Team size: Four

How do you approach managing legal aspects during periods of instability or crises, and how does your legal strategy align with the broader business strategy to ensure the organisation’s resilience? 

Despite the general downturn in the economy, we have managed to grow the business in our Northern European Region. During periods of instability or crises companies may look to outsourcing partners.  In that respect the legal function always tries to raise the bar and run an effective legal operation while at the same time be a growth accelerator for our business partners. As such, our legal support model is directly mapped against the company’s overall business strategy both in terms of geographical support and business line support.

Business strategy is important, but often the success is measured against the ability to negotiate and execute long term beneficial contractual outcomes. In our day-to-day legal operating model, we continuously ask yourself what to automate, what to fix in-house, what to outsource and what to out-task. By doing so we can adjust and match the changing needs from the business. Nevertheless, our in-house capabilities are mostly directed towards measurable outcomes. In relation to automation then several GenAI initiatives has been worked on to help ensure the organisation’s resilience.

What emerging technologies do you see as having the most significant impact on the legal profession in the near future, and how do you stay updated on these developments? 

Asking open questions to you Nordic peers about how they run their legal function is one way of being updated on emerging technologies that impact the legal profession. The results of such surveys can be found in the so-called Nordic General Counsel Reports which have been presented at the Nordic Legal Tech Day Conference. Previous reports can be downloaded from my LinkedIn profile.

Asking the IT legal tech community is another way of being updated on emerging technologies that impact the legal profession. To understand what is being developed in Denmark we have issued the so-called Danish Legal Tech Award and reached out to the legal tech community. The award is granted in cooperation with the Danish In-House Lawyers Association (DVJ), the Danish IT Industry Association (IT-Branchen) and the Danish Lawyers Association (Danske Advokater).

Some of what we have learnt is that technological advancements that impact the in-house legal teams may differ from company to company and from sector to sector. In the past, digital legal initiatives were scarce. Some companies automated their NDAs in the early legal tech days. Now legal transformation is starting to appear in many different areas of the law. Some companies have introduced Legal Chatbots to give basic legal advice. The technological advances are sometimes followed by new legislation such as the California Bot Disclosure Law. Some companies are documenting their assts with blockchain technology. Anti-money laundry documentation can be checked and validated against official data in real time. Nevertheless, many companies continue to work in a semi-analogue world. Compliance issues can be dealt with in Governance Risk and Compliance (“GRC”) tools. If you master this, you can go from compliance to confidence.

Contracts have long since matured for digitisation. If you couple the legislative advances with the technological advances in AI, machine learning, deep learning, and generative AI then we are up for some interesting legal tech developments which will impact not only the in-house legal teams going forward but also the way companies do business. The lower the complexity of the service, the easier it is to automate, and the higher the complexity of tasks and cases, the more highly specialised lawyers are needed. With the influx of automation, it is to be expected in the long term that several junior and senior legal positions will be abolished in favour of non-legal personnel such as project managers, legal tech specialists and IT staff.  However, research also seem to suggest that there will still be a growing need of lawyers as the complexity of law as well as the business volume will increase.

Somehow, companies hesitate to invest in digitalisation and Legal transformation despite the return on investment is well documented.