Shaun Plant is the LawVu chief legal evangelist and recently spoke at the Corporate Counsel Summit on mastering contract management.

Speaking recently on The Corporate Counsel Show, produced in partnership with LawVu, Plant discussed his new book: How to make in-house a powerhouse: A revolutionary way of working for in-house legal teams, as well as key challenges in-house counsel are currently facing.

Plant has been working with lawyers and in-house teams for the last 15 years and found that many teams are facing similar challenges now to the ones they were facing 15 years ago – and wrote his book as a “valuable resource” for in-house lawyers to “make some much-needed change within their function”.

“Many of our days are filled with busyness just because we do the things that we’ve always done. I think many of those challenges are because of the way that our legal function has evolved over time. And some of those challenges that we face, whether you’re a GC or an in-house counsel, legal ops or paralegal, you’re still going to be grappling with so many challenges that so many other teams are always facing as well, regardless of the size and complexity of your business and your organisation and the industry that you work in. And I think that’s because we’ve grown iteratively over time,” he said.

“I always thought that the business grew to a size where it needed a lawyer. And then, rather than having a legal team, it had a specific issue that it needed to resolve. So, it employed a lawyer for that specific issue and then that lawyer employed another lawyer. So, our teams have kind of evolved by throwing lawyers at workload demands, I think, rather than defining and then designing a function that has the right processes and the tools and the people from, from day one.”

As a role, the GC dates all the way back to the 19th century – and Plant said that historically, in-house lawyers have needed to continually keep abreast of new trends and issues their business is facing, or risk losing their seat at the table.

“I think the growth and complexity of our businesses and legal issues and the legal landscape that we’re working in and the industry that we all operate in is changing so quickly that if we don’t keep on top of those things, it’s just going to deepen this already. Disconnect, I think, that many teams have from our organisations, and it’s a perception, I think, that many have, that legal is an operational support function rather than being in that position of power and influence, if you like,” he said.

“So, I mean, that’s kind of where I got to. And I thought, we need to change. So, I developed the book, and right at the heart of the book is a framework. So, it covers all these issues, the challenges that we face. It gets into them, into more detail, tries to explain about why we operate the way that we do.”

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As such, unless these challenges are addressed properly, the in-house lawyer may become somewhat irrelevant to modern organisations if they aren’t able to keep on top of things like AI.

“These external factors that are changing the environment in which we work could be perceived as being obviously a threat to the legal function. I believe there are many different ways of dealing with the similar types of issues that we need to be aware of. I don’t want to get into AI, but you can’t ignore the fact that AI is changing everything that we do. And knowledge workers are obviously going to be under threat if you’re unable to leverage the value of AI. And it’s the same with other technology as well. We need to be able to keep up to speed with the way that our businesses are responding to issues and keep track of those things,” Plant said.

“And if we’re not on top of that change, then we’re just going to start to, again, lose our relevance. But I think organisations are changing. That change that is happening is also an opportunity for us. There is more of a focus on wellbeing and trying to help people to live their better lives and enabling them to do their better work. So, there’s been a shift of the grind that legal was always expected to do and helping us to have more of a balanced and healthy way of working. And I think at the heart of some of those things is providing us with the tools and being able to be more creative in the way that we work.

“I think now is the opportunity where we can start to embrace change a lot more than perhaps we did maybe 10 or 12 years ago. And, of course, the technology that is available today is immense. So, there are so many different tools that we can be using to unlock our power, and we should be able to understand and explore those, I think, a lot more than what we would have done a few years ago.”

As to what change actually constitutes moving forward, Plant said that a lack of productivity is “at the heart” of all the current challenges in-house counsel face.

“Productivity is the thing that is stopping us from getting to that top table. It is stopping us from, or the lack of productivity, I should say, is stopping us from being that impactful, empowering legal function because we’re finding that our days are just dealing with the operational churn and busyness of just trying to get this volume of work going through the organisation. And because of that, you then fail to engage with your workforce, with your organisation as much as what you need to.

“So, you don’t have those meaningful conversations as much as you should. So it’s kind of furthering that disconnect that you have with your organisation. And I think I was like most other lawyers, I went in-house not to do the busyness and the churn of low-value work. I wanted to be proactive, I wanted to be impactful, I wanted to see issues through to the end, and I wanted to be able to influence the business in achieving its success. And I wanted to do that real high-value, quality work,” he said.

“And I found that because my ways of working were unproductive and I was just dealing with busyness, I didn’t have the time to do those things. And unfortunately, that work was then outsourced to external law firms that were doing that type of work.”

The transcript of this podcast episode was slightly edited for publishing purposes. To listen to the full conversation with Shaun Plant, click below:

Lauren Croft

Lauren is a journalist at Lawyers Weekly and graduated with a Bachelor of Journalism from Macleay College. Prior to joining Lawyers Weekly, she worked as a trade journalist for media and travel industry publications and Travel Weekly. Originally born in England, Lauren enjoys trying new bars and restaurants, attending music festivals and travelling. She is also a keen snowboarder and pre-pandemic, spent a season living in a French ski resort.