This latest edition of the FT's monthly Accelerating Business series for 2024 focuses on the legal operations specialists who’re using their technological expertise to support corporations' in-house lawyers.
The series examines how lawyers, managers and legal tech providers are leveraging the newest resources to maintain pace with business needs: This time we profile five experts in legal operations. They stand out for his or her efforts to totally leverage technology, particularly artificial intelligence, and expand the role and influence of this area of work of in-house legal teams. The five were chosen by FT research partner RSGI.
Rosario Alonso
Head of Legal Innovation Center – Iberdrola
A contract processing hub arrange last 12 months has turn into central to the Spanish-based energy company's reorientation of its legal department.
Iberdrola's Legal Innovation Center, led by Rosario Alonso, automates and digitizes all parts of the contract process. His tasks include storing, designing, negotiating with suppliers and electronically signing around 28,000 contracts per 12 months. More than 5,000 people worldwide use it usually.
By automating tasks and exchanging data more efficiently, Alonso says, Iberdrola has been capable of reduce the time it takes to barter and sign contracts by greater than a 3rd. This is at the very least partly because “everyone answerable for the contract has the identical information at the identical time.”
Other advantages of this digitalization initiative include an electronic path for contract updates and higher cross-departmental collaboration, for instance between legal services and general business, tax and cybersecurity teams.
Alonso, who has worked at Iberdrola for nearly twenty years and previously provided legal services to departments reminiscent of IT and insurance, says colleagues from other areas of the corporate usually call her asking for advice on digitizing business processes. “The company has modified its vision of legal services,” she notes, adding that she particularly enjoys the “continually recent challenges” that include transforming Iberdrola’s legal function.
Antonello Gargano
Head of Legal and Compliance, Strategy Implementation and Chief of Staff – ASML
ASML’s legal operations team is fully focused on generative AI. The Dutch chip-making equipment provider uses several AI tools, including those from legitimate AI start-ups Harvey and Microsoft's AI-powered assistant Copilot. Tasks range from answering questions on company policies to finding details about legal contracts.
Some of ASML's legal and compliance specialists have even began using Harvey to arrange for legal motion or to evaluate whether the corporate is in compliance, Gargano says.
These AI projects were the results of a legal team brainstorming session last 12 months: “We had 33 ideas,” Gargano recalls. The resulting AI strategy is overseen by a task force of around eight individuals who test the newest tools.
Because Harvey is trained in extensive case law, he has “immense expertise,” Gargano says. He estimates that through the use of Harvey and other AI tools, ASML has helped his employees complete legal and compliance tasks between 15 and 20 percent faster. And for legal tasks that require more research – for instance, in relation to anti-bribery or anti-corruption regulations or jurisprudence – the time savings are “much greater”.
Gargano also emphasizes that AI is only a tool and the outcomes are checked by people. He doesn’t expect this to exchange ASML employees.
Leo Murgel
Senior Vice President, Office of Legal and Corporate Affairs – Salesforce
Salesforce, considered one of the world's largest enterprise software corporations, has deployed its proprietary technology and AI tools to assist its legal team increase productivity and reduce spending on external services.
In the last 18 months, the corporate has automated routine tasks through the use of assorted legal AI tools, explains Léo Murgel. For example, the California-based company's team uses a legal research platform to summarize the U.S. privacy regulations that Salesforce software must comply with, which vary by state. Salesforce also uses AI-powered software to translate its documentation.
The company's legal department uses Salesforce AI-powered customer relationship software to assist keep track of the a whole bunch of law firms and legal service providers it engages world wide. The AI summarizes Salesforce's business relationships with you – for instance by comparing costs and services.
All AI-generated legal information utilized by Salesforce has been verified for accuracy, Murgel notes. For example, AI research or answers to legal questions are based on large legal databases maintained by Salesforce providers that contain links to legal rulings for confirmation.
Using AI in this manner was a key think about Salesforce's ability to save lots of greater than $5 million in outside legal services spend and higher manage legal vendors within the last fiscal 12 months, Murgel says.
And generative AI has already had a “profound” impact on the best way Salesforce’s legal department works, helping it extract meaning and knowledge from unstructured data like documents, emails and contracts.
“In an area like legal . . . Well over 90 percent of our data is unstructured,” notes Murgel. “There really is not any other team in a company that’s so dominated by unstructured data.”
Barbara Rogers
Vice President, Legal, Strategy and Transformation – Honeywell
Honeywell, the U.S.-based industrial conglomerate with products starting from thermostats to aircraft engines, launched a worldwide project this 12 months to link contract, financial and customer data to streamline its contracting process. The core goal is to extract data from contracts in the corporate's own management system after which connect it to almost 20 other IT systems from multiple vendors.
Honeywell's comprehensive management system stores roughly 90,000 procurement and sales contracts with a complete contract value of roughly $4.5 billion per 12 months.
The project will likely be led by Barbara Rogers, who arrange the corporate's legal operations team in September and previously held senior positions in legal, procurement and human resources.
Until now, the pc systems for business billing, customers and contracts weren’t fully integrated, says Rogers. “Someone would must take an order or an invoice and return into the (contract management) system and see if they might work out what contract it was.”
She admits that the IT integration, which began this 12 months and is predicted to be accomplished in early 2026, has faced some challenges. One convinced employees to strictly adhere to the final payment terms in contracts, while one other trained AI to extract the suitable data from IT systems. Overall, nevertheless, progress was smooth.
One advantage she expects will likely be a discount within the time needed for contract negotiations and signing: initially it can be shortened by at the very least one to 2 days, and later by as much as five days. Although it stays difficult to accurately quantify the projected improvements, Rogers says the measures could save Honeywell between $10 million and $50 million in working capital – a “very conservative estimate.”
Petra Stirling
Director of Operations, Risk and Transformation – Westpac Legal
With greater than twenty years of experience in skilled and financial services, Petra Stirling's roles have often focused on providing leadership in innovation.
Her most up-to-date roles include planning and overseeing digital transformation at Westpac, considered one of Australia's leading banks, where she leads the legal department. She has led several modern digital projects on the bank, most recently the introduction of generative AI for drafting and agreeing contracts with suppliers.
Westpac's Legal Operations team began experimenting with several generative AI software products this 12 months.
While Stirling warns that it continues to be “early days,” he says the outcomes to date are promising. For example, the team can review an initial contract as much as 15 percent faster than if the lawyers did the review themselves.
“Productivity improvements are all about speed and efficiency,” says Stirling. “We see significant opportunity in giving our very experienced and talented lawyers the chance to expedite the preparation of, for instance, an initial review of a contract with a 3rd party.”
Given the chance of generative AI “hallucinations” – when the technology fabricates information and presents it as fact – all AI output is reviewed by the corporate's lawyers for accuracy and ensures the AI is used ethically, she adds.
When using AI, it will be significant to maintain the “lawyer up thus far,” emphasizes Stirling.
The bank's legal operations team has also used generative AI to provide a guide to Westpac's preferred position on various contractual and regulatory issues, reminiscent of payment terms and cybersecurity.
And the bank is testing using generative AI to create videos that designate legal processes – reminiscent of contract evaluation – to colleagues in other business areas, based on short scripts from Westpac lawyers. Generative AI “democratizes and, oddly, humanizes some facets of the law for a broader business audience,” Stirling notes.
