Philipp Glock is a Partner and Head of Legal Corporate Services at KPMG Law Germany, part of KPMG Law’s global network of legal services. He also serves as the Head of IT & Innovation in Germany.
We spoke with Philipp about the role of technology in improving legal service delivery, and how KPMG Law uses BRYTER to develop digital legal applications to meet their clients’ needs.
Bringing the firm’s deep expertise and experience into a digital world
KPMG Law’s status as one of the largest global legal service providers affords them access to a global network of in-house experts in all fields and deep experience from countless projects. It also affords them substantial technology resources, which enable them to digitize that expertise into solutions that today’s clients need.
KPMG Law relies on hybrid teams for its services, especially when it comes to building and delivering digital products. Making legal advice and services available digitally and at scale requires not just lawyers, but also project managers, legal engineers, and pure technologists who manage technical projects. Programmers are the absolute exception, as work is mainly done with a no-code and low-code approach. This way of working has the advantage that all experts are involved from the beginning. Domain expertise is integrated into product development from the outset, shaping every digital solution around KPMG Law’s know-how and experience.
Philipp explained his team’s approach to developing digital legal products, saying*, “The topic of no-code and low-code has been around at KPMG Law for some time, and we are finding that more and more units are now using it. With a low-code legal platform like BRYTER, you can build excellent digital solutions very quickly without a huge development effort. It’s the best balance of effort and output. Therefore, Bryter is an essential part of our solution portfolio.”*
We previously spoke with Philipp about KPMG Law’s State Aid Assessment tool. Since then, the firm has continued to push forward in developing a growing menu of digital legal products with BRYTER’s legal engineering platform.
Going digital allows KPMG Law to not only advise, but to solve
KPMG Law will always provide expert opinions on individual legal issues. But simply advising on a problem does not necessarily solve the problem for the customer. They aim in their service offering to go a step further, to be not just advisors, but solvers, even for big, sticky, complicated problems.
Take airlines, for example, that deal with a large mass of claims from consumers and advocates. The same issue of mass claims affects almost any major company, especially in the digital age. If a client gets an email with a legal opinion, the problem hasn’t been solved. There is still work to be done. The claims, which in many cases are mass-produced, must also be addressed thoroughly. Clients don’t just need advice on their problems. They need their problems to be solved completely.
Philipp explains, “Here I say to the client: I’ll really get rid of the problem. I won’t just tell you what a data protection incident is, but I will solve it for you. And I’ll do it better and faster and cheaper than you can do it yourself”
After such a process has been implemented, there are still some legal questions to be answered individually, which then must be handled personally by lawyers, but most of the work is solved for the client with the help of an automated digital workflow designed by the experts.
This is the approach of Legal Managed Services at KPMG Law. To enable this approach, it’s essential that workflows can be built quickly and easily, that maintenance is simple, and that solutions can be smoothly implemented at scale.
“At KPMG Law, BRYTER has earned the reputation that you can build great things very quickly.”
says Philipp Glock.
Transforming legal service delivery with solutions that scale
One advantage KPMG Law has as a legal advisor is that even as tedious problems become complicated and time-consuming, they are still worth solving digitally because solutions can be deployed at scale and provided to other clients. As they address more and more cases, the answers and expertise gained can be monetized, not only once, but again and again. In this way, the KPMG Law team was able to build up expertise in using technology to help many clients, and actually solve many problems with a technology-based end-to-end process that is continuously improved upon as it’s used by KPMG Law’s experts and their clients.
There’s a wide range of practice areas being addressed digitally by KPMG Law, including grant application tools, data breach assessors, and money laundering applications, to mention just a few. A digital service delivery model is especially effective in large-scale proceedings, mass inquiries and mass lawsuits, data privacy matters, and in the area of litigation.
KPMG Law also works extensively on large-volume grant applications, where the public sector is not able to process so many applications. For this type of large-scale repetitive work, BRYTER is especially useful. An independent study from Forrester found that BRYTER applications help organizations eliminate up to 90% of repetitive, low-value work, and realize an ROI of 368%. KPMG Law is able to help their clients see these benefits by building and customizing the applications for them and helping them get up and running with new bespoke solutions quickly and efficiently.
Shaping the future of legal service delivery with technology
In a world in which GCs are bogged down with repetitive work and struggle to manage their workload, digital solutions are rising in demand. KPMG Law stays ahead of the curve by innovating digital services before clients ask, so they are ready the moment a need arises.
“As an innovation team, we search with our experts for opportunities, like ‘Where can we either make your existing services much better or build completely new services that don’t even exist yet?’ Then we start building solutions with BRYTER”
summarized Philipp Glock.
