It's no surprise that the general counsel role is changing, but what today's GCs see as their strategic priorities—and how they view attorneys' general tech competence—may come as a surprise to many outside counsel and legal technologists.

According to "The General Counsel Report: Corporate Legal Departments in 2020," sponsored by FTI Consulting and Relativity and conducted by consultant and author Ari Kaplan, 97 percent of GC respondents say they are now expected to be business strategists, largely driven by pervasive enterprise risk. This means that not only are today's GCs giving legal advice, but they're participating in business strategy sessions as well.

"Rather than serving as the gatekeeper, the general counsel is now expected by regulators, institutions and the board to help steer the ship if the business is not headed in the right direction," one unnamed GC said in the survey.

Wendy King, senior managing director at FTI Technology, agreed, nothing that many of these GCs are being asked to become more entrenched in various business units and asked to play a key role. "Largely, it's a shift away from being the department that says no to everything, toward one that offers creative problem solving and solutions," she explained. "This could mean being responsible for steering or righting the course toward compliance, educating the enterprise on policies, tracking ROI for projects and setting long-term strategy."

But if technology is going to play a role in that business strategy, GCs don't necessarily trust attorneys to take part. Just 39% of GCs said they believe most attorneys have adequate technical competence (10% said they didn't know). Two-thirds said the same about paralegals.

This figure may have led to another survey finding: When asked where the legal profession was going, just 38% of GCs said it would be technology-driven, especially by AI. To King, the stance on technology aptitude was surprising, and the two figures are consistent as "when so many attorneys believe that the profession is lacking in technology competency, it is hard for them to view the future of law being largely technology driven."

"It's true that there's still a lot of work to be done in terms of counsel getting comfortable with technology and understanding the nuances of how different tools and advanced analytics work," she added. "But we see most of our clients taking technology use seriously and taking steps to become more sophisticated. Most have a general openness to embracing technology as part of their practice and finding new ways to apply it to reduce costs, improve efficiencies and work smarter for their organizations."

The survey also found that today's GCs have a wide array of different risks to juggle. Of the 32 GCs surveyed, 69% said their organization had changed its privacy policies because of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for instance. A majority also said they were equipped to handle information governance and data remediation issues (70%), as well as emerging data sources such as social media or cloud-based apps (57%).

Many newer technologies do not seem to be on GCs' radar, though. Most said they were unprepared to handle blockchain and cryptocurrency (79%), as well as AI and machine learning technologies (73%).

"It's notable that counsel feels under equipped in these areas, because they are the ones most likely to significantly impact e-discovery and other day-to-day legal work now and in the coming years," King said. "Varied data from cloud-based apps, social media and mobile devices are now table stakes in e-discovery, and legal teams are increasingly facing matters in which they must collect, process, analyze and review potentially relevant information from a wide range of sources."

She added that this lack of confidence means there is "a pressing need for education and outside expertise to help counsel navigate the landscape of emerging data sources."