As a trusted partner to many corporate legal leaders, what are some major changes you are witnessing regarding the practice and business of law?
In-house legal is undergoing an unprecedented transformation. The modern general counsel or chief legal officer role is evolving from legal advisor into something much more. These leaders are playing a more strategic and influential role with the C-Suite to help make decisions that not only protect the business with stronger risk management, but guide growth and profitability. Demonstrating value beyond cost containment and risk avoidance is key. Our customers want to make smarter decisions and drive better business outcomes. They want to increase their relevancy and demonstrate influence as a strategic partner. The legal teams we speak to are looking to be more proactive especially in identifying and responding to threats and meeting regulatory obligations to avoid financial and reputational risk to the business. Departmental priorities are heavily focused on increasing productivity to focus
attention on higher value work as well as to increase the speed and quality of service to the business.
New risks to the business and data related challenges are contributing to a shift in the role and responsibilities of the general counsel and its department priorities. There is a significant focus on new risk areas around data privacy, cyber threats, and regulatory compliance. The focus that we have been witnessing was corroborated in the recent survey, The Modern General Counsel Survey, that we conducted with CCBJ. Respondents in that survey noted role expansion in related areas around compliance monitoring, data privacy management and cybersecurity planning. Beyond new risks, heightened regulatory scrutiny on anti-corruption and misconduct is on the rise. With dawn raids and on-the-spot investigations making a comeback in-house legal teams are focused on leveraging data analysis and analytics to inform risk management processes. Legal teams are also under pressure to control costs and manage risk amidst increasing data
volumes. Increasing data volume and the complexity of information produced is making it harder to identify, manage, remediate, and report on litigation and compliance activities.
How is innovation being used to meet goals and departmental objectives?
Managing data complexity and data handling activities, regulatory, social, and economic shifts are making the old ways of operating legal departments untenable. The most successful leaders understand that leveraging technology is a necessity rather than a luxury – and making it increasingly clear they need innovation to increase productivity and improve performance. They are also looking to exploit a wide range of critical technologies and services to maximize ROI and minimize risk to reshape the practice and business of law. To optimize operations, in-house legal must automate key activities using AI tools to drive productivity. From a governance perspective, they must exert greater control of organizational data to manage and mitigate risk. With the AI-driven legal platform from OpenText, general counsel will be able to rapidly gain insights, drive better business strategy and help fellow executives make good risk-adjusted decisions, improve litigation strategy, and monitor compliance.
What kind of support does the legal department need to execute on its technology mission and goals?
Achieving departmental goals or successfully executing on key initiatives not only requires close collaboration with its departmental subject matter experts (e.g., legal operations team), but requires a strong partnership with the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the IT department. As the organizational leader for defining the technology strategy, the CIO provides indispensable digital transformation leadership to the GC who wants to facilitate innovation for their organizations and ensure that its departmental strategy aligns with the broader organizational technology roadmap. This may include establishing integrations with key applications, reassessing work dynamics, and driving secure and compliant data handling.In recent years, the CIO is emerging as a critical player in identifying and developing solutions to digitally transform the legal department while ensuring the organization is getting full value from its technology This includes recognizing that automation and other innovations must be implemented to increase productivity and improve performance and collaboration. In fact, in our survey, 72 percent of respondents stated that CIOs play a critical or important role in delivering on departmental legal innovation strategy. And over 40 percent of CCBJ survey respondents indicated that a lack of IT advocacy and collaboration is preventing general counsel from implementing technology.
Critical areas of CIO support generally include: (a) identifying the right technology options to support needs/requirements, (b) mapping solution needs
to existing systems, (c) evaluating the full value of technology options including ROI and (d) supporting user acceptance. Moreover, we have also seen the CIO
play a larger role in supporting legal around data privacy management, cybersecurity planning, incident and data breach response, information governance, and other compliance monitoring activities. The days of operating in silos are long over. As a result, the GC and CIO must establish a strong partnership
to improve alignment around corporate strategy, departmental priorities, and navigating data related challenges associated with complying with legal and
regulatory obligations – including processes, such as setting legal holds and data collections, which are an important part of both records management and
litigation discovery.
How can OpenText help enterprise legal leaders support their departmental priorities and strategy?
To shape the modern practice of law, today’s general counsel must better leverage information and technology that delivers the total legal experience to all levels of the department who play a role in strategy, operational excellence, and delivery execution. Having this total, end-to end, single provider experience transforms an organization from a less mature Legal 1.0 to become Legal 2.0 – increasing department relevancy by empowering smarter business decisions, using AI led tools to drive productivity, and optimize operations by maximizing ROI and minimizing risk to ensure greater governance and process control.We help legal leaders deliver speed to facts, optimize operations, manage risk, and improve outcomes. Our Legal 2.0 platform transforms enterprise legal departments by delivering intelligent, AI-based solutions and trusted services spanning all enterprise legal data and information management needs. The platform leverages AI and automation to increase efficiencies and proactively manage and mitigate risk. Legal departments can optimize workflow, enhance collaboration, and increase productivity within their legal teams. Centralized access to legal resources and repositories facilitates effective knowledge
sharing, repurposing work to expedite responses to litigation or regulatory requests and ensuring consistency and defensibility across the organization. Using this platform, legal team can also proactively manage new and emerging sources of risk, manage outside counsel spend and budget control for cases, meet stakeholder obligations with constrained resources, and effectively defend compliance program activities.
Can you talk a little more about the benefits of your platform?
Our composable intelligent AI powered platform and value add services support and simplify a full spectrum of critical legal tasks and use cases to meet legal and compliance obligations. Key use cases we support include eDiscovery, investigations, legal content management, knowledge management, information governance, data privacy and protection, data breach response, and contract intelligence. We leverage a wide range of core technologies including AI/Analytics, Security, Content Management, and Process automation to address information management needs. These tools deliver on a broad range of core capabilities.For eDiscovery, we provide comprehensive end-to-end solutions that extend beyond isolated point solution. Our capabilities cover the entire flow of information across the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) – supporting all phases of eDiscovery from identification and preservation, data collections, processing, analysis, review, and production. Our advanced analytics and AI help legal leaders to assess case merits, develop strategy, and find
facts faster to make risk-adjusted decisions. Not only do we have the technical breadth, but we have flexible deployment options including off cloud, private cloud, SaaS, and hybrid. We also offer trusted experts and best in class legal managed services that augment our technology capabilities in the areas of digital forensics and collections, investigations, breach response and reporting, managed document review, and subject rights request reviews including DSARs.
How is OpenText looking at GenAI to address customer needs?
Very carefully. AI is the key disruptor teams are focused on right now that is changing the legal landscape forever. Customers continue to evaluate its use to increase productivity, improve decision-making and to free up resources to focus on high-value work. With the steadily increasing interest in ChatGPT, customers are now asking us what our plans are to develop or integrate generative AI into our products.
We believe in deploying AI responsibly for our customers to ensure that our AI-enabled solutions are reliable, defensible, and deliver proven efficiency and cost savings. As a market leader in AI and advanced analytics, we have a deep understanding of market needs. This includes the importance of process defensibility and leveraging techniques to improve accuracy. We also have a strong track record of implementing AI responsibly. Our eDiscovery solutions have a long history of incorporating advanced analytics and machine learning to dramatically improve review efficiency and lower costs while ensuring
defensibility of process. We have been leaders in Technology Assisted Review (TAR) for eDiscovery – from first-generation TAR protocols to TAR 2.0 featuring
continuous active learning for improved speed and efficiency combined with a unique contextual diversity algorithm that eliminates the risk of missing relevant documents. We also incorporated our proprietary AI technology for further data enrichment by unlocking the value hidden in unstructured text - extracting terms, concepts, entities, sentiments, emotions to yield rapid insights and create document summaries for context, sentiment analysis for attitude and emotion, and fact vs. opinion analysis to test assertions.
We are taking this same measured approach with Generative AI. We are committed to deliver ultimate value to our customers rather than just adopting generative AI to make news headlines. There is limited value beyond bragging rights in being first and so we have been careful to avoid getting caught up in the hype and to make bold statements about the power and utility of generative AI without ensuring that our tools can consistently and accurately solve real problems. There are too many concerns over generative AI and large language models (LLMs) around ethical issues, misuse, bias, accuracy, privacy, confidentiality, and security to not work
exhaustively to ensure we apply it appropriately and safely.
exhaustive testing and transparency. Legal teams will need to know the parameters, models, prompts, and chaining techniques that were used. Corporations will want to validate anonymization techniques and workflows to make sure that the new tools honor their own data privacy concerns. Many combinations of fact
checking, regressions, and multiple model comparisons will be required to tackle increasingly large data sets. Additionally, if used improperly, third-party LLMs can
present significant security and privacy risks. Sharing certain types of data or sharing personal, confidential, or sensitive business data with a third-party tool could result in a regulatory violation and such information, used in prompts, may be incorporated into responses for users outside the enterprise. Moreover, any data leaks could expose information inappropriately to the public causing regulatory risk and reputational harm.
OpenText has introduced our first products called Aviator, focused on leveraging GenAI in our technology across our ecosystem. The beginning of the Aviator for Legal journey is focused on enhancing our market leading eDiscovery offerings. This includes using key case documents such as complaints or briefs to identify a set of associated documents that are likely important to the case, then creating a LLM generated case summary from those documents. In addition, Aviator for Legal will provide intuitive, plain language summaries of concept groups to deliver rapid data insights and enhance user experience. We expect these to be available soon as part of a later release.
Any final thoughts for the future?
Absolutely. Forward-thinking lawyers are already creating high-performance, highly flexible legal departments. Most general counsel, if they have not already, are very much aware of the need to be strategically relevant to thrive in this new digital age. A stronger voice, greater agility and innovation are necessary to address changing expectations, increased volume and complexity of data, new regulations, and cost pressures. We play a small role in enabling those leaders and their teams to be successful by helping them to make smarter, data driven decisions to tackle emerging legal, compliance, and regulatory challenges.
Published February 5, 2024.
