Transcription
Lizzie, introduce yourself.
>> So, I'm Lizzie Duffey. Um I work with the Thomson Reuters Institute as senior director. So, day-to-day what I'm doing is spending time really talking to general counsel and legal departments to understand what they're facing and how they're navigating it. And then drawing on the research we're doing, the sort of strategic frameworks and expertise that I've built up over the years to give them some tooling to help plan a path forward and help to sort of problem-solve.
>> Yeah, I love that. I I've worked with you guys. Um the battlefield of legal is is chaos right now and you guys have that privilege of 50,000 ft view and you kind of kind of parachute in, give information, give guidance, and it always goes down so well. So, yeah, really great stuff. Um right, let's just unpack some of the stuff that you were talking about this afternoon. Um with AI comes investment and generally what we see now is that that rollout conversation is ROI. People put a lot of money into this this this um subject at the moment and ROI is becoming a really complex subject in itself. If we were to strip it back at the most basic level, somebody's just invested into it, where do you start with ROI?
>> Can I give the lawyer answer and say it depends?
>> Oh.
>> [laughter]
>> Go for it.
>> So, I think about this in a in a in a few different ways. Um first of all, it is a really important question because the work I'm doing right now, and I know we'll come on to talk to the talk about this, I'm working with our own legal department to design the future GCU and and plan a path to get there. And that came about because the work that our legal department has done so far with AI has been so successful with adoption, experimentation. Um I think in year one they surfaced almost 100 use cases for AI and then buckled down on a few industrial strength use cases. And through all of that, it was huge success but still just seen incremental efficiency gains. And so, that's where we're really focused with our new work, the new chapter of the journey, if you like, is how do we seriously level this up so that we can meet the business where it is. And so, when I think about metrics for the success of AI, you're going to go through phases and it's going to evolve as your journey evolves and as your maturity does. Starting point, you want to be looking at adoption and engagement with the tools, right? So, so that's important. Um but quickly you've got to start measuring how is it helping us change how we work?
>> Yeah.
>> And that's got to tie back to what you set out to do. So, if you're just setting out to increase efficiency, which I don't think is the right long-term goal, then that's what you've got to measure. But if you're really looking at AI to say how can this level us up as a legal department, help us do more with less and and meet that pressure so we can become better business advisers, then those are the things you've got to measure.
>> Yeah, the the where I when I speak to my clients, you know, the data isn't there yet to actually really be able to map out that pure ROI. In other industries, other product lines, um there's a big area we we focus on around return on experience cuz if you get the experience right, you get the investment back. And so, yeah, it's just something that I think over the next 12-18 months we might really see that level out with your report and your the work you guys do, which is great.
>> I wrote a piece recently which is in our value alignment toolkit about AI success metrics. And um not to give it all away, but it's in there and it's all available to download.
>> Teaser.
>> The most important thing is to think about it not as reductive metrics because if you talk about AI in terms of we can do the same work with less resource, that's opening the door for budget cuts, head count cuts. Whereas if you say AI allows us to do this work better and support the business better, then that's more of a case for investment. So, that's a really important point of it.
>> Yeah, absolutely. Now, in the audience today we had uh law firms, private practice, um GCs, a whole portfolio of legal professionals. Um one of part of your report is really showcasing now that the adoption rates, the the positive investment in in the in the products is is really been driven through in-house legal over law firms. And that was really interesting because traditional tech um law firms would just go forwards and always in the in the you know behind those was the the in-house legal teams who were complaining they couldn't get the tech access.
>> What what why is this the case at the moment, you think?
>> I think it comes back to the um the drivers or the the urgency behind it, and that's different for a law firm who maybe feel in a sense has more time and more runway, they think, to figure it out, even if they have more resources to throw at it. When you're in an in-house legal department, your business is already shifting, changing, moving around you because AI is changing the supply chain, how we work with customers, how we work with employees, how different business functions work. So, that trickles down in really meaningful ways to the legal department, so they have to keep up with their business. Um and we saw in the presentation earlier 91% of C-suites say that AI is shaping their business strategy for the next 5 years. So, that and we're we're already seeing in legal departments the pace, the complexity, the volume of work they're facing is growing as a result.
>> Yeah, but and also, I guess today, technology like this has never been so easy to buy, to uh test, to evaluate, to deploy, whereas previous technology stacks were really complex and needed um consultancies and um resource to get off the ground. And a GC can pretty much buy off the shelf and be up and running in minutes, right? So, it's really exciting for us.
>> Yeah, it's amazing. We had um Ravi, who's head of our um core counsel product, walk through a demo this morning. And me not being a techno person, not being not being a a technology expert, um but really being on the strategy side of this, and and and I talk a lot with uh GCs about adoption and some of the barriers they're facing, but the fact that the tool is so intuitive and easy to use, and it's there where the lawyers are already working, it really helps with adoption. And then on top of that, you've got the security that your data's not training someone else's model, and you can sort of feed the model with not just our content, which is verifiable and transparent, but also with your data from inside your business and your legal department, and know it's safe.
>> That's so key now. Law firms have and you know, every legal practice, the amount of data they have in their own shop is is is is huge. And now we have technology that, especially with us, that allows us to harness both our content, but also blend it into what that that lawyer has at their own fingertips today, and really get a a great story to be able to present for whatever they're trying to deliver on, which is pretty cool, eh?
>> There's never been a cooler time to be a lawyer, I think.
>> I know. It's It's [laughter] Yeah, yeah, probably probably cooler. There's There's other challenges there, but maybe not for today, but there are lots of challenges. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was working with a firm recently, and they were saying that LAI has sped up the experience so much that they're now having to invest in other skills around the lawyers' profession. And what I mean by that is, um traditional lawyers would spend so long building contracts and and and spending time behind the laptop working, and that contract can be done now in minutes, right? So, suddenly, the client wants to, "Hey, let's talk about the contract. Tell me what you did." And so, there's whole new sort of um work streams are being delivered on getting the best professional delivery that a law firm can give their clients. And in-house, the demands are going through the roof now, aren't they? With AI, they expect more, faster, more accurate. Um and and the cost of that will Well, we'll see where that one goes as well, right? Um, so there's the whole disparity between the two, you know, you know, we're saying their adoption rates are better in in-house versus law firms. You know, we talk about or you mentioned today in your slides around this the archetype in-house team and law firms. You know, what does that look like and what is that vision? If someone wasn't to see your slide deck today, what you know, what do we mean by that?
>> So, starting with the legal department, where we think that's going to head, um, we've pitched it as 5 years time because for our legal department, that's where we need to be by by then. Um, we've got five archetypes, which are models for how technology and human expertise will combine with new ways of working. And so, um, the place most legal departments will probably start is the scaled enablement. So, it's pointing that high volume automation at the work that takes up a lot of time. It's a real sort of energy suck, but it's just not that super high value. And then once you free up and unlock that capacity, it enables all of the other models, really. So, the next one we think about is uh strategic counsel um or advisory plus we've called it, which is just the general counsel legal team supercharged. So, supercharging analysis, um helping them quickly orient on new matters, learning new areas of the law, um and of course lifting that admin burden. Um, then we've got a couple which are about collaborations. So, internally, we've got empowering peer, which is thinking about a deeper collaboration between legal and other business functions. If you think about HR or procurement or finance, where their work intersects with legal. Then here you've got um legal can sort of set the standard and act as an escalation point, put the guardrails in place, but it's all about empowering those other businesses to do their best work and not be, you know, reduce the friction in in some of that. Um working with law firms, we have seamless integrator. Um so this one is I want to say it's not about eliminating the reliance on firms, but it is about um working more strategically and efficiently with them. So um our CLO has a mantra which is we don't want to pay for the same advice twice.
>> Ooh, right.
>> Um so again, it's a shared playbook, um quality standards, and then AI-assisted reviewing and grading of the work. So whoever's doing the work, whether it's in-house or external, the quality is there, the risk tolerance is built in, the commercial context can be placed. It's a true extension of the team. And our fifth one is um for global teams, there's a lot of barriers right now in time zone, location, and language. And so there's a huge potential from AI to lift that so everyone can show up to their full potential.
>> There's a lot to unpack in in what you've just So clearly we need to get hold of some more information on what you've done there, Lita, which is very good. Final question then. So if we've got both sides of of the audience, let's say, today, if they're listening, in the next 90 days or so,
>> [snorts]
>> what can they do? What can they take from everything we've talked about today, or you've talked about today on your stage, to help optimize that alignment um to get that synergy working together?
>> Yeah, so um first of all, the planning template that we use with our own legal department, we've built that out as a piece of toolkit, which is available on our value alignment toolkit, free to download. And I would recommend uh in-house leaders taking that and and working with that working through it with their teams. But there are some really important questions that law firms and clients need to come together on. Um things like how are we going to develop the next generation of talent when that routine training work is moving away? Um how do we define value, and how do we price for legal services in an AI-enabled world when when AI is changing things and in a way that's going to be fair to both sides but still encourage innovation. Um and there are some really fundamentally ecosystem questions as well that require not just law firms and and and legal departments but academia and tech providers to um input to as well. So, I think there's a lot to unpack but it's really important the two sides start to come together and and converse about this because
>> And it's constantly changing and I think the next 12 months we're going to see more twists and turns in the subject, the industry, and the tech. Um Lizzie, that's been really fascinating catching up. Thanks for your time this afternoon and I hope you have a great rest of the day. Thank you. Thank you.