This Is the Age Of AI, Analytics And Automation Says AI Lawyer Kapil Chaudhary

Mr Chaudhary's illustrious journey in law?

I began as a litigation lawyer with the Indian law firm Fox Mandal, and after about six years, during which I was fortunate enough to also work on a large bilateral investment treaty arbitration claim that Enron had filed with the Government of India. I branched out in- house, and then worked across sectors, starting off with Star News as their head of legal, moved on to be the general counsel for Schlumberger, the largest oil and gas largest oil and gas field services company, and then transition into technology companies, initially with IBM in India for a couple of years, spent a couple of years in Singapore. I also took the opportunity while I was in Singapore to learn, deeply about arbitration and became a fellow with the Singapore Institute of arbitrators, returned back to India in 2015, I was the India General Counsel for Autodesk before joining Twitter India in my current role. It is a steep learning curve. The idea is to keep learning and keep growing and diversifying every day, and I hope to share some of those experiences with you as we progress on this journey. 

During this last one year the pandemic, I have been doing a fair amount of research on creating dynamic future focused and innovative legal departments and teams. So, the key theme of my presentation today is going to be legal innovation and how all of us can work together to create cutting edge forward looking and future focused legal teams. 

Key learnings from the pandemic

Now, what this one year of the pandemic has taught us is that we are being called upon every day to do more with less. With that spirit in mind, we are all now focused on creating what I call data driven, agile, nimble legal teams, because we have to really guard our time meticulously every day. So, what's happening is one of the key future insights, one of the key themes emerging this year is going to be how all of us, as in- house, lawyers, as part of our leadership teams are going to deliver more value back to the business. This will also enable us to create future proof legal professions. So, let's talk about what exactly is legal innovation? Simply put, legal innovation is driving a positive impact within our businesses to create long lasting change. This long- lasting change can be for our customers, for our board of directors, as well as for our shareholders. Let me begin firstly by saying, how can we create forward looking and deeply impactful legal teams.

I am a big fan of lifelong learning. I think one of the things that this pandemic has taught us is that we have to start investing in ourselves every day. We have to start picking on learning abilities, the ability to learn, pick on new skills and add more value to ourselves every day. As you pick on new skills, as we start adding more value, we realize that how valuable it is to be a lawyer at the end of the day, how valuable it is, when a colleague approaches you for advice, that ability to give an advice to someone is a unique skill that comes to lawyers, and I think once we start realizing that inherent ability, we feel that we are truly blessed

New age skills for Inhouse legal teams

I think we'll have to start with having a proper strategy and vision document. Now, what's going to happen is that all of us as GCs, if we are not already doing so, we'll have to start documenting our Target Operating Model. We all have different go to market models, some of us are in the E- commerce sector. Think of the legal profession as a platform, as a marketplace and what happens in double edge or two- sided platforms is that you have a buyer, and you have a seller, and you have consumers. Let us ask ourselves, who are the consumers of Legal Services, today? The consumers of legal services today are our key stakeholders, the internal departments we advise on a day to day basis, have we created a top end, cutting- edge technology roadmap to be able to deliver legal services in an agile and nimble fashion. What that will also involve is putting into place, KPIs or key performance indicators to track progress of our legal teams on a day to day basis. That then takes me to once you have created a strategy and a vision document is how are we going to start fostering and incubating new skills within the legal teams. So, think of yourself as a startup. Think of yourself as somebody who's just entered into a startup, and has been asked to set up a legal team from scratch. Well, you can start calling yourself as a legal technology manager, or you can also start looking at yourself as head of legal innovation. Have we thought about rules, such as hiring data scientists or data analysts in our teams? The pace of transformation happening within the legal teams in India and abroad, and worldwide is so rapid that we will have to start looking at investing in skills such as data scientists, artificial intelligence, machine learning. On skills, let me share with you a very interesting story. So, over the course of the last one year, while we were busy scrambling to adjust to a work from home lifestyle. 

I’ll tell you the story of two 12 year- old twins. These two 12 year- old twins what they did were, they like us had to transition to a work from home environment, they were doing homeschooling. While I found myself grappling with the day to day efforts of trying to preserve our sanity in terms of adding more value, doing more for less. What I realized is, these two 12 year- old twins joined learning platforms like EDX, Udemy and picked on skills, such as Plezmo webinars, block programming, started developing video games online. One of them also picked up, web development with front end and back end skills, implemented databases and picked on skills and databases, such as Firebase and SQL. The other twin started coding and learning Python, web development and HTML as well. Now, before I knew it, one of the twins had actually started their own YouTube channel, and picked on, subscribers really fast.

Legal Innovation and opportunities for a General Counsel

What does this story, tell me? By the way, these 12- year twins are none other than my own 12- year twins, Himang and Ishani, blessed to have them, as well as my wife Sushmita, who's also a fellow lawyer and a source of strength. This personal story really told me that if 12 year- old kids can be so innovative, so deeply passionate about creating an impact, sitting only on their laptops and working from home. We as mature lawyers have a bigger responsibility. We as trusted advisors within our teams have an enormous task of bringing in legal innovation into our teams. Well, if 12 year- old twins can do it, you and I certainly can. Let me then move on to the third part of the legal innovation journey. After you've created your strategy and vision document, after you've looked at fostering new skills and started augmenting your skills, you should then start looking at who are your key service providers, who are your vendors, which is how much importance have you given in your legal supply chain. Are you getting adequate value out of your law firms, are you looking at hiring contract lawyers, or even looking at project based outsourcing on managed services. Are you truly deriving value and cost efficiencies from your outside service providers, your outside counsel, and again it comes down to data, which means there are tools available in the market today, which can give you the exact analysis of whether you're getting the true bang for your buck and whether you're getting return on investment from outside counsel. The world in which we are living in, has been so radically transformed that all law firms are now, eager to add more value. They're eager to become your close advisors, they're eager to participate in that business and I think we as general counsels should happily collaborate and capitalize on that opportunity. It's a unique opportunity for us. I'd also then say that start looking at data as very valuable within the legal function. Each of us as GCs have enormous capacities to start looking at data and analyzing data, and then start deriving value out of your data. 

Thoughts on Legal Tech

Now, you will probably hear this term spoken about a lot this year. I'm particularly passionate about it and it all boils down to, how can we add more efficiencies on our day to day work, in our day to day jobs. What is happening across the board, is that there are these bunch of legal tech companies which are coming up on the horizon, we keep hearing about companies like Kira systems, we keep hearing about document automation, collaboration, negotiation and analytics tools. These companies will emerge very rapidly, and start adding true value across the board. To just share with you an example, I’ll probably share my screen quickly. So, this is just one of the document automation companies, it's called Avvoka. If you see, there are a bunch of other companies available, but we as general counsels and as I said in the beginning have to zealously guard our time, every minute. So, if you can apply analytics data to end to end document drafting platforms, you can start looking at automating your contracts and looking at Contract Lifecycle Management Tools, and start deriving a lot of value from your contracts. After all, our contracts are where risk lies or contracts are where we know what kind of indemnities and liabilities we've negotiated. So, if we can then start implementing tools within our companies, which start providing us deep insights and analytics into these risks, we can become better business enablers, we can become better business advisors.

AI, Data Trust and Data Ethics

Perhaps, the one area that I’d like to probably also call upon and highlight this year is going to be AI and Data Trust and data ethics. I'm trying to do a lot of research and my focus over the past one year has been on the interplay between emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, trust and data ethics. There are very interesting conversations happening around fairness, explainability of AI, trust, transparency and accountability. 

India's much awaited Data Privacy law

The other key area for all of us to focus on this year is going to be data privacy. India, hopefully very soon will have its own personal data protection law that commingled with the fact that we are one of the first countries in the world who are also looking at regulating non- personal data means that all of our hands are going to be busy this year, advising our teams looking at where our data is stored, looking at where our servers are, and where our data centers are. So, if you are not investing in yourself and picking up interesting skills on data privacy, you will be probably lagging behind the curve.

Age of AI, Data Analytics and Automation

I'd like to probably end with a favorite quote I picked up during the US presidential inauguration. From this amazing poet, Amanda Gorman, who was the national poet laureate for the US, and I love the entire poem but I'll probably just pick on the last three, four lines. And it says, 

The New Dawn blooms, as we free it, for there's always light. If only we are brave enough to see it. There is always light. If only we are brave enough to be it. 

With that, I’ll probably end by saying that all of us have a unique capacity, capability and role to add true value to ourselves. Let's put on the innovators hat, let's live dream and breathe, innovation, every day. This is the age of AI, this is the age of analytics, and this is the age of automation, and to be ahead of the curve. Let's start investing and keep investing in upskilling ourselves right skilling our legal teams, and create a better impact and achieve a better influence.

This is an automated transcription from BW Legal World GC Conference 2021 lightly edited for better readability. 

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