How AI Will Transform Organisation Dynamics And Why We'll Still Need Lawyers, With Gett's Eleanor Luker

I met Eleanor Luker, Legal Operations Manager at Gett (one of the pioneers of urban transport tech), at one of our Hungry Counsel Brunches in London recently and was immediately taken by the freshness of her perspectives and her impressive understanding of the current challenges for organisations in the tech space. Naturally, I grabbed the closest opportunity for Part Two of our conversation and wasn't disappointed.

Lorna Khemraz: I've been meaning to ask your view on a slightly salty topic. Is there time, space and resource for Legal Ops in a start up or a scale up (or both)? Legal Ops has often been described as a 'luxury', so I'm curious to hear your take on this.

Eleanor Luker: A very hard yes to all three. I think much of the old school start up approach centres on fast paced growth with an ‘act now, sort later' approach, which I have come to see ends up in messy chaos when the company ultimately levels out into a scale-up/enterprise or decides to go to public. There is rarely a thought to process or paper trail on core documents needed in a company, which down the line means anywhere from one to more in-house lawyers find themselves trying to support the business legally on reactive matters and execute contracts all whilst trying to implement a process to prevent this from happening again.

Throw in the associated demands of trying to train the business on this and police bad behaviour and you have a recipe which never truly works. Legal Ops solves this from the get go.

They take this away and quieten the ‘noise’ - they see the issues, they create a roadmap to solve this, they review and implement legal tech to simplify and create processes which inherently work for both legal and the business. The business has someone to go to who acts as a halfway house between them and the lawyers - fostering better stakeholder relations and allowing the lawyers to do the job they were hired for better.

Legal ops isn’t just a nice to have, it's a need for any start up or scale up who takes their growth and long term business plans seriously - with the development of so much sophisticated legal tech and AI coupled with an innate understanding of how lawyers ‘work’, businesses with a designated Legal Ops team from the get go have a chance to get ahead of the curve, solve legal problems quicker and make the argument/whinge of ‘legal taking too long’ being a thing long of the past.

LK: I'm glad you said Yes to the above or it would have been a very brief interview. Building on your response, how would you describe the value of doing legal ops right from the get go, not as an afterthought?

EL: The greatest value add really is that there is less wasted time spent unpicking the mess of bad processes (or complete lack of) and sifting through the inevitable mess a company creates with no one focusing on simplification of legal practice.

If we are treating our in-house lawyers in the same vein we would external counsel, it is a waste of company time and money to spend it doing what I would call ‘core legal ops roles’ we've discussed above, when they could be focusing on ‘core legal’ matters which the business needs to succeed.

Ultimately any form of process is usually an afterthought by in-house lawyers - usually due to the fact they are fire fighting legal issues in the business and need to focus on this.

Legal ops isn’t just a nice to have, it's a need for any start up or scale up who takes their growth and long term business plans seriously - with the development of so much sophisticated legal tech and AI coupled with an innate understanding of how lawyers ‘work’, businesses with a designated Legal Ops team from the get go have a chance to get ahead of the curve, solve legal problems quicker and make the argument/whinge of ‘legal taking too long’ being a thing long of the past.

LK: Are lawyers difficult to deal with? 😬 What have you learned about lawyers’ idiosyncrasies so far?

EL: No. Yes? No. I’m joking but in all honesty I think Legal is one of the most misunderstood departments in a business. They run a thankless task of trying to protect the company while doing the ‘boring yet necessary’ legal admin elements required to keep a Company going (and legitimate) which often leads to a view of them as a blocker to growth, success and probably the team you don’t want to interact with on a night out.

In my opinion, they are usually the most quick witted, sharp and reactive team in a Company who work fairly tirelessly behind the scenes and don’t get the beauty of any shout outs for their work - which underpins every project and departments output in some way.

Yes, they sometimes may look to ‘fuss’ over a contract and write lengthy emails detailing to a stakeholder what clauses are causing a problem and the legal reasoning behind this (to which most stakeholders just reply ‘so are we good to sign then?’) but all in all, their idiosyncrasies have made them a very fun and intelligent bunch to work with.

LK: What would you say is the hack for helping lawyers optimize for their skillset?

EL: Being flexible and adaptable in their approach. I have seen too many lawyers making the transition from Private Practice to In-House trying to apply the same concrete hard and fast rules in their approach to the business which does not work.

Your clients are your stakeholders you work day in day out with inside the business - listen to their issues, use the knowledge and great skillset you have learnt from your years of studies and practice and pivot this to become a partner to the business - work out the appetite for risk, your hard yes and nos and when to put your foot down and state there is a legitimate risk.

Not all contracts need to be over thought and heavily redlined - but at the same time, just because a person in [insert problematic department here] is harassing you on every possible platform to get a contract over the line doesn’t mean you need to concede when you know in your gut that the contract is not in the business’ best interests legally.

LK: Do you think there is a fundamental difference between legal ops in the scale up space versus legal ops in enterprise? Is one more agile than the other?

EL: Yes - in scale ups it may well still be seen as a ‘nice to have’ but the focus is still on having lawyers (and usually a lean a team as possible because they are still focusing on growth and getting profitable)  whereas in enterprise, business has usually levelled out, they are seen as a more ‘mature’ company and may well have more headcount and money for developing individuals in this role (and even its own department).

The irony is, in scale ups, I still see more agility for legal ops due in fact to this high growth nature of it still being more reactive and pushing on time saving and change - where Legal Ops can swoop in and really benefit the Company instilling better guidelines, tech and processes which help it become a more stable, streamlined and commercially savvy business in the long run.

Enterprise usually has the budget and allowance for Legal Ops in its plans but the agility of working in them can be stunted slightly by pre-existing processes or levels of sign off/seniority which allow for change but may take longer to do so.

LK: Do you have any ops war stories to share? If there is such a thing? I can certainly think of a couple of projects that went completely sideways in my own experience… 👀

EL: I think the worst I’ve usually had always relates to the constant ‘why’ from the business in multiple areas.

Why do we need a contract for that it's ‘such a small thing’, why do we want to spend money on a new piece of legal tech when you already have x amount of lawyers, why can’t you make your legal team execute those 26 requests outstanding in the next 3 days before the Christmas Holidays, why are you taking so long on that 25 page contract which said stakeholder didn’t even review themselves before firing over to the legal team (ignoring the 12 comments for them tagged in the document).

You need buy-in from Senior Leadership as soon as possible - otherwise you will be stuck as I have in the past with the the argument that Legal as Cost Centre is just that - a cost to the business who bring in ‘no real value’.

Lawyers (and humans) can breathe a sigh of relief for now - I can’t see them being redundant any time soon - legal skills and human understanding of a Legal question in relation to the business is not something which can easily be replicated. Until AI can understand the politics of a fraught meeting including various stakeholders, their own political agenda and how lawyers deftly navigate this, I think they can rest easy.

LK: Now, let’s talk about everybody’s favourite word, we can’t hear enough about it these days…AI. What’s your take on AI? Is AI coming to make all humans redundant? What does AI mean for start ups, scale ups, lawyers, legal ops?

EL: Whether you like it or not, AI use will soon be standard practice in Legal. I think the take up of this will vary - I would argue from my current experience, Legal Ops is sector who are the most keen and open to this and therefore are likely to be spearheading its use in whatever business they sit.

For start ups and scale ups, I would argue its integration will be quicker - to begin with, it will cut off the need for basic review in contracts (using Legal Tech with AI capabilities to write rules to review contracts faster and make sure in line with company precedents) but also in a way to answer repeat questions from the business and empower them to understand and interact with the legal ‘sphere’ better.

Lawyers (and humans) can breathe a sigh of relief for now - I can’t see them being redundant any time soon - legal skills and human understanding of a Legal question in relation to the business is not something which can easily be replicated. Until AI can understand the politics of a fraught meeting including various stakeholders, their own political agenda and how lawyers deftly navigate this, I think they can rest easy.

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