Q&A: Regie Anne Gordace – “For me, innovation means building something great that changes things and has an impact.”

After roles in sales and marketing and then practising as a lawyer, you switched roles to focus on using innovation to help Sprintlaw, a purely online legal firm, through your position as Legal Transformation Lead. Can you tell us about that move from lawyer to transformation facilitator?

Essentially, I came back to my roots in so much as I have always liked finding different ways of doing things. While working as a lawyer, I found myself trying to optimise my own job. If I had a task that I had already done five times, I was thinking to myself, ‘How can I improve this? How can I not recreate the wheel each time?’ At the time, I started making all these suggestions and recommendations to other members of the team – and I realised that, although I enjoyed being a lawyer, I’m more interested in optimising the lawyer experience and optimising the client experience. I eventually moved into the Legal Transformation Lead role to help make the magic happen behind the scenes.

It is an interesting job title and one that is not typical in law firms. What’s the job description?

Absolutely, it’s definitely not a common job title. Traditionally, transformation across other industries is used to describe someone who comes into a business and transforms and changes the way things are done. Inherently, Sprintlaw already does that because of its model and the way the firm is set up for its clients, but my job really is to constantly challenge even that and challenge our model. The role is split into two parts. The first is making sure our legal systems and processes are operating efficiently day to day. It’s about monitoring that and making sure there are no bugs. The other side is the more transformational component, which is around challenging the norm, looking inside our processes and thinking, ‘Is this how we should be doing things, or should we change this?’ We always need that mindset and to then execute changes. It's one thing to say, ‘Yes, we've got all these problems and we need to fix this, we need to fix that’, but a big part of my role is executing strategy while consulting very closely with our legal team, our technology team, our growth team and our leadership team.

Sprintlaw seeks to provide affordable legal advice for small business owners and entrepreneurs. Can you tell us some of the key factors and innovation-led differences that have contributed to the success of the firm?

The fact that Sprintlaw is purely online means we must rely on technology in all aspects of the service we deliver. We’re constantly looking at ways we can improve the way technology helps drive our business. That’s from the trust accounting side to onboarding a client, and to the way a client renews their subscription with us. Having that technology mindset at the core and as part of the furniture of the business really drives us to constantly improve.

A lot of traditional firms are grappling with technology and what IT or AI platforms they should be using. Do you have any advice for them?

I think change and project management is the biggest area to look at for other firms. I mean, it's already a big part of Sprintlaw and we’re a much younger law firm compared with some of our competitors. We've got a smaller team, but no matter the size or the infrastructure of your firm, change and project management is really key to ensuring that the innovative technology and the innovative processes you roll out are actually achieving their intended purpose. That includes scoping projects very well, understanding what that technology does, and then consulting the people who are going to use it. What are their frustrations? What problems do they want to solve? I often ask lawyers – “In an ideal world, what would make your life easier?” Then you go backwards from there and have a user-centred approach, which is an approach I learned from my tech experience. In this case, it’s thinking about what the lawyer is after. The same applies for clients. What does the client actually want? If you always have a user-centred approach in the way that you decide what technology to use, that's going to be the biggest learning curve for a lot of the firms who probably haven't done that before.

You were named Innovator of the Year in the Australian Law Awards in 2024. Given that recognition, we’re curious to know what innovation means to you.

For me, innovation means building something great that changes things and has an impact. Most of the innovation that I have built over the years was in the absence of ChatGPT and was very data driven, very user driven, very purpose driven. To me, the key to innovation is that whatever you build needs to achieve what you want it to achieve. That involves going through the exercise of what is the problem you're trying to solve? What numbers is it affecting? Then you put a team together and try to understand, ‘So, how can we achieve this?’ What technology do we need? What resources do we need? What team members do we need? You also need to understand everyone's capacity and bandwidth to execute. After all that, the most important part is monitoring outcomes. You can roll out something and then it disappears into the ether and no one ever uses it. Or you can roll out something and you monitor it and you look at the numbers closely and you can see users achieving their intended purpose. Of course, there are times when you monitor something you've rolled out and it's not quite working, but that's why you monitor it! This gives you an opportunity to go back to the drawing board with those learnings – and it’s so important to have a team with a healthy change mindset to be ready for those pivots.

In an era of change, what innovations and new ways of doing things do you expect to shake up law in the next five years or so?

I feel very excited by all the opportunities around large language models such as ChatGPT. They will make lawyer jobs more efficient, but I also think they make lawyer jobs more meaningful. These technologies can take away those monotonous tasks that AI can do, summarising emails, summarising documents, or spitting out simple documents. That takes away monotonous or admin-type work that a lawyer might be spending hours doing. Then they can focus on providing strategic advice, with ChatGPT getting them 40% or 50% of the way there. They can focus on what clients want and take advantage of the human value that comes from lawyers with their user experience, and with their analytical way of thinking. So, yes, I feel very excited for AI and new tech. In terms of where I see this going in the next five years, there's going to be a large emphasis on data and using LLMs to harness the data of law firms to provide a good impact, not only for their clients, but also for their lawyers. I’ll give you an example of something that we've been working on at Sprintlaw for a very long time, which is our knowledge platform. Sprintlaw works with thousands and thousands of small businesses. At the end of every job, the lawyer might have drafted four documents for this very specific type of small business, and that is knowledge we don't want to lose. That knowledge is tagged by the lawyer and then it’s sent back into our knowledge platform. So, our knowledge platform continues to learn on its own. This is without any LLM yet. This is just data structured really well and collected very meticulously over the years. We’ve been collecting this data for about seven years, and we've got this massive database of all our very, very important knowledge from our lawyers’ experience. Even before GPT, our lawyers were using that database to add filters and search for specific examples.

How does ChatGPT and its ilk take things to another level?

After the launch of GPT, we pretty quickly realised we could lay an AI chatbot on top of our database. We had this data that was already well structured, and we laid an AI chatbot on top of it so our lawyers could query our database. They didn't need any technological understanding of the database or how data works. They could just chat to our bot and say, ‘Look, I've got this matter right now. Here are the three main points about this matter that I know are specific to this matter. Can you search our whole database and give examples?’ And that type of bot will come back and say, ‘Yes, here are five examples drafted by this lawyer on this date’. It cuts down the lawyer's time by almost half.

The other exciting aspect, we suspect, is that a new generation of younger tech-savvy lawyers are coming through the system who will be able to embrace this sort of technology and also help firms along the way. Is that how you see it?

Absolutely. For any younger lawyers, I’d point out that I don't know how to code all the different languages. I don't have that level of technical skill. I don't think that's needed in a legal transformation role specifically. What I do have is understanding what makes a good process, what process has a good impact, and mapping that out. Then I work closely with technology teams to execute. However, with the younger generation coming into the legal industry, it's really interesting because in our personal lives, we're already exposed to and overwhelmed by so much technology. I take so much of that tech with me into my work. For example, my phone right now is as clean as it can be in terms of having just five apps on my homepage, and they're the apps that I use the most because they are the most impactful on my day-to-day life. Everything else is hidden, unsubscribed or deleted from my life because it’s just too much and it’s too overwhelming. As a user of apps in everyday life, you unconsciously absorb what makes a good experience for you, what's most efficient for you, and you'd be surprised how much of that knowledge you can take into your workplace.

Do you have any last advice for law firm leaders?

Just stay curious. Be open to new technologies. Be open to new ways of thinking. Just because things have always been done a certain way, it doesn't mean they have to be done that way – there could be better ways of doing that. You don't need to have the most exciting piece of technology to have an impact either. You just need to understand the specific technology and what problem you’re trying to solve.

This article is an edited version from a recent podcast interview. To hear the full interview and podcast, click here.

www.sprintlaw.com.au