Law firms might not have been unfamiliar with technology prior to COVID-19, but the pandemic has placed that aspect of their operations under the direct spotlight. As a result of this, law firm CTOs and CIOs have been emerging as critical players in their organisations’ continued survival and growth. We speak to four CTOs and CIOs on how they see their role evolving as their firms do.
ALB: Can you tell me about your role and what that covers?
SUBROTO PANDA, chief information officer, Anand and Anand: My role is unique and highly valuable, one that is evolving and yet never losing sight of core goals. As both the chief technology officer (CTO) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO), I balance duties on different ends of the spectrum. A CTO for instance typically looks inward and aims to improve processes within the firm. A CIO, on the other hand, looks outward, and uses technology to improve customer-facing actions. As a CIO, I deconstruct business processes and adopt the best practices in the world for optimum output. Necessarily, this involves use of different and often cutting-edge technologies. Thus, my role has evolved from that of an administrator to a trusted advisor to my firm, especially its senior management.
RAKESH KIRPALANI, chief technology officer, Drew & Napier: My role has two components. The first is setting charting the direction of the firm in respect of the adoption of technology to help optimise our security and workflow, and other relevant issues. The second is to act as a bridge between the business and the IT department. It’s no surprise that IT has a language of its own that the business needs help “translating.” Typically, the business needs to understand two things – technological possibilities and limitations. The IT department also needs to understand what the business needs and respond accordingly rather than making suggestions in a vacuum.
IRSHAD SAIFI, director, information technology and digital transformation, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co: I am responsible for technology and digital transformation in the firm and along with my team we support our business for regular IT challenges, work with them to identify opportunities to innovate, increase productivity, time and cost efficiency, and digitally transform the firm across practice areas and business service functions.
RAJESH PAI, chief information officer, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas: As the chief information officer of the firm, my role is to manage the entire information technology landscape including the systems and network infrastructure, data centre operations, end-user support and application development. The main priority is to provide a stable and highly efficient digital environment for our lawyers that can not only help them with their day-to-day work, but also provide the latest tools to make their work more efficient and effective. Being on the latest technology platform provides the edge over rivals by improving business competence, enhancing productivity, and enriching customer experience. Matching technology to strategy is imperative for a law firm wishing to maintain its lead in the market and that is one of the important functions that I carry out at the firm.
“The role of IT as the enabler for organizations is indisputable, not only in providing sustainability and continuity but also for overall growth. In addition, client expectation is the most powerful reason to embrace digital transformation.”
— Rajesh Pai, Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas
BRUNA PELLICI, Chief Technology Officer, Linklaters: My role as CTO covers everything from technology strategy through to delivery, incorporating architecture, technology-led projects, software development, testing, digital adoption and training as well as information security.
ALB: How important is the CTO/CIO role to your firm and its overall growth strategy?
PAI: The dependence of industry on modern IT infrastructure has become plainly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortuitously, our foresight and investment in the right technology has paid off very well. The role of IT as the enabler for organisations is indisputable, not only in providing sustainability and continuity but also for overall growth. In addition, client expectation is the most powerful reason to embrace digital transformation. The CIO role is critical in this respect to provide a robust governance structure for implementing solutions effectively and to ensure that projects are properly planned and managed.
“Digital transformation is one of the driving forces behind long-term growth and success in the modern business world given the fact that technology helps expedite numerous processes, automate various operations, and manage remote workers with ease.”
— Subroto Panda, Anand and Anand
PANDA: When it comes to the overall growth strategy, a CIO must create a digital ecosystem for an organisation and individuals transacting across a distributed, constantly evolving, adaptive, open, social, technical system with collaboration, transparency, scalability and sustainability.
A law firm’s life and breath are always its clients. The information lawyers possess about their clients, is often the very secret behind their clients’ success, commercially and otherwise. As a CTO and CIO, I help the firm keep clients’ data extremely secure and protected in today’s day and age of scams and cyber-attacks.
Digital transformation is one of the driving forces behind long-term growth and success in the modern business world given the fact that technology helps expedite numerous processes, automate various operations, and manage remote workers with ease.
Most importantly, our growth strategy is backed up by relevant and verifiable data assisted by analytics.
With so much information flowing with regards to law firms, we efficiently combine big data analytics with artificial intelligence in order to collect and collate vast amounts of data without wasting time or money to ensure great insights and modern analytics for business growth.
“A dedicated focus on technology is required, and a sound and experienced technology leader is therefore imperative for every firm in today’s world, who not only can run the technology function, but can also drive innovation, transformation and build products as necessary.”
— Irshad Saifi, Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co
SAIFI: We are in the digital era and technology is playing a significant role worldwide across industries, including law firms. It is important to enable all practice areas with cutting-edge technology to improve productivity, overall growth, and provide a unique experience to our clients. A dedicated focus on the technology function is required to accomplish these, and a sound and experienced technology leader is therefore imperative for every firm in today’s world, who not only can run the technology function, but can also drive innovation, transformation and build products as necessary.
KIRPALANI: It is as important as technology is to any business today. Technology pervades everything, but that does not mean you should adopt technology for technology’s sake. It is important to be able to consider what technology works for the business, and what doesn’t. There is no point in implementing solutions when there are no problems.
PELLICCI: The evolving speed, scale, and complexity of the issues faced by our clients in today’s global legal and regulatory landscape means that we are continually adapting our service to support client needs and expectations. Technology can make a world of difference in the lives of our lawyers and clients and my work, together with our technology team and service providers, is integral to the firm’s digitalisation plans.
For example, moving our systems and services to ‘the Cloud’ is an enormous change programme and later this year we are looking to implement a new document management system, as well as Exchange On-Line, this move will help to support our Science Based Targets by moving to greener technology as well as ‘Ever-Green’ services, allowing the firm’s technology team to focus on the many new requirements coming its way as well as digital adoption, ensuring we make the most of our investments.
As a firm, we are discovering new technologies all the time to benefit both our lawyers and our clients. Providers like Microsoft, InTapp and iManage, are some of the key solutions we use, all building into the Cloud, as the days of on-premise solutions are behind us in many cases.
ALB: How has the function of your role changed during the pandemic?
SAIFI: Our firm has been at the forefront of using cutting-edge technologies for decades and the pandemic further enabled us to rapidly implement ongoing and new initiatives. These initiatives led to seamless remote functioning, and increased lawyers’ productivity by use of cutting-edge AI/ML-based technologies. PAI: Fortunately for us, we already had a remote work-enabled infrastructure in place that allowed for collaborative online working even before the pandemic hit. It was because of this that we did not have a single day of downtime during the pandemic and were able to ride the wave, in spite of the severe disruptions all around. The biggest change for the IT department was moving to a remote support model to assist people who were working from home. We also had to enhance the network bandwidth to cater to the increased online traffic load and quickly adapt to the new way of working and changed expectations from users. We have also become acutely conscious of the importance of business continuity planning and resilience of the IT infrastructure and have devoted much more focus to these areas.
PANDA: COVID-19 was a black swan event which seems to make sense only in hindsight. When it hit, there was utter confusion across each industry. Amidst this chaos and confusion, my role as a chief information officer (CIO) has inherited an altered future with far-evolved responsibilities to be taken head-on through the pandemic and beyond.
This reality required of me, as the CIO, the grit to develop an expansive view of learning that goes far beyond training modules and certification programs. By expansive, I mean honing routine skills based on future needs and values, rolling out reskilling programs that target our firm members with “adjacent skills,” working from anywhere in the safest way.
Having said this, the biggest challenge of this conundrum lies in recognising that security is primarily a cultural and managerial issue rather than a technical one. While almost 90 percent of tech leaders understood and believed their IT organisations have been effective in improving cyber defences, only two-thirds of the remaining C-suite agree that it is more than just tech, implying thereby, that there is considerable room for improvement.
“The pandemic accelerated the firm’s digital transformation journey. It also shifted the focus away from “centralised” IT issues within the firm, to “de-centralised” IT issues outside the firm as employees and lawyers needed to work from home.”
— Rakesh Kirpalani, Drew & Napier
KIRPALANI: The firm was already on its digital transformation journey before the pandemic. The pandemic accelerated that journey. It also shifted the focus away from “centralised” IT issues within the firm, to “decentralised” IT issues outside the firm as employees and lawyers needed to work from home. Fortunately, we were able to adapt very quickly and almost seamlessly to working from home. During the pandemic, the firm also launched DrewTech which provides legal services in the technology space and forensic technology services to clients.
PELLICCI: Since early 2020, technology has played a vital role in allowing us to provide the highest standards of client service as we navigate the path of hybrid working. We recognise that our people have busy lives inside and outside of work and, as our clients’ expectations grow in parallel with a greater need for flexibility from our people, technology has been instrumental in meeting these demands and supporting the dynamic shift in agile working patterns.
ALB: Can you tell us about the type of technology your firm uses and how much of this is developed in house versus externally?
SAIFI: We begin by identifying opportunities to solve, innovate and transform our business as a firm. Once the opportunity is identified, we look at solving these by technology either by adopting the solution already available, making adjustments or customisation to existing solutions, or build ourselves. Our initiatives are divided into four technology stacks:
- Firmwide: ERP, CRM, HRMS, LMS, fixed-fee, etc;
- Legal technologies and innovation: DMS, AI/ML-based contract review, document comparison, proofreading, firm style, etc;
- Cybersecurity and compliance: Insider trading compliance system, cyber-insurance, ISO 27001-based cybersecurity framework, cutting-edge and world-renowned technologies at each layer, such as endpoint, network, remote access, multi-factor authentication, data protection, etc; and
- Infrastructure and operations: Data centre, DR, VDI, M365, world-renowned computer storage, etc.
We have a lean in-house team with strong governance and architecture. As per our operating model, we design and own the solution, and get it developed from external partners.
PANDA: Over the past two years we have witnessed a growing appetite and interest in automation. With the legal industry in the grip of the phenomenon that is now being called the Great Resignation, automation can prove to be a great tool to ease the pain. Firstly, by helping a resource-constrained team to cope with the volume of work, and secondly, to attract new team members who might be impressed by the use of automation technology for addressing those manual, repetitive or administrative tasks.
Our major strength has always lied in the in-house development vis-a-vis external. Examples include document management automation and a next-gen client portal.
PAI: We provide a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment for our users to enable remote connectivity from any global location. The desktops are hosted on a hybrid cloud and users can continue their work seamlessly to pick up from where they left off the next time they log on. For matter management, time tracking, document management, etc. we use world-class products specifically designed for law firms. Most of the tools and technology we use are global leaders rated in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in their respective categories. We also have an in-house application development team dedicated to developing solutions for our internal management and reporting needs.
KIRPALANI: As a law firm, we want to focus our resources on what we do best and so we develop very little of our IT in-house except for customised software applications. Apart from the typical office and document management applications, we recently moved away from local workstations to virtual desktops. This now forms the backbone of the IT infrastructure for the firm and has been essential during the pandemic.
PELLICCI: We have a variety of technology including off-shelf mainstream products and services, looking at cloud solutions first wherever possible. If we’re unable to find a solution to meet our needs then we often partner with third party technology organisations to develop a solution, or build the solution ourselves, though self-build is only a small percentage of what we provide. We are doing a lot in the space of robotics and automation to help create efficiencies in our processes wherever possible.
ALB: In what ways do you feel law firms will evolve in the future, and what role will the technology team and its CTO/CIO play in that?
PANDA: Nowadays, the role of technology is to be fully aware of the firm, its processes and business model, while being constantly updated and informed on the most recent innovations, new technology and new designs that could make the organisation better. Being a member of the executive team, it is essential to exemplify leadership skills and bind the workforce for greater growth of the firm.
Technology not only contributes to organisation’s efficiency, it also enhances communication, transparency, trust and reliability within as well as outside the organisation.
The legal industry tends to hold on to tradition. However, Law firm professionals have now realised that innovation is key to surviving in the now disrupted world. Law firm innovation begins with shifting focus to clients’ needs and providing an end-to-end client-centred experience.
Today, artificial intelligence (AI) is beginning to transform the legal profession in many ways, but in most cases, it augments what humans do and frees them up to take on more demanding and meaningful tasks such as advising clients, negotiating deals and appearing in court.
KIRPALANI: My view is that law firms will start shrinking their physical space and move into cyberspace. I don’t think they will (or should) do away with their physical space completely because lawyering is still a people business. But many aspects of lawyering such as documents, client meetings, collaboration, court, or arbitration hearings, even office real estate, should all be given serious reconsideration. Technology offers many ways to optimise all these issues and it is up to law firms to consider what works for them. Naturally, the CTO/CIO role will be essential in charting the firm’s direction in technology adoption, and playing a bridge between the business and IT.
PAI: Even before the pandemic brought home the indispensable advantages that technology can provide for businesses, the legal industry was well on its way to modernising its processes and adopting digital ways of working.
Technology adoption by law firms across the globe has accelerated sharply during the pandemic and innovative technology solutions have rapidly evolved. This trend will continue to grow and we will see a massive change from the old ways of working. Legaltech has come into its own with a lot of focus on enabling the legal industry to leverage the advantages that come from solutions with a strong technical foundation. Artificial intelligence technology is already being used in areas like contract analysis, legal drafting, e-discovery, sophisticated research, etc., and this trend will only grow with time where machine learning and process automation with AI technologies will allow greater automation of the basic legal processes. Typically, courts and the judicial administrative machinery that have traditionally been very conservative, have now become more than willing to adapt to the changes and use modern methods of functioning and governance. Technology leaders who can guide and lead this digital transformation will play a very important role in the time to come. SAIFI: Law firms are adapting robust strategy and planning in technology. Technology teams of law firms could further advance in areas such as:
- Excellent client experience: End-to-end solutions including better experience during the entire lifecycle of engagement.
- Flexibility of fee structures by providing technology solutions for fee structures, such as fixed-cost structure, time-based structure and other options.
- Time-efficient technology solutions for routine work, including basic document hygiene steps, contract review, due diligence, etc.
- Technologies to help law firms in their day-to-day work:
- Technology that can increase the chance of winning cases, which would provide a recommendation for case success if a specific judge or court is selected for a particular case.
- Technology that can conduct due diligence of M&A documents, which would be able to provide a recommendation as to whether a targeted M&A would be beneficial to the company or not.
- New technologies that would help to review thousands of contracts in a large enterprise to read clauses such as penalty etc, correlate with SLA documents and provide a summary of amount to be claimed from a set of service providers.
PELLICCI: Technology is changing at a faster pace than ever before. Looking ahead, we will continue to embrace the latest technologies, from software applications to aid matter and document management, as well as robotics, AI and automation, all to enhance efficiencies across everything we do. We find ourselves in exciting times where technology can revolutionise the day-to-day.
Keeping up with latest in video conferencing and broadcasting to enable the best hybrid, virtual meetings and events experience, as well as implementing the latest in Microsoft cloud services are all paramount, to help us stay ahead of the curve and to support how our teams are working both in the office and remotely. Having the right technology at the right time to keep us agile in approach is imperative, as well as having a stack of technology to ensure that we can work with clients on their preferred platforms ( e.g. Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams).
Cloud and AI will continue to change the way in which we choose, develop and integrate technology and generally we are all becoming much more tech savvy. As law firms begin to welcome a generation of digital natives who have been living and breathing technology in a way that previous generations didn’t, there will be an increased desire for more technology driven solutions and efficient ways of working.