Jan Hards - making the move from lawyer to innovator

Jan Hards is the Director of Legal Innovation at Johnson Winter & Slattery. After years of practicing as a Corporate M&A Lawyer at Freshfields in the UK, and then later at Johnson Winter & Slattery, he made a deliberate move to become the firm’s Director of Legal Innovation. 

We discuss how Jan worked through that decision, what were some assumptions that he made, and some of the challenges. 

We also explore how Jan and the business look at the innovation function - through five objective criteria:

1. Create efficiency at scale
2. Flexible working
3. Create value from information the firm holds
4. Generate revenue
5. Address risk

We also explore when and how Jan gets involved with client-facing projects (including pitches). Just a note, this episode originally aired as part of the Fringe Legal Virtual Summit in 2020, and much of what we discuss are still relevant today, but it’s important to have the time context. 

You can connect with Jan Hard via the JWS website or on LinkedIn.

The full transcript is included below. If it's truncated by your podcast player, you can find it in full at www.fringelegal.com

Transcript

Ab: [00:00:00] I am delighted to be joined today by Jan Hards, who is the Director of Legal Innovation at Johnson, Winter and Slattery based out of Australia. Jan thank you for joining me today.

[00:01:15] Jan Hards: [00:01:15] No, it's a great pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me.

[00:01:19]Ab: [00:01:19] This is going to be a great conversation. So today we're talking about your journey from being a lawyer to an innovator. And of course, both of these things can exist in parallel, but you took a very deliberate step  from one to the other and, we'll hopefully cover quite a lot, but focus around what are some of the things that you learned, what some assumptions you had, which of those came true? Which of them maybe you had to challenge and what you learned from that.

[00:01:46] Before we dig into all of that, just to set the stage for our audience here, would you mind just describing what sort of started this journey for you? What did you do before you were the director of legal innovation?

[00:02:00] Jan Hards: [00:02:00] Sure. No, that's fine. So I'm originally a solicitor a Corporate M&A lawyer , and I started my career in the UK, although I'm originally from Zimbabwe in Southern Africa. So people wondering about the strange accent hopefully that will explain it.

[00:02:18]I became a solicitor in the UK worked for many years at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer became a corporate M&A lawyer there working on transactions, moved to Australia about nine years ago now and joined Johnson, Winter and Slattery soon thereafter as a Corporate M&A lawyer . We're working in the Australian market and are based in Sydney. I've always been one of the lawyers in the firms that I've been in who's been interested in using or leveraging technology to assist me in my practice as a lawyer.

[00:02:50] So even back in my Freshfields days I was probably one of those lawyers who would be commonly contacting the IT team, suggesting new ways of doing things, new applications and, over the more recent years this has picked up a lot just simply as I've been seeing, witnessing the quite transformative changes in technology , particularly consumer technology to which we have access to.

[00:03:17] And I've really enjoyed thinking of ways that we could use this technology to better drive efficiency and quality of service as solicitors.  Over many years, I've been bugging my IT and my management colleagues to make certain changes or suggesting certain applications or certain ways that we could change applications we currently use.

[00:03:39]About two years ago the management of JWS turned around and said why don't you help us in this area more broadly, not just in your corporate practice and appointed me director of legal innovation at JWS.

[00:03:53] Ab: [00:03:53] That's awesome. And now hopefully you have many other colleagues that come to you and bug you with ideas and projects and so on as well now. So you know what it feels like on the other side. 

[00:04:04] Jan Hards: [00:04:04] I do, yes.  It has been very interesting and I'm not only the transformation from being one of those people that was just constantly suggesting to being the person who is really responsible now for receiving those suggestions, and considering whether or not they should be implemented. That has been quite eyeopening for me.

[00:04:25] Yeah, it's  been interesting to understand, particularly now you're in the hot seat, it's not quite so simple. Particularly if you're working in a law firm, we'll come to that in the moment, but it's not quite so simple to take a seemingly great idea and actually put it into practice - implement it in the firms. So yeah, it's been very interesting journey over the last two years.

[00:04:47] Ab: [00:04:47] We'll certainly dig into that. We were talking about how I've made certain assumptions about putting this summit together and things I thought were going to be simple just because you think they're going to be simple, that never ends up being the case.

[00:04:59]Before we do talk about some of the points around your journey and really dig deep into some of the nitty-gritty of things. What are some of the aims of the legal innovation function at the firm at JWS? So give us the sort of broad line picture of,  what are some of the, maybe the boundaries or that the objectives they're assigned or you've assigned in working with the management team there on what you want to accomplish.

[00:05:23] Jan Hards: [00:05:23] Yeah. So we have a wide number of objectives but we really distill it down into five areas. That's trying to use innovation and technology as part of that, but not just technology, but use it to create efficiency at scale.  It isn't just sufficient to introduce a new way of doing things atop a particular small practice area.

[00:05:43] Now, of course, we will do that If that's something that is compelling for that for that practice area. But what we really want to do in this first objective is to try and create efficiency at scale. So look at ways in which it can be applied across the firm and indeed to for our clients.

[00:06:00] Flexible working is a second objective, which is particularly pertinent in our current environment, but certainly something that we were thinking  about very carefully long before COVID-19 was something that anyone knew anything about. It's increasingly important for many of my colleagues and their clients that my colleagues can work flexibly. That's not only just being able to travel and and still work efficiently, but also a work-life balance and be able to work efficiently from home.

[00:06:32]The next area was really one of the areas that's really interesting to me, is to  create value from the information that we hold<...