every decision follows close discussions with the various business units and support functions to make sure a product will do or can adapt to what we need it to do. My experience is that IT are always eager to explore new tech and are happy to find things that will make your life easier. Building that relationship with your IT people is essential to getting the right tools. But of course, as GC I also need to be involved in the process because only the front-line legal staff can truly stress-test a system.

While there have been big changes in the market for legal tech, most law firms remain quite conservative here and tend to focus on legal skill sets at the expense of other ways of working. However, there are signs of change. New business models that offer on-demand legal staff or a mix of outsourcing and technology-based solutions at competitive price points are becoming more accepted. Ten years ago no one thought it would work, particularly in this market. Now they are threatening the traditional firms. The lesson here is clear. Both in-house and private practice lawyers must be more receptive to new ways of defining products, markets and clients. Technology itself will not leave us behind, but our inability to adapt to its consequences certainly will.

As everyone knows, life after COVID-19 will not simple return to normal. New working arrangements are here to stay, and that means technology will become an increasingly important aspect of working life.

Legal tech is becoming big business in the Asia Pacific region, so much so that the Singapore Academy of Law (SAL) has opened a legal tech accelerator. But much of the industry’s focus remains on selling to law firms. For GCs and in-house legal teams, making sense of the myriad systems can be a daunting task.

It is no surprise then that GCs would like to see law firms doing more to help them make sense of the market. While more than half of respondents to our survey (62%) said their external firms were using technology to deliver legal services, under a quarter (23%) said their firms had offered to share information on how technology might benefit their legal team’s operations.

‘Law firms need to demonstrate the value to in-house teams of adopting technological solutions’, noted one respondent, a Hong Kong-based legal manager at an international consumer goods company. ‘Right now, I think the focus of law firms is using technology to improve their bottom line rather than creating value for clients.’

Another respondent, an Indonesia-based head of legal at a large insurance provider, added: ‘It would be great if the external firm could also offer the service of helping in-house teams find the right legal tech solution for their team. They are often far more aware of the trends and services being used in the market so this would really help us understand things.’

Given the clear client demand, it is surprising that law firms are not seeing the opportunity here. Then again, law firms themselves may have a lot to learn. Just 22% of respondents were satisfied with the technology being used by their external firms.

Law firms should take this dissatisfaction seriously – 94% of respondents said it was important for law firms to keep up with new technologies, while 59% said they had started assessing their firms’ use of technology as part of their formal panel review process.

The incentive for law firms is clear. While legal tech is often seen as a disintermediator, disruptor or challenger to the established order, it does not have to be treated as a zero-sum game. As Susan Cattell, senior legal operations manager at Australian financial services company AMP, notes: ‘Clients and law firms have to work together to ensure the right tech solutions have been put into place and that they benefit both parties.’