The legal team at eBay has a recipe for meeting new compliance challenges head-on while improving existing processes and saving time and money: teamwork and technology.

This year, the San Jose, California-based company's in-house counsel turned new finance and privacy regulatory challenges, namely the General Data Protection Regulation and a growing payments system, into opportunities to increase efficiency and work closer with business partners. That hustle and innovation has earned them the 2019 Corporate Counsel Best Legal Department award for compliance.

Kara Ricupero, eBay's senior director of global information governance, helped lead one of the department's biggest compliance tech efforts, implementing Technology Assisted Review and continual machine learning. The new tools review documents for litigation and mergers and acquisitions while catching bad actors on the company's site more quickly, facilitating anti-money laundering compliance.

“Our team has been working with other teams closely to understand where can we plug in technology, automation,” Ricupero says, “to really understand and police the site and make sure we are not only compliant with our [anti-money laundering] requirements but that we're being vigilant on the site.”

The tool uses “predictive analytics to identify these bad actors,” according to eBay legal analytics professional Cameron Muir, by flagging accounts whose actions mirror the behavior of previously removed bad actors. Muir worked closely with Ricupero and other legal team members to find the best tool to enhance compliance and embed its use in eBay's legal team culture.

Adopting technology tools has also allowed the legal team to focus more on reviewing complex, high-risk contracts and cut down the time lawyers spend on low-risk matters. Cory Sumsion, legal director of technology and corporate contracts, teamed up with eBay's information technology department and external provider LawGeex to implement a tool that scans clauses in statements of work and services agreements for legal issues.

Contracts without problems get passed along, while those with possible concerns are flagged by the tool for attorney review. Only “low risk” contracts currently go through the tool, Sumsion says, while documents dealing with regulatory compliance still undergo full review. He noted it's possible artificial intelligence could reduce the chance of human error, further enhancing compliance efforts.

And, by speeding up the review of lower-risk documents, the tool has reduced commercial work of the North America legal team by 40% and allowed lawyers to focus on more complicated tasks with bigger stakes.

With fewer documents to manually review, Sumsion says legal has been able to improve its turnaround speed, meeting a need identified by the business.

“Don't be afraid to find out ways that [you] can benefit your business, even if it might be hard feedback to get,” Sumsion says. “But that's going to improve the way legal works, because you want to, in-house, make things easy as possible for business to get done. And that can't happen if you're not partnering with the business.”

For eBay's legal department, “working with other teams,” as Ricupero says, has been a key part of successfully implementing technology. The company's lawyers have brainstorming sessions on what processes could be improved and how, allowing them to pinpoint where new tech could help.

To get business partners' feedback on legal processes and tools, Sumsion suggested starting brown-bag lunch sessions where legal can hear about what processes are working for internal clients. Surveys are also an option eBay has used.

“[Reach] out to your business clients and try to be as transparent as possible and ask them what their experience is working with legal,” Sumsion says. “Find out from those discussions where their pain points are.”

It's also important to include IT. Ricupero says that tech implementation teams should be “diverse” with “legal, tech people, business people” who all bring knowledge on what's possible and most strategic for the company.

Even when she's not working on a tech implementation product, Ricupero says she makes time to have lunch with members of eBay's IT team, to keep the relationship strong, get feedback and brainstorm new ideas. There's also an element of trust building, as she relies on IT to “educate legal teams” who may not have a strong tech background when choosing new compliance tools.

Those cross-department relationships are one of the keys to eBay's compliance success, according to Sumsion.

“The biggest advantage we had was treating [IT] basically as part of our department. If we do anything or if we have stuff going on, we try to include them. We have calls with them all the time, we have updates,” Sumsion says. “We really try not to look at it as legal and IT but legal IT.” While they might have different backgrounds or titles, Sumsion notes they're teammates, working “toward the same goal.” Having strong ties with IT can also help legal departments spot when external tools are needed, or if there are internal resources that can be leveraged to improve processes.

EBay's contract review tool wasn't built internally, but the legal department did use other homemade solutions to boost efficiency and accuracy in-house. Ricupero says this can be a way to save costs and align with the business. For e-discovery, legal partnered with eBay's robotic process automation team and designed a bot that collects relevant emails from Office 365. It's a tool that has proved useful during litigation or investigations, when lawyers need to collect large amounts of email.

In the wake of GDPR, eBay's legal team also found an internal tool to automate the company's collection of data and reports from various systems, making it easier for lawyers to respond quickly and accurately to certain subject action requests under the law. The tool has cut the collection time needed to respond from days to a few hours, simplifying GDPR compliance. But eBay's in-house counsel stressed an internal solution isn't always possible, which is why they've gone with a mix of homemade and external tools. Knowing the business and its needs is crucial to ensuring the best tool is picked, not the shiniest, newest one.

“Identify where your pain points are, or where you can improve, and then try to find something that solves that particular issue,” Sumsion says. “I think many times we can get wowed by all the different bells and whistles, but the likelihood that those come to fruition once they're integrated can be minimal. … [IT] will know how well that's going to work.”