How to embrace technology to drive value in legal
By Cynthia Chan
The transformation journey of PwC’s international business reorganisations team shows how legaltech can transform and add value to the legal function.
In-house legal teams are under increasing pressure to deliver more value with fewer or limited resources and to act as strategic business partners rather than solely managing risk. This means having to think hard about how the team works and how new technology could drive efficiency and transform the legal function. It’s a challenge that PwC faces too, and the transformation journey of our legal international business reorganisations (IBR) team provides a case study in what is possible.
This is instructive because, as recent PwC research reveals, many in-house legal teams now see deploying technology within the legal function as a top priority. They recognise that technology-driven transformations can remove the more process-oriented aspects of legal work, freeing up the legal team’s time for more valuable and strategic work. Often, however, a lack of knowledge about how to transform can hold teams back.
How PwC’s IBR team approached transformation
For PwC’s IBR team, the goal was to develop and deploy technology tools and service delivery models that would drive more efficiency in delivering large-scale, multi-jurisdictional projects involving substantial amounts of documentation.
The IBR team embarked on its transformation journey with specific aims that have now realised significant benefits. Through the implementation of legal technology and service delivery models, IBR projects, and associated legal document drafting, reviews and signing, are now managed more effectively and delivered with greater accuracy and consistency, often in accelerated timeframes. Legaltech has also enabled the IBR team to concentrate its expertise on delivering more value-adding legal services to clients. Clients have benefitted from more seamless and efficient collaboration with the IBR team and the ability to navigate IBR projects more easily.
Several factors contributed to this successful transformation:
- Resourcing
- Changing ways of working
- Team buy-in and contribution
Resourcing
Adopting proprietary and third-party licensed technological tools required a financial investment, but also a time commitment from both lawyers in the IBR team and technologists. The process was a learning curve for all involved as a whole. Our lawyers identified the pain points in the process of producing large volumes of documentation to effect numerous transactions in IBR projects, often involving the use of repetitive data. To ensure the technology developed was fit for purpose, our lawyers worked with the technology team to explain legal processes and explore how to address these pain points that could then be built into software logic. The end results include improved accuracy, higher quality documentation, and enhanced and more efficient collaboration with clients.
Changing ways of working
Transformation also required the team to adapt to new ways of working and to adopt a growth mindset. The team has scaled up the use of service delivery centres to streamline aspects of delivering IBR projects when appropriate for clients. Investing time in building relationships and creating a sense of team with colleagues in these centres helped to embed working practices, enabling IBR projects to be delivered in an optimised way for clients. Appointing technology champions within the team to advocate the use of legaltech reinforced it as an integral part of the IBR team’s work. Tracking the usage of digital tools internally encouraged the team to adopt them and demonstrated the value internally.
Team buy-in and contribution
Leading from the top alone is not sufficient to design, roll out and embed transformed practices. The support of our lawyers was crucial for successful transformation; they were the ones who would use the technology to deliver projects within pressurised timeframes. Our lawyers’ legal expertise contributed to the design of effective tools and this, in turn, helped develop their own digital skills, as well as driving team engagement. The team owned the transformation process not only through involvement in the design of the technology but also through running training and drop-in sessions on the tools, as well as identifying further areas for development.
Embracing innovation as continuous process
Technology has now become embedded in the IBR team’s DNA. Having undergone this change, they recognise that transformation is an ongoing process rather than a one-off exercise. The lessons learnt during the transformation programme can help with future change. The constant re-evaluation of how work is done and an openness to harnessing new technologies to drive efficiency must increasingly become business as usual for legal teams.
Certainly, the work is continuing for PwC’s IBR team. Following our strategic alliance between PwC’s Legal and Tax businesses and the AI start-up, Harvey, we are looking to the next phase of evolving our legal technology through utilising the power of AI, alongside the legal expertise of our people, to drive even more value for clients.
How PwC can help
Our own technology-enabled transformation journey demonstrates the benefits available to legal teams from embracing change. We can partner with you to effect large, global IBR transactions, using technology to deliver projects with increased consistency and accuracy of documentation, greater efficiency and in accelerated timeframes.
Our technology can enable your teams to collaborate more effectively and make data-driven decisions in planning IBR projects. This can help your teams to act more quickly, delivering efficiency savings for the organisation’s tax and legal teams.
Contact us
International Business Reorganisations Leader, Global Legal Business Solutions Network (Solicitor), PwC United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0)7887 733399
