6 Points To Consider When Evaluating Legal Tech

Everyone’s talking about legal tech. The usual narrative is about how lawyers should use it to remain competitive, streamline their processes, and save time and money. But the reality is that several legal tech options exist, each battling for your limited attention. This post is for lawyers grappling with deciding which legal tech is most suitable for their business. By the end, you’ll be able to evaluate which solution is right for you. 1. Start with “why” Starting with “why” may seem basic. But I’ve discovered that most lawyers don’t remember why they initially sought legal tech. Crucially, deciding your “why” gives you purpose and direction. It’s also a beacon to return to if you stray from your original goal. For example, a “why” statement may read as follows: I’m searching for software to help us comply with the POPI Act. 2. Develop a business case After establishing your “why”, you should develop a business case. A business case is a document that justifies the project by capturing various essential considerations. For example, it sets out: The scope of the legal tech solution. For instance, “I want legal tech to help me manage the consent requirements under the POPI Act”. The budget. Decide your budget for the project over the short, medium and long terms. Leave room for surprise expenses. The return on investment. Ideally, you can calculate your return using this handy tool. The total cost of ownership. Here you’d estimate the expenses associated with buying, implementing, using, and retiring a solution. Human resource skills. How many people from your team can support this project? Have you assessed their capacity against the time demands of implementing the solution? The required infrastructure. Does the legal tech require strong and unfailing broadband connectivity? Will loadshedding impact your ability to use the solution? Can employees use it while working from home? The intended benefit to the department. How will the solution benefit the department? For example, “The software reduces the risk of us getting fined by the Regulator for mistakenly capturing the consent of data subjects under the POPI Act”. Risk assessment. Assess the risks associated with projects and implement measures to reduce risks. 3. On-premises or in the cloud You need to decide whether the legal tech will be hosted on-premises (on your hardware) or in the cloud (on a distributed infrastructure) managed by the service provider. On-premises solutions are more expensive and more challenging to manage if you have no infrastructure. However, you have more control over the data and security. Alternatively, cloud-based solutions allow for greater scalability. If you’re worried about security, search for a solution with enterprise-grade security features and robust data protection measures. 4. Implementation Once you have access to the legal tech, who will implement it in your organisation? Are there extra costs for implementation? Will the service provider train your staff to scale implementation? 5. User experience How intuitive is the legal tech? Remember that over 90% of lawyers are not tech-savvy. So, can the user simply open it and work on it readily, or does it require significant technical training? What is the cost of training? 6. Scalability How agile is the legal tech for scaling across multiple departments? Is the solution offered in multiple languages so you can scale across the continent and globe? Last tip You don’t have to do this alone. There are independent organisations out there that can help you evaluate legal tech and ensure it meets your needs. About the Author Nathan-Ross Adams – Data and Tech Lawyer, Michalsons Nathan-Ross helps African businesses and governments design, develop and deploy trustworthy AI. He combines legal, commercial, and technical insights to partner with his clients to move toward holistic and sustainable solutions. He believes the best way to formulate these solutions is through collaboration, clear communication, and simple legal documents in immersive legal design.

Why Your Old-Fashioned Contract Process Is Destroying Your Business

Recently, a friend who is a General Counsel reached out for a demo of my company’s product. He asked me to sign an NDA before we discussed details, and I experienced what many of us go through on a daily basis: I opened the email’s attachment, only to discover it was the wrong contract. After a few messages back and forth, I finally got the correct NDA, but I still had to download it to my computer, print it, sign it, and send it back—Only for it to sit in someone’s email inbox. Forever. Businesses today have learned to live with the “necessary evils” of a terrible contracting process because they don’t realize a better solution exists. In fact, many departments haven’t even identified their contracting process as a problem because it’s how things have always been done. Your contracting process may not feel broken to you, but it’s possible the old fashioned contract approach is destroying your business Here’s why: 1.  It’s not fast enough. Technological advances are increasing the speed of business every day. Your current manual solution isn’t sustainable or scalable, and throwing more headcount and budget at the problem isn’t going to help, either. The industry has lost sight of the original purpose of contracts—to enable businesses. But since other processes are only moving faster and a business can only move as fast as its slowest link, you’re holding back the rest of the organization, rather than enabling it. Contracting technology is changing so fast that if you haven’t taken a look at the landscape in the last year, you’re likely missing out. And even if you were forward-thinking enough to put a CLM over five years ago, it’s likely outdated and hasn’t kept up with modern technology. You owe it to yourself and your company to stay on top of the latest developments that can benefit your bottom line. 2.  You’re damaging business relationships. It’s no secret that legal teams have a stereotypical reputation for being bottlenecks within a business. The reason this stereotype is widespread, covering all industries, is because it’s not about you or the people on your team, it’s about the one thing all departments need from legal—Contracts. If you don’t proactively improve your contracting process and modernize your practices, you perpetuate legal’s negative reputation and isolated team structure. Without facilitating cross-functional collaboration and self-service opportunities for contracting across the business, you are holding the business back from growth and success. 3.  It’s irresponsible. As legal counsel for your organization, you have a responsibility to ensure compliance and maintain a high standard of excellence. By neglecting your business’ contracting process, you’re not only holding back the rest of the organization, but quite frankly, you’re not doing your job. Legal departments have historically operated as a reactive function to the rest of an organization, but it’s time to be proactive. If you’re not managing your department by thinking about how to better create, control, and understand your contracts, you’re not fully honoring your commitment to your team. 4.  You’re not doing anything with your contracts after they’re signed. There’s so much that goes into the contracting process, from creation and negotiation to review and signing, it involves effort at every step of the way. But, then what? Once the process is complete, most contracts just sit in a “box”. If a question about a specific contract arises or you need to reference an agreement’s renewal date, panic ensues. Where did we put that? Whose inbox is it in? Do they even still work here? You need a place to store all of your organization’s contracts that allows you to search and locate agreements based on metadata. That way, you won’t lose any more sleep over where contracts are when you need them. 5.  There is a better solution. The biggest reason your old-fashioned contract process is destroying your business is because a better solution really does exist. What’s happening now with next-generation CLM and digital contracting is filled with possibilities and a different approach than before. The idea is that you can break contracts into discrete digital elements, each of which can be connected to digital processes and workflows, speeding up your process without risking compliance. When it comes to cross-functional relationships and your responsibility to your team, the newfound data in your contracts will help unlock new business opportunities and will help demonstrate the value of the legal organization overall. It’s really not just legal who should be interested in the content of contracts, it’s sales, finance, HR, procurement, customer success, anyone who engages with contracts in any way. There are more business insights to be drawn from contracts than any other document, tool, or product within an organization. When you start affecting your company’s revenue and its ability to execute business operations, everyone starts to get interested. While, yes, your current contract process may be destroying your business, digital contracting and next-generation CLM have the potential not only to reverse the course but to pave a new path of unprecedented success. So, what are you waiting for? About the Author Mary Shen O’Carroll is Chief Community Officer at Ironclad, the #1 contract lifecycle management platform for innovative companies. Prior to Ironclad, she spent 13 years as Director of Legal Operations at Google where she built and managed the operations of the Legal Department allowing the organization to scale from 200 to 1400+ people. During her tenure at Google, Mary was recognized by Financial Times (2019) as a top Legal Intrapreneur, by American Bar Association as 2018 Women of Legal Tech, by the American Bar Association as Legal Rebel in 2016, and by LegalTech News as Legal Department Operations Director of the Year in 2016. In addition, she recently served as President of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), the largest and fastest-growing community focused on the business of law.

Legal Digital Transformation: Time to Think Like the Business

It has been a challenging 18 months.  Pandemics, lockdowns, floods, fires, storming of the Capitol, Brexit, food shortages …  an apocalyptic list, almost like an overly inclusive force majeure clause.  I don’t wish to sound glib; the human cost of these events, Coronavirus in particular, has been significant, with many lives tragically impacted.  As we emerge into a brighter future, it seems that we will need to learn to live with unpredictability, in both our personal and professional lives.  The world of business has shifted irrevocably.  A survey of chief executives, conducted by KPMG in March 2021, showed that a quarter of respondents think the pandemic has changed their business model forever. And what about the lawyers?  Legal services has traditionally lagged behind other industries in embracing change and new ways of working.  Despite many years of talk about ‘legal tech’, ‘reg tech’, ‘innovation’, ‘alternative legal services providers’ and ‘digital transformation’, the legal industry has remained, in the main, stubbornly wedded to the traditional ways of delivery.  The pandemic forced a change, of sorts.  Lawyers, like most knowledge workers, were sent home, and were compelled to use digital tools to get the job done.  And although using Microsoft Teams does not exactly constitute full blown digital transformation, remote working has undoubtedly helped to move the dial and to soften the traditional lawyer resistance to more digital delivery.  Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, famously said in April 2020 that Microsoft had seen “2 years’ worth of digital transformation in 2 months”.  Viewed in this light, the pandemic could be considered an opportunity for the legal services industry to rethink its delivery model for the next decade and beyond. Digital transformation has a critical role to play in this new model. Now more than ever, digital transformation is not an indulgence, but a necessity. This is about much more than remote working – to evolve to a digital operating model in a volatile and unpredictable world requires a shift in culture.  Lawyers, in private practice and in-house, will need to cultivate the kind of culture that innovative and transformative businesses have already developed – a culture that is curious, adaptive, transparent, democratic, and comfortable with change. As businesses become more agile and speed-to-market becomes an even more urgent priority, corporate legal teams and external law firms serving the business need to keep pace – or risk becoming sidelined and irrelevant.  Can a corporate legal team effectively support an agile business without adopting agile principles itself?  Can an external law firm advise on the legal and regulatory implications of digital transformation without itself leveraging digital tools and approaches? In times of unprecedented volatility, can an analogue approach to client service ever be justified? During the repeated lockdown periods enforced by the pandemic, I thought a lot about these questions.  I have been in legal services for over 25 years, as a lawyer, as a chief legal innovation officer, as a consultant, as a global head of knowledge, and, most recently, as the Executive Director of the Digital Legal Exchange.  All these roles (with the exception of the fee-earning lawyer) involved pushing the boundaries and driving change, in an effort to improve service to clients.  I have a lot of battle scars! I decided to synthesise my thoughts into a new book to help law firms and legal teams understand more about how to affect and sustain digital transformation. Have a look at Successful Digital Transformation in Law firms: A Question of Culture.  My conclusion (not groundbreaking, no less true for that) is that any leader looking to future-proof a law firm or legal team must learn lessons from the operating model of successful digital businesses. What is it that unites successful digital companies, either those who are digital ‘natives’ or incumbents who have undergone a successful transformation? There are multiple factors, but they can be neatly distilled down to the following five elements. Successful digital companies: focus on customer/client needs and the customer experience above all else; take a strategic approach to digital transformation; commit to seeing the transformation through; hire the best people to make the change happen; and create a culture in which transformation can continue to flourish.   Of these five elements, the most important is culture. There can be no successful or sustained digital transformation without the right culture to support it.  Many of the cultural attributes required to be a digitally effective organisation are those we might associate with a ‘good’ or healthy corporate culture: attributes like organisational diversity (which fuels innovative thinking); transparency (which unites teams around a shared vision); and agility (which allows organisations to be responsive to change and serve customers better).  The challenge, for law firms and for corporate legal teams alike, is how to build this kind of culture in an environment that is often resistant to change. During my keynote talk at the Legal Innovation and Tech Fest Online, I will be touching on these issues, and sharing some practical and actionable insights into how lawyers can build their digital muscles, embrace change and bring legal closer to the business. About the Author Isabel Parker, Executive Director for The Digital Legal Exchange (UK), has spent her career consistently pushing the boundaries and delivering change in the legal industry. She trained as a lawyer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer then moved from fee earning to become Freshfields’ Chief Legal Innovation Officer, shaping the firm’s digital transformation strategy and leading the development of client-facing digital products. She moved in 2020 to become Executive Director of the Digital Legal Exchange, a not-for-profit with a mission to accelerate digital transformation within corporate legal functions. Isabel is passionate about customer experience, technology-focused legal education, and cognitive diversity.

Eitan Stern from Legalese on the Changing Landscape of Law

At the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest earlier this month, we sat down with Eitan Stern, Legalese’s founder and director, to discuss his thoughts on the legal tech space in South Africa. Legalese is a creative legal agency which has redesigned legal services to suit creative, start-up, and tech-based businesses by making them accessible, affordable and understandable. Tell me a bit about your journey in the legal space, how did you get started? I’ve always been around the creative industry as well as in the legal industry. While I was at law school I had a small music career. I’ve always been far more into public law, but I never really pictured myself being a lawyer. When I finished law school I had a tech start-up, but it ended up being the wrong people at the wrong time and didn’t work out. I’ve always been entrepreneurial, but at the same time I had this legal background and landed up doing my articles at a commercial law firm and I had one of those moments where it just clicked that I really understood commercial law. So, I worked at a commercial firm doing commercial law and had this idea to try and merge these two “lives” I’d been living: one in the creative industry and tech and one as a lawyer in a suit and tie. It was quite easy to get into the music industry because there were not many entertainment lawyers. It was good product-market fit I suppose. We developed ways of pricing it and ways of providing the legal services and I was able to find something that suited me and my personality. Little things like putting a price list on our website, which seemed obvious, was abnormal in the legal industry – law firms just didn’t do that. I don’t know if it was me being innovative or that I just hadn’t been in the legal space long enough to have an idea of how things should be. But I took a stab at what felt right to me and that was it – that was the beginning of Legalese! We provided legal services for creatives and we just kept broadening the definition of what creatives were. Today, the creatives that we deal with are mostly entrepreneurs in the tech industry and SMEs. How do you think South Africa compares to the rest of the world right now in terms of innovation in the legal space? I think in terms of innovation in general, South Africa is this great breeding ground for innovation because there’s so much opportunity here. We’ve got quite a strong start-up ecosystem because our economy and culture leaves room for innovation which wouldn’t be possible in Europe or America – the Fintech industry is a great example of that. I also think job shortages in SA means that there’s more and more reason for people to become entrepreneurs. In terms of legal innovation, it’s amazing to see something like this event. It’s only the second year of the conference and you’ve got a couple of hundred people attending. The extent to which I see real legal innovation and tech is really at conferences like this. From my perspective, I don’t think anyone has really properly cracked a legal tech product which has worked for a small business in a commercial sense. So, for example, in the accounting industry, cloud-based accounting platforms changed the game. In the legal sphere, I haven’t seen anything like that quite yet. But I’m excited for it. What attracted you to this event? There’s something about the way that legal services have been traditionally provided that is outdated. What attracted me to this event is that I’m always interested to meet the other lawyers who are doing things differently, because the extent to which we can grow our businesses, is the extent to which we can show clients that things can be done differently. The more people working together at this, the better. Coming to something like this event is great because you’re able to see other lawyers who are looking at new, innovative ways to be lawyers. It’s great to be around like-minded thinkers. About the Author Eitan Stern is the Managing Director of Legalese. Eitan is a practising attorney with a background in commercial and entertainment law and tech entrepreneurship. Eitan has worked with sectors across the board, from creative, advertising and media, to educational, non-profit and technology industries. He’s an established public speaker, lecturer, mediator, negotiator and DJ.

The Coffee Shop Office: Benefits and Challenges of Alternative Working Arrangements

Lawyers David Lancaster and Munya Gwanzura, both experts in business management, reflect on the pros and cons of employees working outside the office. Munya will be speaking at the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in June this year. Increasingly, business people are trading their suits for their chinos (and even their tracksuits) as the formal office appears to give way to comfortable workspaces at home and, at times, in coffee shops.  The introduction of new technology has enabled businesses to find better ways of achieving operational efficiency, including moving away from the traditional model, that requires employees to be physically present in the office, towards more alternative and flexible working arrangements.  The technology era is continuously disrupting the traditional ways of doing things and, if businesses are to survive, they need to move with the times and ensure they remain commercially relevant and competitive. Critical to achieving operational efficiency is having in place a technology infrastructure designed to assist employees to increase the speed at which they execute tasks and deliver goods and services. Motivated, skilled employees, who utilise and leverage technology successfully to create tangible value by delivering high-quality work, are essential. In considering a change in traditional working arrangements, it must be appreciated that technology can generally be accessed from anywhere and is no longer limited to the office environment. With a reliable fibre connection at home, an employee can seamlessly connect into the employer’s network and execute tasks assigned to him or her remotely. These employees can still deliver tangible value without necessarily being physically present in the office. This is, of course, subject to confidentiality protocols being observed and the appropriate cyber security being in place to guard against unauthorised access to proprietary information. The concept of employees working remotely can be a rather daunting proposition for an employer as it means less control over remote employees during working hours. For an employer, there is something comforting about having employees visible in the office. However, should employers place greater value on having employees in the office even if they are not productive, or should the emphasis be on better productivity from employees even if they are working remotely? This must be seriously considered so that a decision can be made about what working arrangements work best for the business. It may well be that certain businesses are suited to having some or all their employees working remotely simply because of the nature of their work. Even if this approach is not currently suitable, alternative working arrangements ought to be considered as the business grows and in light of the increased costs associated with renting office space. The benefits of remote working are numerous and include that employers are likely to have a happier and more motivated workforce because they will feel valued and trusted, which inculcates a culture of responsibility and accountability. Further, a happier workforce generally translates into greater productivity and value creation which are the key ingredients to achieving both short and long term goals. In addition, office space can be substantially reduced and the money saved can be ploughed back into the business and used to reduce debt or to fund acquisitions in line with the business’s growth strategy. One should also not ignore the potential risks that may be involved in formalising a policy that permits employees to work remotely.  Employees may abuse the arrangement which could result in less productivity and have a negative impact on the business. The remote working arrangement must, therefore, be clearly articulated and should be legally supported by a mechanism for dealing decisively with employees who are not productive when working from home. When employees work remotely it may also have a negative effect on teamwork and stifle innovation, which is often achieved through daily interaction among employees within the formal office environment. While working remotely may be attractive for some people, others may find it alienating and lonely and it may also have the effect of undermining a sense of commitment to the company.  More importantly, research has shown the importance of the need for human interaction, and when employees work in silos they have been found to be demoralised and to not have a sense of job satisfaction. A delicate balance thus needs to be achieved. Employers can mitigate the risks successfully by carefully selecting the employees within a business whose tasks can be executed successfully in a remote working environment. Often such employees are the ones who provide professional services to the business, and these services are suitable for such an alternative working arrangement. Those employees whose tasks require them to be physically present (eg employees who are directly involved in production) would be required to work in the office or on-site. Various models should be considered to ensure that all employees are treated equitably in order to avoid any industrial relations issues. The world is changing at a rapid pace. Businesses are increasingly being forced to innovate to develop and establish better ways of working to achieve their objectives.  Today’s technology-enhanced market presents great commercial benefits that can be harvested from leveraging technology, and businesses that think outside the box and continue to innovate will undoubtedly remain commercially relevant and competitive in the future. About the speaker Munya Gwanzura was a dispute resolution partner at Webber Wentzel and Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr, and has 14 years’ experience as an attorney. He holds BA and LLB degrees from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and is a CEDR (UK) Accredited Commercial Mediator. Munya completed the Leadership Growth Programme at the Gordon Institute of Business Science and is currently the Head of Dispute Resolution at Barloworld Equipment, a division of JSE listed Barloworld South Africa (Proprietary) Limited. This article originally appeared on Africa Legal Analysis & Opinion

Demystifying the Vendor Conundrum: The Areas of Need

The changing landscape of legal sees many companies supporting an in-house legal counsel model, which brings great benefits for the company – some of which include risk management, access to legal support, performance management and succession planning. Samiksha Kader, Legal Counsel at Tiger Brands will be presenting at Legal Innovation & Tech Fest, sharing her learnings around the needs and challenges presented for in-house counsels. We caught up with Samiksha in the lead up to the event. Samiksha – we look forward to having you present at Legal Innovation & Tech Fest. What motivated you to get involved as a presenter at the event? I realised that many of the challenges faced and experienced by myself are also experienced by my colleagues and I would like to share my thoughts on the vendor conundrum as well as share possible solutions, and also learn from fellow colleagues on how they deal with common challenges. Tell us about your story/career journey in the legal space? And what do you enjoy most about your work? I was raised by a single mom. I was exposed to a very different reality than many of my friends and family, where my mum being the sole provider in the household and also my sole caretaker filled the role of what I later learned to be associated, in some instances with the role of a “man in society”. Being exposed to such an independent and strong female role model, I began to question at a very young age how society viewed and treated women. Given the strong opinions I would share, people regarded me as a feminist and in time, that passion to fight against the stereotypes of the world expanded to fight against racism and violence against women. I believe that law was already in my story long before I realised it was. I always want to contribute in some way to a better place to live. I suppose I gravitated to law to make that difference. Through my career, I was exposed to many aspects of the field, from matrimonial law, criminal law to IT law. I spent much of my career at Business Connexion Group, an ICT company. I really enjoyed being part of an innovative industry. What I enjoy about my job till today is that I am exposed to all facets of trade, which I get to learn about i.e. FMCG, IT, Pharmacy etc. I am still very much a human rights law enthusiast and although I have not had enough time to dedicate to it, I believe that I will keep trying to make that difference, however small. A challenge for in-house counsels is wading through the vendor conundrum to find the solution that supports all the requirements seamlessly. What are the areas that need to be focussed on to get this process right? 1. Data Management and record retention 2. Workflow management (audit trail, workflow and work load management, benefit analytics) 3. Template generation tools. About the speaker Given her background of being a specialist in ICT Law and having worked for one of South Africa’s most prominent ICT companies, Samiksha Kader had access to a fair amount of technology at her fingertips, most of which was never meant to support legal, but Samiksha found ways to make it work for legal.  She is obsessed with efficiency and is always looking for answers to work smarter. Samiksha is very artistic in nature and believes the practice of law is an art form not administrative. She loves freedom, peace and nature. Her main ambition in life is to live with passion and love.  

Have We Reached Peak Innovation in Legal?

We are lucky to have Graeme Grovum, Head of Innovation at Corrs Chambers Westgarth from Australia to present on the stage at the inaugural Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in Johannesburg this year. With his deep understanding of legal processes and love of new technologies, Graeme is well positioned to comment and share insights on some of the hottest topics in legal tech right now. Ahead of his presentation on open innovation at Corrs, Graeme shared some of his insights into the current state of innovation in the legal space.

The New Frontier: Artificial Intelligence & the Implications for Legal

We are lucky to have Milos Kresojevic, Founder of AI.Legal Labs (UK) presenting at the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in Johannesburg this year. We caught up with him to hear more about his experience in the legal industry and something he’s particularly passionate about – embracing artificial intelligence (AI) in the legal industry.   Milos, we can’t wait to have you on the stage at the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest this year. Tell us a bit about your journey in the legal space. What do you love about working in this industry?  My major legal journey started with Freshfields and American Express. At Freshfields, I started and co-led their innovation effort. The most exciting aspect of this role has been having the ability to make a significant impact on some of the most complex and largest matters in the world. The ability to “play” with the explosive mix of top-end lawyering and the top-end of technology (AI and ML) is a dream come true. In reality these innovations have resulted in amazing new revenue models and streams for clients, the firm, partners and lawyers. We’ve worked on developing completely new types of legal services and on a completely different scale, not humanly possible. Being a pioneer and part of such the efforts is a privilege and a thrilling experience. For me though, the best part of these new technologies is that they allow for the democratisation of legal services – allowing law firms of any size, as well as society at large to enjoy the benefits. Legal playing fields are being redrawn and there is a lot of talk about the future benefits of artificial intelligence in the legal industry.  What excites you about developments in AI and why should we be embracing this new future as the legal industry? There are two aspects of AI – the threats and the opportunities. AI is disruptive technology by nature, and that means potential disruption of the value chain of the legal industry altogether. AI-enabled work currently done by lawyers might be performed by smart machines and taken over by your corporate clients, accountants or even – strange as it sounds – regulators (for example, the Roll Royce case in the UK where regulators used AI to audit the case). So you definitely don’t want to be the last one to the game since “legal lunch” might be eaten by some other players. Think of Deloitte, who is starting to enter the legal market. However on opportunity side, law firms and the legal industry should play to their strengths and assess how and where AI can and should extend their strategic play or barrier to entry. Pursue pure AI-strategic play and see where they can create new legal services that never existed, or were previously prohibitively expensive.   What excites me is thinking of “AI as new electricity.” Just think for a moment how industries, lives, quality of life, services and societies at large looked before electricity. This will be the major shift of the business (and legal) world we live in, how we live and the kind of services we will provide and enjoy. And to be truly outlandish, how about new regulation being generated, reviewed and monitored by smart AI machines…in real time. Or to bring it home for legal firms, smart machines being able to store the legal expertise of your top partners and lawyers, so that you can own, maintain and use their expertise beyond their retirement or tenure within the firm. Let alone predicting profitability or partnership chances of your pool of newly graduated lawyers. That is what I call “new legal.”  Tell us a bit about the AI initiatives you’ve worked on  Two of the most exciting projects have been: Using AI for new anti-bribery regulation in Germany. It was first of a kind in the world for training new anti-bribery provisions in a matter of weeks, so we were able to review tens of thousands of documents, previously humanly not possible. Once trained our lawyers were able to acquire a significant new number of clients. Using AI on one of the largest class action suits in the world – assessing, categorising claims and court judgements, generation of appropriate arguments and documentation based on automated assessment and all within comprehensive and holistic view of information about claims, claimants, judgements and status across all representative law firms.   What are your top tips for companies/firms looking to embrace “AI here and now!”  My top advice is – for every large and medium client matter/project within your firm, ask yourself how and where AI can help and secondly how would you approach the matter/project if you adopted an AI-first approach from the outset. AI is not supposed to be just the back-office, lab play for techies but an actual major “tool set” for your lawyers and your top current client matters. And don’t just look into doing the same tasks better or faster but asking what other services and value-adds AI can provide to your clients. And that is the point at which your actual AI innovation starts – innovation of client services. AI innovation leads, and is at the core of innovation of client services.   How do AI enabled client services equal value creation for clients and lawyers?  Primarily at the moment, it’s an increase in depth and breadth of legal insights (information), that in turn means an increased depth and breadth of legal advice, legal risk assessment and provision of legal services. For lawyers it means the ability to focus more on the strategic, top end lawyering, expert-level type of work while being able to draw their conclusions from much deeper pool of legal information. It gives the lawyers the ability to take on more high-end lawyering type of work. It moves the lawyer up the legal value chain.   For clients it is the ability to take full advantage of those deeper legal insights based on larger and deeper information pools.  And secondly it means cost savings because of the lower cost of automated legal services – a factor that may drive more access to and demand for legal services. In one of the largest matters I was involved in, the estimated savings to the client was measured in millions of euros.    About the Speaker Milos Kresojevic is the Founder of AI.Legal Labs, and is a thought leader on the use of AI in the legal industry. From Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer to IBM Research Lab and Silicon Valley. Milos has an MBA Degree from Columbia University and London Business School and a MSc. Aerospace Engineering from the University of Belgrade. Milos contributed to the Law Society’s report on “Technology Innovation in Legal Services”, and regularly speaks on AI and Big Law globally – from New York, to London, to Toronto, to Sydney. He is the winner of the 1st European LegalTech Hackathon, and he presented at ICAIL 2017 at King’s College. Milos’ current primary focus is researching the impact of AI and wider disruptive technologies on Big Law and Access to Justice.

What to Expect at Legal Innovation & Tech Fest 2018

The inaugural Legal Innovation & Tech Fest is happening in Johannesburg later this year. The agenda has just been released, and it’s a whopper – 30 sessions over 2 days! We sat down with Legal Innovation & Tech Fest Program Director, Adi Hartuv, to get more insight into what we can expect from this event. 

Stories of Real Innovation From 5 Leaders in Legal

The inaugural Legal Innovation and Tech Fest in 2018 will demonstrate how legal innovation is being enabled by technology through a combination of case studies, thought-leader presentations and more. It will see the best leaders in the Legal profession up on the stage, telling their stories of success in innovation and sharing creative solutions to solve the most pressing issues facing the world of law today. Here are the first 5 legal leaders on the agenda and a glimpse of their stories – 5 reasons not to miss the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in June! Mick Sheehy – General Counsel, Telstra (Australia) Mick is Telstra’s General Counsel of Finance Technology Innovation & Strategy and is passionate about innovation in the legal industry. Mick has an extensive commercial and M&A background, with 20 years’ experience working on transactions in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia. In 2016, Mick founded the regional chapter of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Australia. Among other successes, Mick will be sharing The Telstra Legal Innovation Story and How to Create an Innovation Movement. This program in 2016 resulted in a saving of more than 40,000 lawyer hours and recognition by Financial Times of Telstra Legal as Asia Pac’s most innovative legal department for 2016. In 2017 Telstra Legal tackled an even bolder set of initiatives resulting in more top awards in the United States and a new Harvard Law School case study on the Telstra Legal innovation program. Graeme Grovum – Head of Innovation, Corrs Chambers Westgarth (Australia) Graeme is a legal technologist with 15 years of experience in the legal and financial services industries. He leverages his deep understanding of legal processes, optimistic mindset, and love of new technologies to deliver exceptional results in unexpected ways. From launching an incubator to developing products to streamline legal workflows, to acting as an agent for change within his firm, to recently launching Sydney Legal Hackers – Graeme is at the forefront of exploring and developing creative solutions to some of the most pressing issues at the intersection of law and technology. Graeme will be presenting on Open Innovation & The Power of Partnerships as a strategy that is not only the way forward for his firm, but for the legal industry as a whole. In his presentation exploring The New World of Legal Work & Exploring the Emerging Trends that Will Drive the Legal Industry in the Next Decade, Graeme will walk us through the rise of legal ops, proactive consulting vs. reactive advice, volunteer groups driving grassroots change, the rise of ‘New Law’ lawyers, and the rise of ‘New Law’ services. In his presentation, A Strategic Approach to AI: Corrs AI Toolkit, Graeme walks us through the journey of Corrs being the first large firm to adopt AI in Australia in mid-2016, doing so in a novel way by entering a JV with an AI company. Graeme discusses Corrs’ approach to AI, data capture and the firm’s application of Machine Learning to their time-keeping processes and leveraging historic billing data to accurately generate new matter fee estimates. Neil Comte & Retha Beerman – Director: Knowledge Management and Training & Director: Knowledge Management, Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Initially described as the “boy Friday” of Knowledge Management at CDH, Neil’s roles developed around innovation, learning and development, quality and professional support due to his relative tech-savvy-ness (for a lawyer) and his time lecturing law at the University of Johannesburg. Neil’s formal training includes business and law degrees from the University of Johannesburg. Neil is a qualified attorney and notary public, and also a director in CDH’s Knowledge Management team.   Retha is a Director of Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Inc, heading up its Knowledge Management (KM) department. The guiding purpose of this department is to enable the whole CDH society to deliver continuous improvements in the quality of professional services provided to their clients, at competitive prices, as well as to develop ways in which the firm may offer “more-for-less” to its clients. Prior to taking on a Knowledge Management role, Retha practised as an Employment Director, having completed an LLM at the University of Michigan. Neil and Retha will present the Cliff Dekker Hofmeyr case study about the introduction of AI capabilities to a South African law firm, with a view to enabling competencies such as data-driven pricing strategies; intuitive and immediate knowledge management delivery; and expertise linking and enterprise search. Insights to be shared include creating the innovation vision; concretising the vision – proof of concept, return on investment; and what ‘delivery’ of innovation actually means: understanding the art of the possible, and achieving incremental successes. Brendon Borgia – Lead Business Analyst, Independent (Financial Sector) As a child, Brendon would often look at a system and think to himself, “Surely there is a better way to do that”. During his career, Brendon has fulfilled many roles in various projects but has kept with this way of thinking. His fields of speciality have been made up of analytics, technology, process engineering and strategy development. Brendon will be sharing key learnings from a multifaceted legal technology implementation in the Financial Sector. From understanding the effort and cost to realising the benefits of technology (business case analytics); to internal and external integration considerations; to understanding capability/skills constraints with regards to solution development and adoption. This presentation also revises where legal counsel can add value in technology implementation, how the gap can be bridged between legal counsel and developers and whether you ought to pursue a hybrid lawyer/developer role. An overview and demo of the implemented solution will be showcased to illuminate the work and effort that isn’t always considered. Interested in our Research Report? The agenda for the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest is developed around a research report that was the result of 6 months of extensive interviews and roundtable discussions with the country’s leading legal professionals. You can download this report here.

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