InfoTrack has been servicing the Australian legal industry for several years now. We’ve actively helped law firms around the country shift to an automated digital workflow. In recent months, we’ve seen this change extend to those legal professionals who are working in-house. Traditionally, the role of the in-house legal profession has always been that of a heavy-processing role. I work with in-house counsel regularly and I would describe them as innovators. Often, people look at the in-house counsellor a nice way of saving money or spending money with external counsel. But there’s so much pressure on them now to really lead the business as an enabler. The only way they can do that is to work really smart. If I give my in-house counsel team the right tools to do that, then they will have enough time to take care of the business and lead it in the right direction.
At InfoTrack, we recently hosted a roundtable in partnership with Lawyers Weekly, where we spoke to in-house legal professionals from Uber and McDonald’s Australia about the changing role of in-house counsel and where they see the role going in the future. Below is a roundup of some of the predictions we found the most interesting.
In-house counsel as innovators and the importance of being ‘technically minded’
“One of our lawyers who also has a technical background is helping to create a chat board to help deal with the most common queries that we face in the business. He’s also experimenting with a document management system that flags key words or trigger words for reviewing marketing copy and other communications with some advice built into it. So, if somebody in our business unit is trying to prepare some communications to go out externally, it will actually highlight some of the trigger words and give some advice on what alternative phrases they might use.”
- Katrina Johnson, Associate General Counsel and Head of APAC Legal, Uber
Being a lawyer means working at the business, not filing paperwork
“An easy way is finding software platforms that automate manual processes. We have a lot of software platforms that are relatively new to the business, that the legal team have been driving, that automate processes that have otherwise been manual. And it comes from the fact that we became the paperwork hub of the business, and get stuck with all this paper.”
- Alex Butterworth, Senior Legal Counsel, McDonald’s
“One of our five goals for legal is operational efficiency, and so, just by committing to it and making sure it gets tracked and we’re accountable for that, I think has helped us really get ahead of the curve here. We have done a number of things organically just from the legal team within ANZ, for example ranging from things like holding legal clinics twice a week so that people could get fast advice on a fly, so we don’t have 1000 emails back and forth, through to document automation.”
- Katrina Johnson, Associate General Counsel and Head of APAC Legal, Uber
In-house lawyers focus on solutions, not problems
“In my experience, there are some more junior members who have joined the team that take the approach of, ‘how can we solve business problems rather than lawyering?’ That’s not to say they’re not great legal minds, or doing legal work, but they do it with that mindset of, ‘how can we help the business move forward in the right way?’, rather than ‘let’s just fill some forms and tick the box’.”
- Katrina Johnson, Associate General Counsel and Head of APAC Legal, Uber
“The business is very keen on bringing people from the restaurants up into the corporate side of the business. In fact, this month we’re all (from the CEO down to team coordinators) are spending half a day in the restaurants; behind the counter, dealing with customers on the drive-through, on the fries. They want to put us in front of the customers more so that we can see the really pointy end. Cooking fries is hard work, but dealing with a really grumpy customer is even harder. By spending time in the restaurants, we’re making sure that we’re connected with the coalface of the business because then that spurs our inspiration to innovate and to think of new ideas and new ways of doing things… It’s really important to have that real experience of the coalface of the business.”
- Alex Butterworth, Senior Legal Counsel, McDonald’s
These are just some of the reasons why companies should be keeping up-to-date with their technology adoption for their in-house legal teams. The role of in-house counsel is not just to save money on external legal counsel, but to navigate the business in a really efficient, effective way and they need tools to do that. Equipping your team with the right tools that free up legal resources means that the repetitive, routine work can be complete in a smarter way, allowing your in-house counsel team to innovate more and provide greater value to your business too.
If you’re interested in hearing more insights from the roundtable, listen to the podcast or download the report.
