Transforming life sciences legal departments: Harnessing the power of Generative AI

Progress in the life sciences industry today lies at the intersection of science, law and technology. Scientists drive innovation, General Counsel navigate the complex legal and regulatory landscape, and technology enables them both.

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In particular, Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), with its ability to create original content based on learned patterns, can, for example: synthesize information from vast datasets to help predict potential new drug compounds and create personalized treatment plans; help accelerate regulatory compliance by identifying requirements and potential gaps in company policy; supercharge the marketing process, helping to ensure that marketing campaigns adhere to regulatory and company guidance; accelerate intellectual property portfolio management; review and analyze legal contracts; and help enable quicker responses to complex legal questions.

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However, while the potential of GenAI in life sciences is exciting, its application needs structure and guidance to ensure transparent ethical usage, data security, and broader-based utility for more complex tasks in the legal department. General Counsel have a unique position in their company's enterprise wide GenAI strategy: they can be both an advisor on responsible GenAI deployment, and a primary recipient of its operational advantages.

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Embracing technology

Following the market release of GenAI, many institutions saturated news cycles with the opinion that law could be one of the most impacted sectors by the new technology, with nearly half of legal tasks being susceptible to automation. ?Life sciences General Counsel and their teams are contending with a changing global regulatory landscape; technological advancements requiring new skill sets; a shifting talent market demanding increased professional development; and greater demand from executive leadership to support revenue growth. Increasingly, they must accomplish more with less, with Thomson Reuters reporting that 85% of legal departments are focused on controlling costs.[i]

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Many law departments are identifying technology as one of the most important components to improve productivity, outcomes and employee satisfaction. Legal departments are hiring legal technology or innovation leaders, procuring a wide variety of technology solutions, and increasing technology integrations with processes across departments.

GenAI: Opportunities and challenges

Legal teams can leverage GenAI in numerous ways, including contract analysis; legal drafting; legal research; legal chatbots; knowledge management; marketing materials review; legal due diligence; compliance marketing; and regulatory/law enforcement responses.

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GenAI brings both opportunities and challenges to life sciences legal departments.

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Opportunities

???????? Cost savings – rethinking the legal services delivery model. GenAI makes it possible to augment legal process and advisory, allowing greater efficiency and accuracy, and resulting in significant cost savings. It allows General Counsel to rethink how legal work gets done, and to challenge outside counsel to demonstrate their value with technology. With legal being one of the most GenAI-impacted industries, correlative value should be extracted by transforming how work is delivered.

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???????? Efficiency. GenAI can meaningfully improve process times, transforming what used to be months of knowledge curation and refinement into weeks, and hours of research and drafting into minutes. For example, it can more quickly generate and review contracts, pour through tomes of advertising materials reviews, synthesize emerging regulations, and help generate guidance for regulatory filings.

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???????? Tech stack simplification and enterprise alignment. Just as GenAI presents an opportunity to rethink the legal services delivery model, so does it present an opportunity to re-evaluate the legal department’s technology strategy. What capabilities exist across the current tech stack that are better served in domain-specific, versus enterprise-grade GenAI applications? With legal being an integral part of GenAI enterprise adoption and benefits realization, it can play a key role in the technology’s development, while benefiting from enterprise programs that propel the same.

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???????? Accuracy – data is king. GenAI can process vast amounts of data with high precision, reducing the possibility of errors, aiding in legal research, and ensuring compliance with regulations. At maturity, I believe that GenAI will produce the great democratization of knowledge. Legal departments possess years of advice from some of the top law firms in the world. When that data is organized, in-house counsel can converse with it, before asking the same question to a $1,000/hour law firm.

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???????? Strategic focus. GenAI can free up time for legal professionals to focus on more strategic matters that require a higher level of expertise, rather than routine or repetitive tasks. This will contribute to their professional development and value proposition. Attorneys can dive deeper into their expertise, build stronger relationships with the business, and become an integrated proponent of how the company creates value.

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Challenges

?????? Adoption and change management. GenAI is not only a transformation of technical capabilities, but a transformation of how lawyers work and share information with one another. Successful implementation requires a clear strategy, employee buy-in with aligned incentives, and both executive and meaningful technical support.

??????? Data privacy. Legal departments are data-rich environments, processing some of the most sensitive information. A sound data strategy and strategic roadmap can unlock GenAI programs, without sacrificing data integrity and protocols. However, this can be particularly complex in global operations where different regions have varying laws.

??????? Evolving regulatory landscape. The laws for the application and ultimate liability of using this technology are being crafted in real time. This makes the early education and involvement of legal leaders in GenAI programs all the more essential. The potential benefits of this technology to the corporation at large are readily understood, and the legal department is in the driver’s seat for the responsible navigation of its use and application.

???????? Job changes and employee morale. These systems may replace certain tasks traditionally done by people. This can lead to job role changes and potential employee resistance. The most critical effort that must be undertaken proactively is to define what the workforce will do with the time that this technology saves. Incentives alignment is critical, as these systems can help carve out time for health and wellness, and better, more complex work, or simply enable minimal augmentation of the work force to meet increasing demand.

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???????? Ongoing management. GenAI systems need continuous updates and management to ensure that they are operating correctly and securely and using the most current information. In the context of a legal department, this requires not only ongoing technical expertise and data management, but also legal subject matter expertise to ensure GenAI systems persistently have the best, most usable information.

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A way forward: Lead with value

As it becomes more integrated in the life sciences field, GenAI will engender discussions related to ethical use, malpractice liability, data security, and bias in algorithmic decision-making. But with time, it will help improve the practice of law, eliminating mundane tasks, saving time, improving output, and making room for more challenging work and professional development.

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In the meantime, life sciences General Counsel and their teams should consider reinventing their technology strategy, moving away from a legal-specific approach to a newly combined legal-enterprise technology strategy. They should consider rethinking legal services delivery; transforming the talent model; shifting the technology strategy; guiding policy and risk; and fostering responsible AI.

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But how?

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1.?????? Identify needs and objectives. Identify specific areas where GenAI could be most beneficial. Define clear goals for what you aim to achieve with its implementation. A good question to ask yourself: What is my organization’s value proposition and how can GenAI help?

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2.?????? Understand current processes. Gain a detailed understanding of your current processes, workflows, and systems. Identify areas that have potential for automation or optimization. These processes should include those handled by outside counsel.

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3.?????? Budget with the big picture in mind. In determining the budget for GenAI adoption, remember to consider not just the cost of the software, but also implementation, training, and maintenance. Consider also that these are enterprise-level initiatives, and that legal departments can benefit from participating in them, as well as serving as a role model for technology adoption.

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4.?????? Select a vendor who is a true partner. Research and select a suitable partner whose capabilities match the needs and goals of your legal department and organization. This meaningful transformation effort is truly a team sport.

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5.?????? Unify your data ecosystem. Data is the most critical component of unlocking this technology for your department and organization. With legacy legal technology operating in more classically structured data environments, and GenAI presenting the opportunity to process large amounts of unstructured data, unifying your data ecosystem is essential. You will need a clear identification of the questions your data needs to answer, and the outputs it must be capable of creating.

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6.?????? Train for success. Employees need to learn how to interact with and use the system effectively. This includes understanding its benefits, potential limitations, and how it can augment, rather than replace their work.

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7.?????? Just start. Start with the data you can access now for pilot projects. The time-to-value in working with this technology is meaningfully faster than traditional custom application development. With the likely ultimate ubiquity of this technology across the working world, it is essential to start now, and start learning.

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8.?????? Monitor performance and improve. Regularly assess the system's performance against established metrics and goals. Make necessary improvements or adaptations based on evolving needs and emerging technologies.

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9.?????? Stay on top of ethical and legal considerations. Continuously monitor regulatory and ethical considerations that come with GenAI use, ensuring responsible AI governance, privacy compliance, bias prevention, and transparency about its usage.

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10.?? Communicate. Regularly communicate with stakeholders and the broader organization about the GenAI strategy, progress and benefits. Classic change management and openness towards feedback will help to ensure the team's buy-in.

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Most importantly, remember that these tools are designed to assist and augment legal work. They do not replace lawyers’ education, experience and insights. Furthermore, attorneys have never been more important in the responsible development and application of advanced technology. This presents a unique opportunity for General Counsel to have a seat at the table in setting sound enterprise technology strategy. It is critical, however, to appreciate just how multi-disciplinary this journey will be. Successful teams will incorporate deep technical expertise, legal domain knowledge, and business understanding.

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It is incumbent upon us all in the legal industry to create an ecosystem that provides the necessary foresight, guidance, capabilities, and technology to make us each successful in our GenAI journey. Ultimately, this will lead to better legal advice, better outcomes, and better careers for legal professionals. We only have to get started and keep going.

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This blog includes information gathered from Ernst & Young's GenAI think tank, EYQ.

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The views reflected in this blog are the views of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the global EY organization or its member firms.

[i] “2022 Legal Department Operations Index: Seeking stability amid uncertainty,” 2022, via Thomson Reuters Institute.