What are the key projects that you have been involved in over the past 12 months?

Geraint Thomas is Head of Legal and General Counsel for the UK and Ireland. Recent projects include the renegotiation and transition of JLL from the Crown Estate contract (including Regent St); contracts with Hammerson for their shopping centres including the iconic Bullring in Birmingham and Dundrum, the largest shopping centre in Ireland; renegotiating the management contract with M&G for 40 Leadenhall, one of the biggest offices in the City; and management agreements with Meta for their offices in the UK and Ireland.

What strategies do you employ to ensure the successful digital transformation of a legal department while maintaining compliance with your country’s data protection laws?

Thomas and his team have been using JLL GPT, JLL’s own large language model developed by JLL Technologies to help review, summarise and draft contracts and to create a chat-bot to assist colleagues outside of the department, as it summarises the information on the Legal and Compliance intranet pages. In doing this, Thomas has worked closely with JLL’s Data Privacy team to ensure that all tools used comply with relevant data protection laws and that the model does not share any information in other responses within the tool or outside of JLL. The JLL Legal team are well aware that the legal profession is on the cusp of a revolution and that they need to keep up to date with and embrace the constantly changing technologies or risk being left behind. At the same time, they realise the limitations of the current state of the art: we are at a point in time when technology can assist only, but cannot do, and so the outputs need to be carefully sense-checked and not trusted absolutely.

How do you prioritise diversity and inclusion within your legal department, and what initiatives have you implemented to foster a more inclusive work environment?

Thomas is a keen believer in the benefits of diversity in all organisations, on the basis that they should not only reflect the diverse nature of society, but also because diverse teams make better decisions and the organisation will benefit as a result. The JLL Legal team is a great example of a diverse team across all factors, and we benefit from having diversity of age, experience background, races and gender. One colleague, when asked to explain what a diverse society looked like, pointed to our team and said it basically looked like us!

Thomas took part in JLL’s reverse mentoring programme, where he was mentored by a more junior colleague in the IT team and currently mentors a junior colleague in Madrid. Thomas also attends and speaks at the company’s in-house career insight days, which give local children from state schools around Canary Wharf experience of working both in a large office environment for experience of the legal and property industries and offers work experience placements within the legal team to students interested in legal careers.

Based on your experiences in the past year, are there any trends in the legal or business world that you are keeping an eye on, of which you think other in-house lawyers should be mindful?

Technology is obviously changing the way all lawyers work and our work will be very different in five years to what it is now. This is the great challenge that we will all face, and it’s vital that we keep up to date with the technology and its benefits but also its technological limitations. If we fail to do this, we could become our generation’s equivalent of the old law firm partner who relied on his Dictaphone and secretary to print and send emails to him.

Having said that, our one advantage in this challenge is the human factor. We must remember to relate and interact with our colleagues and clients as humans with empathy and humour. A software program may soon be able to read, review and even amend a contract quicker and more efficiently than a lawyer, but will they be able to advise the client on the most appropriate thing to say and do and why a counterparty may or may not accept amendments?