Bloomberg Law
April 27, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

Genuine Collaboration Between Law Firms and GCs: The Most Innovative Solution

Matt Meyer
CEO

The pace of General Counsel (GC) influence on the businesses they serve is evolving more rapidly than ever. The role and operational capability of corporate legal departments has made a step change through aligning the activity of internal lawyers with the strategic goals of the business they support. This has often involved a philosophical shift away from providing belt and braces risk coverage to harnessing a blend of skills (legal and non-legal), technology and process design to focus on real risk and priority issues.

Put another way, progressive corporate legal departments are focusing on building value for their organisations rather than just managing perceived risk. They are looking at new products and services and not just more efficient ways of doing what lawyers have always done.

Talented GCs who can communicate, operate pragmatically and behave commercially have been rightly catapulted in to prominent business roles. They are now a core member of senior management, driving the corporate approach to risk in the context of opportunity, not just the law.

Equally there are talented external lawyers who spend as much time understanding their clients and their priorities as they do practicing law. It is a combination of these two talented groups from new law that represent the low hanging fruit for corporate legal departments hungry to drive innovation and improvement. Taking advantage of this combination requires both communities to tear up the rule book on buying and selling legal services and start inventing solutions together.

There is no doubt that innovative GCs with a clear sense of business priority are successfully driving an innovation agenda but I challenge the assumption that they embrace innovation better than law firms. In fact, the most innovation solutions I am seeing in the market are collaborations involving internal and external lawyers who are being pragmatic about problems that require a solution.

There is no doubt that there a lot of law firms that have very little idea of how the market is changing around them or where the real opportunities lie, but equally there are some great examples of innovation in law firms from the deployment of technology and AI through to new commercial models underpinning relationships and investment, and incubation of legal tech. It is also worth challenging the assumption that all the answers for the law firms lie in the hands of “Big Law”.

In 2016, we began a partnership with a legal tech startup to change the way businesses make contractual decisions and optimise risk management. By using predictive and behavioural analytics, machine trained text mining and data visualisation the joint venture enables businesses to understand and transform the quality of their deals – enabling lawyers to focus on the genuinely complex issues they were trained to handle and minimise time wasted on mundane document reviews.

It’s about doing new things in the risk and decision making fields augmented by collaborative solution design between law firms and legal departments, the availability of new data and a reinvention of the role at the heart of the decision making.

Legal departments and law firms can bring the best ideas to market and build value themselves. Most problems are not unique after all. Collaborative problem solving is key to the innovation that is needed.

Matt Meyer is the CEO of international law firm, Taylor Vinters. For more information visit:www.taylorvinters.com

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