thought leadership

General Counsels and in-house lawyers are under more pressure than ever before – with an increase in workload volume, a greater demand to deliver advice, manage risk and ensure legal compliance for the business, there’s very little time left to practise law. 

With the Legal sector being considered as Tech sceptics, is it time to start looking at ways to evolve through the digital revolution or risk getting left behind? 

On Thursday 23rd June a group of like-minded tech and legal professionals met online to discuss the drivers and barriers to adopting technology within the legal sector. 

The morning started with introductions from our partners, Off Road Legal and the conversation started by considering the normalisation of automation. 

Adverts are popping up on buses and on TV which is showing acceptance in white-collar industries; everyone is starting to understand that automation can help. “Obviously, factories and blue-collar industries adopted automation a while back, but recently there has been a shift to white-collar automation that is here to stay,” said Peter Impey, Co-Founder of Off Road Legal. 

This begs the question of why is automation not accelerating at the same speed within Legal as in other areas of white-collar work?

 

The Drivers of Change 

Ian Gosling, CEO of AUTTO, followed, “Over the last 10 years we have seen a big change within digital transformation in Law.  It has been driven by the rise of Legal Operations led by  CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium).  CLOC’s Core 12 framework gives us a good basis for looking at all the pieces you need to have in play to move towards having a modern digitally transformed legal function,  and how those pieces connect.  In my experience, for change to be successful people, process and technology need to align with the business model.”

The main driver for adopting technology is operational excellence.  Andrew Wingfield Co-Founder of Off Road Legal went on to explain “The client expects more and that is a major external driver for change.  Those demands are being met by new entrants to the legal market, the big four consultancies, technology-enabled competitors, and listed legal businesses all driving change.  How will law firms win in this situation, if they don’t innovate with technology?”

“Legal operations is a discipline, if you instil it in a legal team, whether they are private practice, inhouse or a legal operations team, it’s a mindset of understanding the importance of process, legal, data, and using technology to get the best results. The drivers behind adopting technology for law firms and legal functions within a business are completely different and I think that has to be recognised,” said Jeremy Hopkins, Legal Operations Specialist, Contentsquare.

 

Barriers to Adoption

When it comes to adopting new technologies within any organisation there are always barriers to change. People have tried introducing new tools before, for example, Contract Lifecycle management tools,  and failed.  This raises the question, do people fail around the tool instead of the tool failing? Have you ever used or been given access to a tool but you either didn’t know how to use it or chose not to use it and continued doing what you normally do?  Eventually, the tool takes the blame.  To successfully change the people, the process and the technology all need to be aligned to deliver.   This can be especially difficult to manage if the change is externally driven and not internally led.

The technology itself must align with the change. 

 

Overcoming the Barriers to Change 

The legal industry is traditionally conservative and often a late adopter of innovation.  How do law firms and legal professionals adapt to a more competitive and demanding environment?

Trying to get to the result fast using a big bang model of change is risky and a better approach is to implement smaller pieces of the overall digital process. “It’s all about incremental change – small changes that will lead to overall bigger changes and bigger impact for the business,” said Ian Gosling. 

One way to implement incremental change is the use of no-code tools which enable incremental change. These allow teams to adopt new ways of working that are low risk, low cost, and still show big results.  A no-code environment gives control of the change to the legal team, allowing them to own the transformation of their work.  This can help make digital and operational transformation internally-led, helping overcome barriers and concerns about technology and change.

Thank you to everyone who participated in this event and our Partners Off Road Legal. If you would like to find out more about how automation can help your business, request a free demo below and one of our automation experts will get in touch.  

As defined by Gartner, a citizen developer is a persona for an employee who creates application capabilities to be used by themselves or others – for example, forms, automations, connections to other systems.  The increase in citizen development is part of the trend towards the democratisation of IT – people who don’t sit in the IT department being able to access sophisticated technical capabilities without technical or development training. These people are working within individual business units and are using no-code tools to rapidly develop applications. They simply don’t need advanced technical training. They need an analytical mindset and an understanding of their subject matter, but they don’t need to be developers. And they are on the rise – with an ever increasing younger, more tech savvy workforce wanting to develop their own applications. Gartner further showed in 2021 that 41% of organisations already used a platform for citizen development, while another 27% expected to use one within the next 12 months.

What are the implications of this for legal? Who are the new citizen developers in law? We’ve heard from a number of them in this white paper. In a GC’s office, they are the legal ops specialists who sit in the legal innovations department and their role is, with input from the legal experts, to assess the challenges the department faces and begin to develop these applications. In law firms, it’s not the front-line lawyers developing these applications (although as we’ve shown in this paper, they will have a massive contribution to make) but rather the Legal Tech teams. 

We are witnessing the rise of multi-functional teams to develop solutions. Lawyers or people with legal expertise plus IT departments who arrange and secure the correct platforms for delivery, join with citizen developers or legal technologists. The latter of these, take the expertise of their lawyers, assess the solution that needs creating and then are developing them on no-code platforms. And no-code is a massive growth area – Gartner predicted a 23 percent expansion within business Worldwide during 2021.  

The implication for cost reduction by moving this functionality out of pure IT development and into legal is massive. Automation is now in the hands of the citizen developer making it possible to automate areas that previously could not as the gains in time simply did not justify the investment.

There is no doubt that the shipping and logistics industry is facing a challenging yet opportune time. Spiralling fuel costs, labour shortages, sustainability, new government regulations and, of course, the small matter of a global pandemic, have contributed to unpredictable, highly disruptive waters.  But, as The Economist neatly put it recently, “the era of predictable unpredictability is not going away” – with challenges come opportunities. The pandemic has seen shipping volumes explode as consumer demand continues on an unprecedented level. The industry has invested heavily in response to this – we’ve seen the rise of robotic technology to automate processes from picking to packing, inspecting to container stacking. However, what of the fundamental digital processes and documentation that sit behind the physical movement of goods? The instructions to partners, the insurance documentation, the verification of processes, the letters of credit, the accounts payable invoicing? Are these time and energy intensive processes keeping up with today’s volumes?  Will ‘the way you’ve always done it’ be enough to keep pace with growth now and in the future? Could you improve operational efficiency and save money by automating these processes? 

Still not sure? Consider this example.  Research from Drewry Shipping Consultants estimates the container liner industry carries 60% of the goods (by value) moved internationally by sea, deploying 5,100 container ships worldwide on approximately 400 scheduled liner services, most of which sail weekly. This generates a global transport revenue of some $166 billion a year in transport revenues. But it also creates 1.26 billion freight invoices.  Each of these has to be issued, verified, paid and reconciled.  Astonishingly, the majority of these are still handled manually, making it a costly and onerous process, rife with errors.  The level of automation of invoice reconciliation and settlement is very low, particularly among small and medium size players. Drewry states the cost of these process inefficiencies represent $34.4 billion a year.  

Imagine an easy-to-create and run system that could massively simplify this.  A process that makes it faster, more accurate and less resource heavy. Technology is available today to easily create a workflow to reconcile bookings, invoices and payments automatically, linking all stakeholders, ensuring digital records are kept for verification. All stakeholders can see it, track it and have the digital evidence.  

But this is just one example. The reality of a modern-day supply chain is that every element of the process still generates a huge volume of documents. In fact, it’s estimated that every year, 12 billion documents are processed in ocean forwarding alone. Business leaders in the shipping and logistics sector should be looking at digital automation as a chance to change, to scale up and future proof their business.  

Typically, the generation of shipping documentation has been handled by people because the cost of digital automation was simply too high and too complicated to create. However, today the use of cloud-based low-code and no-code automation platforms means that companies in shipping and logistics can build, operate and support an automated system with non-technical staff and budgets from a few thousand pounds  a year. It has opened intelligent automation up to companies that could not previously afford this kind of tech. Platforms such as AUTTO have a lot of flexibility and yet also allow control, audit trail and monitoring and allocating tasks to your team. These systems will automate document production, calculations, task allocation, approvals, data transformation, integrations and update records. Potentially packing lists, bills of lading, certificates of origin, invoices and letters of credit can all be automated. 

As software completes tasks within seconds instead of hours it cues staff or another automation to begin the next task – the overall pace at which your business responds increases. This means not only time spent doing a task is reduced but the ‘time elapsed’ between when a job was requested, and when it is completed drops rapidly. As your customers (both internal and external) are becoming more used to an ‘Amazon Prime’ business culture of immediate fulfilment, then the ability to deliver quickly is a competitive edge. 

As an industry run increasingly by robotic process automation, leaders of shipping and logistics businesses should also be looking internally to ascertain which operational processes could benefit most from digital automation.  We at AUTTO help businesses  make operations leaner – improving customer satisfaction whilst using as few resources as possible – by helping you to create your own digital automation workflows. A few simple changes can really transform your business.  With the challenges and opportunities currently facing the shipping and logistics industry, now is the perfect time to start to reap the benefits of adopting this leaner approach to operations using digital automation.  We’d love the opportunity to talk to you more about how your business can benefit and provide you with a free trial of AUTTO. https://www.autto.io/free-trial/ 

If you’d like to understand more about our approach to lean operations using digital automation you can download our white paper here: https://www.autto.io/three-step-guide-to-lean-operations/ 

1 https://www.economist.com/leaders/2021/12/18/the-new-normal-is-already-here-get-used-to-it?frsc=dg%7Ce

2 https://www.solent.ac.uk/research-innovation-enterprise/documents/china-centre/global-maritime-weekly-digest-08-05-2018.pdf

3 According to in a Billentis report last year, of all the invoices issued worldwide, a jaw-dropping 90% of them are still processed manually

 

This week sees the big return to work after the Christmas break.  But after the last of the celebrations are over is the real hangover your lack of enthusiasm for work?  Has time off made you reflect and realise certain parts of your role are over repetitive, uninspiring and just taking up too much time?  Are you considering quitting your current role and finding a job where you feel more engaged, more valued and one where you feel more excited to turn up every day? You are not alone. Globally business is witnessing what has been termed “the big quit” – in the UK alone the number of open jobs rose to a record high of 1.1 million in the three months to August 2021¹. Employee burnout is also on the increase – research shows a 15% global rise this year increasing to a jaw dropping 81% in “non-thriving” company cultures.² 

 

The good news is that the effects of an almost two-year global pandemic have thrust digital transformation on employers and a recognition of the need to use this digital investment to keep their valuable staff.  Leading employers are becoming increasingly genuine about putting the employee at the centre of the business.  They want to keep them engaged, create space for critical thinking and problem solving and use their time and talents to develop the business.  Some are embracing automation as a way to take away those ‘time-rich, imagination-poor’ yet critical tasks from employees.  

 

‘Business automation is getting software to do some work so that humans don’t have to.’

Automation software loves the work that people hate. It is good at speed, repetition and accuracy. “No-code” platforms like AUTTO make automating key business processes and documents easy.  Automating these tedious but nonetheless important daily tasks of every company will free up your time – our customers tell us about 75%.  Investing in a technology that can replace the hours you spend, for example, laboriously cutting and pasting into a spreadsheet or sending out endless emails, proves an employer is invested in you and wants you to feel more valued and empowered to make decisions for the good of the business. Routine documents such as order processing, contracts, invoices, sales activity reports, quote generations, T&Cs, licenses and more can all be replaced with automation. If technology can take care of the mundane, repetitive tasks, that frees up your time to focus on more challenging, creative projects. 

 

Platforms like AUTTO are so easy to use that non-IT staff with no programming skills are being given the automations to identify and create – after all you are at the coal face of your business and know which processes need changing.  With AUTTO anyone can automate in a few hours with our simple no-code platform.  No technical expertise is required. You can take any of your unique business processes, easily learn the system and, like Lego building blocks, automate them.  

 

Automation is driving huge change in the employee experience of work. Perhaps as you return to work this year you should be asking your employer what investment they are making in automation – after all, it is in effect, an investment in you.

 

References:

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¹Office of National Statistics 2021
²O.C.Tanner Europe Global Culture Report 2021