Sessions

The rapid onset of digital transformation over the last few months means we now live and work in a multiverse. Business is an aggregation of physical and digital spaces connected by tech without regard to geographic boundaries. That multiverse is changing and becoming more complicated at an exponential rate. We all need to interact with our colleagues, clients and contacts in a collaborative environment regardless of their location.

Fresh from winning the Financial Times’ Asia Pacific Most Innovative Lawyer 2020 Award, Nick’s session will help you get cut through for your career in this new environment.

Topics include:

• Creating your unique positioning in the hybrid online/offline world
• Marketing and building trust across platforms
• Strategies for effective legal innovation for everyone
• Forget the headlines – what legal tech really matters?
• Leveraging and partnering for lawyers
• Service delivery in a hybrid online/offline world
• The future of law (it’s way better than you think – but not for everyone)

Take this time to visit our rockstar exhibitors and see how they can help improve the way you do business.

Innovation and legal tech are commonly described as isolated topics. They are not. A host of other factors are also involved in the change dynamic – change management, diversity, new skills, customer-centricity, and use cases for data and technology are among them. This talk will provide the audience with an overview of how the pieces fit together and why they are all required to drive impactful change.

3 key takeaways for this session include:

1. Acquire a better understanding of the changing marketplace
2. Recognise that innovation is a process, not a technological solution
3. Acquire a foundation for assessing different areas of a business / operation to be assessed before identifying specific areas of change

Many legal functions focus primarily on output quality. This can be a costly proposition, especially when the legal function mostly provides services in a bespoke manner.

In times of shrinking margins, senior management expect their functions to increase efficiency and provide services at lower cost. For many years, legal functions were able to defend their cost base and only had to make symbolic contributions to these cost-cutting exercises.

More recently, this changed and legal departments, like all the other functions, faced difficulties in accomplishing budget cuts. Given that legal functions were able to defend their budgets for so long, many were not ready and able to respond to the more for less challenge in a sustainable manner. Instead, calls for cost containment were responded primarily by reducing headcount. And requests to decrease response time made the remaining legal resources work even harder.

This isn’t exactly the environment to kick-off fundamental reform programs, therefore the suggestion to all in-house legal resources to fix what ain’t broken (yet) as early as possible. Transformation programs work best if a function is still in control of its destiny and can formulate an intrinsic and purpose-driven reason for change.

The Novartis journey towards operational excellence:

A. Early successes
B. Stagnation
C. Acceleration

Recent significant news:

A. JPMorgan Chase & Co.
B. LawGeex
C. Welcome to Legal 2.0
D. Conclusion

Three questions – and your answers will optimally position your function for future success:

A. Service portfolio
B. Delivery framework
C. Sourcing model

3 key takeaways for this session include:

1. How to engage your lawyers to do things differently
2. Determining the core capabilities of your function
3. Running your function as a business

Justice Connect is a charity providing legal services across Australia. With seed funding from Google, Justice Connect ran a three-year, human-centred-design project known as the Gateway Project, resulting in the creation of 3 new products to support their work (justiceconnect.org.au/gateway).

The products have been delivered iteratively, with intense engagement with users and stakeholders throughout. In 2019, the Gateway Project was awarded a Gold Good Design Australia award in Social Impact, and the Victorian Premier’s Best in Class Design Award for Service Design. The products have played a central role in responses to the Australian bushfires and to COVID-19, with over 160 firms using the Pro Bono Portal to provide pro bono assistance, and hundreds of thousands of consumers engaging with Justice Connect’s online services since March this year.

This presentation reflects on the three-year process, offers learning and insights into setting up HCD projects for success, and tips and tricks for lawyers hoping to incorporate these methodologies into their work. It will cover:

• Overview of Justice Connect, the challenges and pain points they were seeking to address, and why they embarked on a human-centred design approach to improving the way they work
• Overview of human-centred design methodology
• Overview of the three digital products that were the output of the project, and summary of the impact and changes that they are seeing using these new products
• Discussion of challenges faced implementing HCD methodology in a legal setting
• Discussion of tips and tricks for adopting HCD in a cost restrained setting
• Overview of free and low-cost tools and resources that can be used to implement HCD and embed this practice into your work

3 key takeaways for this session include:

1. What is HCD, why does it matter, and how does it challenge traditional approaches to legal service delivery design?
2. How can HCD design be adopted at an organisation, what resistance could be expected to be faced, and how to navigate through this resistance
3. Strategies for implementing and embedding HCD in a cost-constrained environment

Live Q&A session with speaker Kate Fazio.

Live Q&A session with speaker Maurus Schreyvogel.

Shine Lawyers needed to evolve their customer onboarding process to put the customer at the heart of what they do.

They needed to identify an intelligent automation approach that used best of breed technology and could also deliver multiple automation solutions across the business that scaled - a solution that transformed the way employees worked alongside software bots.

In this practical case study, learn how Shine Lawyers combined a bright idea with an automation first mindset to deliver a seamless customer onboarding experience. You’ll hear how this project is enabling their lawyers to work better, smarter and more collaboratively. This session will cover:

• How Shine is using disruptive technologies and a high-automation and low-touch approach for onboarding
• How potential clients are getting onboarded quicker, better and faster
• How leading with a Hyperautomation strategy is maximising the potential for automation at Shine
• How an automation first mindset is the game changer in delivering scalable solutions across the business
• How a cohesive integration strategy across multiple tools and technologies drove compliance

When it comes to transformation and innovation, technology grabs all the headlines. As someone who has worked as a lawyer in the technology industry for 25 years, and worked in a business role leading a team of techies developing legal software, Peter appreciates how technology can really make a difference. But have we overlooked something in our preoccupation with technology? People. Technology may be augmenting how lawyers work but very few lawyers have fundamentally changed what they do. They may have improved their way of working but have they transformed it? Looking at this issue from a different angle, few would argue with the proposition that individual lawyers are the number one asset for law firms and for in-house legal teams. Yet, the vast majority of lawyers are not making the necessary investment of time and money to enhance that asset – their skills, knowledge and expertise. Despite all the evidence of the crucial importance of upskilling and on focussing training and development beyond legal knowledge and skills, very few lawyers are doing so in a structured manner. To compound the problem, most firms and legal teams don't have a comprehensive, holistic plan to support this human transformation. Typically, such training and development is viewed as discretionary and one of the first things to be cut when times are tough and budgets tight. As a result, the most important asset for individual lawyers, and for firms and legal teams, will depreciate and make it virtually impossible for lawyers to become more adaptable, resilient and to transform the way they work. This session will explore human transformation and the role technology can play in facilitating it.

3 key takeaways for this session include:

1. Why do lawyers need to transform as opposed to continuing to improve?
2. What does human transformation mean for lawyers working in firms and legal teams?
3. How can lawyers transform?

In considering the last question, the session will highlight the importance of frameworks and discuss the three leading frameworks for lawyers – the T-shaped Lawyer, the O-shaped Lawyer and the Delta Model.

Ab and Kim explore how to build a business case, drive adoption, and sustain engagement post-roll-out for innovation or technology initiatives. Kim Lewis is the Legal Technology and Transformation Manager at Gilbert + Tobin, and Abhijat Saraswat is the VP of International Business at Litera.