Regional Legal Summit

Four key takeaways from IPRO’s first regional legal summit of 2023: bridging in-house and outside counsel

With a packed agenda for a whole day of learning and networking, the IPRO team brought together a lively group of fantastic and diverse legal professionals spanning law, compliance, risk, privacy and legal-tech leaders to learn, network and improve upon relationships between in-house and outside counsel.

It’s clear from the conversations in the room that both in-house and outside counsel teams are very aware they’ve lived in their own silos far too long, and they’re interested in creating better partnerships to streamline communications and processes, reduce risks and redundancies – but most of all, to succeed this year and beyond.

The success or failure of these teams have always been intertwined, but in times of prosperity it is easy to forget the need to create communities of practice that enable true legal optimization. These are phrases that came up repeatedly during the summit.

Here were the takeaways:

Outside counsel wants to know more about their in-house counterparts’ day-to-day workflows, systems and their business practices and processes.

Their goal is to better consult downstream on how to make litigation projects more efficient – a benefit for both in-house and outside counsel.

In-house counsel wants to know they can trust their firms when it comes to the security of their data.

Often they don’t know what they should be asking regarding the firms’ cybersecurity practices and protocols. A particular concern raised was around data handling practices when their outside counsel employs co-counsel. The best cybersecurity practices within a firm are only as good as the attorneys and staff that follow the procedures properly.

Technology that empowers legal professionals to identify data for discovery before collection is crucial.

The best way to improve efficiency within corporate legal teams, but also provide an opportunity for outside counsel to help guide their clients towards shipping less data externally, is implementing legal tech.
There was a great deal of excitement in the room when a discussion of how searching in-place with IPRO’s LIVE EDA enabled the reduction of as much as 90% of non-relevant data that would normally be promoted to a review platform could be eliminated from the process. A single breach of contract case with 20 custodians results in real world savings of over $250,000 simply by searching for relevant data before collecting it and shipping to outside counsel or a vendor for processing and review.

In-house legal teams want better feedback loops with their IT departments to understand their requests and respond to legal challenges faster.

We all know how the new work environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic has caused both an explosion of electronic data and exasperated the burdens of discovery compliance. This has made it very challenging to keep pace with the volume of data discovery. Legal must be friendly with their IT department, but there is a huge struggle with collaboration between the two teams.