Top row: Leigh Dance, Stephanie Corey, Bill Deckelman, Lucy Fato, Chris Fowler.Bottom row: Catherine Moynihan, Maria Pernas, Daniel Reed, Miguel Viedma, Mark Wasserman

Part 1 of this series mentioned that many in-house counsel have a murky vision of what 'going digital' really looks like for the legal department. Nearly all in-house counsel use some form of legal tech, and digital is surely in the top five business words of the few years—a concept we generally understand as it relates to business.

But what is it that happens when corporate legal goes through digital transformation? When the legal chief announces that you and your team should become digital lawyers, what next?

To better answer this question, I read lots on digital transformation in business and reached out to dynamic and visionary legal leaders. Their enlightening responses come from the US, UK and Europe, in organizations delivering legal services globally: ACC, AIG, BT, Cap Gemini, DXC Technology, Eversheds Sutherland, UnitedLex and UpLevelOps.

Let's start with my exec summary: 8 key points I derived from the more nuanced comments that follow. At the end of this article you will find an 'action checklist' to help get your digital show on the road.

1. It's hard to define digital or digital transformation for Legal in a few words, but as you get into the process it becomes far more specific and concise.
2. Continual learning is required, starting yesterday. When you really understand digital transformation in your business, it will be easier for you to apply it in Legal.
3. Digital for legal services goes way beyond technology to a major mindset change – think creative, imaginative, courageous.
4. Adopting digital gives you a far better ability to support your organization now. It's hard to imagine providing legal support to a large international organization into the next decade without digital transformation.
5. Being a digital legal professional involves new skills, processes and habits— and certain aspects of your traditional legal roles grow in value. Exactly which skills you need depend on your legal team's specific goals and digital journey.
6. Another benefit of digital transformation is that it brings you far closer to your customers, business partners and providers, by necessity.
7. Digital transformation is not a project that gets finished— you have to get accustomed to continual change, and even enjoy it.
8. As a leader, patience and impatience are required at various stages. You've likely already started going digital in small steps. As you learn and progress it may become more efficient and effective to take the really big steps.

Defining Digital for In-house Legal Departments

Automated, data-driven, repeatable outputs replacing custom, manually-intensive tasks

Chris Fowler, General Counsel Technology, BT Legal and Co Sec (London)

"Digital transformation in legal is characterized by the replacement of customized, manually-intensive tasks (such as custom-built contracts) with automated, data-driven repeatable outputs (such as a negotiated contract / early case assessment). Data-rich legal areas like higher-volume enterprise contracts and claims are obvious early adopters of digital. But as legal data structures mature, there is no reason why other areas—such as anti-trust assessments—can't be automatically produced."

"To truly benefit from digitalization, we have found at BT that it's essential to devote significant time to plan the strategy and clarify the goals for our end-state operating model. Transformation of in-house Legal requires department-wide plans for technology implementation, tool and process adoption and management of strategic partners. It's not a finite destination—we continue to revise the plans as we learn and as our business changes. If you have these plans and execute well, you can demonstrate that your team proactively supports the strategic priorities of the business. This in turn helps drive overall engagement in the transformation process."

Three attributes that digital-driven global law departments possess

Dan Reed, CEO and founder, UnitedLex (New York)

"In serving leading global law departments, we find that the modern, dynamic law department builds and maintains a "going digital" mindset by focusing on three core attributes:

1. Support the business in addressing new challenges and opportunities arising outside the enterprise (in essence, capturing value on new frontiers of market activity);
2. Rethink how to use existing and new capabilities to improve how clients are served (reassessing each step of how clients want and/or need to engage with the law department);
3. Re-imagine the technology and process elements that are the foundation to support the enterprise legal ecosystem."

Digital means thinking about legal services delivery in a different way

Mark Wasserman, Managing Partner US, Co-CEO of Eversheds Sutherland worldwide (Atlanta)

"For us, digital in the context of law means thinking strategically about the best ways to use technology and data in new or innovative ways to provide better (and usually more efficient) solutions to client needs and problems. Most importantly, it is not about the technology itself, but rather about changing mindsets, processes and possibly business models to attack problems in a different way.

"Speaking from our firm's experience, delivering on digital requires experimentation with different tools and detailed conversations with clients about their needs. We have worked with several AI and machine learning developers on various projects with clients and within the firm. Recently, we saved a client nearly $45,000 on a project by using Kira, a software that analyzes text in contracts and other legal documents.

"We have created apps that provide information enabling our lawyers and our clients to access what they need when they need it. And we now have a captive alternative provider that will use technology and alternative staffing to assist clients with appropriate projects. Technology is involved in all of this, but at the end of the day it is all about lawyers thinking about the delivery of services in a different way."

How digital legal departments deliver value

Digital law departments ingest and process critical data points more quickly, to better support the organization

Lucy Fato, EVP and General Counsel, AIG (New York)

"A digital law department is one where decision-making is driven by data. Access to real-time, insightful metrics and key performance indicators (based on clean data) is critical. At AIG, our global legal operations group is modernizing our technology application infrastructure. We're also focusing on consistent data element capture to ensure that our data is good. Computing power continues to increase while decreasing in cost. But the primary goal of a digital law department is much the same as it was 15 years ago: a race to absorb and process critical data points quickly enough to proactively manage your legal matter portfolio, while reducing enterprise risk and efficiently managing your organization."

Digital transformation gives lawyers greater ability to provide strategically important advice

Catherine Moynihan, Legal Management Services, ACC (Washington, DC)

"Digital transformation is good for corporate legal departments. It means that in-house counsel can perform at the top of their license. With software providing answers to common questions, routing legal service requests to the right person, and enabling self-service for business clients, lawyers can focus on providing advice on strategically important and complex legal matters."

Follow our company's lead in digital to transform legal services and deliver measurable business value

Bill Deckelman, EVP and General Counsel, DXC Technology (Tysons, VA)

"Our clients have been implementing digital transformation in their businesses for a few years. Now many general counsel are expected to transform the legal function too. Digital transformation of Legal should use the same approaches employed to transform business functions. The specific goals may vary by company but the focus of digital in Legal is to increase meaningful collaboration with our business clients and deliver measurable business value.

"Technology can enable much of this collaboration but transformation equally involves people and processes. To be a digital legal department our people must be proactive, agile, collaborative, creative, resilient, and have a global perspective and cultural awareness. Each of us must constantly learn and improve our ability to connect law with technology and business. At the end of the day, our legal professionals have to understand that this is all about serving our business client and our end customers.

"To evolve Legal into a client-centric organization we must continually move the needle on value. DXC Legal has been on this journey for more than two years, and we still see data and faster contracting as the best ways we can contribute more value to the business. With technology advances, we can now manage our legal function and identify risks much more effectively through data analytics. That added value, and the close business connections that digital transformation brings to Legal, is what it's all about."

Digital helps lawyers do their work differently—and better

Stephanie Corey, Co-Founder, UpLevelOps (San Francisco Bay area)

"Lawyers have a very specific way of working. Besides the arrival of email for sending and receiving information and documents, that way of working hasn't really changed much over the years. Now with better hardware and software and the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI), lawyers are beginning to change how they work, for the better— and that is the promise of digital.

"Legal teams' use of tablets is an example. It's a big advance over 20 to 50-page printed presentations passed around a table to be marked up and stored in a file cabinet, only to be sent to an expensive offsite storage or tossed 5 years later. Now legal teams mark-up documents right on their tablets. Knowledge management has improved through collaborative systems such as Google Docs and MS Teams. Better software like Workflow and new contracting tools reduce the drowning-in-email dilemma. With AI, attorneys will make data-driven decisions better and at a faster pace, and move up the value chain."

Focus on people, process, technology and overall agility

Digital in corporate legal is more than the use of technology—it's an attitude, a mindset

Maria Pernas, EVP and General Counsel and Miguel Viedma, VP Group Legal, Digital and Business Innovation, Capgemini (Paris)

"Digital, within the context of corporate legal, is more than just the use of a given technology or a new tool. It is rather an attitude, a mindset and an opportunity to transform ourselves as professionals. For digital transformation, we must maintain curiosity and an open attitude to constant change. We must question the ways legal services are provided and use technology to anticipate and enable lawyers to provide the fastest and best possible legal advice.

"Initiatives that we have implemented at Capgemini in the last year include the establishment of a Global Legal Center which hosts our right-shoring legal capabilities worldwide, knowledge management and industrialization legal capabilities worldwide.  The Center uses enterprise collaboration tools to collaborate with the various on-site legal teams. Another example is the development of virtual Global Legal Networks within the legal team that are able to act with agility to support the business across the many jurisdictions and geographies where Capgemini operates."

An action checklist to get your digital show on the road

1. Identify your problems in responding better to business demand for legal support, in managing legal/compliance risk better, and in delivering recognized value. What are your practical challenges? Make a list.
2. Armed with the list from point 1, identify the current steps your legal department is taking to solve the above problems and deliver greater value to the business. Then circle or highlight your current actions that are underperforming on solving problems and delivering value.
3. Find 1 or more corporate legal functions that are significantly ahead of yours on the digital change front, and invite them to walk you through their model and approach to technology and data (you can offer to walk them through one of your best practice areas in return). Use video conferencing to involve your team. This is an efficient way to build a vision of what a digital legal department looks like.
4. Circle back up with your entire team or a select group. Invite their input on your findings so far—key problems, what's working and what's not. Discuss specific actions and ideas using technology that could help your function better meet demand and deliver value.
5. Taking the lists and input gathered from point 3 above, get your team involved in talking with other in-house legal functions to understand how they are addressing similar problems. Try to find those that are open to adopting new processes and technology.
6. Put all the info together and select what appear to be the most important problems to address and the best opportunities to advance (the low hanging fruit).

Complete the above and you've already begun your digital journey. Step by step, and learning and adjusting as you go.

Leigh Dance works with diverse corporate legal and compliance leaders as they manage change. She leads the ELD International consultancy as well as a roundtable of legal/compliance leaders in global companies across several countries. Leigh works from offices in Brussels, New York and the friendly skies, and is grateful for all those that contributed their comments for this article. www.ELDInternational.com