LawHawk Blog

It's hard to believe this is happening the way it is, but one day, we see tariffs being imposed, the next day they’re not, and the day after that, they’re back on but only for some goods from some countries, and with different percentages! It’s enough to make anyone’s head spin, but this is just a snapshot of how quickly the business environment globally is changing and how challenging it is for legal teams and businesses to keep up.

As a recent World Commerce and Contracting Report (Managing Tariffs and Market Uncertainty: Business Strategies and Emerging Trends) noted, tariffs represent just one of many recent market disruptions, from the COVID-19 pandemic and inflationary pressures to geopolitical instability and raw material shortages.

In such a fickle and financially challenged environment, businesses are constantly restructuring. Key individuals may no longer be involved; they may have different roles, or their entire business units may have ceased to exist. It’s like trying to play musical chairs with the rules changing every minute.

So, what’s a legal team to do when helping their business carry out its goals while staying legally compliant?

Look into no-code software.

We’ve been big fans of digital signing for more than 7 years, starting to use and recommend it after we got to know the team at Secured Signing in 2017. I wrote a blog about it at the time: Digital signing for lawyers – Secured Signing and LawHawk Join Forces.

In 2020, when COVID hit, lawyers were suddenly challenged to work out how to sign documents electronically, and I was asked to participate in a webinar for the New Zealand Law Society on short notice. I believe more than 3,500 lawyers attended the webinar (by far my largest audience on a webinar!). We demonstrated a Secured Signing digital signing workflow, and I involved my 10 year old daughter to show how simple it was. I mustn’t have done a very good job, as people commented that they thought it looked too hard for lawyers to learn, and I don’t believe there was any major uptake. Many lawyers instead watched each other sign documents with pen and paper via video call and swapped counterparts later.

Things are changing, though.

At the risk of over-disclosure, over the past 6 weeks, I have lost quite a lot of weight. There is a work related aspect to this post - I'll get to it! 

Despite being fairly active last year, I couldn’t shift the additional weight I’d picked up. No matter how much I ran, I couldn’t lose the weight.

Towards the end of last year, I bought a new suit in a larger size because my old suit no longer fit me and I couldn't see a way back to it. I just assumed that my metabolism had slowed down, and this was the new reality.

However, over Christmas, our son told us how he had slimmed down while building his strength using the MyFitnessPal app. Tell me more I said…

The 2025 ACC Chief Legal Officers Survey contains some fascinating findings after surveying 772 participants across 20 industries and 48 countries. There is room for optimism, but a number of apparent inconsistencies and perhaps overall pointers to many legal teams repeating the same mistakes and getting similar outcomes for 2025.

Some of the key findings and my comments on them are set out below.

One of the things we regularly see legal teams grapple with is when to put their legal automation solution into live use.

Having done the hard yards of reviewing and refining their documents and the process, having it automated to a high standard, and having done a fair amount of testing within the legal team and with some key users, there is often a feeling that still more needs to be done before setting it live.

I’d encourage you to consider the benefits of putting it live earlier.

We got a new TV!

Last year we finally replaced our TV.

The previous TV was state of the art when we got it. It had a great picture – 3D! -and did the job well, until it didn’t. The change wasn’t immediate. The picture progressively degraded to the point where visible lines ran down the screen. We stopped noticing, but it would have stood out immediately to visitors. We were watching high-definition movies, but they looked like rubbish. The “smart” apps weren’t updated, and we had to use our phones and Apple TV to get to anything useful.

We could have replaced it at any time for little money, but we didn’t, and I can’t really explain why in logical terms.

When we did buy a new TV, it was all done within a day, for a fraction of what we previously paid. The new TV offers so many benefits in terms of connectivity with all the other apps we regularly use.

We really should have done it years earlier, but our mindset was that it was still going, so we’d keep using it until it literally died.

This happens in law firms and legal teams, too

Like many involved in legal automation, we initially started with a focus on document automation.

This was the particular pain point we had experienced as banking and corporate lawyers ourselves, and we were looking for a way to draft complex legal documents much more quickly and with fewer errors.

When we set up LawHawk eight years ago, there weren’t many options for broader workflow automation, so most initial projects were limited to document automation. Even so, it was common for our projects to deliver 75% or more time savings when drafting individual documents, and potentially much more when delivering packages of documents. This could often translate to several hours of time savings for drafters per matter.

One of the most interesting things I got from the recent World Commerce & Contracting Summit in Sydney was the report and session run by Dr Sara Cullen of Cullen Group on my Contract Management Style profile. If you haven't done one before, I recommend it.

My results are above, showing how I compare to the average person.

I wasn't particularly surprised that I scored highly for my focus on the relationship development, problem-solving, entrepreneur and scanner categories. They are all things that we have had to focus on when looking to build and grow a new business that intersects complex legal and compliance workflows with fast-moving technological advances. The need to talk to people, understand their problems, and match them to technologies that can solve them is constant – and what I enjoy.

I did pause to think about my relatively low scores for Organizer and Protector and whether those are things that I need to score more highly on.

The 2024 World Commerce & Contracting APAC Summit on 12 and 13 August was a great reminder of the importance of contracts in everything we do and the need to create more value in our contracting.

The best conversations I have with law firms tend to have little to do with technology, as there are more fundamental things that need discussion first.

Technology can be a great enabler, but only if it aligns with the law firm's business model, and how the firm creates and captures value.

That’s why I'm always keen to understand what a firm does and how it charges for its services. If they are still charging by the hour, it will make little sense for them to invest in the type of solutions we specialise in delivering, which aim to remove as many hours of time from the job as possible.

If the firm's costs (mainly premises and staff) are largely fixed and they don't have a marketing strategy to get more clients for their distinctive solutions, there's a high chance with an hourly rate billing model that they could end up doing the same amount of work, for the same clients, faster and for less money! Why would the firm want or pay for automation?