The Operations of Legal

Since its inception some years ago, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), a non-profit community of legal professionals, has looked at legal departments as true business units whose internal operations must be optimized for efficiency and strategic relevance.

These teams don't simply solve the problems that their internal clients bring them - they anticipate and plan. They don't just try to run more efficiently - they innovate and experiment. They listen to their “customers” - the internal client teams - but don't limit their contributions simply to addressing their issues. Their numbers are few, but growing.

Roux-Chenu and de Rocca-Serra^[42] argue along the same lines and call for legal departments to become business creators:

Every Legal Department should be looking to not only be a business enabler but it should be a business creator in order to make a real difference. This is possible because very often the Legal Department is involved in contract negotiations with the whole ecosystem, in the case of Capgemini this would mean clients, procurement and alliances contracts. This unique central position allows Legal to have a 360° view, to foresee the needs of the market, and to develop solutions for its internal and external clients.

von Alemann^[43] stresses that both, the challenge and the opportunity to improve operations through communication with other business functions applies equally to legal departments in large corporations and in small and midsize enterprises (SME):

The need to constantly communicate with other departments of the company may be even more important for members of small legal departments than for members of bigger legal departments. That is because small legal departments - as opposed to large legal departments - usually do not have a formalized process for alignment with other departments.

Such constant communication of legal with other departments is facilitated by information technology (IT) and the increasing digitalization of legal service delivery. Although technology is only part of a systemic solution mix which must also include governance, process and people aspects, it is in this area that legal departments can have the greatest impact and fastest success for satisfying business expectations. The English anthropologist Gregory Bateson defined information as “a difference that makes a difference,” i.e. a change that matters to an observer. IT improves legal operations not only by providing the tools for scaling communica­tion, i.e. the exchange of information, but also by creating new insights and shifting basic forms of legal reasoning from humans to machines, as Zetterberg and Wojcik^[44] remark:

There is an entirely new type of software, very different than office automation or efficiency tools, and it changes the way lawyers work. It leverages a new set of technologies referred to as Artificial Intelligence (AI), and combines Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in a way to help lawyers change what they do in their engagement with clients, not just make what they do more efficient.

However, Matthaei and Bues^[45] point out that for the foreseeable future, lawyers will not be replaced by robots since the definition of a problem domain, i.e. the setting of a context within which legal meaning arises, requires a form of strong AI which currently is still beyond reach:

Al currently used in LegalTech tools is far away from strong AI. [Therefore, when we speak of AI in the context of LegalTech, we mean technologies which seem intelligent but have defined functions, i.e. weak AI.] It uses models of its problem domain given to it by programmers. Weak AI cannot perform autonomous reduction, whereas strong AI has a real understanding of a problem domain. Therefore, weak AI requires an expert who performs all required reduction in advance and implements it into a system. As a result, weak AI will only have a specific set of tasks it can solve.

4.3