How Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and new technologies are changing today’s legal services (Webinar)

May 9, 2018

From eDiscovery and collaborative workspaces, to analytics and document automation, innovative technologies are transforming today’s legal services. To keep pace with your business’ evolving demands and shifting expectations, it’s critical to understand the ways that Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and new technologies are being incorporated into the practice of law, and litigation in particular.

As part of the 6-part webinar series developed by Osler’s Litigation and Dispute Resolution team, Best practices for the legal department of tomorrow, Natalie Munroe, head of Osler Works – Transactional, and Lia Bruschetta, a corporate commercial litigator at the firm, explore the impact that Artificial Intelligence, machine learning and new technologies are having on the delivery of legal services and offer specific examples of how the firm is using these technologies to improve efficiencies while meeting client needs.

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Video transcript

Good afternoon. And welcome to Osler's webinar series best practices for the legal department of tomorrow. I'm Eric Morgan. I'm a litigator in Osler's front office. This is the first in a series of webinars that Osler is presenting on how your in-house legal team can position itself for success in this ever changing legal landscape.

In today's webinar, we'll be discussing the growth of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and new technologies in the legal industry. I'm joined today by Natalie Munroe, Head of Osler Works Transactional who leads a team that is changing the way we support you in your transactional matters. And Lia Bruschetta, a lawyer in our litigation group with a broad based commercial litigation practice.

If you have any questions during the webinar, please email us or type them into the area provided on your screen. And we'll respond to them as time permits. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to Natalie and Lia.

ERIC MORGAN: Good afternoon, everyone. And thank you to Eric for that introduction. We're very excited to be with you today to discuss how artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other new technologies are changing today's legal services. While our presentation today is going to primarily focus on technologies that are relevant for litigation, a number of the technologies we will be discussing also apply to and are regularly utilized in corporate and commercial transactions.

To start, we've laid out a bit of a roadmap of what we intend to touch upon in today's session. The three topics that we'd like to cover our current trends in artificial intelligence machine learning and new technologies, the growth and development of artificial intelligence, and learning how to gain efficiencies, and how legal technologies can help you. So with that said, let's get started.

To start the conversation, we thought it would be helpful to begin with what we're seeing today in the legal industry overall. Not a day goes by where we're not hearing or reading about changes in the industry, and I'm sure that many of you are involved in those discussions at your companies or firms.

So what are a few of the key trends? The first major shift to highlight is that we've seen the legal industry go from a seller's market to a buyer's market. This shift began before the financial crisis.

However, after the financial crisis it was substantially pushed forward. So why is this change relevant? We're seeing more and more legal in most departments across all industries seeking alternative fee arrangements in order to provide cost certainty.

I'm sure that many of you have taken these initiatives and are exploring these opportunities in your companies or firms. This is driving law firms and other providers of legal services to respond and begin to transform their fee arrangements.

Work in this area related to pricing is still very much a work in progress. But overall, these changes in pricing structures mean law firms have to increase efficiencies, leverage their reusable work products, and track and manage their legal projects better than ever before.

Another fundamental shift is the way in which business is done. Email and the rate of information exchange has revolutionized the way we do business. And this is being reflected in the legal services industry.

By way of example, you can look to shifts in the way in which lawyers now approach and perform tasks like document review and due diligence. New technologies that we've been hearing about for the past few years have now finally reached a stage of development and commercialization that we can actively begin to use them to provide legal services to our clients.

Finally, one last shift to note is that the competitive legal landscape for services has changed. As many of you know, as traditional law firms are far from the only game in town. New law firms, accounting firms, and tech enabled legal service providers, and many others are now offering legal services to you. And this is driving all of the players in the industry to innovate in an effort to differentiate and distinguish themselves as leaders in the area of technology and efficiencies for their clients.

So before we talk about specific categories of technology, they're relevant for litigation, we wanted to take a couple of minutes to talk about legal technology in general. As many of you would know, discussions about legal technology are pervasive. And it can be very overwhelming to figure out where to begin,

And as we'll discuss a little bit in further slides, we start with a problem that we're looking to solve for our clients. While technology is more often than not part of the solution, it's not the only answer. Legal technology tends to fall into categories.

If you start with a problem that you're looking to solve, you can then figure out which category of legal technology may be relevant. At that point, you can begin to focus your research on the technology that is relevant for your purposes. Whenever we assess the technology, we of course, conduct a security on it.

If a technology passes our security audit, then we demo the product. And when we demo the product, it means that we're getting a one hour review, where the technology provider is showing us what their product can do.

After that, we tend to narrow down our focus to two or three products that we think are the right solution for our problem. We then pilot those technologies. And by piloting it, it means that we actually get in there and we use them because it's only by using them that we can determine whether or not the work to solve our problem.

Given there are so many providers of legal technology today, it can be hard to figure out which is the best product for your purposes. And as such we use pilots to make sure that we really use them and we understand their core functionality.

People often ask when do you know, or what kinds of tasks, could I leverage technology for? And the types of tasks that we look to leverage technology for our instances where a process may be to a certain extent automated. It has a high volume or it is repeatable. Those are types of services where we have focused our efforts to date to try to change them and leverage technology to do so.

So we thought we'd take a couple of minutes and talk about artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is now being used to enhance the way in which legal services are provided. It's the most talked about technology today.

However, you do have to differentiate between the hype and the reality of AI. There are some excellent tools available today to enhance legal services that use an artificial intelligence technology. And later in our discussion, we'll talk a bit about some of the machine learning technologies that are available and that we use.

But as previously mentioned, we always start with a problem that we want to solve for our clients. And AI may or may not be part of the solution. It's important to know that there are other technologies that are useful in connection with providing legal services that do not include artificial intelligence.

So as Natalie previously mentioned, where to start? We at Osler like to start with a problem that we want to solve for our clients. And how we go about doing that is to begin we assess the current state of the problem or the legal or other service for which we want to solve that problem.

At this beginning stage, we don't try to problem solve. We're simply trying to get the details relating to how the process for the service works today. Another word that you may have heard or this type of analysis is called process mapping.

Typically at the beginning stage, you're really looking at who provides the service or who contributes to the service, as well as the operational aspects of the service. And that can go anywhere from financial, to pricing, or to legal secretarial support.

And once we have a good understanding of what the current state of affairs is, that's when we can begin to map out the future state. So how we do that is we like to pinpoint and identify the inefficiencies or wastes that we're seen in that process.

Some examples of waste or inefficiencies you might see would be repetition of work or poor delegation. And from there, we highlight the parts of the process that we think that we can redesign or improve. It's only at this last stage, where we actually begin to think about whether or not there are any new tools, including technologies that are going to help with these inefficiencies and that may be part of our solution.

Ultimately, the future state map that we're trying to create is going to detail the people, the process, and the technology that we're going to expect to use and to provide the service to our clients. For those of you who are interested in learning a little bit more about process mapping, and how you can use that in your own companies, our next webinar in this series is coming up on June 13. And it's actually focused on legal process improvement and process mapping.

So to move forward and get into what I like to call the fun stuff, the legal technologies that are currently available or we're seeing being developed to help with inefficiencies. So with regard to e-discovery, we actually have another upcoming webinar at the end of this series, which we'll go into e-discovery in more detail. But we didn't want to leave out and not mention in this presentation and acknowledge that e-discovery tools have fundamentally changed the nature of discovery in the last decade.

We've seen the introduction and adoption of solutions based platforms across the board that allow for the secure management of data and that utilize machine learning, analytics, and visualizations to manage and understand that data. One of these platforms that we're using at Osler is called relativity.

Relativity dramatically reduces the time that's associated with e-discovery and enables lawyers to deliver results faster and more effectively. The software itself includes a robust processing, and it allows for documents to be processed into reviewable formats that takes less time. It also has a based interface that features intuitive navigation and secured access for experts, co-counsel and lawyers anywhere in the world. This allows for a collaborative this e-discovery and review process.

Relativity also utilizes advanced analytics such as email threading, predictive coding, and near duplication analysis. These types of analytics significantly cut down on the review time that lawyers are using when it comes to e-discovery. In addition the platform provides real time updates of review progress through auditing on activity in the database allowing you to monitor and review for efficiencies.

So collaborative workspaces. An increasing number of our clients are asking for virtual spaces in which they can collaborate with us. One of the drivers behind the shift is a desire to move away from emails.

The requests that we receive range from conversational tools such as Black or Skype, a workspace in which we can collaborate on documents in real time, and a good example of that is if you think about a factum in the litigation space, typically a law firm drafts of factum. But there are lots of notes to draft that they insert for their clients. They then email the draft factum over to the client, the client then marks it up, sends it back by email, and it goes back and forth and back and forth by email.

A document collaboration tool would allow a law firm and a client to work in the same space in real time in which case you can avoid sending emails back and forth and really focus on the factum itself and getting all the pieces put together. We've also received requests for workspace to store documents related to a particular matter such as an Extranet, we had Osler use have begun to use HighQ. And it is a great place to have a portal where both a law firm and a client can collaborate through portal documents on which you're working can be stored, and there is also workflow built into it.

There are several accidents on the market in we chose HighQ. But it really depends. The technology that you use really depends on your needs.

Or Extranet provides us with the flexibility to restrict and/or allow access to certain users based on client needs. Again, you can upload and manage documents, you can have discussion forums wikis, questions and answers. It is just a really great way to facilitate project management and collaboration. And we had Osler of the view that collaboration tools are going to become a necessity in order to really work with our clients on a go forward basis.

So the next topic we're going to talk about is actually my favorite. And it's my favorite because it is a tool that I use with my team on a day-to-day basis.

So as some of you are aware, there are a number of legal due diligence software on the market. These softwares use machine learning and other technologies.

For those of you who wrote about these but don't actually understand what they can do, and nor understand machine learning, machine learning is a type of artificial intelligence. And its basic premise is to build an algorithm that can receive input data which in our case documents, and use statistical analysis to predict an output value within an acceptable range.

When I first heard that, it meant absolutely nothing to me. So to further break that down, in effect, you feed the system and you see the algorithms documents. And you tell those algorithms what you're looking for.

And a really good example is if you feed it, a bunch of contracts and you want to show it what a governing law provision is. And you would highlight those provisions.

The algorithm retraining and it will train itself. So that it can automatically analyze and extract those provisions on a go forward basis once trained. So what these technologies do, and what we like to say that they do is they really take the first cut at document review.

Instead of having to sift through documents yourself, this really helps trim down and really get at that first cut of what you need to get out of the documents. We are often asked if it is a case that AI is associated with the replacement of jobs.

And one of the things that we like to emphasize is that people are still very much involved. These technologies extract information from documents, but they don't analyze or contextualize. As such you still need people to go through the results to confirm them, but also analyze them in the context of the problem that you're looking to solve be it in the litigation or transactional matter.

For litigation purposes, these types of software can be trained to analyze and extract, for example, provisions in statute. So if you were looking, for example, to analyze the statute of limitation across 200 different statutes, you could actually train these types of systems to enhance the way that you could do it by training them to automatically analyze and extract those types of provisions in statutes.

Kira can also-- so we have to use Kira Systems. But there are lots of different technologies on the market. But these types of technologies can also be used to analyze documents for document review or theory of the case in a litigation matter. So for example, if you need to look for a termination provision in a set of agreements or analyze how a provision changed over time, you would be able to leverage these types of technologies to assist you in doing so.

LIA BRUSCHETTA: So Natalie just referred to her favorite topic to talk about. And this technology that I'm going to talk about next is my favorite topic, especially as a litigator.

Research has always been a central part of a litigator's role combing through large volumes of cases with varying fact patterns. In the past few decades, I'm sure many of you are aware and have seen the rise of online databases with service providers like Westlaw and LexisNexis, as well as the free database Canley, where case law is easily and electronically accessible.

And so it's unsurprising that building off of those electronic databases. In the last few years, we've also seen the growth of analytic based software tools capable of complementing traditional legal research by mining, classifying, and annotating legal data to identify patterns and generate visuals that display those results in a meaningful way.

Osler's partnered with one of these platforms in Canada. Bloom analytics. And for any of our clients or listeners that may be logging in south of the border.

There are also US versions of this type of analytical software. Two of which are premonition and Lex Machina. So how does it actually work? And what is going to be the impact for litigation?

So this type of software has the ability to input specific criteria and assumptions to generate statistics and a graphical breakdown of decisions. So by specific criteria, you could input the type of motion, the area of law, the jurisdiction, or the judge that you were looking for.

And there's lots of benefits to this type of software. The first being that targeted research becomes much more easy when you're able to feed in these assumptions and criteria to get the output that you're looking for. It really enables you to better and much more efficiently and quickly analyze judicial decisions on a specific topic.

You can even look at the timing of specific decisions, what certain judges and trends in the way that they've been deciding, certain provisions in the types of orders that they've been releasing. But one of the most interesting ways beyond the targeted research aspect that this software is going to impact the way in which litigator's approach the practice of law is going to be early case assessment.

This type of software allows for the ability for a litigator to analyze win loss rates based on specific assumptions of specific types of cases up front. And that really opens the door for the development of strategies working with your clients based on early risk assessment and your settlement approach.

You're able to use the analytics that are derived from these similar cases and decisions across jurisdictions and have those conversations with your clients earlier on about win loss rates and success rates. And I really find that this is going to be an area that's going to grow as we move forward.

So to move over to document automation, again, this is an area that we've really seen growth in the last few years. And there are several document automation tools that are available on the market.

To speak to some of the ones that Osler's currently using, we currently use ACL internally. And that's a software that speeds up the drafting process by using web based questionnaires to fill in matter information relating to litigation proceedings.

There's lots of different tools on the market that use this type of document automation process. But what ACL is doing is they keep up to date based on the rules of civil procedure relating to forms in relevant jurisdictions. And by feeding in this questionnaire and matter information, we're able to automatically generate standard forms and pleadings, as well as Osler's specific letters and agreements to the extent that they're standardized. This really is a cost savings and really efficiently manages this type of process.

We also understand that ACL is working towards introducing a document exchange server that will be able to serve large files and automatically generate an affidavit of service. As we see a more and more often in the litigation world to electronic service of documents, this type of automated process will absolutely become handy, as well as hopefully moved more towards the norm.

Another interesting tool that we've been piloting internally. And I remember Natalie just mentioned previously. Our love of piloting here at Osler.

One that we've been piloting internally in our litigation department is site right. Now, it's a program that allows lawyers to import case law from Canley, or Quick Law or Westlaw into a Word document, and quickly and easily search and insert relevant paragraphs with proper McGill style citations and short form names for those migdal style citations automatically updated.

For any of you that have ever worked in a factory or a legal document and had to deal with citations, I'm sure you can appreciate how useful and handy and efficient tool this will be. In addition, the software allows, if you're moving around paragraph's within your factum, CiteRight actually automatically ensures that those citations are updated and properly formatted to reflect those changes in your document. This is a significant move forward in taking these automated processes away from lawyers, and allowing them to focus on more of the substantive work that they're doing.

Once a fact or legal brief has been drafted using CiteRight, CiteRight actually also has the ability to generate by the click of a button a book of authorities complete with tabs and cybering. Again, users are able to also use CiteRight to access all of their factories and memos generated internally, which cite a particular case. For example, the leading case on summary judgment, allowing better access to understanding of and use of your internal precedents.

NATALIE MUNROE: So Lia just talked about litigation's specific document automation tools. We thought we would also talk about a general document automation tools that can be used for both litigation, as well as corporate and commercial matters.

Two examples that we've shown our contract express and hot docs. To similar to some of the litigation specific tools, what you do with these tools is you can take your precedent documents. And there are typically precedents that you use on a repetitive basis.

And once you have those precedent documents in a form, and you know what you need from an optionality and a variability perspective, you work with a coder to code the documents for use with the software. Once the documents are ready they're coded and they're ready to be used, as a user, you respond to a web based questionnaire, and the document or document package is generated based on your responses to your questionnaire.

These tools are quite sophisticated. They allow for a significant amount of conditionality, which means that you can build them so that they can work for different types of scenarios. And depending on your response to the questionnaire, it will know which scenario you're talking about or you were interested in and be able to pull the right information into the document.

If you we often code-- at we often code packages of documents. And therefore, we can choose to code all some-- or we can choose to generate all some are one of those documents.

Because your responses to the questionnaire flow through your package of documents, it increases your accuracy of your results. Because you're no longer inserting information in each document itself, you're entering the information once into a questionnaire, which means that you just need to get it right once and it will populate in the documents that you've selected to generate as it should.

This is an example of something that we can work that we do work on with our clients to create client specific documents. So some of our clients do have repetitive documents that they want coded, so that from a generation perspective, they can be generated faster.

We're often asked if document automation tools replace mail merge. There are instances where a mail merge may make sense in lieu of a document automation tool. However, our view is that as these tools become more sophisticated and CSV files are used and/or accommodated by the tools, the need for a mail merge will decrease because you will be able to feed in a CSV file, which is a form of Excel file into your question, into the software, and your questionnaire will auto populate.

LIA BRUSCHETTA: So moving on to the organization and management of documents, there's many instances in which documents need to be organized and ultimately sent out for signature. And I'm sure this is something that all of you encounter on a daily basis.

There's software available today that allows you to organize and manage your documents electronically. With these types of softwares, you're able to create an agenda, assign signatories to each of the document in that agenda, and then track the status of each document in that agenda.

Typically, these types of software as we're seeing them used frequently in corporate and commercial transactions. But they also have application to litigation matters.

We recently used closing folders for litigation matter in which we had somewhere between 75 and 100 agreements that we needed to distribute to various parties. We ended up passing on a template of that agreement to our Osler works transaction department who auto populated and created the individualized agreements for each entity, and then set up a project for us in closing folders for this purpose.

This allowed us to keep track of each agreement, as well as each signatory as we move through this process. And we were able to upload various versions of the documents and keep a track of our history of doing so.

Related to and in tandem with closing folders, and in connection with the litigation matter that I mentioned, we also distributed the documents for signature via DocuSign. Now, DocuSign is a tool that I'm sure many of you have heard of. It's an e-signature tool which allows you to send and sign documents electronically.

As a user, regardless of where you are, you can easily sign documents using your phone or tablet. I find that this is becoming more and more the way of choice for clients when they're signing documents, and we're dealing with having to get signatures.

The really great thing about these two different softwares is that closing folders and DocuSign are integrated. So in the litigation matter that I just mentioned, we were able to upload our documents to closing folders and then ensure that DocuSign was sending out auto reminders to those signatories that had yet to sign.

We were able to track the status of our documents and closing folders, and then determine the frequency with which we needed to send out those reminders via DocuSign. And it allowed us to outsource our tracking and follow up reminders to the software itself.

This was very cost-effective and that it cut out and outsourced the time that you'd otherwise be spending on administration and follow up with various parties. And it really allows your lawyers to be focusing more on the substantive issues that are arising over the course of a project.

There is something to note, though with the use of e-signature software like DocuSign, especially as they become more and more prevalent. You do have to be careful to ensure that the documents that require signature can be signed within e-signature.

There are still some rules and regulations that do require e-signature. That said, we do see many of our clients even if there are projects where there are some documents that require ink in and a pile of documents that can otherwise go out via DocuSign. We usually see people bifurcating the process and sending most of the documents by DocuSign, and then just utilizing PDF or originals for the few that do actually require e-signature.

NATALIE MUNROE: We thought we would take a couple of minutes to talk about vendor management. Vendor management is critical. Whenever you decide to implement a new technology, you need to carefully consider how you intend to implement the technology and how you intend to manage your ongoing relationship with the vendor.

It is important that you establish the type of relationship you want with your vendor right from the get go. With some of our technologies, and just to give you some examples of what we have done, especially with some of our newer technologies, we have quarterly meetings with our vendors, where we sit down with them and we discuss both performance issues and enhancement requests.

With a lot of the newer technologies, they are still in development. And the people behind those technologies are interested in hearing from the users themselves, so that they can figure out how to best continue the development of the product.

We also sit down with our vendors on an annual basis for what we call an annual roadmap discussion. During this discussion, we discuss what they are doing, or what they intend to do, and what their development goals are over the next 12 to 24 months.

This is critical in terms of figuring out where your vender and where the technology is headed. And in some instances, it may require that depending on where they're headed, that technology may or may not continue to align with what you are using the technology for.

From time to time, our technology team also gets involved, and they have performance related meetings with our vendors. These are either scheduled on a quarterly basis or ad hoc depending on the technology.

The other stuff that we've taken is we also have monthly meetings with what we call our super users. It's critical to hear from the users of the technology, those that are providing services to clients in order to ensure that performance issue and enhancement requests align with actual usage.

Last but not least, it is important to ensure that following the implementation of a technology, there was an internal plot plan in place to maintain and manage the technology. You need to identify who will add users, provide licenses, monitor the administration panel, attend to performance issues, track enhancement requests, monitor the market for competitor technologies, negotiate contracts, and/or renewals of contracts. These types of tasks actually take up more time than one thinks.

As previously mentioned, you need to ensure that your super users are engaged in all discussions about the technology. They're your best resource. And you need to ensure that they are a fundamental part of the conversation. If you just operate without them, then sometimes the developments of the technology do not proceed in line with actual usage.

ERIC MORGAN: That's great. Thanks very much Natalie and Lia. We're just going to take a couple of questions. And the first one I had was I just wanted to ask both of you, how technology is changing the role of the lawyer in terms of the skills, the tasks that people are doing and how people are spending their time? So maybe Natalie if we want to start with you.

NATALIE MUNROE: Sure. So it's changing it quite a bit. And I think that when we think about solving a problem for our clients, we think about people, process and technology. And so we have taken steps internally to create an e-discovery team, where we have folks that specialize in e-discovery. And so that has shifted the work that was previously done by associates away to a specialized team.

Similarly, my own team, which is focused on transactions of corporate and commercial matters, again, we've shifted certain legal services. And those are due diligence and closings to a team that specializes and does those services on a day to day basis.

And so again, we've shifted work away from associates for certain tasks, so that they can focus on the strategic elements of a transaction and moved other tasks to where we leverage people, process, and technology to provide them in a more efficient and more effective way to clients.

And I think that what we've really seen and what we feel with the technology on a day-to-day basis. And I think particularly of our due diligence technology is it really does make the process of reviewing documents far more efficient and far more effective.

LIA BRUSCHETTA: Just to echo what Natalie said, I do believe that technology is actually really aiding the role of the lawyer today. A lot of task speaking from my own personal experience when I first started, a lot of the tasks that you start doing as a junior lawyer or as a student former student or articling student, we're now seeing those tasks be automated and having efficiencies created that are freeing up time for Osler lawyers and all lawyers across the board from the beginning of their practice to really focus on the substantial legal issues and the complex portions of the file.

And I think that it's just allowing people to focus their time better on the real meaty issues of the proceedings in front of them as opposed to being mired down a little bit more in some of the administrative aspects of the practice of law, where we're really seeing these automated processes and technologies pick up the slack in that area and take that of the plate of the lawyer. And that really does create a lot of issue efficiencies for our clients, where they're no longer having to deal with us having to take time away from thinking about and musing over the complicated aspects of their file.

ERIC MORGAN: Thanks very much. So one question we've got from one of our participants is, there any value in having a designated team member to manage all legal operations, processes, and technology, or could this potentially be allocated among all the existing lawyers? Natalie, that I think that might be a question for you.

NATALIE MUNROE: Sure. I think it depends on the quantum of what you're doing. So I think if you're looking to implement one process or one technology, that's a lot different than if you're looking to implement several.

So we at the firm, we've implemented several. We don't necessarily have one designated person per se. However, we don't broadly distribute-- we don't broadly distribute some of our technologies. Some of them we've really focused and said, we actually just want a specialized team to use them because it's the combination of people, process, and technology that's really providing the better results for our clients.

So I think you have to really look and see what it is that you want to accomplish. And in certain instances, there's no question. There should be a central person through which much of it flows.

Just dealing with the technology itself, and vendor management, and internal management, and rollouts, and communications, takes up a lot of time. And so if you are someone who is practicing, and providing advice, or strategically advising your business units on a day-to-day basis, and your plate is already full, it will be very difficult to also take on the role of implementing technology, communicating to others about the technology, ensuring that implementation is ongoing and continuing, dealing with vendors, negotiating contracts, et cetera.

And so again, you have to think about it from a realistic perspective and understand that it does take resources to manage all of it. Be it one person. Be it a few people. It is something that you do need to give a lot of thought to a lot of in-house departments.

Do you have a director or similar of legal operations? And that is in effect their role. And so I think there's no question. There's been a shift in the market over the past several years to having an individual who is responsible for legal operations, whether that makes sense for all is to be determined.

I think it really depends on what you're looking to accomplish, what technology you're looking to implement, what processes you're looking to change, et cetera.

ERIC MORGAN: I was just going to say that was I think you've answered my follow up question which was on the client side. If you've noticed any patterns between having a single point person versus rolling out across the whole legal team.

NATALIE MUNROE: Yeah. I think there's no question clients. Many clients do have an individual responsible for legal operations. More often than not, I have lots of conversations with those individuals just given what my group does.

And I think that given the day-to-day business needs of units at companies occupies a lot of time. I do think it has made sense for a lot of companies to have someone who just deals with the operational aspects on a day-to-day basis.

ERIC MORGAN: And another question from one of the participants is, do you have any technologies that aid in the organization of firm or in-house legal files? So I think we've spoken about a couple of them.

NATALIE MUNROE: So I think it depends on what you're looking to do there. So there are a couple. So one, it could be leveraging and Extranet where you have a portal where you organize and store documents.

A lot of the Extranet to the Extranet that we use, you can not just about plunking the documents and so you can just see all the files, you can also create what's easiest to think of as a spreadsheet, where you not only have the document, but you have a bunch of different data points where you can also build in workflow to trigger email reminders to it. So there's that type of product that's available to help organize documents.

And in some instances, it may in fact work as a contract management system. Really depending on the size of your organization.

Lia discussed closing folders. If you're doing some-- and everyone thinks of closings and they automatically associate that with corporate. What the closing folders in a similar types of tools do is they allow you to electronically organize and manage documents that will ultimately need to get out for signature.

And that may or may not be associated with a close. And it could just be that you have a document or many documents that need to be signed by many people. So that is another way depending on what you're looking to do, that's another option in terms of helping clients organize a manager documents.

And just as an aside, I know that many participants are in-house. And I think I often have conversations with clients. And they're trying to figure out, should we adopt this tool or should we be putting pressures on our law firms to adopt these tools?

And again, I think it really comes down to what you're looking to do the size of your organization the repetitive or volume nature of what you're looking to do as to whether or not you choose to adopt them or whether you choose to say to your law firms. We want to see you using these tools.

ERIC MORGAN: I think when one goal that many clients have is cost control and reduction. And I'm just wondering if you can speak a bit about whether the extent to which you're finding these technologies are helping in controlling costs.

NATALIE MUNROE: Sure. So I'll come at it from a corporate perspective, a corporate and commercial perspective. So they are definitely helping control costs. And they're doing that in a couple of ways.

One, the technologies are contributing to the efficiency in which the work is. So the pace at which we can get the work done, which often helps drive down costs. We use fixed or capped fees as a general matter, for example, all of our diligence matters, which means that a client knows from the get go what the cost is going to be based on a certain set of assumptions, which usually involves a document number count.

And so I think there's no question it's driving down. But the other thing that we've done is we've really thought about it from a people, process, and technology perspective. So it's not just about adapting these technologies and saying we have them, it's about really redesigning our processes thinking about who should be using the technologies in order to help us make it more efficient and more effective as a whole.

But again, we use fixed fee pricing. On average, I would say that we've noticed a 40% decrease. Sometimes it's more. Sometimes it's less it really depends on the matter for our due diligence matters.

The other thing that we do is we track our data. So for any given closing or due diligence matter, we track a significant number of data points. And we then on a biannual basis analyze those data points, so that we can say for this particular size of a deal for this many documents, et cetera where are we coming out from a pricing perspective.

And I think we've been looking to do more and more work from an analytics precise from a data analytics perspective to really understand the costs that are involved in providing some of the services, so that we can make sure that we're really providing cost effective results to clients.

ERIC MORGAN: Right. Lia, I'm just wondering if you can speak a bit about how technology is changing the litigation procedure in practice.

LIA BRUSCHETTA: Yeah. So it's really influencing all areas of the litigation procedure in practice. Something a bit of a buzzword that you would often hear 10 years ago from corporate lawyers that we were trying to go paperless. And they were trying to have a paperless practice.

And if you told me then that you could imagine a litigator moving towards a paperless practice, I think I would have laughed at you a little bit. But with the ability to deliver and exchange information, the way that we can now, we're seeing this shift even in a litigation procedural practice all the way from we've seen amendments to our rules of civil procedure here in Ontario to address service of documents by email as opposed to having to send them over in a paper format before.

We've also seen the courts moving towards e-filing procedures with practice directions related to e-filing. One of the biggest ways that I've really personally seen this in my practice is I just completed quite a lengthy trial, which we did completely paperless.

It depends on you're the court that you're dealing with and the judge that you're dealing with. But a lot of them are quite sophisticated and quite happy to entertain technology solutions, and they're happy to have these solutions introduced into the court where you can have real-time transcripts being displayed for the judge, as well as all the participants in the courtroom.

You can also have the documents displayed for the judge. And you can have someone in the courtroom often from some of these softwares that do it they'll actually send you a technician who will do it, and they'll highlight the passages as you're working through the documents with your witnesses during trial.

I really think this is a really interesting area for lawyers because it's really making it much more efficient and much easier for the judge to digest and intake all of this information that they're dealing with. So that's really where I see the practice moving.

ERIC MORGAN: Thanks very much. I am wondering if you can speak a bit about as competing technology solutions continue to emerge. How people make the choice between different technologies?

NATALIE MUNROE: It's not easy. We monitor the market on a daily basis for technologies. We're contacted on a daily basis from new players in the market who would love us to use their technologies.

We again we go back to focusing on the problem that we want to solve for our clients. And then we're big believers. As we've mentioned a couple of times about doing demos and then about doing pilots of products, you can spin a marketing piece any way you like.

However, when we're using a technology, we actually need to make sure that the core functionality is there. If the core functionality of what we really need in the technology isn't there, then it's of no benefit for our clients.

And so it can be really tricky. And it can be really difficult, especially when there is so much hype and marketing pieces are so glossy. We really believe in doing demos, asking a lot of questions, really probing the technology providers about their products, and then ultimately piloting them where we get in there, we use fake documents publicly available documents what have you to really get in there and play around with it and push it.

And we often will set up a scenario. And again, this takes time and resources. But We'll often set up a scenario where we'll do a fake live deal, so that we can see how it would play out and we figure out all the issues you run into.

And so we like to do a play out of what would happen with the technology. So we can really see what it can do. Again, I think until you actually use it, even if you demo it it's really hard to see what the functionalities are, you really do have to get in there and use it.

Again, it takes time to do so time and resources to do so. But well worth it in order to figure out what it is that you need.

ERIC MORGAN: Do you have any specific advice for smaller legal teams who are maybe a third party vendor is too costly to justify the value? And really how can smaller teams leverage technologies without breaking the bank?

NATALIE MUNROE: Yeah. So that's a tricky one. And I'd say it's tricky because a lot of the technologies are expensive. And so you really do have to think about whether you should be adopting it, or whether you should be using a third party who uses it.

For smaller legal teams, I think they have to think about-- but I think it equally applies to bigger ones. You have to think about, well, what are our problem areas? Where our pain points? What problems do we want to solve?

And figure out what those are and then figure out whether there is a justification to bring on a technology, be it a new technology. Or maybe there is actually an existing technology that can be leveraged in a way that maybe doesn't get you to the ideal solution, but maybe gets you part of the way there. And sometimes that's OK as a starting point.

Again, I always go back to the problem because it's not just about adopting technology. Sometimes it's the answer isn't actually with technology. Sometimes it's with people or process, and sometimes it's about figuring out which is the right person doing this particular task.

Sometimes, and we've had instances where we've looked at certain processes within the firm. And we've realized it has nothing to do with technology. It's very much a process point.

And if we just tweak our process, then actually, it alleviates a significant number of pain points. And the one that comes to mind is we examine the way we deal with trust wires at the firm.

And the solutions really didn't rely on technology, it relied on changing our process. And so I think if you are a smaller legal team, and you don't have the resources be the human or the financial resources, I think you go back to thinking about your pain points.

And then figuring out what the potential solutions can be for those pain points. And in some instances, it actually will make sense to use a third party or to tell your law firm you expect them to be using some of the tools that are available on the market.

But I really do think it starts with figuring out your pain points in your problems, and then figuring out if it's a people process or technology solve.

ERIC MORGAN: That's great. Thanks very much. I guess just for the final question. I'm wondering Natalie if you can just talk a bit more about Osler works and explain it to people for those who haven't heard of it before.

NATALIE MUNROE: Sure. So Osler was transactional was set up by the firm about a year and a half ago. It was decided that we wanted to create a team that would focus on providing certain legal services in the context of corporate and commercial transactions.

Back in 2011, the firm set up an e-discovery team to respond to the changes that were occurring with e-discovery. And this was the time and then a year and a half ago, they decided to do something similar with corporate and commercial.

And so at present, it's a combination of lawyers and other professionals. And we leverage technology to provide due diligence and closing services to clients to date.

The uptake has been fantastic and we've grown from a team of 3 to a team of 16. And I believe it's about to verge onto 20. And so the demand has really been there.

As we go forward, we'll be looking to develop out further services, as well as really focus on what technologies we're using. And one of the things that if you're using technologies, you'll find is there are a lot of discrete platforms for technology. But they don't talk together. And so one of our focus is going forward will be to think about having all of our different technologies talk to one another.

ERIC MORGAN: And you work with all of our offices although you're based out of Ottawa.

NATALIE MUNROE: Correct. We work with all of our offices and all of our practice areas.

ERIC MORGAN: Terrific. Well, thanks very much. And on behalf of Natalie and Lia, thank you very much for joining us for this webinar. We hope it's given you some useful insights.

You can also find more information about Osler works on our website, osler.com. And make sure to join us on June 13 for part 2 of this series. It's called legal process improvement and efficient strategies for in-house counsel.

This webinar introduces key process improvement concepts from lean and Six Sigma with practical focus on some litigation examples. And if you tune in you'll learn about what value means in a lean environment, the eight ways to look out for, analyzing the root cause of an inefficiency, and how you can apply some of these concepts in your work environment.

Thank you again for attending this webinar and have a good day.

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