The Smarter Working Week explores the different ways legal functions are becoming smarter about the work they do, how they do it and why – a place where in-house teams can share practical advice and best practice.

Following a year of crisis, cost-cutting and re-inventing the business, a new working model is emerging within in-house functions. One that is all about business processing, mapping and identifying the work that really matters to the business.

Doing more with what you have, doing more with less, doing less with less are all strategies trying to achieve the same things – reduce the amount of time the legal team spends completing low-value admin tasks and focusing more interesting work, work that only lawyers can do. But what is the winning strategy?

Watch the session recording on ‘Doing more with what you have vs doing more with less vs doing less with less: what is the winning strategy?’

  • Working smarter by letting some things go: the notion of accepted risk and understanding that the legal team doesn’t need to look at everything
  • When “good enough” is good enough: becoming more critical about the work the legal team actually needs to do and why
  • Increasing the efficiency of your resource allocation and the importance of having a robust process in place for this
  • The importance of business processing and mapping: relieving the legal team from having to do low value admin work through automation and external counsel

 

WATCH ON-DEMAND

 

Speakers:

Vikki Greatorex, Head of Legal and Data Protection Officer, NIBC Bank

Vikki is the head of the Legal department and data protection officer at NIBC Bank N.V., where she has worked since 2013 after her move to the Netherlands. She previously spent many years in private practice, advising banks and private equity clients whilst at Allen & Overy, first in London and latterly for more than 10 years in Paris.

Martin Halford, Managing Director, Head of Legal, Barclays

Martin heads up the Barclays Platforms, Data & Digital Services teams – helping Barclays create and scale new digital business lines. He is also part of the Barclays LawTech leadership team – finding ways for Barclays and industry players to advance the LawTech agenda, whether through the Barclays LawTech Eagle Lab or the surrounding ecosystem. Martin’s formative legal years were spent at Eversheds, working with VCs, start-ups, scale ups and Universities before moving in-house to join Barclays in 2007. Over the past decade, he has led legal teams on international expansion projects, the build-out of Tech/BPO Centres and creation of innovative payment propositions, taking him across the globe. More recently, Martin led the Barclays UK legal team in the design, authorisation and stand-up of Barclays ring-fenced bank.

Mark Rodgers, Regional General Counsel, DB Schenker

Overlaying his international education with a decade of blue chip commercial experience, Mark has worked in legal, commercial and managerial capacities across numerous industry sectors both domestically and abroad. Mark has strong interests in developing high performing legal teams and currently is responsible for piloting the use of Legal Technologies across DB Schenker’s global legal operations. Mark currently sits on the Board of DB Schenker in Australia and New Zealand and is responsible for legal operations and governance whilst also Chairing Schenker’s foundation partnership status at Sydney new Nancy Bird International Airport.

 

Eric O’Donnell, Head of Legal Operations, Total

Eric qualified as a solicitor with McCann FitzGerald in Ireland in 1995. Soon after qualifying, he moved to France to start his in-house career with Eurosport, where he was involved in all areas of operations with the channel, including setting up language versions and the specific “window” for the UK. In 2001, Eric changed sector to work for Chanel and again in 2003 to start with the Refining & Marketing branch of Total. With Total, he worked on several landmark matters in Africa, Asia and the UK before moving to Singapore in 2013 to take up the position of Head of Legal for the Marketing & Services branch for Asia and the Middle East. Eric started his current role as Head of Legal Operations for the Group in August 2018.

Moderator: Tim Pullan, Founder and CEO, ThoughtRiver

Tim is founder and CEO of ThoughtRiver, the contract acceleration pioneers. Tim’s professional background spans partnership in a London Law firm as well as leading lines of business for large corporates across Asia. In 2015 Tim relocated from Singapore to UK to develop ThoughtRiver’s innovative technology in Cambridge, one of the world’s leading centres for natural language processing and machine learning. Tim is a regular writer and speaker on the role of data and machine learning in transforming legal risk management, and he was recently recognised by the Financial Times as one of the top 10 legal business technologists.