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According to a recent ��˾����ҹ���� survey entitled “The Tech-Enabled Lawyer”, in addition to their legal skills, general counsel are now expected to be tech savvy. But what does this mean in practice, and how can general counsel ensure that their team has the necessary technical ability for the modern corporate world?

Read the ��˾����ҹ���� Tech-Enabled Lawyer: The evolution of the legal function

Legal Tech enabled General Counsels

We have identified five key traits of tech savvy in-house lawyers. Whether the general counsel is the sole lawyer within their organisation or leads a team, it is useful for them to possess some of the following abilities:

• Agility - they are not fazed by uncertainty and can adapt to new situations, willingly challenging the status quo when they spot better ways of achieving desired results.

• Collaboration - rather than keeping the legal team at arm’s length from other departments, tech-enabled General Counsels will be actively looking to work alongside all the key stakeholders in each part of the business.

• Innovation - always keen to learn new skills and put forward new ideas, tech-enabled in-house legal counsels can often bring about much needed business transformation, improving processes and enhancing efficiency across the board.

• Resilience - this relates to the concept of “failing fast” whereby new ideas can be tested out and quickly scrapped if they don’t work. Although lawyers are naturally risk-averse, tech-enabled lawyers are more willing to balance potential risk and reward, confident that they can quickly pivot if innovative ideas fail.

• Growth mindset - this basically means that general counsels are keen to go beyond their specific duties and targets, in order to position their team as a core source of innovation within the organisation.

Why are General Counsels expected to be digitally led?

Over recent years, general counsel and their teams have transitioned from essentially sticking to purely legal functions into helping drive the business forward more broadly. 

In-house legal counsels who are responsible for a team need to ensure that all lawyers have access to the right tools to do their jobs efficiently, and this includes any relevant software and legal tech products. However, according to the survey, over half of in-house teams think they are being held back from digital transformation due to a lack of understanding over choosing the most appropriate technology. It’s up to the General Counsel, working with the IT department, to decide on the best products and services, implement them and arrange necessary training.

In a world in which data is becoming increasingly important, in-house teams are demanding legal technology which has the ability to surface data insights - such as the ability to understand trends across contracts and clauses which may influence the sales cycle. It’s the role of the General Counsel to help drive forward an approach to enhancing data-driven technology and insights.

Automating repetitive tasks

Another finding of the ��˾����ҹ���� research is that in-house legal teams are being stifled by routine work, with 53% spending too much time doing repetitive low-value tasks and 51% too much time reviewing documents. These types of tasks can easily be streamlined using legal tech solutions such as document automation and contract management software. Once again, it’s the duty of General Counsels to implement the appropriate legal business solutions to remedy any bottlenecks and free up lawyers to focus on more high-level tasks.

Although legal tech is being implemented for in-house teams, with around four fifths of legal teams questioned in the survey intending to increase their adoption of legal tech over the next 5 years, 63% admitted they have given legal operations no attention whatsoever. In those cases, General Counsels need to dedicate more time to shoring up this side of their department. Fortunately, according to , 33% of in-house legal departments will have a dedicated legal technology expert in-house by the year 2023 - so this should take the pressure off General Counsel.

Read the lexisnexis tech-enabled Lawyer report