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.