Mo Zain Ajaz is global head of legal operational excellence at National Grid and founder of legal operations consultancy Lex360. At LegalWeek CONNECT, which is taking place in London later this month, he will be discussing how businesses can work with law firms to create a plan of action for better inter-team collaboration.

At LegalWeek CONNECT you're part of a panel discussion on legal departments and how they can drive better collaboration, both internally and externally – what are you expecting to touch on?

We've been given 10 minutes to do a TED-type talk about creating a roadmap for collaboration. I've set out a guide to create this roadmap. It starts with infrastructure, which is putting down what needs to be done and making sure everyone knows what they're doing. Then the next stage is aligning priorities – being clear as to what the priorities are for working with everyone. Then the last one's all around stats-based relationship management – looking at the stats and understanding how well it's working and how effective the plan is.

What does the term collaboration mean to you personally?

Putting the right people in a space where they can solve or work on something together, which then gives the project collective value.

In your workshop you're talking about how to create an 'action plan' for collaboration. What do you think is the best way for a company to approach this sort of plan to create a collaborative partnership?

We worked out what our pain points were, we worked with internal teams and spoke about what concerns there were for working with law firms, and then from that we would build our priorities, come up with ideas and then impose a plan. You can't write an action plan in isolation – it has to be thought out by considering what needs improving. So you need everyone to come up with their various concerns to then create a plan to solve these concerns.

And what were the pain points you discovered?

When we first did this, one of our pain points was that we had no sense of standards over how we managed our company. We wanted to be able to create some measurement system for our standards and values, so this was something we then addressed. And another one was how well we carried out legal training.

What pain points are you trying to overcome now?

As the organisation goes through different stages, we naturally have different priorities at different times. One thing we want to do is automate our contracts and we are collaborating with law firms to help us do that. We are speaking to our firms about our objectives, and collaborating with them to figure out how this programme will work.

Can new technology make collaboration easier? Are there any examples you can cite?

Technology is definitely an enabler, be it extranet platforms (HighQ), matter management platforms (Unity), automation and self-service platforms (Contract Express or Clarilis), or outside counsel feedback platforms (Top 3 Legal or Pursuit), allowing the legal function to co-create and deliver documents/projects with its business and internal and external legal teams.

At National Grid we believe that, where it makes commercial sense, if we own the technology stack it puts us in control and avoids us using multiple systems that each of our panel firms have. Clearly it makes little sense today for us to purchase e-discovery or AI platforms, so we use our panel firms' systems.

➤➤  Effective legal collaboration strategies and innovative partnerships will be explored on day one of LegalWeek CONNECT, taking place on 28-29 November at County Hall, London SE1. Click here for more information

How important is the culture of a businesses when it comes to encouraging collaboration? And can in-house lawyers play a role in driving this?

You can't expect collaboration to happen if you don't create the right conditions. If collaboration isn't given some evaluation or measurement, you're not going to get much effort put into it. At National Grid we do a lot of work with customers and stakeholders, and that drives our appetite for collaboration.

If there's no internal ownership of a programme, there's going to be superficial collaboration. So we, as a company, need to create the right environment for collaboration.

What is National Grid doing to encourage collaboration, both internally and with its external law firms?

We have collaboration excellence programmes where we have meetings to talk about how well we are collaborating. And we work on collaboration through our relationship management programme with law firms. So it happens on all different levels.

What are the the kind of roadblocks you've faced when trying to encourage better collaboration?

Cost is an issue, as is capacity. Also there's the issue of traditional versus progressive lawyers. The mindsets of different people can be problematic – that's a very important aspect.

Are you working on anything else at the moment?

In addition to my work at National Grid, I'm working on a collaboration portal for the legal ecosystem called LEx Open Source. Through this website, GCs and others in the ecosystem come together to address the biggest challenges that we face, using lean and design-thinking approaches. The website is free and contains numerous tools and discussions on these issues.

An example of a pain point I am working on with the ecosystem is co-creating a best practice/standard on contract lifecycle management – this will be an in-person session , happening in early 2019. We have had a tremendous response rate, with more than 50 organisations signing up from around the world. If you are interested, please register your details via: [email protected]

What about LegalWeek CONNECT are you looking forward to?

I think it's a really good source of networking and hearing examples of people doing something different to encourage collaboration.