3#12 - Peter van Dam - Digital Transformation in the Legal Industry (Eng)

«A lawyer has to be compliant. An advice from a lawyer should be fault free. Therefore it is so difficult to just do something. It is not in their DNA."

Unlock the secrets to the legal sector's digital transformation with our latest guest, Peter van Dam, Chief Digital Officer at Simonsen Vogt and Wiig. We promise you a journey into the innovative realm where data management and artificial intelligence redefine the traditional practices of law. Peter offers us a glimpse into his professional trajectory from legal tech provider to digital pioneer, emphasizing how data and application integration are revolutionizing legal services.

Discover the unique challenges and opportunities that come in a new era of digital sophistication in the law profession. Our conversation dives into the significance of roles like Chief Digital Officer in shaping a progressive future for a historically conservative field. We share stories of how to catalyze excitement for technology among legal eagles and clients alike, and we explore the strategic vision needed to navigate the balance between innovation, confidentiality, and compliance.

The episode examines the expanding potential for automation within legal services. Here, the focus shifts to how digital tools enhance, rather than replace, the human expertise of lawyers. Rounding off the discussion, we shine a light on how law firms are upgrading their data access protocols, ensuring that sensitive information remains under lock and key.

My key takeaways:

LegalTech

• Legal might seem as a conservative section, but on the insight everyone, from lawyer, to staff to paralegal is working on continuous improvement and growing more and more efficient.
• Low code, citizen development, hackathons, etc. are ways to quickly iterate on ideas and applying them.
• Internal and external marketing of the importance of technology in law is important.
• You have to lift those first step barriers, an get first hand knowledge of using AI and tech, to really embrace it.

Document & Content Management

• Optimizing interoperability and data exchange between different document management tools is an interesting journey.
• There is huge, untapped potential in unstructured data.
• The biggest challenge for document management is to find ways of cutting through the noise of redundant, obsolete, and trivial data.
• You need a certain quality of data sources to utilize LLMs and genAI.
• Methods of AI Governance need to work in concert with classical methods of data and Information Management.
• Data volumes are growing exponentially, and so does the cost. Records Management is important to structure data, create retention schedules and ensure that datahis available according to need and regulatory requirements.

AI and trends in Technology

• Find a way to balance need and investment in a way that you have the relevant tools available when needed but are not exclusively reliant on those tools.
• Development in technology, data, AI, sustainability, etc. creates more demand for legal services - technological development accelerates legal demand.
• For the practice of law, human interaction is vital. There might be a more differentiated service offering going forward, but human interaction with a lawyer will still be at the core of the practice.

The role of CDO

• The role of CDO is challenged, because it can mean so many different things in different environments.
• A Chief Digital Officer is important to get enthusiasm about new technology and to actually get it implemented and used.
• Communication is the most important skill and tool.
• As a CDO or Digitalization department you need to think 6 month ahead, elicit trends and find out what can become relevant for your firm.

Chapters

• 0:00 Digital Law Firm and Data Management
• 11:55 Digital Transformation in Law Firm
• 25:04 Legal Digitalization and Future Trends
• 31:25 Data Security in Legal Access Management

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

This is Metadema, a holistic view on data management in the Nordics.

Speaker 2: 0:13

Welcome. My name is Winfried and thanks for joining me for this episode of Metadema. Our vision is to promote data management as a profession in the Nordics, show the competencies that we have, and that is the reason I invite Nordic experts in data and information management for talk.

Speaker 1: 0:35

Welcome to Metadema, and today we have a really interesting topic out of us and we're going to talk about the digital law firm. So how will the digital evolution, the changes in data and AI influence law going forward? So we're not going to go into any minority report thinking here, but rather talk about the practice of law in connection to the development of data and AI. So often, this is mentioned in two really opposite perspectives. On the one side, we talk about the classic knowledge worker, where many tasks can be automated. On the other side, we talk about law as a profession that uses analysis, argumentation, discretion and has to really understand human behavior. That's why it's hard to work with data and AI in the field of law.

Speaker 1: 1:26

The specter of innovation in legal is really broad, and from document management on the one side, it goes all the way to interpreting regulations and clauses, to gaining an understanding of your client and the human perspectives in as well, and to data security and the discretion we already talked about. So that's why I needed an expert to talk about that, and the expert is Petter Wandam from Siemensen Wo and Wieg. Welcome, petter.

Speaker 3: 1:55

Thank you very much, Winfried. Very nice to be invited and call the next part so I'll live up to that?

Speaker 1: 2:02

Oh, I'm very sure you will. So before we get started with the topic itself, Petter, please introduce yourselves.

Speaker 3: 2:09

Yes, well, as you may be see by my name, I'm Dutch from origin and I came in 2009 to Norway and the first years I was a provider of a legal tech system, a document management system, and after a few years, I started to work for Siemensen, for the Vogtvik, as their chief digital officer, and she could also call chief data officer, but the official name is the chief digital officer.

Speaker 3: 2:34

So, and besides that, well, so that I have both, I've sat on both sides of the tables. So I'm both being a provider of legal technology and I'm now I'm mostly a buyer of legal technology to service our lawyers, but also our clients, and that's why I, a few years ago, also talked to the Norwegian Bar Association, and they see also that we need to get legal technology, or the implementation and the use of legal technology, better distributed among the Norwegian lawyers, and therefore we have started a forum that's called TechTorger. So once a year, we organize an event in which we talk about legal technology but also have legal let's say, proven legal technology solutions there in order for lawyers to look around and see if they can use it. So that's my. So let's say, 90% is I'm CDO at Siemensen Vogtvik, but 10% I also do other things, amongst which is organizing TechTorger for the Bar Association and also be a board member of the Nordic legal tech hub.

Speaker 1: 3:40

And I am always amazed how many people are involved in trying to spread their knowledge and expertise besides their work. And this is fantastic that you are organizing legal tech as a conference and as an event and are actively involved there. So what does Peter doing when he's not working?

Speaker 3: 3:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Strange work home to ask that. Well, I have to say I work a lot, or I like to work and I like to read about legal technology and also think about new things that I can do with, let's say, with the data and applications that we have and how we have to change it for the better. But when I'm not working, I mostly cycle on my bike to work on my live, as it's two and a half hours both ways. So that's what I'm doing and it's a lot of sport, but that's I like to sport because then it keeps my, it keeps me fit, also to think, because there's not that much. I think you have to keep your body fit also to have your mind fit. So that's what most of it, and of course, I have a family, so it's pretty much the usual thing sports and family.

Speaker 1: 4:49

Fantastic. So you've been a couple of years in the business, both as chief digital officer, but before that also from the tech side. Where did you interest for data and technology? Come from.

Speaker 3: 5:01

I think my interest for data and technology came gradually. Originally I started the economy, so I was bound to be the end up in the bank or in the financial sector, but somehow I got into the information technology sector, first as a consultant and later more technical. Let's say, if you look at my role within Siemens, wuchtendt, also in other law firms and all those sectors, I always intrigued about applications. So I mostly look at how applications can support users or clients, whoever, in doing their job. And if you look at our law firm, it's called document management. What does it really mean? Is that if a lawyer needs a document, how does he or she produce it? Where do you find the information Stuff like that?

Speaker 3: 5:48

But in doing that I saw you see the data is intertwined with that. So every application needs data and I think we're also going to talk about it. What I see in the legal sector, but probably everywhere, is that you have more and more and more applications that all need data and probably the data comes from all those applications. So did you get? My interest is more in how the data architecture is to provide all those applications to work perfectly, get the right info and then support the lawyer and their clients in their daily business.

Speaker 1: 6:22

And this was really interesting because it really reflects a development and architecture as well that we have seen throughout the last years, going a bit more away from that application based architecture, where I have my application to solve that problem and then I need another applications or another problem, and then all of the third problem is getting another application and you end up with like a bit of spaghetti in between and not really understanding when your information comes from, how the business looks like for your data, and even the quality for the data and you can't be really sure about. So I really like that approach. Starting with so what do I have in front of me to help my clients or the lawyers, and how can I connect that to everything else to make it sound trustworthy, exactly?

Speaker 3: 7:13

And if you look at this, I have been intrigued by, for example, things like integration platforms. But what you see is that, from historically, all those applications are sort of the best of breed applications, standalone applications, and then you have point to point integrations between those applications and what we try to do. Now I'm also constantly looking about to good integration platforms, because if you look at our ERP systems, that's about a lawyer. What does he do? He does a time writing time, a registering time, and then the time comes into a case management system and case management. You have to do invoice, so you have that part, and you see that there is a lot of integrations there so that the process from when starting with worked until the invoice is sent and also the books are kept. That's one thing that we can talk about is very interesting. It's happening a lot also with AI.

Speaker 3: 8:07

But the other thing, what is the primary thing, is document management and what is the data there, and I think it's instructor data. But you see also now certainly that when we are talking about the LLNs and AI, that there also is changing something. And what I'm very intrigued about and think about how can we combine those two, because you do the case with creating a document and hopefully creating the document from already existing documents or existing knowledge. And then you could say and there are a lot of.

Speaker 3: 8:38

If you look at legal tech, there are a lot of different legal tech, because document management is one system, but you have also archiving, your whole access management, but you have also the collaboration systems together with clients. It could be a due diligence, it could be a litigation, all kinds of e-discovery, but you could also a document can also be compare a document. You have to combine a document, you have to put things in black, you have to find things, and that's the interesting. Document management could exist out of maybe 20 to 30, maybe to 40 different document management applications and together they use data. And what I'm more intrigued about is how we couldn't reuse that data to optimize process in our law firm or generally.

Speaker 1: 9:25

This is fantastic and you dived right into it and I really like that, and I had a presentation couple of weeks back at what we do a yearly data management book club and different topics from data management that are discussed every week, and I had the pleasure to present metadata management and document content management and I've said it before and I've said again that I think in document management, in unstructured data, is a lot of on top potential and this is where the battles are going to be fought in the future. Also, from a vendor perspective, I think there is a lot that is still unclear, a lot of information that is too layered, too unstructured to actually track any value from it yet. But a lot of vendors already working in our fields and I think with the development on large language models, on AI, there is a huge potential that can open.

Speaker 3: 10:23

I had just a comment about the metadata, as you said, because indeed when I started my career in the legal, it was often that those document management systems, that documents were tagged with metadata and in the beginning you had a document and you had a sort of a table beside it and you had to oh this is case number X, this is team Y, this is author, that all kind of things. And then based on that you could search for document or you could put certain access rights. And that's only 15 years ago and now nobody thinks about pegging document anymore. I think that's the search technology or AI is completely different, but still we talk about metadata. So that was just a very interesting that you said that before.

Speaker 1: 11:08

Before we deep dive into the topic, I would like to talk a bit about roads and responsibilities, and there's a lot of discussion about the role of CDO, both on the chief digital office aside, but also on the chief data office aside. Through the years, a lot of different CXO roles have emerged in the field of data I T classic CIO CTO role. I've seen chiefs algorithm officer. I've seen chief analytics officer Couple. Years back there was a chief mobile application officer in some companies. That has disappeared again, but certain roles have remained consistent, like the chief digital office. How do you see the difference between a chief digital officer, chief data officer and, eventually, other roles in the field?

Speaker 3: 12:02

I think honestly, I could also be called a CIO, could have been, but I think we chose a role chief digital or digital officer because it is the role.

Speaker 3: 12:11

My main role is to get the firm more digitized, so it's not only about what we talk about applications and data, but it's to get the lawyers using the technology and also our clients and various, let's say, areas in which work, to use that technology and be enthusiastic about the technology and then start using it. And that's why I think chief digital, the digital element, is very important to make OK, we are going to digitize this. It could be meeting rooms, it could be document management, it could be collaboration, it could be discovery, whatever, it could be transactions. How do we do that and how do we use technology, so that I would say that's my main role. But of course I could also be called data officer, but I guess then my users would think that I'm a bit, maybe too nerdy. Of course it's a lot what we do Chief technology officer, cto, you see also a lot, and but then that it would be, it would be too technical, but yeah, so that that would be my comment, that it's also important to market your function and that's why it's CTO.

Speaker 1: 13:18

Really good. I really like that description and it shows the transformative character of the role much more than the stable operational part, and I think that's important. So I mean, the follow up question is quite logical.

Speaker 3: 13:30

All right, how do you work with transforming and digitalization in such traditional and I would even call it conservative sector as, as law and legal, I will get back to how conservative we really are, but I think and to an extent we are very, very conservative, but to work with that, I have to see that that lawyers, but also all our other staff, federal legals and people that work every day, they work very hard. So it's not that they are conservative and just sitting behind the desk do nothing. They are working constantly and doing the things that they do as efficiently as possible and to get them using technology and, for example, we use a no code system to make applications for specific things that you cannot buy. Or I think that two things are important. One is that we started with hackathons and that was and I know there are a lot of hackathons, but we use a hackathons where we do hackathons with students and we do also internal hackathons. We are thinking about a hackathon with clients and that's that's always to try to get our IDs and quickly get them into IDs and cert applications. That's one thing.

Speaker 3: 14:37

The other thing is that myself, but also my, my direct colleagues, together with the lawyers, need to market what we do.

Speaker 3: 14:44

So I think once in the two months, we have a sort of an in gathering, talk about technology and now, of course, with AI, we often have stand up sessions.

Speaker 3: 14:55

We also organize courses, information gatherings and also externally that I, together with one of the lawyers, are externally talking about this. How do we do that in order to get all that? We know that I think all my colleagues think, ok, I'm part of a technology advanced law firm and then you get the feeling OK, then I have to be part of that and then you start using that technology, because I think it most important thing is certainly in a conservative branch, that you get people energetic and enthusiastic to use technology, and I think now with AI, that's apparently very important thing. You just need to use it once or twice and then you see it works and then you will use it more. So you have to lift those barriers and I think the conservatism you talked about is also. A lawyer has to be compliant, so advice from a lawyer is should be all free and therefore it's so difficult to just do something. It's not in their DNA.

Speaker 1: 15:53

Yeah, I really like that and that talks about the discretion we talked about and the analytical part of the work that lawyers are doing. But I found particularly interesting and you talked about a different format you have internally to to bring forth Transformation, innovation and digital. How important do you think storytelling and communication is for your role?

Speaker 3: 16:15

I think it's storytelling, or communication, is probably most important and I probably do not do it enough. So with every project that we do, I think afterwards we said, ok, we should have communicated better, we should have used more. If you, for example, need a new application, or let's say, some department has a certain wish could be a normalizing, because that's another anonymizing data, it could be presenting your documentation in a timeline, but just just to highlight how niche these applications are and the data used for that, then you think, oh, that's an interesting application, let's, let's start with it and launch it. But often you forget that you should really should check with the lawyers what do they really need and also communicate how they should use it when, how it should be integrated in our systems. But we don't have the time for that because it's, of course, a fast going business. A lawyer gets a case and the next day it needs to be done. So often that communication just vanishes. But it is also another element that I would like to think and I was thinking before the podcast.

Speaker 3: 17:23

It's very interesting is that as a CDO or as the digitalization department, we have to think about everything that we think could be interesting for our lawyers Also in a half a year or nine months, and that we already have thought about it, that we know how to implement it when needed, because if that situation happens, then we have a platform for that, for example, e-discovery. E-discovery is, for example, you have a case and you have to go through, let's say, 30,000 emails and find two emails that are important because it says, for example, claim and awful, but it only happens once a year in a search. So then you don't buy that system because it's much too expensive. But then you need to know that you have a subscription that you could use like this when needed, but not pay too much only for that case. So I think that's interesting, interesting part.

Speaker 3: 18:17

But that means the communication that you constantly have to check with the lawyers and departments and the management. What is it that could happen, what are the needs, both now and maybe in the future? And I think the key element is there because they are busy people that if you do not have that communication, you don't know, and when the question comes you have to start and it often takes a few months maybe to find something. If you have no idea what you where you have to look. I went a bit of topic there, but I hope that gave the question, not at all a topic, because I think this is really interesting.

Speaker 1: 18:53

There is a certain difference and in season one of the podcast we had an episode on holistic view on data and information management and there still is a certain difference between data management, information management not going to go into the depths of that, but in classic information management and information governance we talked a lot about legal as one of the main stakeholders and you mentioned e-discovery as one method that is really important for that information management. Another one is legal hold. That has been talked about a lot in information management. Data management, not that much. Legal hold is how do I ensure that information that is important for a case is available when it needs to be available, not archived away, not deleted or purged while still important in the litigation process? So how do you see that data information connection here and where do you see the role of legal?

Speaker 3: 19:52

If you look at data management, I think now that you have the systems that are moving into the cloud, you get another dimension. Of course, we are bound by the law. So, for example, if you have a case, on the one hand it's client data, so it needs to be protected. It could be that every that, only a team, only a person from us have access to it. That one thing. The other thing is, when the case is closed, you have to close the case and archive it. But it could be important to still hold on to the data because something can happen to that case. So it could mean that you then, for example, when it's closed, that you sort of that nobody has access to the data anymore, but we can still retrieve it in case. But what you also see is that's coming off from the US and UK, because they always a bit advantage that at a certain moment you remove it records management, that's called them. So we are allowed thinking when do you have to delete it exactly? And, of course, if you ask a lawyer, they will never delete it, because they think after 25 years I get an email and then I have to say why did you do this? And I don't have the documentation anymore, and then I would lose the case after all after this. But on the other hand, you're bound by the law and what I said.

Speaker 3: 21:08

The extra dimension now is that we have that information into the cloud, and the cloud costs money and the data gets more and more and more. Let's say, when we started, the document was maybe some kilobyte, maybe a megabyte, and I think every PowerPoint and Adobe is multiple megabyte, even sometimes gigabyte. So I see the terabyte just growing and growing and you go over your let's say, your amount that you can spend, and so I think also from a month. So not only from compliance, but also from a financial perspective, we have to take data management also seriously in how to remove all the data, because it gets only more. And that's also a topic that I think is interesting when we talk about knowledge management, where you started with finding your documents. If you are looking for knowledge, finding your documents, and you only find a lot of rubbish, old documents, documents that are drafts, then it's not valuable anymore. So I think that is the real challenge, or our document data management in the years to come.

Speaker 1: 22:11

So spot on and I've talked about this before and I call it dark data. So a lot of data, that is, you have it in your systems but you don't really know what it is, how it's structured, if it's just I think there's a term rot, redundant, obsolete or trivial data, or we're talking about data that is actually valuable, and if you have too much of that redundant, obsolete and trivial data, it's like searching for a needle in the haystack.

Speaker 3: 22:37

Exactly. I didn't know about rot, but that's a good term. I should use that more also, because what you now get is that we are looking at using AI, JTTPT or similar how to use that, and then we ideas. If you want to use this technology for legal, specific questions, then you of course, need also have data that it looks into and if it's rot our data, there's no point in pointing that JTTPT to our own data. So that's why it's very important to think about the data which will be which you directed to or let it filter by, or how you prompt it. So I think now we are seeing all the, let's say, the holes or what you called rot, that rotten data, what I would call that. That is sort of getting an Achilles heel for us. So we have to organize our data in a better way and maybe just remove it Some of it, not everything, of course.

Speaker 1: 23:41

I think this is really important and we're talking about fundamentals here.

Speaker 1: 23:45

We're talking about classic practices that have been around for years and, just with the amount of data used in large language models, the amount of exposure AI solutions have now to your data, just give it a different dimension, and I think that we need to find ways and mechanisms to ensure certain quality of what we are delivering with AI, and there are different models already implemented or talked about as costs.

Speaker 1: 24:16

We talked about private modeling how do you protect your sensitive data in your models? We can talk about constrained models that just built in certain constraints and how the models will be used and what predictions they can give and how many predictions they can give that you ensure for watermarking, for example, how do you ensure that the data that goes through a model and through different algorithms is still identifiable and connectable to the source? But we are just at the start of it and I think we are still talking about it on a really large scale and everyone is trying out and sailing first before we can get to a place where this is actually going to be implemented in a proper way. We talked about a lot of different places where focus can be in legal when we talk about digitalization. What would you say are the main areas that you see can be improved?

Speaker 3: 25:21

Main areas that can be improved within legal, that's a good one, I think. I think a bit. Of course, everything I would say there's a lot to improve and, of course, we talked about getting the holistic architecture in a better way. But what I think will be done the next years and it's very important is, of course, getting away from the stigma where we are now that we are a conservative branch, and what I'm trying to work with is that we, besides all the legal services that law firm offers, that we also offer digital services, that sort of underpin these legal services. Because I'm still thinking that one day it will be the other way around. Maybe a customer will ask for, let's say, a digital legal service and then maybe also need a lawyer to support that. So I think that that is probably the thing that is most important to battle for, because that is going slowly, because it's in the DNA of a law firm not to go there, because there was always a more important client question that needs to be answered and they're enough.

Speaker 3: 26:36

So I see it where we think, okay, they are conservative branch and they don't use technology, but they use it, but what I see is that everything that happens now in the community AI, gdpr, other compliances, sustainability and stuff like that. Everything creates more demand for legal services, so that somebody think, okay, legal services will be asked for less. It's not happening because of technology. It will be only be more needed because of technology, because who owns AI, who has the right? Who has the copyright? Yeah, there are only creating more, being created more questions, legal questions for that. Now we got a bit of topic, but that's what you see is happening. And so if you look at the conservative, conservative area that legal is or it's, it's looked upon like it's conservative and you think it will be replaced by AI, I think exactly the opposite is happening. There will only come more lawyers because they have to interpret it and decide upon all these things like AI. So maybe in 10 years, seamless and the Folk Week has 100 lawyers only on AI and IP.

Speaker 1: 27:53

What I think is really interesting is that when you talk about legal and legal services, you always think of a human element there, because we talk about, yeah, client connection, human behavior, we talk about discretion, we talk about trust, and the same goes basically also for the health service. So it's a bit comparable on that side, but we have seen certain one-off services in the health industry that being digitized, where you don't really talk to a doctor anymore but you talk to a language model for certain maybe more more easy questions where you can do digitally online in a different way. And some things have happened around legal as well. On that side, there are some companies that explore the field at least, giving maybe more more simple legal help on one-off cases. Do you think that is a threat for a legal as a sector? Basically, you're thinking of a threat for automating a lot of the legal work.

Speaker 3: 28:55

I don't think that's a threat, but maybe some people would think that. But it's the same, as you said, as in the health sector you have, of course, you had Watson from IBM and it could, of course, better see than any doctor what kind of cancer you maybe might have or what kind of disease. But still, a person likes to talk to a doctor to, let's say, sort of confirm this but also maybe explain it and put it into some perspective. And I think that's exactly the same with the lawyer. We have a lot of, let's say, the applications that we try to make, let's say, a GDPR checklist or a dawn rate guide. You could use them, but still you maybe have one or two questions and then you still want to ask to the lawyer.

Speaker 3: 29:41

I had one lawyer where, five years ago, you have a lot of EU directives it's often 7,000 pages so we made sort of an app that you could go to that, let's say, the first question you have about this regular directive you could get via an application, because otherwise you would call a lawyer and you have always. But probably when you get the first check of this automated process, you would see, yes, you have a risk or there is something that you're not applying to and then you're willing to call that lawyer. So probably we will only use the technology, the automation, in a way that we better define the, let's say, the questions or the legal questions that the lawyer will then answer. No, I see that only in a positive way, that we use the technology to better define what we can do for our customers, and then those customers are, let's say, served better and they will come with more questions.

Speaker 1: 30:38

We are actually closing into the end of the conversation, but I had one more question back to the fundamentals of this data that we already discussed. We talked about the document content management. We talked about metadata. I want to talk a bit more about data security and how to ensure that you can access your client data in a secure way and for many legal firms, we've talked about the partner model right and maybe also a more of a distributed environment where you answer your legal question. You talked about infrastructure already part of the whales ensuring that your data is protected across applications and how do you work with securing access to On different levels, I think.

Speaker 3: 31:25

So one is, of course, that you cannot get into our platform based on, let's say, conditional access, multi-factor authentication zones, different silos and stuff like that. But that's, I think, the primary technical, let's say, infrastructure, and of course also everything has security, that spam and all kinds of cybersecurity things are done. But I think if you're looking more into the legal, into the applications, the applications that we use, and therefore you see often that to get on the legal market you have to have certain requirements in order. So, for example, our document management system, but also our collaboration system that we use in our communication customers, they have a very granular model in how to create access models for those cases. If you have, for example, a two diligence, which you could call it the bidding room, then you have, of course, on document level, on person level, you could water market, you could say you cannot download it, it's only view. But you could also say people cannot see each other in those rooms, because if you have multiple sellers, multiple bidders, the bidders, of course they cannot see each other, for example. So that's on the one level.

Speaker 3: 32:43

If you look at our central document management system, I think it's getting more and more that we are now a model that's called security policy manager. So it means that you can, if something is stock listed, you can immediately close it off and you see also everyone that has access to document and done something with the document. On that level, of course, you're working with, let's say, I see that where we come from working with groups that were put on a document, that now it's also based on metadata. It's very interesting. So you could, for example, say your law firm is based on office on tractors area maybe on, but this could be everything. It could also you have more.

Speaker 3: 33:24

Let's say, how do you call it? You could nest all we call the pivot table and you could say, for example, a case is only accessible for a certain person that depends on the fact that he is based in Munich and that he is in litigation, and only for one month, and that is based also on integrations with other systems. So the document management system is, of course, a fed of the ERP system in which other roles are kept. So I think also security access management is getting more and more advanced, which I of course like very much because that's for some part of my job and I think the lawyers must feel secure about that. Nobody gets access to the documents unless they need to, because that's the mode, I think. For a law firm, that's probably the most valuable information is the documents, and other information could also be sound files, films and stuff like that.

Speaker 1: 34:20

I think there is a really strong development, as we said in the beginning, exactly that we talk about automated classifiers. We talk about identifying certain terms in a document that could lead to any conclusion about who should have access and who should not have access. You can also automatically delete certain information in a document that shouldn't be accessible to your client, for example, so there's a lot of interesting possibilities in that field. I've had a really good time talking to you about a lot of these possibilities and a lot about the fundamentals of data, especially here in the legal context. So at the end of the discussion, I would love for you to either sum it up or give us a key takeaway, if you would say what are the key takeaways from, let's say, data and management and digitalization in the legal sector?

Speaker 3: 35:13

I think it's still getting the stigma away and because everybody talks always about the legal sector as a conservative sector and you always see those reports about 40% of the legal functions will no longer exist in X years because of genitive AI, but they also said that 10 years ago.

Speaker 3: 35:31

So my goal is still that one day one should talk about the legal sector as also a normal sector or very interesting sector, also digitally look at digitally. So I think that's interesting. The other takeaway is, I guess, that the law sector is getting more and more digitized, with more and more applications let's say best of breed applications for various sectors because you could log from. It is really a combination of a lot of small sectors and to create a whole holistic application platform. I think the next step is to have good integration platforms, not only for data let's say, erp data records but also for documents, and I think also with that, the reporting criteria or the reporting demands will also be more. So you probably, if we talk about an integration platform for all those applications, I guess you will talk about multiple integration platforms which will tap in all those databases which will be distributed and if you have a good architecture or vision on that, I think you're very, very good, fantastic.

Speaker 3: 36:42

Thank you, so much, thank you, it was very nice to talk about what I do on my job. Thank you, Winfrit.