70 LEXPERT MAGAZINE
|
JUNE 2016
| IN-HOUSE ADVISOR: FUNDING LEGAL INNOVATION |
"the product actually does work in the in-
house environment.
"In fact, they're doing some paid trials
with companies like Volkswagen because
for large volumes of contracts, a sophisti-
cated business person could at least have a
first pass review of the document using a
tool like that. at frees up the lawyers in
the in-house department to focus on the
higher-value work.
"If you have NDA agreements that's not
always the best use of a lawyer's time to do
a review. If there are hundreds of them to
be reviewed, a tool like Beagle can be very
helpful as a first pass."
He also points to Global-Regulation
Inc., a Canadian startup that recently
launched a legislation search engine allow-
ing users to search more than a million laws
and regulations from 31 countries, includ-
ing the European Union, United States,
Canada, China, Philippines, Sri Lanka,
Ireland, Germany and Japan. e program
could be a tremendous help to in-house de-
partments of companies with global opera-
tions, saving them many hours of human
research and other costs.
So is the in-house Bar helping to drive
innovation in this area? Moyse says not
directly. "e in-house market does not
realize the degree to which they have the
stronger hand, from a bargaining position,
with their legal position. ey're paying too
much and getting too little. It's the ones
who push back against their providers that
are starting to drive innovation."
Fred Headon, Assistant General Coun-
sel at Air Canada, is one who is actively
pushing to innovate.
Headon says if some in-house counsel
appear to be slow to embrace innovation,
it's partly that "nobody taught us how to do
this. So we struggle with how to innovate.
Cheaper is one thing, we'd all like to pay
less, but that only gets you so far into the
conversation. How are you going to do that
once you've used all your traditional nego-
tiation skills to get the price down?
"at's where in-house can play a helpful
role because of our proximity to the client,
even though we're not necessarily more
equipped to innovate."
Headon, who headed the Canadian Bar
Association's Legal Futures Initiative, sees
one of the most exciting growth areas for
general counsel as automating the client
interface — allowing business executives to
do their own input on their own schedule
instead of being forced to attend a midday
meeting with the company's lawyers.
He lets slip that Air Canada is actually
working on its own technology that does
just that. "e more we can do to gather in
information, get the preliminary pieces of
the case organized, deal with our clients in
ways that are familiar and suit them with-
out completely disrupting their lives, the
more it will go to our relevance and cred-
ibility with the client.
"e same way you can file your taxes
online, could you perhaps shoot a whole
pile of supporting documents along with
your first crack at answers to your lawyer
once the kids have gone to bed instead of
the middle of the workday? And what if
the machine could prompt you in the ques-
tions your lawyer is probably going to ask
because, in a lot of files, there are pretty
routine questions as we try to get up to
speed with what the client is looking for.
"If we could have the machine recognize
certain answers, recognize certain docu-
ments, and start to gather more of that
information when it suits the client, those
kinds of systems are the ones that have me
JASON MOYSE
>
MARS LEGALX
The [Beagle Inc. contract
analysis] product actually
does work in the in-house
environment. In fact, they're
doing some paid trials with
companies like Volkswagen
because for large volumes
of contracts, a sophisticated
business person could at
least have a first pass review
of the document using a
tool like that. That frees up
the lawyers in the in-house
department to focus
on the higher-value work.
