Celebrating the people, technology, ideas and innovations that are literally transforming the way law firms and in-house legal teams operate.
Why a Legal Innovation & Tech Fest?
The world is changing. Businesses are more demanding. Fee models are evolving. New technologies are emerging. And the pressure is on for law firms and legal businesses to operate more efficiently and effectively. Technology is disrupting (and enabling) the practice of law, which is why we are hosting the Legal Innovation & Technology Festival – in association with The Corporate Counsel Association of South Africa (CCASA).
Research was conducted via a series of interviews and round table discussions across South Africa involving over 100 professionals from over 75 organisations driving innovation & tech initiatives within their organisations. This sharing of challenges, opportunities and investment plans frame the hot topics around which this conference has been created.
Hot topics to be covered include:
- The Legal Ecosystem, Legal Business & Lawyer of the Future
- Building the Skills & Capability for Successful Innovation
- Data Driven Decision Making – What You Can Measure You Can Manage
- The Strategy, the ROI and the Business Case for Legal Innovation, Change & Collaboration
- Leveraging User Experience to Drive User Adoption
- Demystifying Artificial Intelligence, Automation and Augmentation
- The Vendor Conundrum – Sales, Implementation and Beyond
- Stakeholder, Project & Change Management.
To further explore the topics, download the research report at:
http://www.techfestconf.com/legal/sa/hot-topics/
Keynote Speakers
Name: Graeme Grovum
Position: Head of Innovation
Company: Corrs Chambers Westgarth (AUS)
Presentation title: The New World of Legal Work – Exploring the Emerging Trends that Will Drive the Legal Industry in the Next Decade
Overview: Our industry is ripe for re-invention and the decision to change is increasingly being made outside the confines of private practice. Does this spell doom for lawyers (especially young lawyers) and students? Just the opposite! While the pace of change will unsettle some, there has never been a better time to work in the legal industry. This is an opportunity to participate in shaping the future of legal services.
Name: Mick Sheehy
Position: General Counsel
Company: Telstra (AUS)
Presentation title: The Telstra Legal Innovation Story – How to Create an Innovation Movement
Overview: Two years ago Telstra Legal launched a series of design thinking workshops and innovation sprints to tackle a set of productivity opportunities. In 2016, this programme of work resulted in a saving of more than 40,000 lawyer hours and recognition by Financial Times of Telstra Legal as Asia Pac’s most innovative legal department for 2016. In 2017, Telstra Legal tackled an even bolder set of initiatives resulting in more top awards in the United States and a new Harvard Law School case study on the Telstra Legal innovation programme. This presentation will explain how these results were achieved and why collaboration was a critical element of success
Name: Shaun Temby
Position: Partner and Head of Innovation
Company: Maddocks (AUS)
Presentation title: Running Concurrent Innovation Programmes – Insights and Experiences
Overview: Drawing on my experiences at Maddocks in 2016 and 2017, when we ran 3 different innovation programmes at the firm, I share some of the lessons that we learnt about what works and what doesn’t when trying to create an innovation culture and deliver on an innovation strategy in a commercial law firm environment.
Name: Milos Kresojevic
Position: Founder
Company: AI.Legal Labs (UK)
Presentation title: You’d Better be Ready for AI – Because it’s Here, and it’s Now!
Overview: Legal playing fields are being redrawn and there is a lot of talk about the future benefits of Artificial Intelligence in the Legal industry. But how do you go about it? Is it about creating value for law firms or for clients, or even the wider society? How can you position AI as an AI portfolio? And where do you even start?
In this compelling session, Milos will show you how he successfully implemented an Innovation effort starting with a team of one and no budget. Starting with the simple mantra – “AI here and now” – he developed and deployed AI applications, 2 machine learning systems, 1 expert system and a portfolio of applications in less than two and a half years.
Name: Eugenio Menezes
Position: Legal Manager: Outsourcing
Company: Anglo American
Presentation title: How Anglo American Group Legal Improved its Service Delivery: Routine, Low Risk, High Volume Contract Review and Drafting to LPO Firms
Overview: This presentation provides a snapshot of how Anglo American built additional capacity and guided in-house lawyers responsible for managing the legal risks of and support to all Anglo American’s operations in South Africa in respect of routine contracts by partnering with the right service providers to optimally deliver the expected outcomes at a reduced cost. Learn of the journey and the how-to, when-to and what-to of LPO services. Eugenio walks you through real-life examples of some organisational and outsourcing interventions. These include the use of LPO for lower risk replicable work (Anglo American pioneered the use of LPO in the South African legal market); and the use of LPO to support legal administrative activities associated with discovery and due diligence exercises.
Name: Alex Harris
Position: Adventurer and Endurance Athlete
Company: Xplore
Presentation title: Journey to The South Pole
Overview: Antarctica is one of the driest, coldest and most hostile of environments on the planet. It is a place devoid of any permanent life and a place that requires the utmost competence and sheer determination to survive for any length of time. Through history, the tales of suffering and perseverance are legendary and etched into adventure folklore. For more than a hundred years of polar history, no African had ever made an unsupported walk to the South Pole. That is, until Alex teamed up with another South African, Sibusiso Vilane.
In January of 2008, Alex and Sibu became the first Africans to complete the 1200km trek unsupported and unassisted. The journey took 65 days and was in Alex’s words, quite simply the hardest thing he has ever done.
Speakers and topics
GRAEME GROVUM
Open Innovation: The Power of Partnerships
In the last decade, Corrs has evolved its legal services delivery through open innovation. This strategy is the way forward, not just for us as a firm, but for the legal industry as a whole. In a nutshell, open innovation means that we regularly partner with third parties to deliver better outcomes than either of us are capable of on our own, and seek to open up our advancements to the wider market. Taking this approach benefits our clients, our firm and our industry. Graeme will cover a subset of product and platform partnerships that Corrs has entered in pursuit of improving outcomes for their clients and their firm.
MEGAN JACKSON
Breaking Down the Barriers: 5 Simple Ways to Cultivate a Change Mind-Set
Successfully implementing change in an industry, that, by its very nature is both change and risk averse brings many challenges and barriers (real and perceived). Overcoming these can be daunting. This presentation provides some practical steps that change agents can implement to increase engagement, drive adoption, overcome resistance and facilitate the development of an innovation mind-set at all levels. It will also include real-life stories of success and lessons learned in identifying, communicating and implementing technology and process change in law firms and in-house legal teams.
MICK SHEEHY
The More with Less Conundrum: Is the Destiny of Legal Teams to be Continually Leaner & Smaller?
The more with less conundrum: Is the destiny of legal teams to be continually leaner and smaller? How might we might stop the downward trend of ever-decreasing legal budgets? What does it mean to be a legal business partner in the future? What value do we need to add tomorrow that we don’t add today?
MILOS KRESOJEVIC
Is GDPR a Great Chance to Create a (Very) Innovative (& AI-Enabled) Knowledge Management Function & potentially Offer AI-Based Legal Services?
GDPR is a big challenge for Law Firms, Legal Functions and every firm. Can this big threat be turned into even bigger opportunity? Yes – GDPR offers a chance for innovative firms to take full advantage to innovate their Knowledge Management function, if not enable new legal services. This presentation also addresses responsibility about data privacy and protection, effective use of AI in real world applications, and AI not just as technology or efficiency play, but as strategic play.
BRENDON BORGIA
A Look at a Large Legal Technology Implementation – its Challenges, Successes & More Importantly, Lessons Learnt
Key learnings are shared from a multifaceted legal technology implementation in the Financial Sector. From understanding the effort and cost to realising the benefits of technology (business case analytics); to internal and external integration considerations; to understanding capability/skills constraints with regards to solution development and adoption. This presentation also revises where legal counsel can add value in a technology implementation, how the gap can be bridged between legal counsel and developers and whether you ought to pursue a hybrid lawyer/ developer role. An overview and demo of the implemented solution will be showcased to illuminate the work and effort that isn’t always considered.
SHAUN TEMBY
Experiments in Pricing – It’s a Brave New World
In 2017, we launched a major new pricing initiative experimenting with different pricing strategies and alternative fee arrangements supported by legal project management and software. Our goal is to develop a new approach to pricing; the tools and experience to know when best to deploy them and to help our clients to move away from time-cost billing. As we started this project in early 2018, the results aren’t yet known. However, our goal is to have a much clearer idea of what works and what doesn’t, including how to best support new approaches to pricing with new software and LMP tools; to obtain client feedback on what they do and don’t like; and identify roadblocks to new approaches to pricing within the firm, including time recording, reporting and remuneration.
GEORGE SIBANDA
Data-Driven Decision Making for the Legal Industry: From Extraction to Applied Learning
Developing the technology to automate the day-to-day is just step one. Step two is using it to uncover a wealth of insights into how clients can tackle their biggest commercial challenges. Learn of the impacts of understanding when data extraction software is useful, and applying an AI-powered approach to data analytics for unique business insights. Learn how this is mitigating high risk for clients; preventing or mitigating similar claims in future; and allowing clients to proactively take control of managing risk enabled by trend reporting and analysis.
GRAEME GROVUM
A Strategic Approach to AI: Corrs AI Toolkit
In mid-2016, Corrs was the first large firm to adopt AI in Australia and did so in a novel way by entering a JV with an AI company. Since then, the legal AI market has evolved rapidly, delivering a great deal of choice to consumers but also making it very important to understand market segments and choose the right application for an intended outcome. In this session, Graeme discusses Corrs’ approach to AI across due diligence, discovery, contract analysis, predictive AI, research, expertise automation and work allocation that provides the right application for their clients whatever the outcome being sought.
MATTHEW WELZ
Engineering the Delivery of Fit-for-Purpose Legal Services to a Corporate
Managing the efficient delivery of legal services to a corporate is more a feature of engineering and business analysis than of law. Successfully designing and managing an efficient in-house department requires understanding the nature of the work required, and the best suited manner, timing, and resources (human and technological) to perform this work. Using this approach, the small team at Clicks delivers fit-for-purpose, cost effective and timeous legal support that is scalable to meet the increasing demands of an expanding business operating in a highly regulated environment.
ANDREW MULLER
Intrapreneurs in Regulatory Compliance
In May 2015, 5 colleagues in compliance, later joined by an Astro Physicist, embarked on an impossible journey. Using Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile Principles, to re-imagine how knowledge work is performed in a large organisation. Using various prototyping techniques, we progressively validated assumptions about demand and what was possible technologically until, as invariably happens in innovation, we ran out of runway (the funding dried up). This talk will touch on our inspiration, journey and lessons learned.
PETER WASSERFALL
The Benefits of Using Technology to Enhance Compliance Awareness & Training
The role of the in-house legal counsel primarily involves overseeing a company’s broad Legal Function as well as its Compliance/Regulatory Function. In a heavily regulated environment, the compliance role can be daunting and expose companies to huge risks if there are inadequate processes in place to mitigate those risks. Creating digital assets and using training platforms in a creative way can go a long way towards ensuring company and employee compliance awareness is addressed.
ROHAN ISAACS
Futurelaw: Why & How Lawyers Need to Adapt to the Technology of the Future
Until recently, artificial intelligence was regarded as the technology that was never going to happen. Until two years ago hardly anyone had heard of blockchain. Today these technologies are becoming mainstream, although the range of opportunities and challenges they present to the legal profession have barely begun to be understood. So it is with technology in general. Lawyers of the future will need to be agile and adaptable to the coming technological changes to stay relevant to their clients. This presentation offers real-life examples of how this may be achieved.
RETHA BEERMAN AND NEIL COMTE
Is Artificial Intelligence Affordable & a Practicable Solution for South African Law Firms:A Case Study
CDH will present a case study about the introduction of AI capabilities to a South African law firm, with a view to enabling competencies such as data-driven pricing strategies; intuitive and immediate knowledge management delivery; and expertise linking and enterprise search. Insights to be shared: Creating the innovation vision; Concretising the vision – proof of concept, return on investment; What ‘delivery’ of an innovation actually means: understanding the art of the possible, and achieving incremental successes.
SAMIKSHA KADER
Demystifying the Vendor Conundrum: The Areas of Need
Samiksha shares her learnings of the 3 areas of NEED (not luxury): Data Management and record retention; workflow management (audit trail; workflow and work load management; benefit analytics); and template generation tools. While legal costs or the support of the legal function is at times viewed as a grudge purchase, this presentation details how equipping the company (not just the legal function) brings great benefits. The second challenge for in-house counsels is wading through the vendor conundrum to the solution that supports all the requirements seamlessly.
TSHEPO MIYA
The Technology Revolution of African Law
The lawyer of tomorrow is increasingly virtual, available and connected; making use of AI systems and people expertise; and delivering tailor-made legal services. Tshepo shares how DLA Piper is enabling access to the kind of technology that facilitates this across 17 African DLA Piper Branded and Associated law firms. Not only does this make the lawyer’s working environment easier while increasing efficiency and productivity that positively impacts the bottom line, this also allows clients to enter their lawyer’s space – enabling clients to alter the services they need.
TANYA DE VILLIERS
The Vending Machine Effect! The already fast paced competitive environment of business has resulted in legal counsel (internal & external) becoming a reactive supportive function.
Increasingly businesses require brief interaction, providing little to no information and in return expects a product (agreement) within a short space of time. Innovative advancements such as blockchain and AI in general which provide and optimise the required convenience should be embraced, as the lawyer of the future cannot be as it exists today.
SEBASTIAAN BOS
From Buzzword to Solution; Shaping Your Digital Transformation Journey
Using practical examples, Sebastiaan will demonstrate how our favourite technical buzzwords such as AI, Blockchain and Legal Services can come together in one platform. This presentation will outline best practice for your digital transformation journey, from simple transactional client services and Legal Project Management, all the way to creating innovative products and services for corporate legal teams and law firms. This platform will become the foundation for any digital transformation, innovation or automation strategy.
MICHAEL LAWS
Legal Research – Advancing What’s Possible
This presentation explores the local and international case law landscapes; and how technology and advanced analytics aid in conducting thorough, time-efficient case-law research. From Roman-Dutch principles interpreted by various Divisions back to 1828 and how to untangle these, to researching reported and unreported cases, to conflicting judgments within and across provinces and hierarchies. Learn how to use advanced technology to make deep dives into case law, following a legal principle through case law with annotations, and backing up your argument with comparative cases and old authorities.
CANDICE HOLLAND
The Tech-Led, Data-Enabled Legal Function of the Future
Legal functions are under significant pressure to deliver quality services, in a consistent manner at a reduced cost. To achieve this, they need to reconsider their operating model, tech solutions which can create efficiencies and how best to leverage data to ensure service delivery, cost optimisation and effective legal risk management simultaneously… a tough ask in any one’s language. Hear Deloitte’s lessons learnt and practical examples on doing this and getting it right.
MATTEO PAGANI
Decoding Legal Technology: A Practical Guide for Linking the Business of Legal to Legal Technology
With over 16 facets of technology spanning Accounts/Practice Management to Document Storage and Automation, it is virtually impossible for any individual to wrap their head around everything available to them in Legal Technology. But what if software wasn’t everything? Understanding, not only the (fit-for-purpose) software, but how it should be implemented, will be your key to ensuring the best possible spend on technology. Matteo offers a practical framework to hit the ground running to link the business to available legal software, from procurement to implementation.
Panel Discussions
Interactive IN-HOUSE LEGAL Panel: Insights from the Front of the Pack, facilitated by Mick Sheehy, General Counsel, Telstra (AUS).
New technologies such as the Internet of Things, new platforms and technology ecosystems require in-house lawyers to move beyond isolated transactions and deals to a comfort and familiarity with ecosystems and technology platforms. This interactive panel facilitated by international thought leader, Mick Sheehy, brings together some of South Africa’s leading and exceptional customers from in-house legal teams that are spearheading the legal innovation & tech charge. This hand-selected panel of experts addresses the pertinent and topical elements impacting and disrupting in-house legal teams in South Africa. Think: How in-house functions can keep up with the pace of change, where leaders become positive drivers of this change; how you can save costs, become more efficient and demonstrate your value as a lawyer by using technology; and how you can lead, rather than follow, when it comes to legal tech innovation.
Interactive LAW FIRM Panel: Insights from the Front of the Pack, facilitated by Shaun Temby, Partner and Head of Innovation at Maddocks (AUS).
The legal industry is undergoing re-invention: Mind-set shifts, process improvement and leveraging technology lends to delivering improved efficiency and services to clients, where legal businesses can take advantage of the benefits of exponential growth. Implementing the latest and fit-for-purpose technologies is one of the key aspects that can position legal businesses at the forefront of the profound change confronting the legal profession. This interactive panel facilitated by international thought leader, Shaun Temby, brings together some of South Africa’s leading and exceptional customers from law firms that are spearheading the legal innovation & tech charge. These hand-selected experts explore the trends and insights that are impacting law firms in 2019 and beyond!
View the agenda on the Legal Innovation and Tech Fest website
http://www.techfestconf.com/legal/sa/agenda/
Conference details
Date: 11 – 12 June 2018
Venue: The Hyatt Regency, Johannesburg
Accommodation: The Hyatt Regency (R2500 including VAT for a single room, R2850 including VAT for a double room)
Registration fees per delegate
Super Saver
Register before 13th April 2018 – R10 550 ex VAT
Early Bird
Register before 11th May 2018 – R11 050 ex VAT
Standard Rate
Register before 10th June 2018 – R12 050 ex VAT
Produced by The Eventful Group in association with Corporate Counsel Association of South Africa
Partners
LexisNexis
HighQ together with Visions Consulting
Deloitte
Exigent
iManage together with Co-Operative Computing
Tech4Law
Supporters
HiiL Foundation
Centre for Integrative Law
Register for the event
Through the website
www.techfestconf.com/legal/sa/
via email
registersa@theeventfulgroup.com
give them a call
021 180 4834.
