Aligning legal tech with business needs

In early October we held our annual conference of Heads of Legal and GCs with the theme "Embedding the in-house legal team at the heart of the business" which included expert panels sharing their views.

Our next panel session discussed aligning your legal team with your business's core. Join Rowan Turrall, alongside Maria Passemard from Johnson Matthey and Jamie Fraser, Group General Counsel at Gordon Murray Group, as they teach you how to identify genuine business needs before diving into the world of legal tech.

Conducting a thorough technology audit can save you from unnecessary expenditures and ensure that your tech investments address challenges impacting the entire organization. 

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Transcript

Rowan Turrall 0:04

Hello , I'm Rowan Turrll , artner and Head of Dispute Resolution at Boyes Turner . In early October , we held an event at the Caledonian Club in London called Embedding the In-House Legal Team at the Heart of the Business . We heard from speakers on a number of topics , with one of the panels being all about affordable and innovative legal tech , the focus on how to decide on what you really need and how to sell the benefits to the business . I chaired the discussion and I'm joined by two of those who took part . They are aria pasmard from johnson matthew and jamie fraser , group general counsel and director of legal at gordon murray group , and I think one of the key takeaways from that is don't jump pete first in and take time to think what it is that you actually need .

Jamie Fraser 0:46

Without a doubt . I think you really have to understand what's the problem we're trying to fix here , and it's not just a legal team problem . It's a kind of wider business problem . You know the legal team has issues that it needs to resolve , but if you're looking for investment in terms of money and time from other teams , then you're always going to be more successful . If you're trying to fix something that kind of that bothers everyone .

Rowan Turrall 1:12

During our discussion , Jamie , you sort of talked about common sense and refers to it as a technology audit .

Jamie Fraser 1:19

Technology audit is just a kind of fancy way of saying what have we currently got . So enterprise IT in any business has typically got a huge range of tools , and so by speaking to your friends in the finance department , for example , you might find that really you don't need a legal specific e-billing software , because actually that's what the finance team do , right ? They send out invoices and get stuff paid . And so by both doing that audit in terms of what technology , what software we already have , but also what skill set do we have so that's in procurement or in finance then you can really understand your own landscape before you start buying in or spending any time on anything else .

Maria Passemard 2:05

Yeah , I think it's really important as well to make sure that you've got the basics right . So some of the things I tend to think about are can you pay your bills on time ? Do you know how much money you spend with your various suppliers ? And legal , can you find your contracts ? Do you know when they're due to expire ? Do you know what work your team are doing and are they working on the right sort of stuff ? So , understanding some of those basic principles and understanding whether they have issues or problems that you need to solve , that might help direct you to what sort of technology solution you need to help solve those problems .

Rowan Turrall 2:37

You spoke earlier about sort of the issues you had when you first joined your current company in terms of the software that they already had in place and how the rollout hadn't gone particularly well . Can you tell us a bit more about that and how you were able to turn things around ?

Maria Passemard 2:52

Yes , absolutely . I think it was probably a lesson in how not to implement a technology solution . So the solution that they had implemented covered a wide variety of different solutions in one in one tool . It was e billing , um matter management , uh , document management , contract life cycle management , legal holds lots of different solutions in one . So it was a big bang um solution .

Maria Passemard 3:17

It had been implemented during covid when everybody was stressed out to their eyeballs dealing with all of that and what that entailed . It was implemented with very little training and people were so busy they weren't in the office , they couldn't floor walk , they couldn't do any of the things that you would normally do . So the change management piece around that was really poor . So we had a team that didn't like the tool , weren't using the tool . So I had to have a fairly difficult conversation with the software supplier to say , look , nobody likes it or nobody's using it and if we don't sort it out we're probably going to ditch you .

Maria Passemard 3:50

So they sent the SWAT team over from the US to help us understand what the problems were and actually a lot of it resolved around simplifying what we were trying to achieve with that technology tool . So making it simpler , making it easier , making the interface more apple than some other tools out there . So the team were , you know , actually wanting to use it . So that took quite a bit of time to configure and to get right , but we've now got a tool that is much more user-friendly and the team are using more importantly . So you know you get rubbish in , you get rubbish out . So we needed to to fix that , or else it wasn't worth having the tool at all .

Rowan Turrall 4:28

Can you tell me a bit about some of the positive impacts that implementing technology within the business can have for the legal team ?

Maria Passemard 4:35

Yes , absolutely . Our team have been under huge cost pressures . Most legal operations people tell you that they have a very difficult conversation every year with the CFO where the CFO wants you to reduce the cost of the legal team etc work . But that's difficult to do if they're bogged down with a lot of the other low value , low risk work . So , to give you an example , our team were dealing with over 3 000 NDAs a year and that was taking up a lot of their time and what we've been able to do with the current solution that we've got in place is create a short form , self-serve NDA so the business can go on to the legal support request form , answer six questions and then they get sent an NDA automatically via email .

Maria Passemard 5:24

So the business loves this . They think it's great . They're getting an answer much more quickly than they would have done had they waited for a lawyer to pick it up in their inbox . The lawyers like it because it means they're not having to deal with thousands of NDAs and they're able to focus on the high-value strategic work , which is better for them and their growth and development . So that's been a really good success story and we're trying to build on that and think about what could be our next NDA . What else could we get the business to self-serve with and develop further solutions for , together with FAQs and just being finding ways to get the low value , low risk work off our lawyers desks ?

Rowan Turrall 5:59

One of the things that came out of the discussion was the importance of change management .

Jamie Fraser 6:03

It's so important , and I think change management is something that lawyers really aren't trained in but can learn right . Really , it's about marketing , and it's about marketing both within the legal team explaining , training what the new system might be , but also explaining and training the wider business as well what it is that we're trying to do , and I think telling that story is really important and we get to these kind of skills that I think are quite far away from technology , and they are things like storytelling and empathy and empathy being what is this business person trying to achieve today , when they email or come through the legal front door , what is it they want ? They don't want 12 pages of interesting history about the battle of the forms and contracts . What they want is a solution . They just want to hear yes , ideally , but if not , then they want to know why , and so I think being able to put ourselves in their shoes and be able to provide an answer in the format they want it is really important and that's kind of change management . It's also partly legal design as well .

Rowan Turrall 7:09

So all that remains for me to do is to say thank you for our panellists . Thank you to Jamie thank you and thank you to Maria . Thank you for a great discussion . Thanks for listening . If you're interested in checking out more episodes from the Boyes Turner team , then please do go to our website . You can also follow or subscribe , wherever you listen to your podcasts . Goodbye .