Insights

Vaishali Gopal, VP of Integrated Solutions at Counselect, was recently invited as a guest on the CLM Rx podcast hosted by Kami Paulsen, Managing Director at Deloitte.

In this engaging conversation, Vaishali shares her unique perspectives on legal tech, innovation-as-a-service and capability centres at Counselect, the future of legal teams, talent, tech, and the modern legal department.

Below is a summary of key insights and takeaways from their discussion. Listen to the full podcast on Apple Podcasts or watch on YouTube.

Vaishali’s backstory and career trajectory

Vaishali began her legal career on a traditional path, graduating from law school in 2006 and working in-house at a stockbroking company. A serendipitous encounter then led her to Pramata, a pioneering legal tech startup.

“There was no reference point for legal tech then, it was very unusual, ” Vaishali recalls.

Over a 14-year journey at Pramata, she took on diverse roles spanning contract review, solution design, operations, and eventually product leadership. This multifaceted experience, coupled with exposure to the challenges faced by legal departments in North America, shaped her into a legal innovator deeply attuned to the industry’s pain points.

Lessons from the trenches

Vaishali’s journey at Pramata, from implementation to product development, provided her with unique insights into the challenges legal teams face around document management and the design of effective contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions.

Designing solutions to meet diverse stakeholder needs requires a deep understanding of business problems and user personas. “At the end of the day, if you look at CLM, it’s not just for the legal team. It’s an enterprise-wide tool,” Vaishali explains. “You need to understand the problem statements from different stakeholders and design something to enable that.”

Another key learning for her was the power of contract data and analytics. “We get a little deeper into understanding how unstructured data can be converted to really structured data from contracts, designing that so you can do a lot of reporting with all these business teams,” she shares. While AI tools for contract analysis are more exposed to clients these days, Vaishali is quick to point out that “they’re not new, we’ve been using them and building on them for many, many years.”

Moving from implementation to product development taught Vaishali important lessons about influence, pattern recognition, and user-centric design. “When you’re building product, a lot of it is thinking about the patterns across the board and what impact that can have, not just for one client, but for multiple clients,” she explains.

Usability and adoption-by-design are also critical considerations. “Product teams teach you that you can’t just throw features over the wall. You need to figure out how you’re going to take the user along with you,” Vaishali emphasises. This involved spending time observing lawyers’ work processes to optimise and build features that truly support their workflows.

Developing innovation-as-a-service at Counselect

When asked about her current role and responsibilities at Counselect, Vaishali contextualises Counselect’s journey by noting that our initial focus was on secondment services in the legal sector — assigning lawyers to projects within companies on a temporary basis.

This model provided a unique vantage point. “With secondments, you’re getting a lot of context ringside from them on what is happening in the organisation,” Vaishali explains. Beyond talent needs, we started seeing recurring problem statements around technology and processes.

Vaishali had been pondering these challenges independently. “There’s so much appetite and attitude for innovation, but there is a forum missing for legal teams on how to enable them on that front,” she observed. It wasn’t a lack of willingness to innovate, but rather a lack of know-how.

This realisation sparked a brainstorming session with the Counselect leadership, leading to the evolution of their offering to incorporate what we now term “innovation as a service.”

Our approach to innovation

Counselect’s approach, Vaishali explains, begins with understanding each client’s unique problem statements. “In most situations, it’s actually just trying to first understand their problem statements,” she adds. “It’s not even going in and telling them what we offer.”

This exploratory phase often uncovers opportunities for optimisation within existing tools and processes. “I find that often there are a lot of tools and they may not be used fully. They’re using parts of them and they haven’t expanded and they’re not using full functionality,” she notes. In these cases, our focus shifts to maximising the value of the current tech stack.

For more forward-looking legal teams, the innovation journey may involve a comprehensive analysis of the entire legal function. “GCs will always think about how do I prepare for the future,” Vaishali shares. “In that case, it’s a wide spectrum. They want you to analyse the whole legal team and the touchpoints and all of that and find out the problem areas that they need to improve on in comparison to where the industry is heading.”

Our innovation-as-a-service model is designed to meet legal teams where they are on this spectrum of maturity. “Sometimes it’s just about a tool. Sometimes it’s rehauling the whole operating model. Sometimes it’s looking at contracting. Sometimes it’s just looking at some other area,” Vaishali explains. “We let them kind of uncover their problem statements and take it from there on what would be right again, designing the right solutions, which includes, but always with a tech first approach along with innovation.”

The human side of innovation

Beyond technology and process, we are deeply focused on the human side of innovation. “There’s a huge shift in also running innovation or culture mindset shift workshops with teams,” Vaishali shares. These workshops help legal teams understand what “doing more” can look like and how to get there.

“You need to like work with them through the day to kind of unlock those areas, contextualise pain points through them, then say, okay, this is how you can think about solving it,” Vaishali explains. This may involve rethinking goals and OKRs, redefining roles, and creating new incentive structures.

Skills and mindsets

Skill development is another critical component. “Legal teams are also looking for help in driving innovation and helping them get up to speed on these things,” Vaishali notes. “We do sometimes design thinking on those aspects that can help them think about [solutions], because these are now peripheral skills that lawyers are expected to pick up as well, along with project management.”

Ultimately, the goal is to help legal teams change their mindsets around innovation. “Sometimes it’s not even about going in and bringing in a tool or a process. It’s helping them change mindsets around it, getting away from the day to day and just doing a workshop and thinking through problem statements,” Vaishali shares.

Building centers of excellence

Counselect is helping legal departments innovate by setting up contracting centers of excellence (see Contract Excellence and GLCC). There’s growing interest in legal capability centers, especially in India. “What used to be considered low complexity, high volume work has now changed to really strategic work, but tapping into the talent advantage in India,” Vaishali explains.

A contracting center of excellence involves end-to-end process optimisation, including standardised templates, playbooks, and technology integration. Stakeholder engagement is critical throughout this process.

Drivers for centres of excellence

While volume used to be the primary factor for setting up these centers, cost efficiency is becoming increasingly important. “There’s a lot of pressure on budget,” Vaishali shares. “The board and management is cracking down on how efficient and cost-efficient you are.”

Contracting centers of excellence help legal departments do more with less, addressing budget constraints while maintaining work quality. As Vaishali notes, “This is such a valuable way to answer those budget questions, but still get stellar work product.”

The evolving role of legal teams

The role of in-house legal teams is undergoing a significant transformation. Legal departments are becoming more multidisciplinary, strategic, and deeply integrated with the business.

“The big shift is there’s still some of the traditional element of having the practice areas that people are in. And in-house contracting is still 60, 70% of the work,” Vaishali notes. “But what I’m seeing is the shift in roles like legal ops coming in.”

This multidisciplinary approach is driven by the recognition that legal teams can’t do everything alone. Lawyers are expanding their skill sets, creating new roles in areas like legal operations.

Gartner captures this shift well, according to Vaishali, referring to legal teams as “corporate sense makers.” The focus areas are expanding far beyond traditional contracting and advisory roles, into domains like ESG and data privacy. “As a result, what you’re then seeing is an expansion of the skills and also their openness to bring on people with that kind of domain expertise who are not necessarily lawyers,” Vaishali explains.

Technology and changing expectations

Technology is a key enabler, allowing legal teams to automate and become leaner. But it’s the changing expectations from the business that’s really driving this transformation. “They expect the most strategic seat from legal to advise on things. Like how can we do this?” Vaishali shares.

This shift is manifesting in various ways. Legal teams are inserting themselves more proactively into business conversations.

Strategic integration and collaboration

To enable this more strategic, business-focused approach, legal teams are investing in deeply understanding the business. Vaishali explains, “They’re really trying to understand the offering in depth, so that we can structure a better site and give real-time guidance.”

Collaboration with business stakeholders is key. Vaishali shares, “Every GC that I speak to, we see the expectation that you need to collaborate a lot with the business end to understand their problem statements.”

Ultimately, legal teams are positioning themselves as change agents within their organisations. This evolution from risk guardians to strategic business partners requires new skills, new ways of working, and a new mindset. For those teams that can make the transition, the opportunity to drive real value for their organisations is immense.

The next generation of lawyers: Born in a tech-native world

The next generation of legal professionals is entering the workforce with a fundamentally different set of expectations and skills, shaped by their immersion in technology from a young age.

“The new generation is already tech native in their world. They are born in technology, basically,” Vaishali observes. “So I think for them, they expect it when they move around organisations to see whether things can be done with technology.”

This tech-native mindset is putting pressure on legal departments to evolve, even if legal education hasn’t fully caught up yet. While some promising developments are emerging, such as innovation sprints in law schools, much of the learning is still happening on the job.

As more tech-savvy, business-minded lawyers enter the profession, they will accelerate the transformation of legal departments. They bring with them a natural inclination towards innovation, a comfort with technology, and an understanding of the strategic role legal can play within organisations.

Roadmap for legal innovation: Top focus areas

Vaishali outlines three key pillars for legal departments embarking on their innovation journeys:

1. Understanding your service portfolio
2. Talent and knowledge management
3. Technology adoption

Understanding the service portfolio helps legal teams identify opportunities for optimisation and automation, while also uncovering emerging areas where they can provide more strategic, proactive support to the business.

Talent and knowledge management is critical to avoid over-reliance on individual team members. “Corporate memory becomes really, really critical. And I’ve seen that as a huge problem in most legal teams,” Vaishali notes. Investing in systems and processes to capture, organize, and share institutional knowledge is essential.

Technology adoption is no longer optional for legal departments. “You’re not escaping it now,” Vaishali emphasises. The key is to approach it strategically, in alignment with the service portfolio analysis and knowledge management efforts.

“So I think that if you start from looking at your service portfolio and also then looking at how you’re creating knowledge management and a systems-driven approach and then seeing your tech stack and how the talent is overlaid in that context, I think that’s where the Modern Legal Department is moving, essentially,” Vaishali summarises.