Team building days, time planning for innovation projects (hacking Project Google 20%), using legal education and development, and other creative mechanisms to dedicate time to innovation are all necessary for legal innovation to flourish. Lawyers should, of course, constantly strive to improve the legal function through innovation or otherwise. At the same time, and especially if they want to be seen as a strategic business partner, they need to aim for a broader goal, expand their ambitions beyond the legal realm and use their creativity and expertise to contribute to their company`s innovation strategy. More complex matters are dealt with or approved by the central in-house legal service. Finding time for innovation and the use of technology is arguably the biggest hurdle for busy in-house lawyers. CPD requirements provide time for in-house counsel to learn the theory of legal innovation, but innovation and technology skills are best acquired by interacting with technology in a practical way – and it takes time. “Eighty-seven per cent of the legal departments we surveyed in 2020 expect their total number of full-time internal employees to remain the same or decrease,” says Hutto. “Traditionally, larger workloads could only be managed through increased internal productivity or expensive external advice. Advances in natural language processing and machine learning (ML) technologies offer a third way to address these critical challenges. In this analysis, we assess the impact of current and emerging developments transforming the legal market and share our views on how the in-house legal department can best position itself to take advantage of future opportunities. In addition, we suggest practical ways in which legal functions will innovate in the future to offer the usual elements of their service with less direct intervention from the lawyer, allowing lawyers to focus on value-added elements.

Innovation is amazing, but it means nothing if it doesn`t align with all parts of a larger business plan. That is why an innovation strategy is very important. An innovation strategy is an organization`s commitment to a set of policies and actions to achieve clear and innovative goals and objectives. “I had to buy insurance to cover the risks my company had taken in hundreds of existing contracts. I was aware of a contract analysis tool that could identify and extract risk provisions from contracts and automatically insert them into a table for further consideration. Integrating this contract analysis tool technology in-house was not an option. However, I accessed the results of the tool by hiring a law firm to use the technology. This allowed me to spend my time looking at the risk provisions that were automatically extracted from the technology. Innovation is a core value in many companies that everyone needs to adhere to.

Everyone is called upon to innovate, including lawyers. It is probably to be hoped that this general agitation of innovation will lead the company to innovate effectively at a strategic level, such as some companies where a conscious policy of promoting creativity and innovation has been able to achieve spectacular results (3M, Google and others). If you answer the above, you can skip a turn or two. Think of it this way: if external law firms are legal 1.0, then internal is legal 2.0. What companies are looking for is legal, risk management, compliance and governance leadership that is efficient, effective and accessible, pervasive, meaningful, understandable and accessible to all. It`s Legal 3.0 – three corners away and only possible if a lawyer takes responsibility and embraces innovation to disrupt the status quo. Now let`s move on to innovation within the legal function. There is a lot of enthusiasm for this topic. Think, for example, of the Financial Times awards for innovative legal services and the noise surrounding legal technology. In this report, the General Counsel, General Counsel, General Counsel and other executives responsible for the delivery of in-house legal services share their views on innovation-driven change management.

The prevalence of the role tends to increase with the size of the organization. What could be the next innovation role in corporate legal teams? A Gartner study notes an increase in investment in legal project managers (up 56%) and data scientists working in the legal department (up 30%). In addition, most legal departments do not plan well for such initiatives. A common mistake is to follow a legal technology roadmap without sufficiently considering the needs of businesses or end users. Typically, companies that look at how a technology improves certain business functions or business outcomes perform better than companies that don`t. The key to success is first identifying specific problems that can be solved with automation, rather than using legal technology in search of a problem. In-house lawyers, even those who feel “technically challenged”, are able to master technical skills. Don`t be fooled into thinking you don`t have the technical skills or expertise to use the technology or provide the automation.

Lawyers are smart and able to harness the superpowers of patience, resilience, and experimentation. You can also accept an innovation that is good but not perfect. The innovation journey will include moments when lawyers will feel lost, frustrated, and unable to understand what`s going on – why isn`t this technology working? Or what are these computer scientists talking about? All right. Stay calm and keep going. The rewards are worth it. At The Lawyer, 71% of GCs said they were not looking for alternative deployment models. But how are you supposed to get different results if you do things this way over and over again? Allowing an alternative corporate structure (ABS) on a panel or salary arbitration strategy would allow legal teams to focus on high-quality outcomes and leave everything else to other companies set up for efficient standard work. Disaggregation is always relevant.

“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without shepherds. Without innovation, it is a corpse. The proportion of legal budgets devoted to technology will increase significantly by 2025, according to a 2020 Gartner survey of legal leaders. Eight to seven per cent of legal departments in 2020 expected their total number of full-time internal employees to remain the same or decrease. These challenges are at two levels: on the one hand, the contribution to the company`s innovation strategy (launch of a new product, reinvention of the business model, transformation of the organization, etc.); Secondly, to improve the functioning of the Legal Service itself. Make no mistake: from the company`s point of view, there is a clear hierarchy. Making an effective contribution to the company`s innovation strategy is more valuable than improving the functioning of the legal department. This is not to minimize the importance of improving systems and processes within the legal department. But the focus on “in-house cooking” should not lead in-house lawyers to lose sight of the big game. Tip: Join the ACC Australia Legal Technology and Innovation community and check out Legal Technology and Innovation resources| Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), join the conversation and connect with other innovation-focused business consultants and share your thoughts and feedback via email programdevelopment@accglobal.com The global legal market is approaching a tipping point. Cost pressures, regulatory overload, global size and scope challenges, technological advances, supplier diversification, and the professional expectations of a new generation of lawyers entering the profession are coming together to confront the in-house legal function with decisions it can no longer postpone or avoid.

How General Counsel and their leadership teams respond to these transformative challenges over the next decade will determine the future of the in-house legal department. To leverage some of the broader transformation investments of other functions, specialized legal technology providers will increasingly build legal applications on business application platforms from Microsoft, SAP, Salesforce and ServiceNow. These will appeal to large companies that want to leverage existing investments and ensure easier integration. Despite the hype surrounding the field, automation is not a leap of faith. Even in 2019, the average legal department reported that 33% of their corporate transaction work was automated.