From Ideation to Creation – The Birth of Baobab Law from HiiL Hackathon Winner
As a LegalTech founder and web developer, I was excited to take part in the Global Legal Hackathon 2018, hosted by HiiL Hague Institute for Innovation of Law in February in Johannesburg, earlier this year. Since the Hackathon was hosted by HiiL, I decided to focus on an Access to Justice (A2J) solution. It was an exciting weekend project that offered a good break from my daily LegalTech focus centralising around practice and process management.
The 8 Hottest Topics Shaping Legal This Year
This year sees the launch of the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in South Africa, the first event of its kind in the country. You might be wondering how the agenda for this event is developed so as to be on point with the latest pressing issues in the industry. It’s down to a unique research methodology that really gets industry professionals speaking their minds and sharing real challenges, plans and trends. A series of roundtable discussions and interviews with legal professionals results in a list of hot topics that have been debated and discussed within the community. It is these topics that will shape the agenda for Legal Innovation & Tech Fest 2018. This Year’s Research This year’s research groups saw over 100 senior professionals from law firms, in-house legal teams and alternative legal service providers getting together for small face-to-face discussion groups facilitated by an industry thought-leader in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Discussions revolved around the challenges and ideas for improvement and innovation in the world of law. Key Themes The following 8 themes emerged from the roundtable discussions as being most important to the legal community: The legal ecosystem, legal business and the lawyer of the future Building the skills and capability for successful innovation Data-driven decision making – what you can measure you can manage The strategy, the ROI and the business case for innovation, change and collaboration Leveraging user experience to drive user adoption Demystifying artificial intelligence, automation and augmentation The vendor conundrum – sales, implementation and beyond Stakeholder, project and change management The discussions around these topics were captured in an extensive research report which you can download here for more detailed insight. Legal Innovation & Tech Fest 2018 The inaugural Legal Innovation and Tech Fest will launch in South Africa in June 2018 and will demonstrate how legal innovation is being enabled by technology through a combination of case studies, thought-leader presentations, discussion groups, product demos and panels. All based around the key topics brought forward by the community in this report. We look forward to building the agenda and continuing the inspiring conversations around these themes. See you at Legal Innovation & Tech Fest 2018!
4 Practical Steps Towards Real User Adoption of Technology Initiatives
It’s a common complaint. Technology spending increases every year, but with the lack of proper user adoption and underutilised apps, many of the benefits of a new tech implementation are just not realised. Dougless Cadell is the CIO and Global Leader of Innovation Projects at one of the largest law firms in the world. At the Legal Innovation and Tech Fest in Australia in 2017 he spoke about the user adoption challenges that Mayer Brown faced, and he shared the practical things they did to change the user experience into a positive opportunity for driving adoption and generating real value from technology. Doug believes that there are 4 critical elements that need to be understood, addressed and woven together to ensure successful user adoption of a new technology initiative: 1. Tell a Compelling Story It is very important for the IT team to communicate a clear vision and to tell the story of why this change is happening. The story needs to be told over and over again through a multitude of different formats and platforms, so that the business really understands the “why” behind the new technology initiative. 2. Carefully Consider Competitive and Existing Systems Have a look at the current embedded systems that people are using, and realise that you will need to cleverly incentivise them to move over to the new system for full adoption to occur. This is a difficult challenge as it’s hard to change existing behaviours, but a necessary step if user adoption is to occur. 3. Education and Training It’s time to rethink traditional training efforts. The way that people work, engage, learn and consume information has changed and our tech training approaches need to adapt accordingly. Training might look different for different groups of people. Some people may be working remotely and some are billing by the hour, making it impractical and unlikely that they can dedicate many consecutive hours to traditional, in-house training sessions. It may be that the business is challenged for time, or the appetite for traditional training at the organisation doesn’t exist. It is also true that tech has become more intuitive. With the increase in mobile accessibility, many people are able to self-teach and learn through doing. Adopt multifaceted and adaptive ways to teach people that matches the way that they like to consume information. For example, you may want to introduce informative pop-ups on the organisation welcome screen, short videos sent to inboxes or set up a learning management system where people can access tutorials and resources as and when they need them. Where it is vital for people to undergo training it can be mandated by introducing compulsory versus optional training modules. 4. Influence of Culture It’s important to gain an understanding of the culture of the users you are targeting. Geography, age, role and the clientele they are servicing all play a role in the way they use and adopt the technology. About the Author Doug is a veteran CIO, legal industry technologist and internationally recognised speaker and writer on law firm and law department technology, and its best use. He has over 30 years’ experience in finance, operations and management, and in leading the technology efforts of a variety of organisations, including mid-sized and large law firms and a governmental law department. In 2004 he was honoured as IT Director of the Year by New York-based Law Technology News and in January 2009 he was recognised by the Legal Technology Awards in London as International IT Director of the Year.
Stories of Real Innovation From 5 Leaders in Legal
The inaugural Legal Innovation and Tech Fest in 2018 will demonstrate how legal innovation is being enabled by technology through a combination of case studies, thought-leader presentations and more. It will see the best leaders in the Legal profession up on the stage, telling their stories of success in innovation and sharing creative solutions to solve the most pressing issues facing the world of law today. Here are the first 5 legal leaders on the agenda and a glimpse of their stories – 5 reasons not to miss the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in June! Mick Sheehy – General Counsel, Telstra (Australia) Mick is Telstra’s General Counsel of Finance Technology Innovation & Strategy and is passionate about innovation in the legal industry. Mick has an extensive commercial and M&A background, with 20 years’ experience working on transactions in Australia, the US, Europe and Asia. In 2016, Mick founded the regional chapter of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium Australia. Among other successes, Mick will be sharing The Telstra Legal Innovation Story and How to Create an Innovation Movement. This program in 2016 resulted in a saving of more than 40,000 lawyer hours and recognition by Financial Times of Telstra Legal as Asia Pac’s most innovative legal department for 2016. In 2017 Telstra Legal tackled an even bolder set of initiatives resulting in more top awards in the United States and a new Harvard Law School case study on the Telstra Legal innovation program. Graeme Grovum – Head of Innovation, Corrs Chambers Westgarth (Australia) Graeme is a legal technologist with 15 years of experience in the legal and financial services industries. He leverages his deep understanding of legal processes, optimistic mindset, and love of new technologies to deliver exceptional results in unexpected ways. From launching an incubator to developing products to streamline legal workflows, to acting as an agent for change within his firm, to recently launching Sydney Legal Hackers – Graeme is at the forefront of exploring and developing creative solutions to some of the most pressing issues at the intersection of law and technology. Graeme will be presenting on Open Innovation & The Power of Partnerships as a strategy that is not only the way forward for his firm, but for the legal industry as a whole. In his presentation exploring The New World of Legal Work & Exploring the Emerging Trends that Will Drive the Legal Industry in the Next Decade, Graeme will walk us through the rise of legal ops, proactive consulting vs. reactive advice, volunteer groups driving grassroots change, the rise of ‘New Law’ lawyers, and the rise of ‘New Law’ services. In his presentation, A Strategic Approach to AI: Corrs AI Toolkit, Graeme walks us through the journey of Corrs being the first large firm to adopt AI in Australia in mid-2016, doing so in a novel way by entering a JV with an AI company. Graeme discusses Corrs’ approach to AI, data capture and the firm’s application of Machine Learning to their time-keeping processes and leveraging historic billing data to accurately generate new matter fee estimates. Neil Comte & Retha Beerman – Director: Knowledge Management and Training & Director: Knowledge Management, Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Initially described as the “boy Friday” of Knowledge Management at CDH, Neil’s roles developed around innovation, learning and development, quality and professional support due to his relative tech-savvy-ness (for a lawyer) and his time lecturing law at the University of Johannesburg. Neil’s formal training includes business and law degrees from the University of Johannesburg. Neil is a qualified attorney and notary public, and also a director in CDH’s Knowledge Management team. Retha is a Director of Cliffe Dekker Hofmeyr Inc, heading up its Knowledge Management (KM) department. The guiding purpose of this department is to enable the whole CDH society to deliver continuous improvements in the quality of professional services provided to their clients, at competitive prices, as well as to develop ways in which the firm may offer “more-for-less” to its clients. Prior to taking on a Knowledge Management role, Retha practised as an Employment Director, having completed an LLM at the University of Michigan. Neil and Retha will present the Cliff Dekker Hofmeyr case study about the introduction of AI capabilities to a South African law firm, with a view to enabling competencies such as data-driven pricing strategies; intuitive and immediate knowledge management delivery; and expertise linking and enterprise search. Insights to be shared include creating the innovation vision; concretising the vision – proof of concept, return on investment; and what ‘delivery’ of innovation actually means: understanding the art of the possible, and achieving incremental successes. Brendon Borgia – Lead Business Analyst, Independent (Financial Sector) As a child, Brendon would often look at a system and think to himself, “Surely there is a better way to do that”. During his career, Brendon has fulfilled many roles in various projects but has kept with this way of thinking. His fields of speciality have been made up of analytics, technology, process engineering and strategy development. Brendon will be sharing key learnings from a multifaceted legal technology implementation in the Financial Sector. From understanding the effort and cost to realising the benefits of technology (business case analytics); to internal and external integration considerations; to understanding capability/skills constraints with regards to solution development and adoption. This presentation also revises where legal counsel can add value in technology implementation, how the gap can be bridged between legal counsel and developers and whether you ought to pursue a hybrid lawyer/developer role. An overview and demo of the implemented solution will be showcased to illuminate the work and effort that isn’t always considered. Interested in our Research Report? The agenda for the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest is developed around a research report that was the result of 6 months of extensive interviews and roundtable discussions with the country’s leading legal professionals. You can download this report here.
5 Insights Into AI for Legal Professionals
At the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in Australia in 2017, Sam Nickless, COO and a Partner of Gilbert + Tobin presented on the early experiences with artificial intelligence (AI) at his firm during their implementation and experimentation with elements of AI. Sam summarises the key points of his presentation here.