Talking ivory towers, artificial intelligence and perfect chemistry in the GC-law firm relationship with Jeevan D’Silva.
Ahead of the 14th Corporate Counsel & Compliance Exchange in April, we sat down with Jeevan D’Silva, General Counsel and Company Secretary at T-Systems Limited “T-Systems” to find out what is on his agenda for this year.
T-Systems provides support to companies in all industries. Some 47,800 employees combine industry expertise with ICT innovations to add significant value to its customers' core business all over the world. The corporate customers unit generated revenue of around 8.6 billion euros in the 2014 financial year.
Jeevan, you are the General Counsel and Company Secretary at T-Systems Limited. What's the biggest challenge, from your perspective, facing legal and compliance leaders in 2016?
That's a good question. 2016, I think, will require the legal industry as a whole to look at themselves and ask, how can I generate further value? Legal professionals should be constantly striving to become the leading business adjuncts in their professional line. You need to strive and visibly be seen to be doing exactly that. My view is that lawyers should not sit in an ivory tower and just give advice. Lawyers need to cross the boundary - they need to be making strategic decisions on how to develop, evolve, and grow business.
You will be joining us for a particularly exciting session, looking at the General Counsel law firm-relationship.
From your perspective, where is the disconnect between General Counsel and their external legal advisors?
Law firms have grown fat, in the past, on having a captured market in relation to corporates. As the importance of counsel within corporates has evolved, there has been a trend of a better calibre of lawyers taking up in-house roles, who can competently address questions that arise on the application of law. That has created a tension between in-house counsel and external counsel in relation to capability and the related price points. It is important for external counsel to begin to invest in their clients and better understand their clients' processes. They need to realise that the days when clients were prepared to pay per hour rates are gone.
External counsel need to come up with other pricing mechanisms to retain corporates, and show that they are adding value to the business development of corporates.
I was speaking with another senior General Counsel in Bonn the other day, and this was one of the things that came up. It's not that we object to paying the price for external counsel in external firms. What we object to is the fact that it goes through a junior review, a medium review, a senior review, a three person review, before it actually comes back to the client. So you are paying three times, when it could be done once. It may sound exaggerated, but you have to ask external counsel have to look at this from a GCs perspective.
Read the full interview to find out more about Jeevan D’Silva, General Counsel and Company Secretary at T-Systems views on how legal advice will change with the introduction of artificial intelligence into the legal sphere.
You can also view the full agenda for the Corporate Counsel and Compliance Exchange here