Canadian Lawyer InHouse

JULY/AUGUST 2018 22 INHOUSE It was Deloitte that provided one on the last transaction we did — so it doesn't necessar- ily need to be a law firm. ACKROYD: My views are that's good for the right deal and the right transaction, but I think there are a lot of smaller companies that aren't doing five M&A deals a year and not using external counsel regularly where they have that rapport with an external law firm where there would be that investment by a law firm. But I think that what is really necessary and essential and it depends at what stage your business is at is contract intake — so how do you create appropriate contracts? I think we need a better way to ask the right questions, get the right inputs to create a better contract and then how to manage that contract and get the information out whether through AI or if you need to know your change of control provisions or something like that. I do think some small legal tech companies are better suited to do that than a big law firm or some of the accounting firms depending on size and scope. INHOUSE: How would you say technology has changed your job as a lawyer in-house? LAWAL: I might be dating myself, but if you think about Shephardizing a case . . . the old school way of doing cases, or if you re - member when Lexis and Westlaw first came out and if you did a mega, mega search and cringed when the bill would come in and how technology has allowed us to do things more efficiently. We started with things like checklists, then self-help options for business. I think the next phase will be to help us with document generation. At In - terac, we have an NDA form — we call it an NDA wizard — it allows you to pull down menus and allows people to generate NDAs themselves, but I think the next phase will be for the business user to say 'This is what I want to accomplish' and then it creates the NDA. I look forward to that sort of thing. It would allow legal to focus on the things that matter — the strategic things and that's my hope — that I will be able to leverage technology not for the sexiness of it but to be able to free me and the people I work with to do things that matter — that require the kind of advocacy and things machines cannot do. BABIN: We are doing a trial of a Thomson Reuters product — Practical Law [Note: Canadian Lawyer InHouse is a Thomson Re - uters publication]. It is something we are considering purchasing because we are hop- ing to defer some of that more junior work doing case law research to do other things. We're also hoping it will allow us to do more of that internally as opposed to going to ex- ternal firms. The product also offers some annotated agreements and can help us just be more efficient in drafting down the road. It also means our dusty library is now gone. INHOUSE: Do you find technology is invading your work and personal life more? GEARING: It's the ability to be connected 24/7 that is challenging sometimes and it's the pace of it that has changed over the course of my career. Sometimes, you just have to say 'We have to slow down for a minute and think about this.' People's ex - pectations, especially in retail — retail is fast — so that's one challenge I find in my practice. FARR: There's really no time for sober de- liberation. The email, once sent, a reply is expected. Two things, too — picking up on your point — our law library is pretty dusty. It's not really getting used. One ex - ample — we have something in compliance . . . a legislative framework and we have identified every statute by business line that applies and we will have each manager certify how their policies and procedures It's just time and technology marching on, but the practice of law has to march on; it means lawyers have a shorter amount of time to analyze things. KIKELOMO LAWAL, Interac Corp. I think technology is great in some ways, but you're just always on and I think we're expected to be quick and be nimble. GORDON ACKROYD SecureKey Technologies

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