This week I was very fortunate to have attended the first of a three part workshop on Digital Transformation for Chief Legal Officers held by the Instituto de Innovación Legal in Madrid. A special thanks to María Jesús González-Espejo and Laura Fauqueur for the invitation!

It was fascinating to listen to the other participants share their experiences about the pressures their teams face in the Spanish marketplace. Most were chief legal officers and general counsels from Spanish companies or offices, and while the team I manage and the business we support are global, the challenges are the same: how to deal with containing costs, regulatory uncertainty, adapting to change, evolving skills, risks to our companies’ reputations, and how to reinvent ourselves and the value that lawyers add to our in-house clients.

We also had two practical examples of the use of artificial intelligence for the automation of contract generation and claims management and discussed what legal officers should look at when selecting a contract management tool. One of the best lessons that came out of this what that automation cannot be done in a vacuum. In other words, it is not something that belongs just to the Legal Department. You need the support and buy-in of your internal clients, aka the Business.

From our experience, automation makes a lot of sense for the Business. It not only helps in terms of simplifying the customer experience and speeding up the contracting process — bringing in revenues quicker and decreasing administrative costs — but in theory should also improve post-contract account management. Standardization should significantly make the lives of your billing departments better, making it much easier for them to prepare invoices and collect fees. Account managers — especially for those with large portfolios — will also find it easier to engage with their customers over the life of a contract. Implementation and delivery teams should enjoy the benefits of standardization and simplification, being able to quickly identify customer requirements and better allocate resources over multiple projects. For these reasons, the work flows and automation should be developed in a way that has the end-user experience at the heart of the design and benefits all of your internal stakeholders. But start small. Don’t be overambitious.

At first many lawyers — obsessed with making sure that all t’s are crossed, i’s are dotted and no loophole is left un-closed – distrust automation or at least fear that it will render our work irrelevant. But with the simplification of menial tasks, we lawyers can focus on what really adds value and where the exciting work begins: helping our clients succeed. Once we reach that realization — as we have in my team — we not only welcome that task, we encourage it.

But there is a but: it takes two to tango. I can only simplify, standardize and automate what my business colleagues are willing to do themselves on their end. Simplification takes more discipline from our sales colleagues who ultimately will have the harder task of selling a one size fits all model — as opposed to something tailor-made — to the customer than it does from us. How many times have you heard: “Just give me a one-pager”? The Business demands a simple, short contract, but when it comes to negotiating the commercial terms, they want all the flexibility in the world, and that flexibility means tailor-made, non-standard contracts. So the next time someone comes to you demanding simplification, force them to begin with the commercial terms and go from there.

It takes two to tango. We’re ready to dance. Are you?

I have written before about how effective lawyers focus on providing solutions, as opposed to acting like a mere traffic light that says stop or go. A few months back, I was to talk about an experience that had an impact on my career development. I told the following story about my first day at a tech start-up more than a decade ago:

On my first day at the start-up where I previously worked, the CEO and founder who had literally made hundreds of millions selling businesses he had founded, proposed a certain marketing campaign. I sent him a lengthy email with a very well-reasoned description of why his idea was misguided. He called me into his office and said, “Eric, I know you are very smart, but I didn’t hire you to tell me that my ideas are bad. Either you make them better, come up with a better idea, or don’t come back to work tomorrow.” I was very embarrassed because I knew he was right. So often we lawyers get caught up in telling the clients what they shouldn’t do, when we need to focus on providing solutions. Whenever I find myself becoming a nay-sayer, I remember that conversation and what my role is supposed to be.

Here is a good check list of things legal teams can do to avoid becoming the “Department of No”. Nevertheless, finding solutions is easier said than done.

When I had written about what it takes to be an effective in-house lawyer back in April, one of my favorite business-side colleagues sent me a message asking to put my money where my mouth was on a particular transaction we were working on. My team had reviewed a prospective customer contract and identified dozens of potentially unacceptable terms, and my internal clients were not impressed. In that instance, I had to explain that we weren’t trying to “kill” the deal, just describe the ugly commercial conditions hidden in the contract, a document that they likely had not reviewed yet. Contracts aren’t really about the law. They are mainly about the business, so often times lawyers are simply informing our clients of the inconvenient reality of what the terms of the deal are.

But point taken. Lawyers shouldn’t aspire to be mere messengers and contract readers. We need to find ways to make a deal better than the one sitting on our desks. In the last two weeks, I have had to remind myself of that story from my start-up days to make sure I was part of the solution, not the problem. Just always keep in mind that if you ignore the problems, then you are not providing a solution either.