How to create a digitally savvy legal team to support an increasingly agile business

Vodafone is undergoing an existential transformation, from operating as a traditional telecoms company to becoming a tech comms company that can adapt to a changing and disrupted operating environment. This shift has resulted in an uptick in innovation within the organisation and a wholesale move to agile working in many business units. There is a focus on launching products more quickly and improving them continuously through a process of agile iteration.

As exciting as this change has been, it has presented challenges for those of us leading the legal teams that support Vodafone in achieving its objectives. Our legal professionals are now expected to adapt quickly to new business lines and areas of legal expertise as strategies evolve at pace. They must also become comfortable with new team working methodologies and digital tools as they interact with the business on projects.

We recognised that Legal needed to transform and create a more efficient operating environment while seizing the increasingly available opportunities for legal teams. Over the past two years we have worked hard to create a team of empowered strategic counsel that are ready to support an ever-evolving business. This article gives some insights into what we have achieved and how we did it. Hopefully it will also give you some ideas on how best to approach your own transformation challenges in an increasingly digital world.

Digital transformation is the new big thing in the legal profession. However, rather than change for change's sake, the first step should always be to identify the problems that you are trying to solve. Although there might be some great digital solutions that you can use to address some problems, remember that not everything needs to be digitalised. Clear guidance notes and playbooks are still as important as ever if you are trying to improve consistency and quality.

That said, digital tools can take some traditional ways of operating to a higher level. For example, having your contracts stored in a well-structured way or your advice in one place, tagged and searchable can improve speed to execution. We now have an interactive playbook, which not only makes it easier to navigate, but enables blog-style commentary to be used to build up knowledge and capture experience in real time.

Being digitally savvy allows us to engage effectively with the business and work with their digital tools, understand our products and services, and take advantage of opportunities to experiment and improve our operations. In-house lawyers now require an understanding of digital developments and a level of confidence to engage with digital tools so that they can partner effectively with their business clients.

From a management perspective, a deeper understanding of digital solutions as they apply to a legal function is critical if we are to make the right purchasing choices and maximise the value from the tools we buy. The right suite of digital tools can lead to improvements in speed, accuracy, consistency and efficiency in the delivery of legal services.

For further information, see Practice note, Digital transformation programmes: what the GC needs to know.

In any transformation programme, setting a vision is critical if you are to get buy-in from the team and clarity on what good looks like. As a management team, we worked through the challenges we faced in supporting an increasingly agile business as it changed direction and together devised an engaging vision statement that the team could get behind. The idea was to create a "North Star" that sets an overall ambition for how we want to operate in the organisation, with the freedom to work towards that goal in a way that suits us.

Once the vision was set, the next step was to invest in cultural development. We organised an offsite with the team to explore agile methodology, Kanban, and lean thinking to improve our ways of working. We workshopped the concepts upfront so that colleagues could get comfortable with them, which in turn created a culture of openness to experimentation on early digital wins.

As our transformation programme took off and small groups took charge of specific digital experiments, we made sure to celebrate early wins, creating a healthy competitive team culture that provided recognition when projects were delivered on time. We also made sure to acknowledge failures and simply close off any transformation workstreams that weren't working so that we could focus on the most successful projects. Giving yourself permission to fail fast is critical but lawyers are rarely comfortable with this. Taking time in team meetings to run through the lessons learned and what you would do differently next time is a good first step to tackling this issue.

Starting team transformation can often seem a little daunting but it need not be. The secret for us was to start small and identify and deliver quick wins and incremental improvements to build momentum and engagement. Through the open discussions that took place while defining our vision and strategy, we had already identified problem statements and areas where we could improve our existing practices.

We encouraged the entire team to propose solutions and put them into action through quick experiments, building minimum viable products (MVPs) so that we could start to enjoy the benefits without getting bogged down in the detail. Encouraging this approach was crucial as it fed into the cultural change that we wanted to instil around collaboration, experimentation and finding solutions.

A lot of these experiments focussed on low hanging fruit, using existing tools from our Microsoft Office suite, from Teams to email and Cloud storage. Simply becoming more aware of how we used these tools, investing time in understanding the functionality and sharing knowledge among the team, was a simple but powerful way to increase our effectiveness. Internal IT team training also helped us get up to speed (for further information, see Practice note, Working effectively with the IT team).

Through experimentation and the use of MVPs we made a series of improvements in our ways of working. We identified use cases that added the most value which we decided could be taken further. We continued to develop these use cases and they eventually evolved into larger ongoing transformation projects.

Two of our initial MVPs were among the most effective. The first involved moving from our old network storage to the Cloud and, in doing so, implementing improved naming and filing conventions to drive consistency and improve "discoverability" and collaboration. The second was implementing Kanban matter tracking across the teams to give more real time visibility on matter status and workload.

These contract and matter management approaches were taken as far as possible using our existing IT. We developed tools to provide a snapshot at any given time but were unable to see the underlying data or trends that might allow us to make better, data-led, decisions (for example, on resourcing, risk or prioritisation). To get further benefits, we needed a more tailored platform that would enable us to capture and track data in real time.

Our MVPs became use cases, and we evaluated several options before deciding to work with Osborne Clarke Solutions to build a bespoke platform, which we call Sprite. Sprite grew out of the need for a matter and contract management tool but through iterative design it now incorporates much more functionality, including by:

It is now in effect the central hub for the day to day work of the team, incorporating key functionality and readily accessible links out to other resources and tools. We've continued experimenting and built on Sprite iteratively, adding new tools. We recently rolled out Sprite 2.0, featuring an advice library, contract approval processes and enhanced data visualisation tools so that we can see real time metrics and run reporting for ourselves and the business.

Our work on culture and the creation of a team hub has served as a springboard for further creativity and digital engagement with the business. As a team we regularly step back and ask, "what problem are we trying to solve?" In particular, by using design thinking to focus on the customer or user experience (for further information, see Practice note, An introduction to legal design). We have:

This is all part of our drive to leverage digital tools, collaboration and experimentation to increase our speed and efficiency. This approach should both improve the experience for our clients and enable us to focus our resources where they can have the greatest impact.