Lawyers occupy a unique space in the technology world. Trained to detect, identify and eliminate risk, they often feel at odds in an industry that thrives on risk, where risk is equated with opportunity.
But in an age of radical transformation, as digitization sweeps through every industry – making no exception for the law – attorneys may need to rethink their relationship with risk. In fact, the inaction that often results from focusing on risk management might be the riskiest action of all – for lawyers and the businesses they serve.
That's the counsel of Mark Chandler, General Counsel at Cisco and a keynote speaker on the second day of the 2016 DLA Piper Global Technology Summit. Chandler, who made prepared remarks and was interviewed by Stasia Kelly, co-managing partner (Americas) of DLA Piper, addressed a group of technology lawyers about how he's made his legal department vital and valuable at Cisco during a period of tumult by driving change, not resisting it. He did so largely by hewing to a simple guiding principle.
"There are no legal problems," he said. "Only business problems."
Chandler joined Cisco in 1996, during its ascendancy as the premier supplier of online-networking gear. But in the last few years he's seen the company confront a massive threat in the shift to cloud computing, reduced growth in demand for the routers and other hardware where Cisco dominates. And just as he's watched his employer pivot toward subscriptions and other services that actually disrupt its legacy business, he's likewise pushed his legal department to evolve, even when – or especially when – it's most uncomfortable.
"We could focus on our ordering process and our signature process and all the things we've always done so successfully," he said. "But you lose if you do that."
Instead, he's pushed innovations that have leveraged technology to streamline those processes, to make closing deals and getting signatures easier for the sales and other frontline soldiers who drive Cisco's business. He replaced the traditional paper-laden NDA process with an automated system that lets team members generate agreements by answering a few questions on their laptops. He's established an electronic acceptance process that reduced the time it takes to approve agreements from 11 days to just five and built a Global Center of Excellence in the legal department that gets transactions signed in four hours – six times faster than the paper-and-ink method. That increased transaction speed led to a 50 percent staffing savings.
He believes that is only the beginning of the automation that will transform the way law is practiced.
"We should start to realize that we'll have rule sets and systems that will be able to process huge amounts of information and generate results that are usable by clients," he said.
Chandler sees the transformation coming in two waves. The first is the one we're hip-deep in today – digital processes, metric and manual dashboards and the standardization of internal policies and processes.
The second wave, Chandler believes, will be marked by radical transparency, in which all the parties involved in any transaction demand full access to all the associated information. That will be a difficult transition for lawyers accustomed to guarding information, using privilege or other legal principles to – at least in the traditional way of thinking – mitigate risk by holding on to whatever data they can.
Succeeding as lawyers in a dramatically different world – driven by full transparency, artificial intelligence and other still-hard-to-grasp concepts – will require lawyers not only to embrace risk, but in some cases to embrace disregarding the rules. That's a cultural change, Chandler said. And it's perhaps the hardest to pull off.
"You have to make people believe in what you're trying to do," Chandler said. "We need to be disruptors of business."