Legal eagles
Gilbert + Tobin
Gilbert + Tobin is an independent Australian corporate law firm founded in 1988 – a relative youngster in the profession. It has its own innovation hub and recently hosted a 24-hour hackathon with Westpac and LegalVision, where more than 50 lawyers and coders collaborated on working prototypes to streamline and automate legal tasks. Already at work is the firm’s Smart Counsel app, loaded with concise answers from in-house counsel to the most commonly asked questions, such as what to do if the ACCC turns up at your office with a search warrant.
The Smart Counsel resource is available for free via email registration but G+T has applied for a patent for its verification management tool, which has transformed the painstaking process of preparing a prospectus for an initial public offering (IPO).
When a legal firm creates a prospectus for a company’s IPO to list on the stock exchange, checking everything – including identifying a verification document to confirm each fact and figure – is a “hugely important but tedious job”, says partner Rachael Bassil. “Believe it or not, someone sits down with a pencil and a ruler and draws a box around everything that needs to be
verified in a 200-page document, numbers it, prepares a table with all the numbers and allocates it to a person. Then it’s scanned and sent to maybe 20 or 30 people, who then scan in their handwritten mark-ups. It is just a beast.”
With G+T’s verification management tool – an online portal that has taken years to build – it’s all done electronically, connecting everyone involved in the process in one place. “If something’s not right, we can easily feed it back into the prospectus; if you’re not the right person to verify something, you just reallocate it and it electronically sends it on,” explains Bassil. “Everything is automatically tracked,” she says, adding that it has dramatically reduced human errors, costs and “pain”.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is already helping G+T lawyers review huge volumes of documents very quickly and accurately, “instead of having to rely on teams of junior lawyers to flick through hundreds of documents, looking for things”. AI tools are excellent, for example, for examining masses of similar contracts and identifying consistencies and inconsistencies.
G+T continues to automate all sorts of cut-and-paste processes around due diligence and preparing reports from ASX searches. “The human element is critical and we’re not going to be replaced by robots,” says Bassil, “but a huge amount of what needs to be done to deliver the advice to clients can be replaced by tools or enhanced by unlocking massive amounts of data. Because we work to hard deadlines, it frees us up to do more valuable things for the client.”