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Technology

Three heart attacks away from innovation

Karen Ngo

08 Nov 2017

The agenda at The Economist’s General Counsel conference last week was virtually identical to all of the other GC conferences that have taken place in 2017. Nevertheless, the quality of the speakers and delegates was outstanding and their conversations together made for a very thought provoking day. Also, the fact that similar topics and themes pervaded all the agendas of GC conferences this year is somewhat reassuring that regardless of company size, sector or geography — GCs everywhere share the same challenges.

The main part of the conference covered the now familiar themes of geopolitical uncertainty, technology disruption, data privacy and cyber security.

Setting the scene for the global stage, a view of optimism was presented that all the economic drivers of the world’s biggest markets were working well. Unfortunately, the political landscape is and continues to be volatile. The intersection of the two forces does not make the life of the General Counsel an easy one.

In the evitable session on artificial intelligence (AI), one of the panellists mentioned that lawyers were merely ‘three heart attacks away from innovation.’ Whilst the comment elicited the expected response of guffaws and giggles from the audience, there was also universal acknowledgement of the fundamental truth of the statement. The subject of technology is a tricky one. The panel agreed that AI cannot be a solution in search of a problem, but rather provide opportunities for businesses ’to know what they know’ (uncover, understand and make use of their data).

Similarly to many other professions, lawyers constantly find themselves hostages to data – working only to react to data; gradually losing the fight against the endless volume and speed that data is flung towards them.

With AI — in particular technologies that provide anomaly and pattern detection, and contract life cycle management — it was felt that finally there might be a return to a time where it is possible to take back control of data, to proactively focus and think about issues worth thinking about.

‘Lack of confidence’ in tech

Despite of this laudable vision, there was, however, a lack of confidence in all machine executed intelligence. Although the technologists on the panel tried to reassure the audience that AI would be to lawyers what Excel is to accountants, the jury was definitely out on how useful technology can be.

When asked to consider ’what you would lose to automation’? The question ended up being far from rhetorical. There was mistrust of the term ’artificial’; should computer intelligence be better referred to as ’augmented’ or ’adaptive intelligence?

There was also mistrust of the science behind technology. How do you know that you can trust the algorithms? How do you avoid infecting computer algorithms with human bias and imperfect logic? There was even mistrust about the processes associated with technology, for example, how auditable is the filtering process?

Is technology always secure?

The rest of the morning sessions were taken up by the security aspect of technology. The regulation of technology, and GDPR coupled with cybersecurity were presented as the two big ticket items keeping GCs awake at night.

In relation to data protection, it was suggested that many companies were not compliant with the current regime let alone be GDPR ready. The advice to companies was three-fold:

  • Understand what data you hold
  • Define your risk profile
  • Put in place and execute a plan to get to an acceptable risk tolerance

On cyber security, the overwhelming single piece of advice was simply to be prepared for a data breach. The panel urged the audience to be rehearsed in dealing with a cyber security breach, and treat it as an event that will happen and not even as an isolated occurrence. They also said that GCs should have a mind-set that anything can be hacked — nothing is behind a firewall. There were many reasons for justifying this advice ranging from our love for apps, which can be buggy, to insider risks and threats.

For the GC, three elements were considered to be essential to the GC’s position:

  1. To know the law. But in a global or at least borderless business world, how can one know all the laws of all the countries
  2. To be a gatekeeper. Thankfully this does not mean being the sole gatekeeper, but given all the earlier discussions about geopolitical, technological and human threats to name but a few, gatekeeping is not an easy ask
  3. To be a business partner. The ability to build a relationship of trust with the company is the bedrock of all successful GCs and legal departments

External advisers of all types and costs, and increasingly technology, account for skepticism and were deemed essential to enable the role of a GC.

There were also discussions on millennial employees and how to recruit and retain the best talent from their ranks. Whilst the fundamental values of this generation are aligned to the previous generations, research shows that their approach to life is different.

Responding to a formal job offer with its many pages of attachments carefully drafted by HR, by texting back ‘OK, great’, is deemed a perfectly good response. Companies need to demonstrate that they live by their brand values to retain the loyalty of its millennial employees. Life and work is all about personalising the experience of both. It is not much about a work/life experience but a work/life blend in the end. And there is confidence by the bucket (even if some in the room would say sometimes misguided) about technology and innovation.

Looking to the future

By 2020 half of the workforce will be millennials who have a very different attitude to data. For example, the attitude of ‘where I get data from is also where I put my data’ (Facebook, Twitter, etc) is common with today’s social media users who take this attitude with them to work. Then there are complex user environments with lots of moving parts and the dangers presented by the internet of things. Finally, the Cloud. Yes, it is probably right to trust the expert cloud services providers to provide the best security for your data. But lawyers are fully aware that the Cloud is just a bunch of physical servers located in a physical place. Do you know where the servers are hosted and which country has jurisdiction over the servers? So, if innovation was synonymous to entrusting technology to replace a part of a lawyer’s role, it’s no wonder that lawyers are three heart attacks away from innovation.

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