Many businesses have a diversity and inclusion (D&I) policy, but at Nokia, we prefer to think of inclusion & diversity. Inclusion is the foundation upon which diversity flourishes in an organisation. An environment where people feel they can be themselves and contribute to the best of their abilities is the surest way to attract more diverse candidates.
As Chief Legal Officer, I believe inclusion is fundamental. The first step is to ensure people feel part of the team, to make them feel that they are valued, that they can contribute, that they can feel safe being who they are, and that they can bring the best of themselves to Nokia. If you don’t have that foundational belief in inclusion then diversity is just a statistic, and statistics without impact are meaningless.. Creating a safe space where our people in every part of the organisation feel that they have a real chance to progress and be included is essential in encouraging diversity.
When I first took on the role of Chief Legal Officer, I’m sure everyone expected that I would appoint someone from my leadership team into one of the key roles in my organisation. Much to everybody’s surprise, I hired a person from elsewhere in the organisation. She joined my leadership team and created such a positive reaction in the team that when there next were open positions, the number of applications multiplied, and I had people from every part of the organisation apply. That sort of open environment encourages people to step up, apply for jobs and become more visible in the organisation by taking leadership roles.
Legal teams can be hugely influential in setting the inclusion and diversity agenda. The role we play in our companies, our influence, our ability to drive decisions, and the fact that we are involved in many discussions and embedded in the business in a significant way means we are uniquely positioned to influence the wider culture.
Coming Out for I&D
Corporate diversity initiatives are a journey that typically starts with tackling a particular issue, for example, improving gender diversity, before gradually broadening out to look at ethnic and racial minorities, people with disabilities, age gap issues, and other forms of diversity. I happen to be interested in all aspects of diversity, but being gay = I was keen on advancing I&D at Nokia to include our LGBT+ communities. One example of this work has been helping the Nokia LGBT+ employee resource group to launch the OUT Leaders programme. By stepping up as an ‘out’ leader and making myself visible within the organisation, I am helping to draw attention to the fact that you can be your authentic self and be included at Nokia. Shortly after we launched the initiative, I was appointed as Chief Legal Officer, which I see as a very positive message for both our leadership and the company.
However, I wanted the programme to become more than just one leader stepping out and speaking up. In the second phase of the programme, which we launched last November, we look at bringing something positive and giving opportunities to our leaders at Nokia by focusing on development, providing mentorship and networking opportunities, and creating the opportunity to design, develop and implement a project that will be sponsored by one of Nokia’s global leaders. Members of Nokia’s LGBT+ communities will join with external and internal people from our customer network, suppliers, the recruitment community, and some of our own senior figures to speak about what it means to be an ‘out’ leader and to develop your career. Hopefully, this will help the participants build their leadership skills and provide them with a mentorship opportunity from a senior leader in the organisation who will support them to develop and grow. It will also give them an opportunity to be visible in the organisation by profiling them in our internal communications, giving them an opportunity to develop and implement this project further.
Nassib Abou-Khalil | Nokia
As the project matures, it is moving from an aspirational idea to something that truly gives people in the LGBT+ community the tools and platform to succeed, to learn how to be a role model and to inspire others within Nokia. We want to cement the atmosphere that Nokia is an employer of choice for the LGBT+ community, that this community is encouraged to thrive within Nokia, and that Nokia takes the development of the LGBT+ community seriously.
I feel a responsibility toward the LGBT+ community. I have been fortunate enough to be successful in my career, but I also have lived some of the challenges that many LGBT+ people face, such as coming out in the workplace, to your family, to your friends. Granted, times have changed, and things have developed, but they haven’t changed that much. The struggles are still there. Things have improved, but we cannot speak of absolute equality. And when we look at the global workplace, I am even less sure that we have reason to be complacent. I felt a sense of duty and a sense of responsibility to be active in the LGBT+ space. That said, our LGBT+ initiatives are important for everyone. I want everybody in my team to feel that they can be their authentic self and contribute to their fullest capacity when they are contributing to the success of Nokia.
Going global
Businesses in Europe, and especially in the US, tend to have more I&D infrastructure. There are certainly more organisations – the likes of Diversity Lab and the Minority Corporate Counsel Association – to help advance the conversation. Typically, the major initiatives have been entirely focused on US companies, or the US offices of multinationals. The next step is to make sure we have truly global initiatives that acknowledge the different conversations happening at a local level. As a result, we are looking to work with Diversity Lab and pilot the Mansfield Rules 2.0 that can be measured based on our global operations. This will help us develop the playbook for this certification that applies to global businesses.
A year ago, we were the first multinational with a global presence to join the Minority Corporate Counsel Association. We are working to take some of our initiatives and export them outside the US, bringing them alive in a much more global scene. As with many of our initiatives, the objective is to partner with thought leaders, take established policies and frameworks, and see how we can work together to extend their reach.
Of course, this also applies to how we work with law firms. Given that we look at I&D from an inside-out perspective, I will be re-evaluating how we work with outside counsel and our panel firms. In my role as Chief Legal Officer, the immediate step for me is to develop measurable criteria that we expect our outside counsel to implement when they are working with us, and these will be around inclusion and diversity. We are thinking very hard about what exactly we will ask our law firms to do, and how we can measure it. Our aspiration is not just to talk about things, but to do things.
I am deeply grateful to both the MCCA and Diversity Lab for their support and partnership with Nokia and to the entire Nokia Legal and Compliance team for believing in and being committed to our I&D initiatives.
The business case for diversity has never been stronger, but we still need more progress on a global scale. Creating a workplace that’s committed to diversity, inclusion, equity and belonging is a journey that takes constant commitment, ongoing investment, and intentional action from everyone across an organization. Companies must focus not just on attracting a diverse slate of candidates, but also on retaining them and advancing them into executive, management, technical, and board roles. Consistent demonstration of this commitment at the highest levels is necessary to set the tone and expectation throughout the rest of the organization.
For example, at PayPal, we’ve focused on building a diverse Board of Directors with years of experience and who provide a range of leadership perspectives. Our Board of Directors is currently 45% women and underrepresented ethnic groups. Our Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) also play an important role in ensuring we listen to the voices of all employees. We need to understand diverse experiences and ensure PayPal employees always feel supported, protected and included. By partnering with ERGs, we are better positioned to advocate for employees who are women, Black, Latinx and Hispanic, veterans, LGBTQ, specially-abled or disadvantaged. This diversity also strengthens our ability to innovate and to understand and better serve our customers.
Our work will never be complete – sustained advancements in diversity and inclusion require a consistent and holistic approach. It’s critical to our culture and to how we do business, and we’re committed to continuing to doing even more going forward.
Taking a stand
At PayPal’s core, we are a mission-driven, values-led organization. When something runs counter to our values, we must stand up, speak out and, importantly, take action. This naturally requires a strong partnership between the business and the Legal team. Given the recent proliferation of societal issues, and the rapid acceleration of innovation and technology, legal functions must be in lock-step with their partners – both across the business and in the public sector – to provide strategic counsel and identify risks. The success of this model can be seen in the many actions PayPal has taken over the past several years – from ensuring we pay equally across gender and ethnicity, to withdrawing from North Carolina in response to the passage of discriminatory laws against the LGBTQ community, to opposing discriminatory laws targeting immigrant communities, to taking stands on removing white supremacists and other hate groups from our platform.
Louise Pentland | PayPal
Recently, I’ve worked in close collaboration with PayPal’s leadership team to acknowledge and confront the systemic racism endured by our Black colleagues and customers for far too long. In response, PayPal announced a $530m commitment to support Black- and minority-owned businesses and communities through a multi-pronged initiative designed to help address the immediate crisis and set the foundation for sustained engagement and progress towards economic equality and social justice. As part of the program, PayPal committed $15m towards strengthening the company’s internal HR and D&I programs. Of this, $10m will be invested in university and high school recruiting, pro-bono engagements, public advocacy initiatives, and matching employee giving and volunteer hours. The remaining $5m will be pooled to be shared among PayPal’s Employee Resources Groups to help drive internal programming and community engagement aligned to the company’s mission to democratize financial services.
Building networks
Lack of diversity in leadership roles remains a challenge for the legal profession. Systemic racism is a topic on everyone’s mind right now and it’s more important than ever for us to do all we can to promote diversity and inclusion in the legal field. The benefits are clear – as companies diversify their workforces, they are able to serve more diverse customers. Diversity of thought and experiences allow us to uncover new ideas, challenge legacy processes and better solve customer pain points.
I’ve long been an advocate for mentorship and at PayPal, we’re constantly seeking innovative solutions to create better support systems and encourage greater connection. In developing the Women Luminaries Program in Singapore, for example, we set about to help address the gender diversity gap in technology. Through the program, we partnered with local universities to provide tuition scholarships, mentoring, internships, technical workshops and courses, and networking.
I came into this profession with no network myself, and without the privilege of personal or professional connections. In fact, I was the first in my family to go to college so my advancement as a lawyer has been a distinct combination of hard work, and mentors and sponsorsThe lack of diversity can, unfortunately, still be attributed to the fact that many people don’t have a network. I believe every lawyer with influence should be compelled to use their network to support under-represented lawyers, whether that’s introducing new law students to law firm partners, or advocating for diverse pipelines in law firms, or by simply serving as a mentor.
I believe it is important to not only ensure my own team is diverse, but that outside firms with which we work also have diverse representation. I am proud that the PayPal legal team has committed to the Mansfield Rule and for the 2019-2020 inaugural pilot, was one of only 13 legal departments to have earned the Mansfield Plus Certification. The primary goal of the Mansfield Rule is to increase the representation of historically underrepresented lawyers in legal department leadership by broadening the pool of women, racial/ethnic minorities, LGBTQ+ lawyers and lawyers with disabilities who are considered for leadership roles, open positions for lawyers, high-visibility work opportunities, and outside counsel hiring. This commitment went beyond our established annual diversity survey and extends it to each new matter. We have also created an internal Legal Diversity Council that meets regularly to discuss opportunities and initiatives, and to track our progress. We hope that PayPal’s commitment to important initiatives such as this encourages others to take similar action.
U.S. Bank is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where the horrific killing of George Floyd occurred in June. Immediately thereafter, conversation began within the bank and the law division about how we were feeling and what we needed to do. The tone was set at the top by our CEO, who highlighted the need for us to lead differently and better to address inequality. Subsequently, the Bank announced multiple investments (over $100m) and initiatives to bridge gaps and address inequities. Within the law division, we’ve launched a new program reflecting our commitment to racial justice and to standing against racism and working together with purpose to learn, grow, build community, and foster change within the legal team, the broader legal profession, and our communities. I feel a special responsibility in this as a corporate leader, a lawyer representing the legal system, and as a citizen of Minneapolis.
In-house legal departments have big role to play in positively influencing diversity with outside counsel. Given our purchasing power, we’re able to drive change and I feel an obligation to do this with our law firms, which we consider an extension of our own in-house function. We do this in several ways, including participating in external initiatives, and through our internal Spotlight on Talent program. We also request and measure diversity data from our law firms to help drive hiring decisions, and last year presented our first U.S. Bank “Invested in Diversity” award to one law firm, in recognition of its efforts and success with diversity.
Moving the needle on diversity and inclusion
One of the initiatives we have been closely involved with is Move the Needle (MTN), [a collaborative effort designed and funded with $4m to test innovative initiatives to create a more diverse and inclusive legal profession, facilitated by Diversity Lab]. I am proud to serve as a founding MTN general counsel and on the MTN Fund’s board of advisors. The MTN concept is to test innovative diversity initiatives to create transformational change that has been lacking in the profession. Diversity Lab brought together five leading law firms, over 25 general counsel, and top community leaders to work together to develop new approaches to be tested over five years and hopefully serve as models for lasting change.
Importantly, the law firms have invested $1m each in the initiative, and have set aggressive, measurable and public goals in areas like recruitment, retention, work assignment, access to clients, and advancement to firm leadership. Corporate departments support these firms along the way, backed by our significant collective legal spend. It’s no small thing for big law firms to commit (expose, really) themselves in this way, financially and with public accountability, and I commend them for their courage and bold thinking. I’m excited about the prospects for MTN and hoping we can, actually, “move the needle” more so than in the past.
While we have a robust Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I program) at U.S. Bank, we’re not where we want to be yet and need to keep working hard at it. The program has several elements and we continually adjust it, keeping what works and discarding what doesn’t. In terms of recent priorities, several originated with Diversity Lab. For example, last year U.S. Bank was proud to be among the first companies to join the Mansfield Rule pilot for in-house legal departments which requires consideration of underrepresented groups for hiring and leadership roles and also outside counsel representation. We just certified complete for the first year and have started the 2.0 version of the commitment. We’ve also requested that members of our preferred outside counsel program, representing 40 or so of our deepest law firm relationships, agree to participate in the law firm version of Mansfield. They also must have at least one diverse client team leader on our U.S. Bank account. And I’m gratified to say that several firms adopted Mansfield in response to our specific request.
Talent spotting
I believe strongly in formal talent planning and mentorship or sponsorship as part of furthering diversity, and they’ve worked well for us. At U.S. Bank, the law division participates in disciplined talent planning processes and also mentorship and sponsorship programs for professional growth and development over time. The programs, some focused specifically on diverse employees, are not only good learning opportunities but they also drive retention and engagement.
We’re also involved with several talent pipeline efforts, such as law school internship, externship and fellowship programs and our own Pathways Summer Associate Program, a partnership with several preferred law firms to host diverse summer associates. And we partner with outside counsel on the development of diverse, early-career lawyers. For example, through our “Spotlight on Talent” program we invite preferred law firms to apply for the opportunity to showcase their diverse talent by conducting an in-person educational session for our entire department followed by meetings with our senior leadership and practice groups. Afterwards, we work to create lasting relationships with the Spotlight “alumni” with the goals of career advancement and engaging Spotlight associates on Bank matters.
Mentoring will certainly remain important as we re-adjust to a post-COVID world. We’ll need to lean on each other and learn and grow anew as we navigate the future. Some are concerned that economic difficulties caused by the pandemic will disproportionately impact women and people of colour within the legal profession. However, I believe that most law firms and corporate departments fully appreciate the criticality of diverse and inclusive workplaces and have been finding creative ways to keep mentorship and other diversity efforts active during the pandemic and in a largely virtual environment. We recognize that the new challenges brought on by this environment demand innovation and creativity, which diversity can help unlock. But we do need to remain vigilant and make sure we don’t lose any of the progress we’ve made with diversity over time.
My journey into football really started with watching Hannah Storm host the NBA playoffs. Growing up in Oakland I’d always been a huge sports fan, so seeing a woman lead coverage of a huge sporting event captivated me. At University of California, Los Angeles I became the first woman ever to cover football for [UCLA newspaper] the Daily Bruin. Covering football led me into internships at the Oakland Raiders and the NFL Players Association, and from there into media relations.
When I later went to law school, I knew wanted to keep my focus on sports, and in my early years as a lawyer [at Latham & Watkins’ San Francisco and New York offices] I worked primarily on player contracts and collective bargaining in the NFL. I was recruited to the San Francisco 49ers in 2011, right as the lockout was ending, and we were entering what was the last collective bargaining agreement. That was really a thrill for me, because I was from the Bay Area and it was a wonderful opportunity to go into a newly-created role where I would build out a day to day legal affairs practice there.
A universal language
One of the great things about sport is that it offers a microcosm of society. Football appeals to all ages, races and sexual orientations. The NFL fan base is more or less split 50:50 between men and women, offering a true reflection of the country. As a team we have season ticket holders from almost every state in the United States, and fans from all over the world. When it comes to D&I, that gives us a great power to help influence things and show how sport can be a positive catalyst for social change.
In my role as chief administrative officer, I have been at the forefront of the Niners’ community philanthropy, public affairs, and fan engagement work. A lot of these initiatives are really a celebration of the diversity of our fan base. For example, we have Women of the Niners (WON), a fan engagement platform and official fan club for women, which reaches several thousand female fans every year through its digital magazine. We also hold events like our virtual happy hour where our female fans can hear from beat writers who cover the team and discuss the upcoming season, as well as hear from our marketing department on some of the new initiatives that are coming out. We had rap artist Saweetie, who is a 49ers fan, join one of these chats. Her grandfather, Willie Harper, was a linebacker for the 49ers in the 70s and 80s so it was really cool to link that history.
We also have 49ers Pride, our fan engagement platform for the LGBTQ+ community and allies. A big part of that is making sure all of our LGBTQ+ fans know that they have a safe space here at the 49ers and that we welcome them as an important part of our fan base, while also encouraging all of our fans who are allies to speak up and show that we are one community. We participate in the San Francisco Pride Parade, hold watch parties in The Castro, and generally bring two very important parts of San Francisco’s cultural life – its football team and its vibrant LGBTQ+ population – together.
Beyond this fan engagement work we have looked to make a positive change to our communities through direct contributions such as social justice grants, looking at commercial relationships to make sure that our business is selecting vendors in a way that reflects racial equity, and even direct interventions through policy work. We endorsed Proposition 16 in California at the 2020 election, which would have removed the ban on affirmative action involving race-based or sex-based preferences from the California Constitution.
At the Niners we also have a diversity of interviewing policy, which means that we interview at least one person of colour and at least one woman for every single business opening. We also recognise that there has to be diversity on both sides of the interview table. If we want to attract diverse candidates, the panel of people who are making the selection needs to be diverse as well.
Mentor’s Playbook
One of the great initiatives at the Niners is the Denise DeBartolo York Fellowship, which provides opportunities for women in professional sports. Fellows are given exposure to many business divisions within the 49ers, and particularly to those where women have historically been underrepresented in sports. As an executive mentor to the programme, I have been privileged to work closely with many talented young women. Mentorship is something we all benefit from in our personal lives, whether it is offered by a supportive parent or a community leader. We also need that same support in our professional lives. Mentoring doesn’t have to be an ongoing, formal relationship between teacher and student. Some of the most useful mentoring I received came in one off conversations with people who were prepared to take the time to help me. That, for me, is the mindset of a good coach. You need to make sure you are always potentially available as a resource to others.
I began developing these views in my book, SZN of CHANGE: The Competitor’s Playbook for Joy on the Path to Victory. The book is my attempt to give people some of the tools that have worked for me, and to offer those who do not have a mentor they can call up and speak to a framework for how to think about their careers. It is best thought of a guided journal, with a structured plan for reflecting critically on what we’re doing and why. It moves from studying your own motivations and personality traits, to outlining a vision of where you want to go, right through to drawing up a game plan of how to execute this vision and make it a reality. It also covers what I call “reading your clips”, which is all about how you take in outside information and understanding the difference between constructive criticism and noise that you need to tune out, and tips for “in-game adjustments” when things get tough. Finally, I look at recovery – just like athletes, all of us need recovery and self-care – and practice. How do we continue to use these tools going forward? These tools are a part of a long-term plan, and keeping a journal is something that can help people make sure the dedication to self-improvement sticks.
Obviously, the book is heavily influenced by my time in sports, and there is a simple reason for that. A lot of the tricks that help an athlete to overcome challenges and push on to success are equally relevant to business. For diverse candidates who feel the odds are stacked against them, I hope it fires them up to fight even harder.
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.
Sheldon Renkema, general legal manager, Wesfarmers
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.
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.’
Networking, as any diligent MBA-holder will tell you, is essential for an eye on corporate leadership. But finding the time to network is often the last thing on a busy lawyer’s mind.
How things change.
Several months into lockdown, finding effective ways to network has become the only escape route from sliding into set ways of doing things. ‘Remote work is the future of work’, says Amar Sundram, head of legal for RBS India. ‘That means we need to come up with new ways of forming and building relationship and keeping on top of changes in the way other organisations are doing things.’
Nowhere is this truer than the world of legal technology. For many GCs, keeping up with the pace of new technology was challenge enough. The pandemic has only made that job more difficult. As a result, a growing number of GCs are seeking out new forms of community building, networking and peer learning to help them cope. Suddenly, professional learning networks (PLNs) have become all the rage.
Across Asia Pacific, a raft of dedicated tech networks aimed at training and educating GCs has sprung up, from the Australian legal Technology Association (ALTA) to the Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) in Singapore. These organisations do many things, but all of them aim at a common goal. As Josh Lee Kok Thong, chair of the Asia-Pacific Legal Innovation and Technology Association (ALITA), puts it, they ‘encourage lawyers to take learning into their own hands, to be more interested in the technology and other disruptive forces that can affect their work’.
As peer networks become an increasingly important way for GCs across Asia Pacific to engage with legal tech, we canvas some of the leading institutions, and their members, on what it means for lawyers’ engagement with technology.
Master PLN
Among the largest informal member networks is the aforementioned ALITA, a regional coordination platform that seeks to promote legal innovation and technology initiatives. The organisation launched in 2019 with a bold mission statement to make Asia a hub for legal innovation. It is, says ALITA’s Singapore-based chair Josh Lee Kok Thong, the first truly Asia Pacific wide legal tech forum.
‘This was a great chance to bring together a vibrant ecosystem and show the significant advances in the development of legal innovation and technology in all countries across Asia Pacific.’
‘While each country has its own legal tech networks, we felt the cross-border interaction was missing. We wanted to give a voice to the region, to promote collaboration opportunities across the region. The results so far have shown just how much progress can be made when GCs and thought leaders from different countries work together to share experiences, context and opportunities.’
ALITA has grown rapidly to around 150 member organisations in 20 countries. The membership includes some of the world’s largest law firms and technology companies, as well as universities, think tanks, legal tech companies, and governmental or quasi-governmental organisations. It is also fast becoming a leading platform for the region’s general counsel.
Narae Lee, lawyer, Bliss Law Office
Narae Lee is a Seoul-based lawyer at Bliss Law Office and an organiser at Seoul Legal Hackers, a separate discussion forum for issues arising at the intersection of law and technology. She recently joined ALITA’s steering committee and says the regional focus will be invaluable to the GC community.
‘Legal Hackers is an international organisation, so I already had the benefit of that cross-border perspective. However, when it comes to the use of legal technology there are nuances of context that matter. As counsel in Korea I will have a very different set of pressures, expectations and possibilities to someone based in Europe or the US.’
‘Generally, it’s useful to have a forum that looks at what other people facing these same issues are doing. The best way to learn about legal technology is to speak with others who are using it and know what it can and can’t do.’
Though still relatively young as an organisation, ALITA is already expanding its activities to create what Josh Lee Kok Thong describes as ‘probably the world’s first legal tech observatory.’
‘Just as an observatory contains a set of tools that help stargazers absorb data and information, draw patterns, and observe movement, we are creating a set of tools to help the legal community scan the Asia Pacific region. Above all, we want to make it a live observatory that feeds people with information on the initiatives that are taking place across Asia, so that actionable insights can be drawn.’
State of the future: Singapore’s bid to become a legal tech hub
The Government of Singapore has set its sights on a new and unexpected industrial development plan: developing the island state into a legal technology powerhouse. GCs speaks to the people looking to make these plans a reality.
Since gaining independence in 1965, Singapore has pioneered an economic model like no other. By combining a free market and open-economy with strong government involvement, the island state has grown at a breakneck speed to become, on a per-capita basis, one of the wealthiest countries in the world.
The lessons of this economic model, poured over by policy makers and business analysts ever since, break down to three things: decide what you want to be a world leader in, back the industry so it has all the conditions needed to thrive, and stay the course.
Singapore’s legal market has been following this rule book for at least two decades. First, in the early 2000s, foreign lawyers were permitted to set up Joint Law Ventures (JVLs) with local firms, a move then Attorney General Chan Sek Keong said would make it a ‘one-stop shop’ for cross border transactions. Since then, the government has been a staunch supporter of its legal industry, developing a world-class arbitration infrastructure and a judiciary that is unparalleled in the region.
When Singapore launched Asia’s first legal technology start-up accelerator in 2019, it was legal tech’s time to take the limelight. Backed by generous research grants, ambitious accelerator programs and direct financial support, Singapore’s legal tech providers had become the latest champions of future prosperity.
If you build it, they will come
When it comes to legal technology, GCs often face a dilemma. While many know what they would like technology to do, they often find themselves disappointed by the marketplace. In short, there is a huge gap between the legal technology that is available and effective now, and technologies with the potential to be truly disruptive.
It was precisely this dilemma that led Singapore to establish The Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP). Now under the aegis of the Singapore Academy of law, FLIP first emerged out of discussions at the Committee on the Future Economy (CFE), a governmental body founded in 2016 to help Singapore’s economy adapt to the market conditions likely to prevail over the coming years.
Paul Neo, Singapore Academy of Law’s chief operating officer, says the initiative helped draw attention to the economic potential of legal tech.
‘A lot of people knew there were all these bottlenecks in the legal market caused by poor adoption or adaption of technology, but the hard evidence was missing. We needed to take the lay of the land and understand the market through surveys and discussions, which we distilled into our “101 Industry Problem Statements”. That had a number of positive effects in terms of understanding the market, but it also allowed us to show potential investors the huge demand out there, emphasising the rewards available should these problems be solved.
‘A lot of technologists focus on fintech rather than legal tech, so this initiative helped to display to them the opportunities available in legal tech innovation. While there were already a lot of tech accelerators in Singapore, none of them were focused on legal tech, which has its own unique issues. To build one, we had to partner with existing accelerators who knew how to scale companies and had general business know-how, to which we added in our legal expertise.’
That led Neo to found the Global Legal Innovation Digital Entrepreneurship Program (GLIDE). In its early days, the initiative was aimed at Singapore’s investors, but the ambitious attempt to turn legal tech into an investment class has caught the attention of investors far beyond the island state’s borders.
‘Whenever I visit London, law firms and legal community builders want to know about the marketing work being done by the FLIP program’, says Chan Zi Quan, co-founder and CEO of Intelllex, a Singapore-based law tech startup offering an intelligent knowledge management system that allows lawyers to search for, store and share knowledge. Quan, who sat on the minister’s committee during the early days of FLIP. ‘They can see the beneficial effects it is having and are interested in replicating its success.’
Quan, who sat on the minister’s committee during the early days of FLIP, says that while the idea of legal tech providers receiving state funding may seem unusual, it was exactly what the market needed to take off.
‘The legal industry is rather fragmented when compared to other sectors. For example, in shipping or manufacturing there is much more consolidation and it is not at all unusual to see the government step in and offer support. But for a tech provider that caters to all sort of businesses, from SMEs right up to blue-chip global companies, it is much more difficult to make a case for that level of support.’
‘This sort of government support has really boosted our legitimacy. The due diligence they conduct on suppliers has really helped grow community trust.’
While Intelllex itself was deemed too mature to benefit from FLIP or GLIDE – it was, says Quan, ‘founded before there was even a term like “legal tech” to describe what we were doing’ – it was recently approved as a preferred supplier by Tech-celerate For Law, a support scheme for the adoption of technology solutions launched by the Law Society of Singapore, in partnership with Ministry of Law, Enterprise Singapore and Info-Communications Media Development (IMDA). The programme aims to help Singapore-based legal entities compete in the global marketplace, underlining the government’s commitment to its vision of a tech-enabled legal marketplace.
Under the Tech-celerate programme, Singapore-based legal practices are awarded 80% of the costs for any new technology implemented for the first year of use, allowing vendors much-needed time to establish proof of concept and refine their offering.
The infrastructure put in place by the government of Singapore has also attracted tech talent from other markets. Workflow automation software provider Checkbox was founded in Australia in 2016. It has since grown at an impressive rate, tripling its user base over the past year. But, says co-founder and CEO Evan Wong, its experiences in Singapore were transformational.
‘We were part of a competition at TechLaw.Fest that involved a number of rounds of pitching at the conference after a rigorous vetting process. After winning this, it really helped to lift the profile of the company and allowed us to move into the GLIDE program. From there, things started to really take off for Checkbox in Singapore.’
The road ahead
Even more ambitious plans are underway to make sure Singapore is at the forefront of legal tech. The government has made a bold statement through its S$15 million National Research Foundation grant to the Singapore Management University (SMU). This will see the creation of a new Computational Law Centre and research program at SMU, fulfilling SMU Principal Investigator Wong Meng Weng’s strategic vision for the development of legal technology at the University.
Jerrold Soh, assistant professor of law, SMU
The Computational Law Center ambitious flagship project will attempt to build a domain-specific language for law, something Jerrold Soh, assistant professor of law at SMU, says has far-reaching implications for the legal industry.
‘The analogy I would use is that we are doing something similar to what Adobe did with PDFs. Computational law is essentially expressing legal rules as computable units that can be calculated through logical operations. Our project starts with a basic tool, the domain-specific language, and builds legal tools on top of this. For example, someone writing a contract would be able to define the terms and mechanisms in a code-like language so it can be understood by the system. You could then run a check to see if it contains logical errors or has terms not defined’.
‘More importantly, you could also port this code-like language over to various natural languages. Once you have it in a condensed, pure logical form it’s easily translatable between different languages at once. Mandarin to English is doable, for instance, which will have many applications’.
These developments in computational law would not only improve the efficiency of legal tech, but could represent a sea-change in the capabilities of human-machine interfaces more broadly. But, as with most ambitious projects, it remains a moonshot. ‘It sounds like we’ve got it all figured out, but we haven’t’ says Soh. ‘It’s a big research project that will take a lot of time and effort to accomplish’.
With the Government of Singapore now backing legal tech, finding the resources to accomplish these ambitions should not be a problem.
These ground-up attempts to share information sit alongside more formal initiatives to develop awareness of legal tech organised by the region’s academic institutions. Perhaps the most advanced of these is The Future Law Innovation Programme (FLIP) run by the Singapore Management University and the Singapore Academy of Law. FLIP has issued a series of roadmaps on the future of legal innovation in the Asia Pacific region, which were highly praised by the GCs we spoke to for this report.
Australian institutions have also been notable for their activities to promote legal tech. The country’s largest postgraduate legal practice education provider, the College of Law, runs the Centre for Legal Innovation (CLI), a legal innovation and tech think tank focusing on emerging legal practice, future legal tech, innovation and entrepreneurship in the legal industry.
The focus throughout these activities, says CLI executive director Terri Mottershead, is on practical actions, and while CLI is actively monitoring market trends, it is ‘more interested in understanding how to those trends can be translated into solutions.’ For example, CLI offers a programme called Reinvent Legal Business, which looks at the various changes that have been taking place in the industry, covering everything from in-house initiatives to the work being done by law firms and alternative legal service providers.’ One of the biggest shifts across the profession, says Mottershead, has been the growing interest in technology among lawyers.
‘We have seen a real shift in the uptake of technology, particularly in the wake of COVID-19. As part of our Digital Literacy series we are looking at how we can provide support for lawyers to use technology effectively and help them understand how it can be incorporated into their practice.’
Sheldon Renkema, general legal manager, Wesfarmers
CLI, which has branched out from Australia to establish bases in New Zealand and Singapore and, more recently, the UK, does not operate like a traditional network. It offers the bulk of its courses and services for free ‘to help promote the sharing of information’. Recently, it has been devoting more time to vendor-led demonstrations of the newest legal tech from around the world.
‘It’s not intended as a sales pitch’, says Mottershead. ‘It is an opportunity for tech developers to explain the gap they sought to bridge and how they did it, while also giving them a chance to listed to the needs and feedback of end users.’
‘In fact, we have noticed that many lawyers are receptive to seeing how the technology works. The demos have been popular, and we have been holding more and more of them to help meet demand. That suggests to me that lawyers have a big appetite to understand the systems and tools that are available to them.’
Sheldon Renkema, general manager for legal at industrials conglomerate Wesfarmers and the Australia regional co-lead for the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), has a similar take on the value of per-to-peer learning in a fragmented legal tech market.
‘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 so it’s 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 specific context’.
Haebin Lee, research manager of the crypto finance division, Block Crafters
‘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 very helpful’.
Across Asia Pacific, universities and academic institutions are rolling out a variety of courses that bring aspects of IT and computational thinking skills to a legal audience, alongside a much wider number of courses that teach lawyers about the business impacts of tech and innovation. Some, such as the Singapore Management University, have gone further and now offer combined law and technology degrees.
Haebin Lee, research manager of the crypto finance division at Korea-based Block Crafters, agrees, and gives weight to the idea that membership organisations are the best way for GCs to move the industry forward:
‘There should be more a lot more discussion on how we should shape legal tech, and which direction we should take with new technology. That’s what we’ve been striving to do through Seoul Legal Hackers and ALITA: open up a room for free discussion.’
Path of least resistance
Free discussion and knowledge sharing are changing the way GCs learn about and interact with legal tech, but at a certain point this enthusiasm for change hits hard problems. As Nilanjan Sinha, head legal for Indian multinational banking and financial services company ICICI Bank, observes:
‘Legal tech, perhaps because of the mindset of lawyers, is not as disruptive a space as it could be. The problems have been identified, and various solutions have been proposed by service providers. The hope is that as people become more used to using tech and working from home there will be a greater uptake, but there remain obstacles.’
‘Senior management needs to buy in to a particular way of working for new practices to become widespread. As GCs we have a big responsibility to oversee and facilitate that change within the team.’
An even bigger problem, and one identified by many of the regional organisations we spoke to, is that lawyers’ mindsets need to shift before the profession embraces technology. As Sinha notes, ‘It may take time but there will be greater efficiencies on an ongoing basis if we make the effort now.’
New Ways of Working
Near universally, the global pandemic has forced a fundamental rethink as to how many of us live our lives, be it personally, professionally or otherwise. The legal sector in Asia-Pacific has proved no exception, with the past year providing an impetus for innovation and an acceleration of technology-based solutions.
‘Technology is not only changing how lawyers work on a day-to-day basis; it is reshaping some of the most fundamental aspects of law,’ says Vinay Ahuja, Partner – Indonesia, Lao PDR & Thailand and Head of Indonesia Practice at DFDL Tax & Legal.
‘Consider the huge changes that have taken place in courts across Asia. As someone who grew up and practised in India until 2010, I can safely say that it has come as a big surprise to see India’s courts embracing virtual hearings!’
While virtual courts may be one of the most immediately recognisable changes to legal practice – particularly for those outside of the legal sphere – for both in-house counsel and their law firm counterparts, the day-to-day differences in regular work habits are perhaps even more pronounced.
‘Today, law firms are typically arranging for client meetings and negotiations to be carried out via video conferences, while webinars are frequently being arranged for a range of purposes, including external seminars for clients, as well as internal training sessions for lawyers within the firm,’ says Zhuowei (Joyce) Li, partner at Han Kun Law Offices.
‘The COVID-19 pandemic has made organisations more reliant on technology than ever and as a result, when using technology tools for remote work, privacy and security have become a more critical issue.’
Concerns around privacy and security are unsurprisingly not limited to law firms. Cybersecurity was one of the most frequently cited concerns related to technology that the in-house counsel who took part in the research for this report raised, with the sensitive nature of legal work, in addition to the risks associated with data breaches, both front of mind.
‘With the emergence of new technologies and more broadly, changes in business trends, in-house clients are increasingly moving towards technology-enabled services,’ says Janet Toh Yoong Sang, partner at Shearn Delamore & Co.
‘This has resulted in new and different inquiries coming from clients, with advice sought on issues around data security and risks associated with the use of technology-enable services, as well as an uptick in the number of clients conducting risk assessments of third-party technology providers before consideration of services for contracting can begin.’
These issues speak to the need to establish new frameworks to deal with technology-related issues and are translating to a rise in new types of work for private practice lawyers. Multiple WSG member firms have reported that they are being instructed to advise clients on legal issues arising from the use of technology in remote working scenarios – including the issuance of guidelines for video conferencing software and collaborative working applications – a trend that all expected to continue to evolve as businesses and law firms alike come to terms with new ways of working.
There are signs that this resistance to change is slowly fading, however. Josh Lee Kok Thong, himself a millennial, says a new generation of lawyers across Asia is coming to the table with quite different expectations from their predecessors.
‘The millennial generation is going to be key. We are going to hold key decision making roles in organisations, law firms or in-house departments in a few years’ time. Once that happens there will be a fundamental shift in thinking in terms of how legal services are going to be provided’.
Besides which, the writing is clearly on the wall. Technology will play an increasingly important role in how lawyers deliver their advice, whether lawyers like it or not. But more importantly, when it comes to the law, the medium is the message. As Mottershead notes:
‘At the moment, we see legal tech as a tool that assists us in doing things more efficiently, but over time, that will develop or will actually provide different ways of delivering legal services altogether. It will inform decision making processes and create the opportunity for additional or new revenue streams.’
At which point, even the most conservative of lawyers will see their interest piqued.
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.
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.
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.
