Episode 49: Creating Tech Friendly Ecosystems for Law with Teemu Oksanen

This episode is brought to you by Precisely, the CLM platform setting a new standard for digital contracting. For more info, go to PreciselyContracts.com/LDB. Welcome to Legal Design Podcast. We are your host, Nina Toivanen and Henna Tolbanen. Today we meet with Demo Oxanan, who works as General Counsel at Socialize, to talk about creating ecosystems for implementing technology into legal work. Demo is a forerunner when it comes to legal tech. With his team, he has automated legal work and even created a robot to help non-roiers understand what law is about and how to use it in everyday business life. Tune in to hear how to take the quantum leap in legal with the help of human-centric design and technology. So my name is Demo Oxanan and I've been working at Futories for about six years now and for those of you who may not have heard of us before Futories is a digitalization consultancy and we bring together strategy, design, engineering and data to help our client organizations to take control of their futures. We have offices here in Finland and also in Germany, Sweden and the UK. And my title here is a General Counsel but I usually describe myself as a janitor of the group because as GZ you have to know all the corners of the company to keep the house functioning and prevent any major damage from happening and you have to know a little about everything as people tend to contact you when they don't know who else to contact and also listening to the discussions at the courtyard or in our case, the espresso machine is of vital importance to do the job. And sometimes you also have to chase away the kids behaving badly at the courtyard. But yeah, first and foremost, I also consider myself as a legal geek and I have always been interested in technology and being responsible for all the legal matters here at Futories. I of course want to take advantage of it myself, helping me, my team and my colleagues. And yes, nowadays even real senators take advantage of modern technology at their work so why wouldn't we as lawyers do the same? Yes, to create examples. I love the introduction and actually it really fits well for the General Counsel role. That's true. So, welcome to the podcast demo. Our agenda for today is to discuss the role of technological solutions in creating better working environments, especially for lawyers and their clients, but also for other people who are involved in these systems of work. For many businesses today, it is pretty self-evident, I would say, that in order to bring their operations to the next level or even just to meet the expectations in the market today, businesses have to invest in new technological tools. But no tool, of course, solves the problem if it's not designed to address the actual needs of the organization and especially the people who use those tools in their everyday work. So it's not just the technological advancement we need, but perhaps also improvement in the way we think and approach about our problems. The reality in many organizations, especially in the public sector, I think, talking for my own experience is that yet the right tools to address the issues already do exist somewhere in this world, the operations are not mature enough to take the required quantum leap towards more meaningful and more efficient ways of working. So demo, from your experience, what kind of obstacles do you see in your daily work requiring the implementation of new technology, technologies, especially in the legal sector? What holds us back from going to the next level? That's a good question. If I have to select one word, then that would probably be the habits. We people tend to be super reluctant to change the ways we are working. And if the chains such would make our lives easier, and even if we actually knew that the chains is for good. A good example of this was when we at Future is changed the platform where we drafted and signed our employment contracts. On the previous platform that we had, our HE people, and yeah, we call our 8R, we call them human care. So that's why it's HE. They still had to do a lot of work like editing there for each contract, like juicing the right clauses and deleting the clauses that were not needed and so on. And we had agreed upon adopting a new questionnaire-based platform for the employment contracts. But the launch actually took several months as my BC, HE colleagues always say that, "Hey, I will still do this one more contract with the old system as I know how it's done there." Yeah, exactly at the end, I actually informed them that the old platform will be closed in a month, so better start using the new one now. At the end of the day, they did say that the new system was way better than the old one, but the change itself was just in a way a big step for them and that was the obstacle. Select another word, then I would select or two words, use her experience. It's also about how we try to answer the need for the chains. For instance, many of the early contracting platforms, or I think they were either made by people with engineering background, or they were targeted mainly at lawyers, and they really were not that intuitive. They were not made for the end users, but just tried to somehow kind of mimic the process that light in lawyers or the engineers' minds. I would say user experience is also or used to be kind of an obstacle for this, but I think we have actually took those huge leaps in technology now that there is also more emphasis on the user experience. Yes, so it happens and the problems with the user experience. How to address these two issues in real life? What should organizations pay attention to in order to create work environments where old habits could be or were taken with new ones and kind of created social ecosystems that are more ready to adapt to the necessary change and where the user experience point of you would be taken into account early enough? Yeah, I think one important thing here is actually not to think legal tech as just legal tech. It's just something that boosts your legal team's efficiency or put through or whatever. Yeah, I actually think that I know you are big fans of legal design because you have this podcast, but I actually think that legal tech and legal design actually go very much hand in hand. Yes. And for instance, I have an example, for instance, one pride of our legal team is our so-called NDA rowboat, a very simple tool that we build for ourselves. At the heart, of course, it is a stack of different technologies. There is type form, precisely, Zephyr, Slack, those all connected through their APIs, but of course that that is not something that the end user sees. They don't see the technology and there is no even need for them to understand or see the technology. They see an easy interface that just simply works and lets them to concentrate on their real business, like their own work that brings in the money to the house. I may, of course, myself, I'm the creator of the NDA rowboat at the end of the day. I may see it as legal tech tool, but they see it first and foremost as legal design. Yeah, that's true. And that's a great way to put it actually. And I'm already loving this discussion even though it's been like five minutes or something. But you had a really good point that I mean legal take shouldn't be for lawyers. I mean, it's sometimes it's so easy to think that all legal that if that is to something for lawyers. But it was a great example that you mentioned that you've been working with your HC and actually involving the end users. Because we should really have more people than just lawyers to when we develop something. So if we look at the collaboration from a little different angle. Do you think legal players should collaborate more when creating ecosystems for technological development? Because I think we could actually be a lot further technical wise as an industry and a profession. If we focused more on working together, instead of re-eventing the wheel individually one by one. And do you think the collaboration is ever going to happen or are we lawyers just to keen to keep our innovations to ourselves. So no one steals our funders. And I think you're also right on the point here. From my perspective, many of us and by us, I mean lawyers. We still think that that somehow we are able to put that little magical secret ingredient to each of the contract we're working on. But honestly, honestly, I think we're not that bit that special or at least I can admit that perhaps I'm not. Yeah, I think there are good examples on the other hand kind of we have been progressing on this front also as lawyers. One of the one of the best examples actually of such kind of new ways of working new collaborative model is is one in the if you have heard of it a project where where a group of legal professionals made kind of a general. The idea is that the one in the a template should be balanced. So there is only need to fill in or even negotiate certain fields such as, for example, the jurisdiction, of course, otherwise it is always and must always remain in its standard form. So no one should use time to actually negotiate or even review it. Because at the end of the day, an NDA seldom brings in any business for for the company and and no lawyer, I would say likes reading those NDA. Yeah, if you yeah, yeah, if you haven't checked it, I really suggest you to go to I think it's one NDA or or something like that it's it's I think it's a great project. And from my own perspective, I have also tried to open up my my kind of legal tech stack in several events as a speaker or to anyone just just happening to ask me, unfortunately, I don't think we have too much time. Now to do it on on on this part, but let's say it's not the secret that we have built some of our tools, for example, on top of your sponsor precisely and I'm happy to share more details about it to anyone. If if if someone wants to discuss about it, I think sharing thoughts on on how to make our our lives easier. It is just collegial and and does not take anything from me other than perhaps some of my time, but but I also value the discussion with my colleagues. So so just treat me out on Twitter or LinkedIn. If you if you're interested. That's really nice because I really do think that we all should collaborate more because I mean in the end of the day, we shouldn't think ourselves, but we should think the client and if we develop something together, then it would benefit the client side. Exactly. And and kind of in a way, I think the lawyers work is to serve the world in general, at least to some extent. So exactly, it's a customer service professional. Yeah, and when we're talking about creating the ecosystem, it's really difficult to work efficiently if other people are not working efficiently as well. So I think sharing information and knowledge and experiences, like in this podcast and also in social media, whatever forum you choose, it's like part of that because then other people's kind of get this incentive to to figure out better ways of working as well. Exactly. This episode is brought to you by precisely the contract management lifecycle tool helping enterprises to scale their contracting in a sustainable way. Precisely automates every aspect of your contracting workflow. So a legal professional like you will be able to focus on making better decisions and leaving the office some time. So let's move on to talking about more concrete examples of legal tech tools that you have been working with demo. So working as a general counsel for fruit, like you said, a company that specializes in digital transformation. You must have many interesting case examples and ideas on how to successfully process through a legal tech project. And we have at least heard that at Futurisa, you have organized a contract negotiation and management cycle pretty impressively also using AI. Would you like to share with us about that? Yeah, I already mentioned our NDA robot, for example, I really think that is kind of our current gem, so to speak, it just really works for for everyone's advantage. It makes it makes us or our lives as lawyers or our legal team easier, but at the end of the day, it really helps helps our business people to do their work. And it's also somehow kind of forefront on how we do things that future is so an easy solution for sometimes even kind of easy, kind of low hanging problems that just have to be done to make our lives easier. And once again, I must emphasis that it's all about legal design. So no tool, I think, can help you if you if you try to make everything full of legally slang words that your business people just don't understand. Even if you automate your contract, you will still use a lot of your own time in negotiating the contracts. If the business people don't understand the end results of your, for example, your automation projects, so the contract. So to be honest, I think many of our legal tech projects here at future is have they have actually started with doing the very basic thing, which is kind of checking our own templates and making them understandable. And as I said, also also balance for the both parties involved when the templates as such are ready to be shared, then they can be automated to, for example, in our case, it's precisely. And suddenly you see that you have to cut the time or you have managed to cut the time that legal has to spend in negotiating the contract. As now the business can handle it, they can make it, but they can also negotiate it because they understand what's the, what, what it says in the contract in a way. Yeah, it's sometimes easier to negotiate something when you actually understand the context. Yeah, exactly. So you know, automating the contract, it would, it's, of course, it's nice to have that PDF, but if you send it to the client, you don't understand it, the client, don't understand it. The problem will come back to the legal table. Yeah, sure. Hey, then, well, you mentioned the one in the role of no, the NDA role, but for a few times now, I was just wondering, have you done some calculations on how much time do you have actually saved from your legal team? To be honest, that is something that I cannot tell, but I guarantee you I have, or we have saved a lot of, lot of time there. I think imagine. Yeah, I think kind of the initial reason for, for all the, all the kind of initiatives that we have taken on the, on the kind of legal tech front is that just two years ago. I was the only lawyer at Futurist Group where a group of companies with some, I don't know, 650 employees in five different erudixes, I really just had to find a way to survive my working day. Sounds lovely, but actually that, I mean, I think lawyers will only see the benefits of technology when they're going to have to. Exactly. At the moment, we don't have, I mean, of course, we have lawyers who are interested in technology and who are willing to use it, but then again, we still have the dinosaurs, hello to everybody over 60 maybe, who still wants to do the things the old way, but they will see the benefits when they actually have to, and then probably it might be too late for them. Yeah, talking about benefits, you said you can really measure, like we'll provide any data on how much time you saved with these new tools, but what kind of other positive outcomes or experiences have you had? I think actually the kind of best result of all these is that, again, I must emphasize the kind of collaboration between, or the connection between legal design and legal tech, I think the best result for us has been that people are not afraid of legal. You know, they see that it's not something legal and contracts and stuff like that, it's not something that only lawyers can do, it's something that they are able to do, and of course, there are days and still we get a lot of those contracts that they don't understand and then the legal have to take role in that, but they have realized that they can actually do quite a lot of by themselves, because at the end of the day, contract is, I think it's more business than legal. Yeah. It's a formulation of your business case in a way, or it should be. True. That is so groundbreaking if you have made people to understand that legal and law is something that they should be able and they are able to do themselves, and it's not, it's just not for lawyers. That's actually huge. It is, it's a bit like a paradigm shift in people's thinking that actually this is something that we are capable of tackling as well when it is done like this, and we can take part in this, so. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we at Future is actually, we had kind of an organization kind of remodeling, of course, as any organization. We had this remodeling here, and I think our legal team is nowadays considered, I think they say, we are global enablers, so we are the enablers. That is so cool. Oh wow. Hey, then, were you already mentioned something that a lot of legal tech ideas came because you needed to find a way to work in different literary stations, and you were the only good lawyer up until two years ago. Yeah. But how did you initially discover the problems that you wanted to solve with technology? Did you, do you ideate within the legal team, or do you ideate with everybody in future eyes, or how does it work? Yeah, two years ago, when I was death legal team, it of course started in the legal team. But no, to be honest, I think it's also something where the the the the journey term mentality that I mentioned in the beginning comes in. You have to be the ears at your office and kind of try to spy on your colleagues to find out where there, where where their pain points are when it comes to legal. So I actually suggest you to go and and grab a cup of coffee and just sit in your office's coffee room to to find where to start your your own legal tech journey in a way. Because at the end of the day, as I said, we are the enablers for the business. But that's actually a great tape. Well, I worked for the KPMT and most of my clients are my KPMT colleagues. And sometimes you organize meetings and try to ask people like how could I help you? And then for some reason, maybe I'm for a scary or something, people tend to say nothing, everything is fine, everything is good. But then when I sit next to someone and have some coffee or maybe a beer like after work, then all the ideas come. They seem like the relaxed atmosphere or I don't know, but like in a meeting, it seems to be impossible to ideate. Yeah, exactly. I think if I remember correctly, the NDA robot that I that I have mentioned a couple of times already, it kind of, it was the discussions that we had at some point. It wasn't someone coming to me to say that we really have to make something to the NDA kind of process or the NDA templates that we have. But it was something that, you know, we just discussed something around, you know, client project or something around the coffee table. And then during the discussion, I kind of realized that that why is it so hard? And it's not, I wouldn't say it's my own idea, but it kind of started to grow on that coffee table discussing in a way. And it took a while. It wasn't like, hey, we need an NDA robot, but it was an iterative process in a way, you know, first working with the templates and then bringing in the technology and so on. And at some point we had the NDA robot. But that's a great example that you can take small steps and then they build up to something quite large and super useful and it actually makes people's lives easier. Exactly. And the importance of having these low-key coffee breaks with your colleagues that they can turn out to something special. Hey, demo, does implementing technology have also changed the way your legal department is managed? For example, are you more data-driven and do you make decisions based on data? I will come back to the data part also because the problem I think is also that that when we discuss about data and data-driven business and data-driven legal department and so on, people easily lose or get lost in the kind of huge space of big data in a way. Exactly. Guess what is probably our most important tool for our legal team? It is slack. It is definitely slack. Together with my calendar, I think our own legal team's slack channel is what I probably follow most actively throughout my day at work. So if someone says it's of course, it's for our internal collaboration. There's our legal team, so we are nowadays two lawyers plus one part-time training at our team. So of course, we have our own internal discussions there every now and then, but if someone sends us an email to our legal email box, we get notified there on Slack. If there is something easy to reply, we can reply those emails, assign those emails within our team, or if it was just some kind of FYI email, we can mark it as close there on Slack without ever opening our email at the end of the day. And that's really nice. If someone makes a new MBA with the MBA robot, or if a new contract is signed in one of our own systems, we get a notification on Slack. And each morning, there is a summary of new contracts added to our electronic contract archive. That is kind of a, when you have a morning coffee, you see kind of a short summary of the previous day because you see the contracts that were added to this effort. That's really nice. So the kind of the main point, and I think this relates to data and kind of what I'm trying to say is to also make the idea of data-driven legal team more approachable because it's not about empowering all the hidden data in your contract. It could be that, of course. But the main point is that That our team, even though nowadays we have two lawyers and the trainee, we would still never have the time to go through every contract and document that kind of flies around here at future. Instead, we have tried to make it as easy as possible for everyone in our organization to put, for example, their contracts into this kind of magical pipeline there that they don't see. It is there. We still don't have time to read each of those in detail, of course. But with the help of all those kind of automatic notifications on our Slack channel, we are still always aware of what is actually happening in all of our companies. And that's actually, I think, that is kind of how we mostly today take advantage of this kind of data driven approach. So it's actually very easy. It's not anything kind of, it's not AI, to be honest. It's very simple applications, but it's still a way to take advantage of the data that is already there to make our life easier. And of course, we have also started, I must say, we have also started to eat our own dog food and are now trying to actually find some of those insights in our construct mask with the help of machine learning. Of course, we do that, but we're still taking just kind of a baby steps on that front. But let's say still, also the early kind of experiments on that front is that indeed, it was more convincing to negotiate the payment terms with one of our clients when we actually were able to show them almost kind of real-time statistics of all our payment terms in all of our contracts as a bar chart at the meeting where we were negotiating the contract. So instead of having this very, I know you're familiar with it, this kind of traditional discussion that we want this payment term, but this is a market practice, but we have never seen this payment term in our contract. We always use this in our contract to actually show what is the real kind of real case of our payment terms. And they were like, okay, this is actually a approach that we have never seen. And although we still think that this 90-year, 90-year, 90-day payment term is good and we should use it, we're actually quite convinced that we are trying to get a bit to long payment term here. Yeah. Oh, it's been a lovely discussion, Pamela. And we have learned many new things about implementation of legal tech. So it's time for our last concluding question. How do you see the landscape of legal tech in general at the moment? What kind of legal related work are we really able to outsource to tech like AI and what it is still a dream or some sort of like utopia we are not there yet? What is perhaps coming up next? We me and Hannah remember a few years ago, there was a lot of worry about robots overtaking lawyers. But I assume there's still waiting for us at this with my alarm clock on for Monday morning. Yeah, but I guess there's still a way to go even to have the robots working along with the lawyers. Now it sounds like that they're at Futurisa, it's already happening. I will come back to the robots still at my conclusion perhaps. But I think my kind of message here is that today's lawyers also at Futurisa still tend to do quite a lot of kind of repetitive, administrative work. And that is really the law hanging fruit that could and should be automated. Really, just tell me the lawyer who loves to arrange the contract to archive or review and approve general MBAs all day long instead of actually kind of using their brain to find new ways to new great solutions to the problems that we have in our society. Show me that lawyer who wants to instead be the janitor of the contract archive. So I think there are a lot of those those longer hanging fruits, making processes automated where there is no kind of advantage that a human could bring in. And that is what should be automated. On the other hand, I think legal professionals are needed when there are those very complicated problems that are just too hard to formulate for a computer. Computers are at the end of the day, computers are quite stupid machines. So, there are those problems where legal professionals are needed because the problems are so, so complex and multifaceted. But on the other hand, I think where a lawyer's touch is needed is also those, those many cases where there is a need for empathy at the end of the day, when you know, sometimes as an in-house lawyer, you end up in negotiations where, well, where you have to go to very kind of personal matters in a way, exits what not, and they might be big, big matters for people. And there you need empathy and still today and in the future, I think a machine probably could not have the empathy that is needed in those cases. So to close my kind of contribution in this podcast, I would like to quote from one of my favorite quotes by Simon Davies, who was the former president of the Law Society of England and Wales, and I heard this at legal conference maybe four years ago or so, and I use it quite often and I see the opportunity to share it here again with you and the listeners. And I think it puts this very much into the box that it should be in. And it was like if you think like a robot, you will probably be replaced by a robot. And if you work like a robot, you should be replaced by a robot. That's my message, and I think that's a great way to put it. It really is. It gives us something to think, yeah. Hey, demo, thank you so much. This has been so much fun and it was great to hear all your ideas and all the concrete works that you're already doing at future is with legal tech, very inspiring. Thank you. And thank you, Henna and Nina also for hosting this podcast because I think we discussed also kind of the importance of sharing our thoughts around, was it legal tech or legal design? I think that's kind of a different side of the coin in a way. So big, big thank you for hosting this. This is a great thing. And thank you for listening to legal design podcast. This episode is sponsored by precisely contract lifecycle management tool, precisely has a special offer for legal design podcast listeners. Go to preciselycontracts.com/ldp and get a free assessment of the state of your contracting and tips on how to automate your contracts.