Jonathan Brayne of Allen & Overy.

Jonathan Brayne, head of Allen & Overy's legal tech space called Fuse, believes that the legal market has reached a "tipping point" and in-house law departments need to shift toward becoming tech-led providers of legal and risk anticipation services to become an integral part of their organizations.

London-based Brayne recently released a white paper, "The Future of the In-House Legal Function," in which he discussed the pressures on general counsel for change and the key building blocks needed to meet the challenges of the future.

Brayne told Corporate Counsel on Monday that he sees in-house counsel "facing a decade of transformational change," and he hoped the paper would be a practical tool on how they can respond.

As his paper puts it, "Cost pressures, regulatory overload, the challenges of scale and global reach, advances in technology, diversification of providers and the workplace expectations of a new generation of lawyers entering the profession are combining to present the in-house legal function with choices that it can no longer defer or avoid."

Brayne predicted that in the future general counsel will identify the challenges they face, and suppliers will have to respond to those challenges.

The most significant challenge, he said, is probably "how you form your kind of routine, business-as-usual work without having to absorb huge amounts of time of high-quality expensive lawyers."

He described the answer as a sort of self-serve legal function, based on a chatbox or logic system, "empowering business colleagues to act, and transact, without direct lawyer involvement, yet safely within parameters set by the legal function."

He said the self-serve function will allow internal business clients to find answers to frequently asked questions so they can generate, negotiate, amend and conclude contracts on their own. Other challenges outlined in the paper include keeping up with regulatory and market changes; anticipating risk from compliance breaches, misconduct, litigation and arbitration; reshaping remediation activities; and moving from "a world of text to a world of data."

Brayne said artificial intelligence undoubtedly will expand in the next decade as well. "But in the short term, basic technologies such as workflow, database flow and collaboration tools will have a bigger impact."

Jean-Marc Chanoine, in-house counsel and global head of strategic accounts at Templafy, sees similar challenges for legal departments in the next few years. Chanoine is based in New York City although Templafy, a document automation and template management software company, is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark.

"For in-house counsel the keyword for 2020 is change," he said, "both technology change and regulatory change."

Chanoine said the main challenge comes down to preparing for risk, especially online security and privacy risks.

He mentioned the European General Data Protection Regulation and the new California Consumer Privacy Act going into effect in January. "Some of those rules carry monstrous fines," Chanoine said, "introducing a new economic risk to the company."

Chanoine added, "For a lot of lawyers, me included, it's brutally hard to change. But next year they need to be open and responsive to a dynamic and increasingly complex environment."

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