Real examples and case studies of technology-enabled innovation from in-house legal teams can trigger ideas, inform initiatives and support a business case.
How in-house legal teams are innovating
In the CLL Knowledge base of best practice articles, you’ll see how technology can drive key processes for in-house legal teams. These include contract management and automation, knowledge management, document management and, where appropriate, self-service approaches to low-risk processes.
Increasingly these areas are being dominated by the use of AI, driving opportunities for increasingly sophisticated automation, KM and self-service.
Here are seven examples of technology-driven innovation and good practice which caught our eye. Let us know about any others that inspire you!
1. Microsoft in-house legal team use generative AI to support productivity
Microsoft’s in-house legal team gained early access to Microsoft Copilot, the overarching brand name for a number of generative AI capabilities that are threaded through Microsoft products. The team have used Copilot for Microsoft 365 to experiment and transform in-house legal processes within Microsoft with an aim to improve both efficiency and effectiveness.
Microsoft’s internal legal and compliance organisation is known as CELA and consists of around 2,000 people. Around a third of staff are lawyers, but there are also a range of other roles. Copilot has supported general efficiencies through CELA such as generating meeting transcripts and notes but also supported more specific legal use cases.
To ascertain ideas for use cases for Copilot, initially the team built an “AI for CELA lab” site which allowed staff to contribute ideas and make suggestions for use uses. This contributed to further experiments with Copilot.
Currently Copilot is being used around three main scenarios:
- Knowledge management and chatbots: helps drive self-service within the business to lawyers by querying a repository of legal documents, so lawyers can focus on more strategic matters.
- Automating contracts: helping to speed up contract management and support negotiations and revisions.
- Regulatory: monitoring and understanding the regulatory landscape to assist teams to drive efficiency, improving response speed and consistency.
There was considerable change management effort required to support the best use of generative AI, even within Microsoft. This has involved communications using storytelling techniques, the use of local champions, involving senior sponsors and more. Having governance and guardrails has also been important to mitigate risk and inspire business confidence. As a result of using Copilot, the team have seen significant efficiency (32% increase) and effectiveness (20% greater accuracy) gains.
Key points:
- Getting ideas and suggestions from staff helped derive use cases and buy-in.
- Managing change is always critical.
- Generative AI must have the right governance framework in place.
- Generative AI is a journey which is continually evolving.
2. Adecco Group streamline operations with generative AI
Adecco Group is a global recruitment and staffing specialist operating across 60 countries across three main business units. The Legal & Compliance team have an important role in navigating across multiple jurisdictions, supporting compliance and minimising risk. In particular there is a lot of work around contracts in the recruitment space.
With an increasingly complex regulatory landscape, the team were put under more pressure, so turned to generative AI to streamline their processes and potentially improve service delivery. The team leveraged Harvey (the generative AI platform focused on legal use cases) to try and support daily tasks while also improving decision-making.
The AI has delivered benefits in three key areas:
- Supporting contract analysis and drafting, for example including producing summaries and consolidating clauses. The generative AI helps to spot potential compliance gaps, speeds up contract management processes and drives consistency.
- Supports communications including helping to draft internal messages and external memos that help to summarise legal updates.
- Helps with legal research and analysis, for example identifying gaps in contracts and recommending amendments.
Key points:
- Generative AI can provide potential benefits across multiple scenarios.
- Using a specialist AI product with legal domain knowledge “built in” has potential advantages over more generic products.
3. Repsol experiments with generative AI through in-house pilots and external products
Repsol is a global energy company headquartered in Spain. Like others in the sector, it has ongoing compliance challenges, so the in-house legal team play a critical role in mitigating risk.
As part of a broader transformation of the in-house legal function, the team sought generative AI solutions [Note: link is to interview in Spanish from “Iberian Lawyer” magazine] in order to allow their lawyers to focus on more value-add tasks, assisting in areas such as document analysis, comparison and drafting.
The team decided to experiment and developed “Lexia”, a legal support assistant, as a pilot. This was developed internally in a partnership between Repsol’s legal technology team and their IT function. Lexia was trained on legal documentation from across three jurisdictions where Repsol operates allowing the team to query and analyse this documentation from a legal perspective via a chatbot interface.
At the same time the team piloted an external generative AI legal solution to decide what would be a more viable long-term solution. The latter proved to be more effective.
Today generative AI provides value in several areas including document summarisation and analysis, document comparison, creating proposals, improving clauses in documents and translating legal documents.
The team stress the focus on improving repetitive tasks such as document comparison, which aren’t legal work per se, but require legal knowledge. They also stress the importance of training people to get the best out of the technology.
Key points:
- Experimenting with different solutions and conducting pilots can derive the best solution.
- Focusing on the right tasks is critical, particularly those that are repetitive.
- Change management is important to unlock value.
4. ASML and Phillips collaborate to sign the world’s first AI-generated contract
In 2023 the legal teams at Dutch technology company ASML and health technology giant Philips worked together to sign what was believed to be the world’s first completely AI-generated contract.
To some extent this can be regarded as an experiment which occurred as part of a “hackathon” organised by A&O. It seeks to better understand how generative AI can be used to improve in-house legal processes, and the advantages and pitfalls of using AI. It sought to look to see how generative AI would impact the division of tasks and workflow between different teams and in-house and external counsel.
Cross-functional teams from both businesses were assembled including in-house counsel with legal expertise, legal operations (with experience in “prompt engineering”), procurement and IT. An external counsel helped facilitate the experiment.
The project included using the Harvey legal AI tool based on the GPT-4 Large Language Model as well as a contract generation tool developed by A&O. It went through several different rounds:
- Joint negotiation and review of the NDA covering the experiment itself, auto-generated and then tweaked using “prompts” only.
- Negotiating and generating service agreements in the same way.
- Reviewing and amending clauses using the AI-powered contract management tool.
Reflections from the experiment included:
- Considerable efficiency improvements in creating the mutually agreed NDA, which allowed the teams to focus more on aspects of negotiation.
- Careful expert review of all output was essential because of errors and hallucinations in the output; these were actually difficult to spot and were only spotted by the legal experts.
- The shift to auto-generation and using prompting has the potential to shift more negotiation of contracts into the business.
- Lawyers with experience of using this kind of technology were better at getting the right outcomes, particularly with the ability to use good prompting.
Key points:
- Experimenting with AI can produce valuable insights.
- Innovation in the format of a “hackathon” and partnering with external teams can reap results.
- Using generative AI in legal processes has the potential for productivity but must have human and legal expert oversight.
5. DBS Bank’s legal and compliance team collaborate with IT to tackle fraud
DBS Bank is Singapore’s largest bank and operates primarily in Asia. FT’s Innovative Lawyers Awards have consistently highlighted the innovative approach of the bank’s legal and compliance function, including in the use of technology.
One area where the team have focused on is working with the in-house digital team to develop AI-driven tools that help to combat fraud, for example in trying to predict where it could be happening and running checks before suspicious transactions can be completed.
Another area is the development of an internal application that analyses external news articles about customers to try and identify any illegal activities. Generative AI is also used to summarise any items and warn stakeholders of any potential issues. Originally piloted, it has now been fully launched. The team is also following the same pattern of piloting other potential AI tools that can help detect illegal activity such as money laundering.
Key points:
- Collaborating with internal IT functions can produce important tools that combat fraud.
- Piloting solutions can be critical to prove success and drive improvement prior to a full launch.
6. Improving contract and matter management at Which?
In 2022 the in-house legal team at consumer rights organisation Which? undertook a review of their approach to contract and matter management with a view to driving efficiency and improving the user experience of the legal team and people within the business.
This review involved a “discovery” period where the team spoke to business users they regularly interacted with and also mapped out existing basic processes relating to onboarding suppliers and contact management. This revealed opportunities for improvement.
Working closely with other stakeholders in the business including procurement and finance, the team redesigned their end-to-end processes for onboarding and contract management, taking-in roles and responsibilities, risk mitigation and use of technology.
Based on these refreshed processes, the team identified a need to renew the systems they used as well as access metrics and data to drive efficiency. They created a list of requirements which they divided into “must haves” and “nice to haves” focusing on capabilities such as automation, usability, a central document repository and interoperability with other systems.
Ideally, they also wanted a “modular” system where the core solution could be implemented and then evolved through incremental improvements.
With cost and ease of implementation always a factor, the team settled on taking advantage of the organisation’s move to Microsoft 365, which met the team’s “must have” requirements. This placed all contracts and matters within the Microsoft environment that:
- already met stringent security requirements.
- was flexible so could easily be evolved in terms of automation and workflow
- was also easy to access for the rest of the business.
A dedicated legal operations resource and a vendor partner helped to create a portal within SharePoint as entry point for all legal requests and be accessed on a self-serve basis. The solution is also integrated with Outlook. The portal was then launched with communications and training for relevant business teams.
The results have been regarded as a success with:
- 40% of all contracts being generated directly by business users through document automation
- Greater visibility of matter status.
- Workflow around reviews and renewals.
- Metrics to drive improvement and report to leadership.
- Electronic signatures and automated filing to support compliance.
The solution has already created significant efficiencies, but there are opportunities for further evolution, such as automating more document templates.
Key points:
- In this case it was essential to redesign their fundamental processes before identifying the right technology solution.
- Using a solution that was already available (Microsoft 365) had significant advantages.
- It was essential to partner up with key stakeholders around the business at all stages of the project, as well as a vendor partner.
- Continuous improvement was at the heart of the solution.
7. Using a variety of chatbots to streamline processes at BUPA
BUPA’s in-house legal team was looking to bring automation to some of its basic and repetitive legal tasks in order to free up time to focus on more complex issues. They used a variety of different chatbots that were created and set up by the team using a commercially available legal bot platform.
Initially the team set up a pilot to work out which repetitive tasks could be automated and also whether there was appetite within the business to interact with a bot rather than a member of the team.
After a successful pilot, the team set up a series of interlinked chatbot that are available on a self-service basis for staff throughout the business. These bots include:
- A triage bot that takes in a user’s request and then sends them to the right bot for their request.
- A bot for automatically generating NDAs.
- A Master Services Agreement bot.
- A competition terms and conditions bot that assists with formatting.
- A fit out and agreement and corresponding briefing bot.
Key points:
- The team used a platform where they could set up the bots themselves which gave them more autonomy to use the tool effectively.
- The business was happy to use the chatbot because it was more efficient.
- Having a triage bot that “hands off” a user to other bots is a framework that allows the team to add more specialist bots as needs arise.
The result has been increased self-sufficiency for business users including BUPA’s property team and a significant reduction in the number of emails that the team must send out, supporting better productivity. Business users are also able to produce their contracts and resolve issues more quickly.
Conclusions
Over the past few years, a range of technology solutions aimed at improving and streamlining In-house legal operations have hit the market. Meanwhile wider new technologies – accelerated by the use of generative AI – are creating opportunities for automation and process improvement across multiple parts of any business, including in-house legal teams. Overall, this is a very fast-moving space which is changing how people work.