27 ASIAN LEGAL BUSINESS – OCTOBER 2023 WWW.LEGALBUSINESSONLINE.COM ROUNDTABLE the intricacies of our legal practices and operations, and what’s happening across the legal industry. Examples of some of the projects I’m currently working on include developing a multi-pronged strategy in response to recent developments in generative AI, building out a new approach to data and reporting, deploying a new knowledge management system, piloting an automated timekeeping solution, finding new ways to define and measure partnership with our clients, creating proprietary subscription-based monitoring services, and socialising the value of innovation generally and specifically with regard to our projects. Caryn Sandler, partner and chief knowledge and innovation officer, Gilbert + Tobin (G+T): I lead the firm’s Legal Service Innovation (LSI) team, which consists of more than 70 specialists working in legal transformation, technology, informatics, knowledge, and legal project management roles. Our LSI mandate is to identify opportunities to optimise and innovate the firm’s legal services – whether through reinventing legal processes, developing in-house technological capability including Generative AI, adapting, and customising third-party software to automate legal processes, or creating new partnerships for legal services. To keep G+T ahead of the increasing technological and competitive disruption in the business of law, it is my responsibility to ensure LSI offers market-leading legal operations and innovation that forms an essential part of G+T’s delivery of high-value legal services. I am also responsible for ensuring our lawyers are equipped with the necessary skills and capability to succeed as “future-focused” and digitally literate lawyers. I also lead our legal transformation consulting capability, G+T Innovate. This offering was developed to support in-house legal teams - knowing they needed to change how they worked but were unclear on where to start and how to drive effective change. In meeting this client need, I have been fortunate to work on market-leading transformation projects for prestigious ASX 20 and international companies. Given the breadth of services our multi-disciplinary LSI team delivers, my role requires me to be intimately across all aspects of the G+T business. To that end, I’m able to lean on my many years in practice as both a corporate and a knowledge lawyer in top-tier law firms in Australia and abroad, which has afforded me an in-depth understanding of the law, legal processes, the intricacies of transactional work and insight into, and empathy for, ways in which lawyers work. ALB: What makes the role of chief innovation officer relevant or necessary in organisations like law firms, which traditionally enshrine hierarchy and legacies? Allgrove: I challenge the premise of the question. Hierarchy and legacy are not necessarily always negatives, and, in any event, many law firms, and certainly ours, have long since moved on from some of the stereotypes of what a “traditional” law firm is like. That said, it is true that the private practice legal market is built on a very successful legacy business model, which, along with some of the constraints of the partnership structure, means it is not
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