Legal Innovators California Interview: Joy Sherrod, Intel

Ahead of the Legal Innovators California conference we spoke with Joy Sherrod, Director of Discovery and Associate General Counsel at Intel Corporation, who has spent years driving technological advancement across legal departments in San Francisco, and will be a speaker at the two-day event on June 10 and 11.

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Questions from the Legal Innovators events team:

There is a growing debate about whether the next generation of in-house lawyers needs to be technologists first and lawyers second. Where do you stand on that, and how is it shaping how you recruit and develop talent?

I actually don’t agree with this, companies hire in-house attorneys for their specialized knowledge and ability to advise on a large number of various issues.  The kinds of things that AI is best at in the legal profession – research, summarization, data analysis, etc are much more valuable for law firm attorneys and in particular more junior attorneys. 

That said, it is critically important that in-house attorneys expand their knowledge of technology and become conversant in the use of AI tools.  We have to become more efficient and spend less time on lower value work, technology is the only way to get there.  In recruiting and developing talent our goal is always to recruit the best lawyers, but now we also want to see a person who can leverage technology in their work.  We have a robust training program aimed at getting all of our attorneys to become comfortable with AI and to incorporate it into their work.

If you had to predict which part of the traditional in-house legal function will be unrecognisable in ten years, what would it be and why?

Contract drafting and development will largely be automated I believe, only the biggest/most important agreements will be heavily negotiated by attorneys.  Patent analysis will likely become much faster, the acquisition of patent portfolios will probably become more common and better targeted.

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There is a school of thought that says AI will not replace lawyers, but will expose the lawyers who were never adding much value to begin with. Do you think that is a fair framing, and what does it mean for how legal departments are structured?

I think it’s more likely that AI will expose legal work that isn’t adding much value as opposed to actual lawyers.  In the past, a lot of time was spend doing the same thing over and over; for example answering the same basic questions over and over or drafting agreements with the same terms, etc.  Now whether the attorneys who spend most of their time doing these types of tasks become obsolete?  If they can’t uplevel the kind of work they are doing, yes; but if they can shift to more high-value work then no.

Many innovation initiatives fail not because of technology, but because of internal resistance: how have you navigated scepticism within your legal team when introducing new tools or ways of working?

The best approach is to understand what the groups’ pain points are and what technology can really help them, don’t introduce a new tool for the sake just of the sake of it – many projects fail because they are filling a need that doesn’t exist.  People don’t want to spend time learning to work with technology that doesn’t help them.  You also have to get stakeholder buy in early when introducing new tools, especially at the executive level.

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Tickets For Legal Innovators California Conference – SF – June 10 + 11

To gain your complimentary pass for the two-day landmark legal AI event in San Francisco, please use the Express Registration here – only for those working within law firms or inhouse teams.

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As global regulation becomes more complex and fragmented, do you foresee a shift toward greater international harmonisation of laws or increasing divergence, and what would that mean for multinational organisations?

Definitely more divergence.  The EU and UK will continue to focus on privacy and the ethics of AI,  I expect will put in place more controls as the technology becomes more powerful and ubiquitous.  Latin America and Asia will likely follow this route as well.  The US will continue to be the wild west, so far fewer restrictions which is both good and bad.  Multi-national corporations are not going to be able to have a one-size-fits-all approach to AI use/governance, they will need experts in various locations to put in place policies and protocols specific to the region in question.

Thanks Joy and look forward to hearing you speak at Legal Innovators California on June 10 and 11.

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And if you found this interesting and are in Europe, then come along to the Legal Innovators Europe conference in Paris – June 24 (Law Firm Day) and 25 (Inhouse Day).

Express route to your ticket here.