Canadian Lawyer InHouse

23 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE JULY/AUGUST 2018 have been designed to comply with those laws — that would be an absolute gargan- tuan task, but now with whether Thomson Reuters or Lexis Nexis, you can fill in fields and are aware of every legislative develop- ment and are immediately notified if revised or changed or prospectively being amended. I think back to my old Harvard Blue Book days — I don't know how you could possibly keep up to date with all that now when it's all available from your laptop. ACKROYD: Now when you send out an agreement, within 14 minutes there is a reply from your boss asking if we can send it out. So sometimes you have to stop and slow things down. There is contracting by text now — I see it all the time — so I think technology is great in some ways, but you're just always on and I think we're expected to be quick and nimble. LAWAL: It's a symptom of the world we live in today — just immediacy on all fronts and it manifests in how we have to conduct our - selves. It's just time and technology march- ing on, but the practice of law has to march on; it means lawyers have a shorter amount of time to analyze things. GEARING: I want to echo the shout-out for Practical Law. Especially as a smaller legal department, it's an incredible resource for a small department or solo legal department. I had to do a mobile app agreement and they had one in a Word document and you can edit it and save it. If somebody calls you on a legal issue, somebody from a major law firm has probably already thought about it and written a memo about it. INHOUSE: What about blockchain and the impact of AI? FARR: Obviously, at the Bank of Canada, our whole business is affected by these tech- nologies — we're monetary policy, financial stability, funds management and currency. All are prime candidates for artificial intel- ligence with data analytics or distributed ledger technology. We have major research initiatives underway because we know it's going to impact us, but [we're] not quite sure how it will impact us. We have big data analytics, which is heavily influenced by ar - tificial intelligence. One of the challenges in the monetary policy space is the digitiza- tion of the economy and what that actually means. There is a huge payments modern- ization process going on and that could eas- ily be impacted by distributed ledger. We're also researching whether we should be issu- ing a central bank digital currency and if so just what form it will take. We're trying to create innovation zones where we partner with private sector enterprises to try to an - swer common problems. For a public insti- tution, that is more difficult than you think to do because we have procurement rules, fairness in contracting, data that has confi- dentiality constraints, so how can we effec- tively partner at the same time as respecting all of those structures. It's a work in process. ACKROYD: When I break it down at the end of the day it's a distributed ledger where we are storing information safely, securely and it's not in one hub. I think that's got so many applications and maybe not so much for every company and every law firm, but whether it's real estate transactions, pay - ments, identity transactions — just think about all the things that make sense, so if you have a private or semi-private ecosys- tem with a group of people with vested in- terests, it's the way of the future. Right now, we're working with multiple parties to think about what the right guidelines and strate- gies are to roll out. It's the No. 1 thing we focus on most days. LAWAL: To pick up on the AI point, we have used AI at Interac for many years and we use it primarily in connection with fraud mitigation. So we have a fraud scoring engine that helps us reduce the amount of fraud and predict the transactions that are likely to be fraudulent. I joined Interac 10 years ago and that technology was being used. It is continuously being used and shepherded by a group of people who take the information and make the decisions based on the output of the analysis done at the machine. . . For me, it is helpful to see it in action and helps you think of other ways it can have other applications. The applications in payments area are numerous. It's great to see it in action and helps you see how you can implement it on a smaller scale in your legal department. FARR: The other element is that the law is still emerging, so we're in a dangerous space right now. One example is data scrapping. All the technology is there, the data you can mine is phenomenal, but to actually do it you're actually breaching about every enter - prise's terms of use. We have to find a way to find an equilibrium that everyone can be comfortable doing what they need to do and realize the benefits as well. BABIN: We use external firms when we have litigation involving a large document pro - duction requirement. We're also subject to Freedom of Information legislation and we're seeing an uptick in those requests and they are often document-intensive. The firms right now are, generally speaking, of - fering us a billable-hour model with either an outsourced or in-sourced lawyer sitting I think the firms are trying to embrace innovation and technology. SHELLEY BABIN, Ontario Power Generation

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