The Challenges for In-House Lawyers to Adopt Technology and Possible Solution
What are In-House Lawyers
It appears that there is no formal definition of an in-house lawyer. In most jurisdictions, lawyers are a regulated profession under the local law society. The Law Society of Hong Kong Practice Direction N defines an in-house lawyer as a solicitor employed by a non-solicitor employer. The Rules of Professional Conduct of the Law Society of Ontario (“PCLSO”) defines “law firm” as including one or more lawyers practising in a corporation or other body. In other words, unlike the Law Society of Hong Kong, which has created a specific practice direction for in-house lawyers, the Law Society of Ontario does not distinguish much between in-house lawyers and private practice lawyers. The Law Society of Ontario will simply include exceptions in the Rules of Professional Conduct whenever such rules do not apply to in-house lawyers. For this article, the in-house lawyer means a solicitor employed by a non-solicitor employer.
Embrace Technologies by Private Practice Lawyers
Although lawyers working in a law firm and in-house are qualified to practice law, their focus can differ to a great extent. Besides actual legal works, private practice lawyers may need to spread their efforts by organising seminars or participating in marketing activities. They also need to bill clients and ensure prompt payment by the clients. Per 3.1.1 reasonable fees and disbursement, commentary 4 under the PCLSO, a lawyer shall explain the basis of the fees and disbursements charged to the client. Thus the lawyer will need to spend a considerable amount of time recording the details of the performed work for billing purposes. Unfortunately, the time spent preparing the bill is not recoverable from the client. Thus, the early legal technology available in the market for private practice lawyers is billing-related software. Similarly, clients may feel that any research conducted by the lawyer will also benefit other clients. Thus, clients tend to discount any time spent on legal research heavily. The private practice lawyer will therefore try to complete this research task as quickly as possible or use anyone with the lowest charging rate. This seems to explain that legal research tools are the other legal technology blooming area. Both billing and research tools can reduce time wastage on non-billable items, which means the lawyer can focus on the billable items. This will positively contribute to the law firm’s revenue. Thus, the law firm is willing to invest and spend on these expensive technologies.
Different Needs for In-House Lawyers
In contrast, the focus of in-house lawyers is different. They need to be mindful of the quality of the actual legal work, improve efficiency and track the legal resources utilisation for hiring any extra lawyer or defending costs reduction. The usage for any billing system in an in-house environment is perhaps more on tracking the workload of individual legal staff or comparing whether it will be more cost-effective to give the work to the external provider than in-house. There is no concern about the billing details.
There is less demand for actual legal research because, depending on the business nature of their corporate employer, if a subject matter is required to have undergone in-depth legal research, this, perhaps in itself, will be a good indication of the risks behind it. Feeding these preliminary findings to the business units (“BUs”) will then lead them to put the idea on hold, change it completely or wait for the comments from an external legal advisor. Thus, the two main usages of legal technology in private practice seem less applicable to the in-house environment. Unlike law firms, using legal technology for in-house lawyers does not contribute to the revenue. If there is only one in-house lawyer in the legal team, the need to use any mentioned legal technology will be minimal. The corporate employer is, therefore, less likely to approve the in-house team to spend and invest a considerable sum of money on the technologies used in the law firm. All these factors may explain the reasons behind the low adoption of law firm technology in the in-house environment.
Challenges for In-House Lawyers to use technology
Lacking Technology Awareness
In the cases of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and England and Wales, the admission requirement for legal education is upon finishing secondary school. After that, there will be no specific training related to technology. Compared to the United States and Canada, legal education can only be taken as a second degree. Thus, if the candidates have a first degree in technology areas such as computer science or engineering, they may have the technology mindset to use technology to improve their work. In general, the vast majority of in-house lawyers lack sufficient technical knowledge to improve their work. As a result, if in-house lawyers want to implement technology into their operation, the first expert advice will be from the organisation’s information technology (“IT”) department. The IT department will then analyse the pain points of the in-house team and propose to build the system with internal resources, purchase off-the-shelf products, or engage an external vendor to build the solution.
Developed by IT Team
If the decision made by the IT team is to build the solution internally, the legal team will then need to compete with other BUs on the scarce IT resources. After all, the IT team may prioritise the development of a solution capable of helping the organisation to generate revenue, which means lower priority on the in-house team solution. The waiting time will be longer, especially if the IT team still uses the traditional waterfall software development lifecycle. IT team will get the requirement from in-house lawyers and then go away to design, implement and test the solution. Finally, the solution will be launched into production, and if everything is correct, the solution can solve the in-house team’s pain points. The waterfall model’s problem is that it heavily relies on documentation. For each phase, the user will sign off the corresponding documentation. It can be challenging for in-house lawyers to understand whether conceptually the solution will solve their problem, especially during an early stage of development. It also takes a long time to document and build the solution, given this back-and-forth confirmation. By the time IT completely built the solution, there may be changes in IT or legal personnel, the underlying workflow, or even the technology itself. These all may lead to the internal build solution not being able to improve the in-house lawyer’s work efficiency but rather wasting all the resources used to build the solution.
Off-the-Shelf Products
If the decision made by IT is to purchase off-the-shelf products unless the requirement from the in-house team is a very generic and widely available in the market, such as digital signing, it is not easy to find a reputable provider with a reasonable price. Many start-ups aim to capture the legal markets by providing legal adjacent areas such as DocuSign for digital signing, Docjuris for contract redlining and other companies. They usually adopt the business model of land and expand by offering a free trial for the in-house team. Their services will be hosted on a cloud and accessed through a browser to reduce the need to collaborate with the IT team. The usual challenges for the in-house team are the concern of putting the legal team’s confidential data on the cloud without vetting by the IT team on the technology behind it. The standard contract used by the startup may choose startup-friendly jurisdiction clauses as governing laws. It can also be tricky for the startup to be registered in the enterprise vendor payment system to receive payment.
The off-the-shelf products coming from the dominant legal solution providers in the market are less relevant in addressing the needs of in-house practice. The solution providers seem to think there is little difference between in-house and private practice lawyers. Thus, they will simply promote the solution primarily built for the law firms to the in-house team. With the comprehensive features in place, the price point will not be justifiable to deploy for an in-house environment, especially for a small in-house team. Further, the dominant legal solution providers may want to retain their price point to existing law firm customers by not reducing the price easily. It may be advisable for these solution providers to understand the needs of the in-house team better and shape their products accordingly.
Build by External Vendor
If the decision made by IT is to engage an external vendor to build a customised solution, in terms of the cost, it may not be justifiable to have the scale of development. The cost justification will depend upon the in-house team size and the chosen infrastructure. The in-house team may not have the expertise to translate their requirement into technical instructions for the vendor to develop. The lacking technical knowledge may lead to the involvement of the IT team again. After all, if the objective of the in-house legal team is simply tracking resource utilisation, certain generic software commonly available in the market, such as clockify or other software used by IT, may also serve the purpose without reinventing the wheel.
Human Factors
Sometimes, the challenge for the in-house team to deploy technology to improve their practice is due to human factors. The legal team members may resist or have little incentive to adopt new technology. As mentioned, the in-house legal team members may not have any technical background. They may all enjoy modern technology in their daily life, such as communicating with customer services via chatbot, but at the same time, it can be a bizarre concept if anyone suggests deploying a chatbot to answer legal questions. Depending on their training and exposure during their private practice, they may either enjoy the technology supports from the dominant solution providers or do everything manually with Microsoft Excel (“Excel”) or Word. Thus, they can be sceptical about using technology such as artificial intelligence to help them with contract negotiation.
Time Constraint
Regardless of how the legal solution has been developed or acquired, there will need someone from the legal team who can understand the pain points and liaise with the other parties, vendors, and IT. It may not be easy to recruit a person with a good understanding of the technology and legal world. It can be a considerable challenge for a small legal team operated by a few lawyers to have an extra headcount for this liaison role. In a small team situation, this person may simply be one of the lawyers who need to handle the legal work being assigned and simultaneously do all these liaison works. This lacking of time factor may reduce the desire for a small in-house legal team to adopt technology to improve their work efficiency.
Possible Solution
Use Standard Tools Adopted by other Business Units
As mentioned earlier, some of the problems faced by the in-house team are shared by other BUs, such as tracking resource utilisation. Most of the IT team will use a ticketing system for users to raise IT services requests. The request will then be monitored and analysed for further improvement. It depends on the setup of the services requests system, for most IT ticketing systems it does not have extensive functions to capture the interactions between users and IT. Perhaps, IT can usually solve the problem without the user’s comment. In contrast, legal will need to be back and forth to discuss the problem and get instructions from the user to complete the work. Legal normally wants to keep detailed records of those discussions for future referencing or disclaim liability. For example, in a contract review situation, after legal reviewing the contract content, legal will need to explain the content with the comments given and the suggested amendment to BUs. The BUs may have their input on those suggested amendments. All these discussions shall be documented within the ticketing system. Depending on the IT ticket system platform, it may not be difficult to include such features in it to cater for the needs of legal. Putting a new feature into the existing system will require IT and legal to work together, which can create a similar experience to building a new system. If so, this may lead to the problems mentioned earlier.
Use Microsoft 365
With the comprehensive products offered under Microsoft 365 (“MS365”), it seems that there will be a breakthrough in the problem mentioned above. Microsoft’s product suite is the dominant software used by many corporations and households worldwide. The in-house team will likely have access to MS365 products. Depending on the licence type subscribed by the organisation, there will be different products bundled in MS365. The licence type “E5” will include all the useful products mentioned below.
Using Microsoft Planner
As mentioned, the in-house personnel will also need time to adjust their mindset to include technology in their workflow. The Microsoft Planner can be a good starting point. Initially, the legal team member can manually input the legal request received from the user into the Planner. This creates transparency on who is doing what among the legal team members. If necessary, other BUs with granted access can log in to understand the case progress. Comparing the open task time and finished task time can also provide a rough idea of how long it takes to complete a legal request. At this stage, everything will be done manually. This manual input can incur errors and extra labour, but if every request has been placed on the planner, its graphical interface can help the team to gain insight into the team’s workload at any point in time. Hopefully, the team can appreciate the insight brought by the graphical interface and will be keen to implement more technology to improve their work practice. Once the team is familiar with the Planner interface, some of the processes can be automated, as explained later.
Using Microsoft Sharepoint
What if there is only one lawyer within the entire in-house team, the use of any Microsoft Planner seems unnecessary unless other BUs will want to know their case progress. For this solo lawyer team, both the corporate employer and the in-house lawyer shall consider documenting the legal know-how properly instead of letting it be archived in emails and disappear following the change of legal personnel.
This know-how can be used internally within the legal team, including procedures on settling vendor invoices, engaging external vendors, standard clauses to be included in contracts, corporate information and others. The know-how can also be used to remind other BUs, such as the information or document to be provided to legal when raising any legal request, or how to use any standard legal template, such as a non-disclosure agreement. The design of Microsoft Sharepoint is to allow users to build a webpage with a few clicks of buttons. Traditionally, if legal wants to put up information on an intranet site, legal will need to discuss and feed information to the IT team, who will then put the information in the intranet site. With the ease of use of Microsoft Sharepoint, legal will have complete autonomy to update the content to provide timely information to the BUs. At the same time, IT resources can be used for other, more sophisticated projects.
Using Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Forms
Providing legal training is one of the common tasks to be taken by many legal teams. Before the introduction of technology, the training was usually classroom style, and the meeting room size limited the training capacity. If there are multiple office locations, the training would usually mean travelling between different locations. With the help of Microsoft Teams, which is similar to Zoom but operates under the MS365 bundle, the training can be hosted online and recorded for future use. This can save training time and costs. During or after the training, legal can use Microsoft Forms to prepare quizzes to check the audience’s understanding of the subject matter. The collected information will be stored in an Excel file, and the data can be shown easily with a graphical illustration. The legal team can gain insight into the effectiveness of the training. If using the quiz function during the training, it can create interactiveness with the audience, similar to using Kahoo. Besides quiz functions, Microsoft Forms can create a questionnaire to collect basic information from BUs regarding legal requests.
Using Microsoft Stream
The recorded training, together with the post-training quiz, can be placed on Microsoft Stream. Microsoft Stream is similar to Youtube, but the default setting is only sharing the content within the company. The Microsoft Stream videos can be used as on-demand training, which can be delivered to any new staff onboarding. The link to Microsoft Stream can be placed on MS Sharepoint for internal users to access easily. Having the availability to play back the recorded training will be particularly useful for a solo lawyer, who can maintain legal awareness but reduce the training frequency.
Using Power Automate and Power BI
Once the legal team becomes more familiar with various Microsoft products, the legal team may consider having delegate resources to link various Microsoft products together. Each Microsoft Teams channel has a delegated email address. Anyone with a little programming concept can use the Power Automate to link this email address to Microsoft Planner. Thus, when BU sends an email legal request to the Microsoft Teams Channel email, this will trigger a new Microsoft Planner entry automatically created. This entry can be linked to an Excel file for recording and further analysis. Depending on the information to be analysed, Power Automate will need to link certain Microsoft Planner events back to the Excel file. Once all data have been captured in the Excel file, the information can be visualised with Power BI. Subject to the licence type, the graphical data can feed to Microsoft Sharepoint to create a dashboard layout. Thus, everyone in the team, including management, will know the level of legal resource utilisation. Over time, this will be useful to justify any increase in or defend any reduction of legal resources.
Pros and Cons of Microsoft Suite Products
The primary advantage of using Microsoft suite products is that the cost of software licencing has been included in the corporate subscription, which means no additional cost for the legal team to implement the above solution. This is vital, especially for a small legal team. Suppose there is any product enhancement in the Microsoft suite product, such as additional plug-ins with other software or adding artificial intelligent features. In that case, the legal team may enjoy them through Microsoft with minimal development.
Since the entire development may not require any involvement of IT, it can reduce time to explain the pain points. There are plenty of resources in Microsoft, YouTube videos or other online resources to guide self-development. MS365 suite can be accessible by different devices and anywhere. This supports any remote work initiatives.
The disadvantage is that Microsoft suite products are a standard package, and the legal team will need someone who understands the legal operation as well as programming concepts to construct anything useful. It can be intimidating to start coding for the solution by learning every piece from internet searches.
Legal Operation Professional as a Possible Solution
Regardless of which solution is adopted by the in-house team, it seems that the key to success is to have someone who knows both IT and legal operations. There is a new profession emerging known as legal operations professional who is capable of introducing technology to the in-house environment. In short, they are project management professionals delegated to the legal team for the purpose of bringing in technology. Their skill sets related to project management, strategic planning, financial management and technology expertise can directly fill up the skillsets gap of the in-house legal team.
Summary
In summary, the existing legal technology used by law firms may not be transferable to an in-house legal environment. It is because such technology focuses on billing and legal research, which are not directed to the needs of the in-house lawyers. With the comprehensive functions built into those technologies, the price point may not be justified for an in-house environment, especially for small team sizes. Further, in-house lawyers usually lack the technology mindset. This makes them hard to imagine how technology can benefit their operation or even relate their problem in a technology context. The in-house team can seek help from their IT, who can either have difficulty understanding the requirements or take a long time for development.
The possible solution to these problems may be self-development by the in-house team under Microsoft 365 product suite if there is sufficient talent within the legal team. Otherwise, the in-house team can consider hiring legal operations professionals to assist with the digital transformation journey.
