Probably because I didn’t know any better at the time, and unlike the majority of my graduating law school class, I started my legal career in-house. Due to the circumstances of my first real legal job back in 2000, I became GC (whilst 100 percent not qualified for that title) within weeks of starting at a Fintech Dotcom in London. Since then, I’ve spent only one year working at a law firm.

The old-fashioned model

Twenty-five years ago, in-house lawyers did not receive the respect of the legal profession that they do today. Going in-house meant a lawyer was “downshifting”, seeking a less stressful environment and undertaking less intellectually demanding work.

It sounds ridiculous now. Just as it does now, working as an in-house lawyer back then meant becoming a deeply engaged business partner to your organization, which actually resulted in a far more intense work experience. Everyone who has gone in-house knows the dramatic shift that happens when you go from the hallowed halls of a law firm, in which distance and time exists between you and your clients, to a fast-moving in-house environment – one where your client is right there in the room with you.

The technology of the day seems as archaic now as that old-fashion thinking – we were reliant on email, photocopier and a fax machine, a Blackberry was a later major upgrade. Effectively, we had no legal technology at all. I can still recall making a sign to put above the fax machine at QVC UK that instructed staff not to fax contracts without first having them reviewed by the legal department (me).

Back in those days the in-house profession was relatively early in its evolution. I was QVC UK’s first in-house lawyer and GC, a role I’d liken to that of air traffic controller. I understood my role as in-house counsel to be primarily spotting and mitigating risk. Spot issues and call in the experts. Is it a trademark issue? Call a trademark lawyer. Is it an employment issue? Loop in an employment lawyer. I took for granted that a law firm lawyer’s advice was required, and I got that advice in the most effective way I could and implemented it. So, although I was deeply engaged with the business, I wasn’t deeply engaged in determining its strategy.

That model of operating seems archaic now, too. I was doing my best to be an integrated business partner, but I didn’t have a role model for what it meant to be a great in-house legal leader, and I didn’t have the tools necessary to drive operational effectiveness – or even really know what that meant.

Game changer

My heavy reliance on external counsel changed when I went to work for Amazon as a contractor in London in 2009. I was working on a project and asked which law firm I should call for advice. “Use Google,” I was told. This was actually very beneficial to my practice as it freed me from my lack of self-confidence and dependence on external counsel. I did my own research online and was given the opportunity to provide guidance to the business without perfect information or a law firm partner’s approval. Almost equally impactful in my development was the clear desk policy which pushed me to go fully digital at a time where many lawyers were still operating on paper (and still are).

Evolving my in-house practice with technology was a breakthrough for me but I can see now that I was still operating “manually” with tools that were not fit-for-purpose. In my next role at eBay in Silicon Valley, I spent my early years building a legal function primarily using email and word processing software – powering my way through NDAs, SoWs, and MSAs. This way of working meant I had no quantitative information to show how much work we had done and whether it was impactful or aligned with the business’s objectives.

Instead, most information was qualitative, obtained well after the fact, and inaccurate – it didn’t reflect what was going on in the business. Which was not a good look in a tech business replete with strategists, analysts, and data scientists.

After a couple of years at eBay, I was promoted to Head of Legal for the eBay Classifieds Group and eventually became a member of the business’s leadership team. It was paramount to me that I would run my legal function as best in class in the manner of my business and functional peers. I’d done a lot of research on benchmarking – what does it mean to be a great legal function? – but the lack of data on the subject was frustrating and I didn’t have anything to compare our impact against. For example, information about how many contracts we’d executed, their value and how we used our budget internally and externally wasn’t readily available. I needed to interrogate HR, Finance, and Operations teams to source the data.

This unwieldy process spurred me into action, and I began building, albeit manually, a recurring reporting system – using spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides to create graphs and charts that I was able to include in presentations to the business’s leadership.

Legal tech drives professional evolution

When eBay North America Legal rolled out a contract management system (CMS), my team and I leveraged it to build a centralized commercial contract function for our international business. It was a significant undertaking that involved centralizing commercial contracting from 17 countries, including change management and rationalizing languages, jurisdictions and legal practice cultures.

The implementation gave us real-time visibility into our workload, internal customers, and other valuable metrics. Most importantly, implementing technology gave us the opportunity to set a baseline and make continuous, scalable, and sustainable improvements to our operational effectiveness. We were able to both have a significant impact on business velocity and communicate that impact in the language of the business.

The next step was to combine the information from our contract management system, including data on our workflow automation, with our manually collected data from legacy point solutions like the e-billing tool and from other functions such as HR and Finance. I then manually analyzed and visualized that data which allowed me to communicate the impact of our function using the language of the business rather than the language of the academic or legal worlds.

The implementation of fit-for-purpose technology is crucial to the evolution of in-house legal practice as we cannot meet our business partners expectations without it. We know that our roles are no longer air traffic controllers for external counsel. We are at a tipping point as a profession and our business leaders now expect us to be business people with legal skills who are a competitive advantage and drive business velocity.

In order to do this job well, we need the tools that our functional peers utilize. No other functional leaders – not heads of Finance, HR, Marketing, or Sales – operate in the situation in-house lawyers often find themselves in, working with archaic workplace productivity tools from the early days of desktop computing like email, spreadsheets and PowerPoint. In my experience, from a technology perspective, in-house legal is often five to ten years behind HR, which can be up to ten years behind Finance, who along with Sales were the first to get fit-for-purpose SaaS technology to run their functions.

While huge changes in our ways of working occurred during the decade I was with eBay, we still had plenty of room to evolve as a profession, particularly in regard to technology. I think I successfully used the tools that were available: manual processes, a contract management system, a legacy e-billing tool, along with a lot of assistance from a great Legal Ops team. My strategy was to take all the information I could get manually and create something that was credible at the business’s leadership team table.

The dream

The legal operations team would ask me at least once a year what I wanted from a management and operations perspective – my pie in the sky dream. I’d say, “I want to run my function like a business unit. I want a real-time comprehensive dashboard so I can run my legal function the way my peers in HR, Finance, Sales and Marketing do.” Suffice to say that this was considered impossible at the time.

In a relatively short time, things have evolved dramatically. Legal is the last business function to be the beneficiary of fit-for-purpose technology, we are the last function to be “SaaSified”.

Lawyers are trained to be reactive and highly detail orientated, and we are renowned for our extremely strong work ethic. Whatever comes at us – be it down the phone or by email – we react to it. We do our best to get it done and then we move onto the next thing. This system works well in a law firm in which you bill hourly, but it doesn’t translate to in-house ways of working – because what’s important in an organization is the impact you’re having on the business, not how hard (or how late) you’re working.

Having comprehensive, intuitive, fit-for-purpose technology gives you transparency, efficiency, and opportunities for automation which ultimately allow you to move to a proactive stance where you have the bandwidth and headspace to focus on strategic alignment, key business objectives, and accelerate your function and your business.

We have for too long been branded a “cost center” where any increase in workload required doing the unscalable, throwing more lawyers at the problem. This, as we know, tends to result in diminishing returns. Best-practice legal leadership, management and operations has now embraced multi-disciplinary teams of operations and data science professionals and the use of technology to create a scalable engine room for the function and the business. This is an exciting new phase for our profession, as diversification of roles and increased business relevance create the opportunity for more satisfying in-house careers for us all.

I’m excited to be helping drive this evolution at LawVu. I have worked with numerous customers as they evolve their functions by implementing LawVu’s cutting edge, fit-for-purpose SaaS platform, allowing them to quickly redefine their roles in-house into innovators and business accelerators.

If you want to find out more about LawVu’s legal workspace, click here to book a personalized demo now.

David Lancelot is the CLO and EVP of Advocacy at LawVu.