IT strategy

Ground up IT strategy

Constraints

There is a marked lack of financial and HR resources to implement new systems:

To buy new IT (Bottom line expense)
To package/maintain/install IT (Technology resource)
To configure new IT for UBS (Technology resource)
To configure for use by legal (Legal/Technology resource)
To train users (internal Legal/Technology resource) - do not underestimate the importance and difficult of this

NB: users who are legally and technically literate are rare.

User intransigence
- technological: don’t understand/like new technology; significant change fatigue
- Technical: Our skill is creating and articulating bespoke solutions, not commoditising standard ones.
- Lawyers don’t write well. Legal drafting is convoluted, over-particularised and prone to negotiation and error
User knowledge is imperfect
- Individuals who don’t understand policies are incentivised to apply them literally (being institutionally short an option - see below)
- Institutional Knowledge: Generally is good (UBS turnover is comparatively low) but we leak institutional knowledge and it is not tracked and captured.
Institutional knowledge is poor
- We don’t track our decisions - no MI kept on litigation close shaves; which issues come up and which don’t.
Legal department’s institutional position: Being a control function, Legal is “short an option”
- We are not rewarded for approving successful business;
- We are criticised for approving business which encounters any legal issues.
  - Important to differentiate legal and commercial issues and allocate ownership correctly. (e.g.: indemnities are, ultimately, commercial and not legal issues)

Data we don’t use: All historical departmental email: - a rich source of indexable institutional knowledge - this resource should not be restricted to use in conducting.
Underused/misunderstood existing tools -
- Sharepoint
- Microsoft Word/Excel
- Workshare
Opportunities to enhance/improve existing tools
- TADH
Easy implementation to enhance interaction and connectivity
- “Business Data Catalogs” to interrogate external databases from within Sharepoint
- Application Interfaces (“API”s)
Open source solutions - There is a lot of good, free software available (e.g. MEdiawiki)
You have to spend to save: Some technology is worth investing in.

We are in a new world, and we should upgrade our practices to take account of it: e.g. Electronic execution,

collects audited information about the time and date of execution
documente assembly naturally stores documentation and collects key metadata about the variable content of the agreements

First: clean up: it is much easier to automate a simple structure than a complicated one. Simple structures are more scalable, less prone to error.
Small projects: See above. Be unambitious. Small, unglamorous projects save resources incrementally and buy time for projects.
- e.g., Confidentiality Agreements
Co-ordinate: each project should be managed separately, but users should be encouraged to share technology, and build on each other’s work - centr