Rashmi Chandra. Courtesy photo

It's all too common for in-house counsel walking into the legal department to struggle with the question of what tools to use to start working smarter.

Rashmi Chandra, the executive director and head counsel of intellectual property and information technology at Aetna Inc., has plenty of experience making decisions about how to engage with technology. A former Kirkland & Ellis attorney, Chandra joined Aetna in 2010 and has had to build up systems and processes for an in-house IP group that she said used to operate largely using Excel spreadsheets.

Chandra spoke with Corporate Counsel about what technology she and the broader legal department find most useful and what she thinks of AI in-house. She'll be speaking more on similar topics at the 2018 Women, Influence, Power & Law conference. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Corporate Counsel: What kind of technology are you using to handle Aetna's IP needs?

Rashmi Chandra: For the IP group, the technologies that we were using when I came in were Excel spreadsheets. It was awfully hard to manage. When I came in, I had two paralegals and we went out and shopped for different database management systems. At that time we were looking for one that would cover all kinds of assets, including trademarks.

One of the more robust pieces of technology for trademarks at the time was WebTMS, which is what we have now. It's a database management system … But at that point, we only really had about 20 patents to manage. So we said we could do that on spreadsheets.

Five years into my tenure here there were a lot of data analytics and just a lot of health care transformational technology. I was getting a lot of questions on innovations and patenting innovations. I was supervising that with the help of outside counsel, but I really felt we needed to have an enterprise strategy. In 2014, I started a movement of trying to get senior executives to have a centralized patent budget where I would go out and hire another patent counsel and also get some expertise in-house as well as get a database management system. Not necessarily to manage the few patents that we had, the hope was that we would grow, but also for competitive intelligence.

As a result of that we did get some funding, I did hire a patent counsel. In the first go-around we were a bit unsuccessful. The man we hired stayed for a year but then he went back to private practice. So I had to hire someone new last year. We have IP Manager, a Thompson's database, which manages patents but also has a competitive intelligence component to it. If you put in key technologies that you're on the look out for you can track who has a patent or patent pending on a certain kind of technology.

What kind of technology does the rest of the legal department use that you've applied to IP and trademarks?

When I think about legal transformation, it's also about, how do you make the practice of law efficient? We already, as a department—we call it the law and regulatory affairs department—use the Passport System for our outside counsel management. It is a pretty robust system and everybody, or at least all of the paralegals and admins, get trained on it. It works wonderfully because we give our outside counsel an incentive to bill us in a timely way and if we pay within 20 days of getting the invoice we get certain discounts. It benefits both parties. That is our invoice management system, which is separate from the entire company.

The other big movement that we're having in law, which would also affect other parts of the business, is our contract management life cycle. We have a whole set of folks working on what we call an enterprise contract obligation management system where we're essentially trying to find a centralized repository of all of our contractual obligations. This enterprise system is being worked on and will hopefully be installed within the next year, we're really trying to bring all of the enterprise contracts onto one system.

Have you considered adding artificial intelligence into Aetna's IP practice?

I haven't looked at solutions or vendors that are bringing that to the table as of now. That is certainly something we would want to explore if there are solutions.

From an IP standpoint I find that there are very, intensely analytical issues that come to us. So our trademark portfolio, we have maybe 500 to 600 trademarks. The issues are not only whether you're using the Aetna marks properly. The issues go to copyright, the issues go to, are you using a third-party mark? Or have you now put that in your ad content? And then we have another level of review where the insurance regulators have some marketing parameters. We find that a lot of these are really intensely legal analytical issues that we get. It's been hard for us to figure out how to make this more efficient other than a person looking at something and reviewing it.

From our side, the way we've handled it is to create a lot of self-help tools and guidelines and empower the business to use them to give them good guidelines so that every piece of paper doesn't have to come to my desk or my paralegal's desk.