Mili Desai, director of legal services for Globality Inc.

As advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning reshape the legal industry, more companies are leveraging technology to carve out niche spaces in the market.

One such firm, startup Globality Inc., is using an AI-powered platform to make the request for proposal process less of a headache and help connect large companies with service providers throughout the world. The Silicon Valley company has Fortune 500 clients who operate in an array of industries, from finance to pharmaceuticals. 

Globality's director of legal services, Mili Desai, joined the company a year ago after serving as a manager of lawyer talent at legal staffing firm Axiom following a stint as a Big Law litigator. The Harvard Law grad spoke with Corporate Counsel recently about AI, RFPs and data-driven trends in the legal industry. 

The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Corporate Counsel: We've written about how the RFP process is broken, and one of the main complaints we've heard from in-house counsel is that they can get these lengthy RFP responses that don't say a lot. What do you hear from clients about the RFP process and how they want to see it improve?

Mili Desai: What you identified is definitely a huge pain point for in-house counsel in terms of the process just not working. The responses they're getting are not tailored to their actual problem. Part of that, I think, is an issue with scoping out what the actual need is and part of what our tool does is use AI to help scope out the need. First of all, identifying who in your panel are even the right firms to bid on a project. Are there providers outside of your panel that are better suited to this and aren't just a recommendation of someone that you already know? 

CC: Do you see this market becoming more crowded in the next few years?

MD: We've all heard of legal tech. That's sort of the buzzword. But in terms of companies that are going to make an impact on a large scale for large companies, it's a smaller subset. There is a ton of room for process optimization and increasing efficiency in a way that the legal business is run. But in terms of becoming the standard across the industry, that's a smaller subset of the companies that we're seeing emerge.

CC: Let's talk about another trend regarding how roles in law firms are expected to change or form in response to more creative pricing methods. 

MD: We've already seen a little bit of this with law firms hiring chief pricing officers or heads of pricing. I think that those are going to become more departmental in large law firms, giving those people a staff that can help respond to client demand, downward price pressure that they're getting from clients. I also think clients are wanting more accountability in terms of where these fees are coming from. What's the justification for the hour estimates that you're giving us for a certain matter? It connects back to the data piece in terms of having a more thoughtful approach and, quite frankly, a defensible approach to fee setting when talking to more sophisticated clients who are facing that price pressure from their own budgets. 

CC: Data privacy, compliance, cybersecurity—all big issues and major concerns for companies and their legal department leaders. Talk about trends you see in that realm and how that might be shaping corporate legal departments. 

MD: It's no longer enough for GCs to say, "OK, technology and information security is [information technology]'s realm." The legal department needs to get a little bit more involved in establishing policy for incident response and just being more savvy as to what the business is up against when it comes to data privacy and information security.  

CC: Is there anything that you'd like to add?

MD: The overriding trend here is we're moving into the future slowly but surely. That change that everyone has been talking about for the past seven or 10 years, we're really on the cusp of it now where I think lawyers are becoming more comfortable embracing technology's role in their everyday life. We can feel a little bit more comfortable in terms of these technologies being reliable and being able to use that to make us more efficient as lawyers.