Webber Wentzel: Driving Innovation for South Africa’s Legal Sector

Because we have had such a focus on migrating all our core systems to the cloud, part of the benefit it generates is that we have the core system and, let’s say, our document management system in the cloud. This means we have a behavioural footprint on the user. When there’s a variation to that behavioural footprint, even though the person might be using the same credentials, we can start picking it up.

In real time, we’re constantly enriching that identity graph for the individual. So when there’s a geographic disparity between where the person logs on and what happens, that concern immediately begins. 

The next aspect is around the devices. A device has health, and as long as the health is at the appropriate level, the individual can join whatever resources they need to. But from a conditional access point of view, and because there are automated playbooks in the background, our incident response team doesn’t have to come to an incident and think about which playbook to kick off.

Of course the last aspect we think about is data. Our law firm’s brand promise is around ensuring client confidentiality and client privilege. The way we think about the curation of the data, the way we then employ multifactor authentication, and the way we think about using data loss prevention factor into the way we manage devices. All devices are managed. If your device isn’t managed, then you can’t have client data on it. And for us, because we’ve become so clear about our information security management system, we’re now in the process of pursuing a third-party certification: ISO 27001, 27002.

Could you tell me about the Webber Wentzel legal platform? What is it, and what’s the role of technology in bringing it all together?

Our firm is all about intellectual property: being able to bring together a person’s academic knowledge, a lawyer’s academic knowledge, and their behavioural knowledge. The behavioural element is something we get from our document management system. We knew the first point of leverage was to be able to get an accurate view of our people. 

Our first platform in the cloud was Workday because we needed to take advantage of the innovation premium, and because we had six different applications for HR. Now we have one, and we’ve reduced the cost of management for all these platforms. Therefore, our teams can focus on helping the HR function, putting them in a position to initiate recruitment faster. This impacts our graduate recruitment process because we take attorneys straight out of university, and we put them through a process. And in two years’ time, they will join us as a bona fide legal associate. We knew from a recruitment perspective, and from an induction perspective, it’s one of the fundamental things we have to get right.

Coupled with that is diversity and inclusion because while we have a large Black population, the representation in the workforce is quite small. So by understanding our own employment equity, we were then able to set targets for ourselves and put programmes in place to ensure the representation of individuals who come out of university. 

The next part of our platform is our client platform and the ability to bring our client insights. And once again, as a client briefs us on a matter, we no longer have to rely on an individual partner to share that knowledge. We go to Workday. We understand that they have this body of knowledge, and we can then match the client’s need to the internal skill. 

Then there’s finance and operations.. We’re in business to make profit, but to do so in a responsible and a sustainable manner. We needed the ability for our business to understand financial discipline and to preempt cash flow issues—which was probably one of the biggest opportunities we saw through COVID-19. We knew we had to get a real-time understanding of our cash flow. 

The last portion is an innovation platform. A mentor of mine always said there’s this juncture between using the ax and sharpening the ax. This is one of the things we see playing out quite well into the way we do innovation.

Can you tell us about your approach to data management and how you get the most value from it?

It’s not a technology issue; it’s an organisational issue. That’s one of the first realisations. The second is we have clearly identified system owners, and that system owner is someone in one  line of business who drives the capability that needs to be developed. So when we think about our business model, we think about the client. We think about what the capabilities are in terms of the value proposition that we need to develop. Then we think specifically about business capabilities. 

Finally, the thing that happens when we do the right things is that the economic outcomes are produced out of understanding those different components of the business model. We knew we had to get really data driven, and we’ve developed the capability among a core of our staff to be able to understand data science, the application of data science, dashboards, user interface, and the way user interfaces work. Because when I show you a piece of data and I don’t bring the appropriate context to it, the ability to consume it decreases. It’s this ability to go from the macro down to the micro, and then to be able to build up from that granularity back to the macro picture—that’s key.