Meet the specialists digitising companies’ legal teams

The legal operations specialists who use their technological knowhow to support companies’ in-house lawyers are the focus of this last instalment of the FT’s monthly Accelerating Business series for 2024.

The series examines the way lawyers, managers and legal tech providers use the latest resources to keep pace with business needs: this time we highlight five legal operations professionals. They stand out for their efforts to make full use of technology, especially artificial intelligence, and for broadening the role and influence of this area of in-house legal teams’ work. The five were selected by FT research partner RSGI.

Rosario Alonso

head of the legal innovation centre — Iberdrola

A hub set up last year to deal with contracts has become central to the Spain-based energy company’s overhaul of operations in its legal team.

Iberdrola’s legal innovation centre, led by Rosario Alonso, automates and digitises all parts of the contract process. Its remit includes storage, drafting, negotiating with suppliers and electronic signatures relating to approximately 28,000 contracts a year. More than 5,000 people worldwide use it regularly.

Automating tasks and sharing data more efficiently, says Alonso, has helped Iberdrola cut the time it takes to negotiate and sign contracts by more than a third. This is at least partly because “everyone [who] is in charge of the contract has the same information at the same time”.

Other benefits of this digitisation initiative include an electronic trail for updates to contracts and better cross-departmental working between, for example, legal services and general business, tax and cyber security teams.

The company has changed its vision of legal services

Alonso — who has worked for nearly two decades at Iberdrola, and formerly provided legal services to departments including IT and insurance — says colleagues from other areas of the company regularly call her for advice about how to digitise business processes. “The company has changed [its] vision of legal services,” she notes, adding that she particularly enjoys the “constant new challenges” involved in the transformation of Iberdrola’s legal function.   

Antonello Gargano

head of legal and compliance operations, strategy execution and chief of staff — ASML

The legal operations team at ASML has gone all-in with generative AI. The Dutch chipmaking-equipment supplier uses several AI tools, including those from legal AI start-up Harvey and Microsoft’s AI-powered assistant Copilot. Tasks range from answering queries about company policies to digging out information on legal contracts. 

Some of ASML’s legal and compliance specialists have even begun to use Harvey for preparing for legal action, or assessing whether the company is complying with regulations, says Gargano.

We came up with 33 ideas for AI projects

These AI projects were the fruit of a brainstorming session held last year by the legal team: “We came up with 33 ideas,” Gargano recalls. The resulting AI strategy is overseen by a task force of about eight people, who test the latest tools.

Because Harvey is trained on comprehensive case law, it provides “immense expertise”, says Gargano. He estimates that ASML’s use of Harvey and other AI tools has helped its employees complete legal and compliance tasks between 15 per cent and 20 per cent faster. And, for legal tasks that involve extra levels of research — relating to anti-bribery or anti-corruption rules, or on case law, for example — the time saved is “way more”.

But Gargano also stresses that AI is merely a tool, and the output is checked by humans. He does not expect it to replace ASML employees.

Léo Murgel

senior vice-president, office of legal and corporate affairs — Salesforce

Salesforce, one of the world’s biggest business software companies, has used its own technology and AI tools to help its legal team increase productivity and cut spending on external services.

In the past 18 months, the company has automated routine tasks by using a variety of legal AI tools, explains Léo Murgel. For example, the team at the California-based company uses a legal research platform to summarise US data privacy regulations that Salesforce software must comply with, but which vary by state in the US. Salesforce also uses AI-powered software to translate its documentation.

The company’s legal department uses Salesforce’s own AI-powered customer relationship software to help keep track of the hundreds of law firms and legal service providers it hires around the world. The AI summarises Salesforce’s commercial relationship with them — including, for example, comparing costs and services.

There’s no other team inside a company that’s so dominated by unstructured data

All AI-generated legal information that Salesforce uses has been verified for accuracy, Murgel notes. For example, AI research or answers to legal queries will be based on large legal databases, maintained by Salesforce suppliers, which include links to legal rulings for corroboration.

Using AI in these ways was a significant factor in helping Salesforce to shave more than $5mn off its spending on external legal services in the past financial year and to manage legal suppliers better, says Murgel.

And generative AI has already had a “profound” effect on how the Salesforce legal department operates by helping it extract meaning and knowledge from unstructured data, such as documents, emails and contracts.

“In a space like legal . . . well over 90 per cent of our data is unstructured,” Murgel notes. “There’s really no other team inside a company that’s so dominated by unstructured data.”

Barbara Rogers

vice-president, legal operations, strategy and transformation — Honeywell

Honeywell, the US-based industrial conglomerate, with products ranging from thermostats to jet engines, embarked on a global project this year to connect up contract, financial and customer data, to streamline its contracting process. The core aim is to extract data from contracts in the company’s own management system, and then connect it to nearly 20 other IT systems, provided by several suppliers.

Honeywell’s comprehensive management system stores approximately 90,000 procurement and sales contracts, with a combined contract value of approximately $4.5bn each year.

The project is led by Barbara Rogers, who set up the company’s legal operations team in September, having formerly held senior roles in legal, procurement and human resources.

Somebody would have to take a purchase order or an invoice and go back into the system [to] figure out what contract it was related to

Previously, the computer systems used for business invoicing, customers and contracts were not fully integrated, says Rogers. “Somebody would have to take a purchase order or an invoice and go back into the [contract management] system and see if they could figure out what contract it was related to.”

The IT integration, which started this year and is expected to finish in early 2026, has faced some challenges, she acknowledges. One has been persuading staff to stick tightly to common payments terms in contracts, while another has been training AI to extract the right data from IT systems. Overall, though, progress has been smooth.

One benefit she expects is a reduction in the time needed to negotiate and sign a contract: it should come down by at least one to two days initially, and eventually by as much as five days. Although quantifying projected improvements exactly remains tricky, Rogers says the measures could save Honeywell between $10mn and $50mn in working capital — on a “very conservative estimate”.

Petra Stirling

Director of Operations, Risk and Transformation — Westpac Legal

In more than two decades of experience in professional services and financial services, Petra Stirling’s roles have often focused on taking a lead on innovation.

Her latest role includes planning and overseeing digital transformation at Westpac, one of Australia’s leading banks, where she is head of legal operations. She has led several innovative digital projects at the bank, most recently its rollout of generative AI for drafting and agreeing contracts from suppliers.

Westpac’s legal operations team started experimenting this year with several generative AI software products.

While cautioning that it is “early days”, Stirling says results so far are promising. For example, the team can review an initial contract up to 15 per cent faster than if the lawyers completed the review themselves.

“The productivity gains are really around speed and efficiency,” says Stirling. “We see significant opportunities in enabling our very senior and talented lawyers to speed up the production of [for] example, a first review of a third-party contract.”

Generative AI kind of democratises and . . . humanises some aspects of the law for a broader business audience

Given the risk of generative AI “hallucinations” − when the technology fabricates information and presents it as fact — all AI output is checked by the company’s lawyers for accuracy and to ensure that the AI is used ethically, she adds.

Keeping the “lawyer in the loop” is essential when AI is used, Stirling stresses.

The bank’s legal operations team has also used generative AI to create a guide to Westpac’s preferred position on various contractual and regulatory matters, such as payment terms and cyber security. 

And the bank is piloting the use of generative AI to create videos, based on short scripts by Westpac lawyers, that explain legal processes — such as contract analysis — to colleagues in other parts of the business. Generative AI “kind of democratises and, oddly enough, humanises some aspects of the law for a broader business audience”, observes Stirling.