Katrina Gowans is passionate about changing the way lawyers work. As National Legal Transformation Lead for Origin Energy, Katrina is at the forefront of how legal innovation is affecting in-house workflows and processes.
“If my newsfeed in LinkedIn is anything to go by, there is so much discussion and so many developments happening in the legal innovation and technology space,” said Katrina. “For some in the legal profession, including myself, the impact of this has led to entirely new roles and businesses that didn’t exist even five years ago.”
Don’t wait for the silver bullet
The challenge that now faces legal professionals is the sheer volume of opportunities for legal innovation and the technology available.
“I think most legal teams, particularly in-house, are still getting their heads around these opportunities, let alone mounting the business case to buy and implement them,” said Katrina. “This cautious approach is not all bad – we need to be thoughtful about where we spend our precious time and money. But equally, we shouldn’t be waiting for a silver bullet to deliver us legal innovation. Innovation happens with all the small one percent changes we make along the way to improve the way we work every day.”
Katrina thinks the biggest impact from legal innovation for those in the trenches still lies ahead.
“I think the greatest opportunity for the legal profession is to move away from the old way of working (matter in, advice out, repeat),” Katrina observed. Rather, legal innovation is providing legal professionals with the opportunity to move to a way of working that more deeply considers the nature of the required legal work, and identify solutions for triage, workflow, automation and like.
“Historically, lawyers have relied on experience and used their memories (and maybe their inbox) to recall how they advised on a matter in the past,” said Katrina.”The opportunity going forward will be to use legal innovation to capture and share that experience and, where possible, to develop a workflow or process to support its ongoing delivery in the future.”
It takes time and effort to do this, Katrina acknowledged.
“In terms of threats, the legal profession is no different to any other industry facing disruption due to innovation and technology – what lawyers do today looks different to what we did ten years ago, and will look different to what we do a decade from now,” said Katrina. In this sense, the legal profession has much to learn from workplaces which have already adapted to new ways of work.
The future is in automation, collaboration and data
For in-house teams, Katrina predicts the biggest innovation will be in automation.
“Automation doesn’t necessarily mean AI,” said Katrina. “Lawyers will continue to identify more and more low hanging fruit, areas where a workflow or process can be applied to take out some of the leg work and get to the pointy end faster.
“I also think (and hope) that we will start to move out of our inbox and into more agile workspaces where we collaborate more with each other and with our clients. For example, our Digital Team led a move for us into using Jira for the legal review of our digital content. The Jira board helps track and prioritise all jobs, rather than relying on emails, phone calls, IMs (with the added benefit of a centralised repository of all the learnings that previously was fragmented across team members and their inboxes).”
“Finally, as more and more teams adopt and enhance their matter management system, I think we will have better data about where we spend our time and money,” Katrina said. “This will help us make more informed, commercial decisions about the way we run legal functions, rather the historical approach of doing something because that’s the way we have always done it.”
Focus on how technology is used, not the technology itself
As the profession enters a more mature stage of innovation, assistance with change management is essential.
“I say it all the time – legal teams can and do spend millions of dollars on new technologies, but how much money and time do they commit to implementing and embedding that technology in their team? At the end of the day, success will be measured on how the team uses the technology, not the technology itself. So, this should be our focus.
“The good news is that many legal professionals are very experienced in change management,” observed Katrina. To support change management, we need to bring the key principles of change management to the surface, and give teams the time and support they need to undertake change well.
“At Origin, the size of our team and the timing of our transformation journey meant that I was fortunate enough to take on the change management role in a dedicated capacity without having to be a lawyer as well,” said Katrina. “I know this isn’t feasible for all teams, but what is feasible - and I dare say, imperative - is for the legal function to assess what time they are committing to their change program, allocate a resource to this and prioritise it as if it were any other legal matter (rather than hoping the lawyer will get to it at the end of the day).”
Empower lawyers to ‘learn as they go’
For new lawyers entering a changing profession, Katrina simply advises to learn as you go.
“To do this, make sure you adopt a growth mindset,” said Katrina. “More specifically, once you are in your new role, have a conversation with your manager or your clients about identifying what your ‘safe spaces’ are to test and learn new things, and what are your team’s and your organisation’s ‘hard limits’’.
“Giving yourself the freedom to try something different, with the appropriate checks and balances, is the best way to start to shift the dial. But it only works if you are empowered by your team and your manager to do it. So have the conversation.”
Katrina is a member of the Centre for Legal Innovation’s (CLI) Advisory Board.
“Already, I am amazed by the number of events and conversations the CLI is hosting and having with people in the industry,” said Katrina. “The Australian legal industry is an absolute hive of activity now, and so I think there is a great role for CLI to help the profession make sense of that activity in a thoughtful and objective way. The CLI also has the reputation to be able to tap into people, experts and teams that are ‘ahead of the curve’ which can be of tremendous benefit to those in the profession just starting on their journey.”