General Counsel roles take a new dimension in the post-pandemic world

Today’s general counsel is a strategic advisor to the broader leadership, which ordains expanding their competencies and knowledge of technology.

Organizations the world over have been exposed to increasingly diverse and complex measures leading to greater commercial, reputational, and legal risks. These measures are being brought on by the nature of the technology-induced transformation and changing business requirements post-pandemic world that has also led to a re-shaping of general counsel roles. In-house lawyers have become an integral part of making critical decisions at the highest levels of their organizations.

[box type=”success” align=”” class=”” width=””]Indeed, today’s general counsel is not a mere legal advisor, but a strategic advisor to the CEO and broader leadership. To meet the challenge, GCs are expanding their team’s competencies and deepening their knowledge of the business—and turning to technology to increase their impact on the organization.[/box]

To drill further into these trends, industry leaders recently participated in a panel discussion titled, “General Counsel Leadership in the Modern Age of Disruption & Uncertainty.”

The speakers focused on three pillars of successful in-house legal teams: trust, transparency, and transformation—and how technology can enable each, in turn, to help legal teams achieve top performance.

Trust

Trust is a widely used term but if one were to dig deeper then there would be a cognizance that the meaning that trust carries has different connotations and perspectives. It is also critical to understand that trust is built on not just what is preached, but also what is practiced. Undoubtedly, technology is helping businesses overcome the barriers to trust and transparency, while also acting as a driver of transformation. Trust and transparency are two critical pillars for all business relationships.

Trust is a currency that takes a long time to build but a short time to break. It is especially critical in the face of privacy and cybersecurity concerns facing all organizations.

Trust is a widely used term but if one were to dig deeper then there would be a cognizance that the meaning that trust carries has different connotations and perspectives. It is also critical to understand that trust is built on not just what is preached, but also what is practiced. Transparency and visibility are core elements of trust. Undoubtedly, technology is helping businesses overcome the barriers to trust and transparency, while also acting as a driver of transformation.

Transparency

Additionally, the legal profession should embrace digital transformation with ‘tech intensity’ (the rate of adoption of new technologies and the capability to fully integrate them into the organization) in order to achieve success globally.  For instance, from a technological purview, cloud storage has become ubiquitous and the volume of digital information has increased to zetabytes from petabytes. The focus today has thus shifted to leveraging the cloud to acquire greater economies of scale to extra insights to build a competitive advantage and acquire economies of scale, despite the data deluge.

Today, steps are also being taken to establish new interoperability standards and initiatives to ensure a better and more seamless flow of data.

Transformation

People are the biggest enablers of transformation. The real transformation occurred only when a fraternity adopted specific technologies en-masse leading to a change in the world as we know it and probably forever.

[box type=”success” align=”” class=”” width=””]Technology is not the only driver of transformation; for legal departments, increasing the level of knowledge and developing a thorough understanding of the business and its needs can also drive change.[/box]

A critical facet is a great knowledge that has been created in companies about the law of the land, best practices, compliance requirements, and the key here is to leverage this knowledge effectively not just for business transformation but also the knowledge development of legal counsel and legal departments.

Today, companies resort to technology when it comes to the legal department and technology and automation is being used to the fullest. This is the future of legal counsel. When it comes to the legal department, businesses had to look at the entire atmosphere of doing work, organizing and engaging themselves with internal and external customers and stakeholders with a new thinking.

The key to bridging the technical gap among legal counsel is simplifying technology.

This is where low code or no code technology comes in as they are tools that can be adopted without any coding knowledge.  This can bridge the knowledge divide for legal personnel. They can configure workflows, define them and make these processes work without needing the help of IT. Having a cross-functional legal department is the need of the hour.

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(Views expressed above have been excerpted from The Economic Times Icertis webinar powered by Microsoft, featuring Bernadette Bulacan, Vice President and Lead Global Evangelist for Icertis, Keshav Dhakad, Group Head & General Counsel – Corporate, External & Legal Affairs (CELA), Microsoft India,  Debolina Partap, Senior Vice President Legal and Group GC, Wockhardt,  Vikash Jain, Group General Counsel, Vedanta, Vineet Vij, Group General Counsel, Tech Mahindra, and Rachita Maker, Vice President, Legal, Tata Communications.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members

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