Business Self Service#2 - Packaging legal solutions for your enterprise's business teams

This is the second in my series of blogs and I am grateful as ever to legal counsel and business colleagues who have contributed thinking.  

This episode examines what we mean by ‘business self service’ as a way of accessing legal services. The title could be misleading.

Quite a few people asked me whether a self service approach really serves the interests of consumers - meaning business colleagues.  Or is this approach a way of palming off boring but important legal tasks to business teams and allow privileged lawyers to remain in their ivory tower working on strategically interesting matters.

Its a fair question to ask.

The best answer I received was from Alistair Maiden (https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/alistair-maiden-04853927/?originalSubdomain=uk) currently CEO of Syke and previously a respected in-house counsel - his interview with me forms my next blog post.  He said a constant refrain from his business clients was ‘Alistair, I really rate your work but can’t get enough of your time’.  This is a problem shared by many businesses: a legal team packed with talent, but not enough people and hours in the day to service all demands.  

In this situation, there is a shared interest between inhouse lawyers and their clients to prioritise the time of lawyers and to give business colleagues knowledge and tools to handle routine legal work, particularly where this is embedded in their business role.    Business clients can access Alistair’s wisdom or template contracts without navigating his inbox.  

For me, business self service focuses on 3 key concepts.  (1) a sensible way of prioritising and allocating legal tasks (including understanding what tasks business teams can and want to undertake) (2) giving business teams easy to use tools and (3) establishing processes that define when legal matters should be delegated, sensible limits on the authority of business teams and good communication with legal.   

How does this work at a basic level?

Prioritisation - most legal teams have some form of work allocation or ‘front door’ to the legal team.  In the digital world, this can be as simple as a collaboration platform and smart workflows such as offered by Bryter - https://bryter.io/applications/intake-tools/.  

Contract triaging is another example as a way of sending draft contracts down the right ‘train tracks’ - for example (i) contracts below $x value or x years are handled solely by the business unit, (ii) others by a procurement or contract management team and (ii) others reviewed by legal.  

The ‘front door’ may therefore open onto a business self service tool rather than Alistair’s waiting room .  

Knowledge and training - can be pre-packaged and easily accessed by business colleagues. Examples include:

• Good housekeeping around document retention, particularly contracts.
• Training sales teams around their sales pitches, the ‘deadly sins’ to avoid contracts or why IP and its protection is so fundamental to business value these days.
• Regular workshops and surgeries to deal with frequently asked questions (FAQs).
• Training to embed the right practices in areas as anti-bribery, modern slavery and anti-trust - including war stories when it goes wrong

A key challenge is much of this is mundane; how to get business colleagues engaged and supportive?  Relevance, interesting and business oriented - are often cited.  Video is a great medium.  Getting buy-in from senior business managers and air time at business meetings.  Education around why these things affect the bottom line and business value.  For example, a sales team that is savvy about contracts will close deals faster, drive more revenue and generate more bonuses - simple.  

Easy to use business self service tools - I will go into more detail in later blog posts but for now highlight (i) knowledgement management and ‘frequently asked questions’ and (i) contracting being two key areas of recent progress.

Knowledge management and FAQs.

• A number of companies have mapped FAQs and developed standard responses.  Ideally, this is all easily accessed through the ‘front door’ - e.g. first room on the right for questions on data. This takes upfront investment but the benefit is one gets a faster and potentially more consistent response by these standard responses.
• Some have access to online solutions - for example asset managers needing to understand selling restrictions for investment products or traders of chemicals requiring information on chemicals handling. Law firm Allen & Overy’s AOSphere is one example.  https://www.allenovery.com/en-gb/global/about_us/online_services.  Such solutions often bypass the need to involve a lawyer. 
• Curated knowledge management systems (with google style searches) are often used but can be difficult to navigate.
• There is limited development so far on ‘AI legal chat bots’, but the potential is large, particularly with advances in natural language processing (such as GPT3 and Google’s Bert algorithm) and machine learning.  There is equal excitement and scepticism in this area - the same debate on GPT3’s automatically produced Guardian article (https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/09/08/the-guardians-gpt-3-generated-article-is-everything-wrong-with-ai-media-hype/) plays out in legal services.  A number of the banks and B2C businesses are looking to adapt their customer facing bots to legal questions.  A later blog post will look at examples.

The contract lifecycle

Business self service has always been a common feature of contracting.  Many contracts never touch legal, either being handled by trained contract managers or (if routine/lower value) business managers.   Business self service tools are accelerating this trend, particularly in the area of contract drafting and e-signature.  

• The front door may lead to a simple MS Word macro which allows you to generate an approved NDA or sales contract using a simple questionnaire.
• More advanced contract creation tools such as Contract Express (https://legal.thomsonreuters.com/en/products/contract-express) and Avvoka (https://avvoka.com/) take this to a new level and introduce the possibility of running the contract negotiation on a platform.  This in turn allows business managers to agree fall back positions without having to consult with legal.

• E-signature tools allow business managers to run even complex signing processes.
• The next frontiers in contracting are contract review, negotiation and management after signature.  Our own Lexical Labs fits into these segments (https://www.lexicallabs.com/)

Like legal chat bots, there are great opportunities but also challenges which I will explore in later posts.

Disputes - Most disputes (particularly in B2B companies) are handled by legal as they require specialist skills and are distractions to business managers.  However, the desire to speed-up dispute resolution and the trend towards business mediation and online dispute resolution will present opportunities for business teams to settle disputes.  In principle, if algorithms will decide cases, parties need only to present the business facts not the legal arguments.   

Conclusion - Enterprises are developing creative ways embedding legal work into the routine workflows of business managers.  This trend will accelerate with the expansion of cloud solutions and computing and advances in AI.  The major challenge is scaling the solutions and reducing the upfront investment in time and money to train personnel, change processes and implement tech. Another is making them easy to use and managing the risk associated with greater autonomy.  Later posts will highlight some case studies of these challenges being addressed and solved.