While many organisations look to their outside counsel for advice about innovation and efficiency, many businesses are embracing the concept of ‘Legal Operations’. In the digital age, corporations are now creating data at a rate that their counsel can not begin to cope with, hence the rise of AI companies that can accurately sift, sort and categorise thousands of documents at speeds that no human could match.

The pioneers of LegalOps saw this explosion of corporate data not as a burden, but an opportunity. Take the repercussions of likely regulatory change as a result of Brexit: where one General Counsel might take the decision to have a Legal Services Provider read through tens of thousands of sales agreements to flag potential risks, a LegalOps team would take a very different approach. Using the latest technological advances, the team could either build or implement a system that could not only process the sales agreements at blistering speed, but also automatically identify clusters that contained risks or opportunities for your business.

The opportunity goes far beyond regulatory change. An innovative LegalOps team could apply the same thinking to any group of contracts to find differences and similarities: perhaps your corporation has acquired another, and wants to TUPE an appropriate number of employment agreements; or perhaps your procurement team wants to create a template for all new business going forwards? Your new hire will look to implement measures that makes your existing data work for you, not against you.