Innovate or Stagnate: Cultivating creativity and unleashing innovative legal minds

Andrew and Karen will share what has worked for them (and what hasn’t!) in trying to build an innovation culture in their in-house corporate and government legal teams. They will delve into practical strategies and tools for igniting a spirit of creativity and forward-thinking within different sized legal departments. This includes embracing existing tech stacks, encouraging collaborative and cross-functional problem-solving, and redefining traditional frameworks.

The goal of this session is to equip you with easily adaptable tools and frameworks which you can take away and use straight away, and mindset necessary to transform your teams into dynamic, efficient and future-ready units. The aim is to to help you not only solve complex legal issues but also contribute strategically to the overall success of your organisations.

• Empowering change agents: Innovation is a team sport – the importance of teamwork and cross-disciplinary approaches
• Encouraging risk-taking and experimentation: How to foster a safe environment for testing and learning from failures (including sharing our real-life successes and failures!)
• Streamlining processes: Frameworks for implementing new strategies for more efficiencies
• Setting innovation goals: How to set meaningful innovation goals for your team to guide your transformation journey
• Impact: Tools for measuring the impact on business outcomes
• Now it’s your turn: Practical steps for how to get started and group commitment to take the plunge

3 Key Learnings

1. Integrating innovation into everyday practice: You will learn practical strategies and frameworks to weave innovation into your daily operations
2. Driving organisational change through legal innovation: You will gain insights into how legal teams can be pivotal in driving broader organisational change by adopting innovative practices
3. How you can get started by starting small: You will learn about examples of small-scale pilot projects that are easily adaptable to different contexts and can help you test new ideas and empower you to be an agent of change

About Karen

Karen is a healthcare lawyer qualified in Australia, New York and England and Wales. She has been a legal business partner for medical devices, pharmaceutical, digital health and fintech clients in Australia and Hong Kong.

Karen has advised on AI, ethics and governance framework development, training and rollout and been the legal lead on machine learning projects in predictive medicine and clinical studies. Karen has led regulatory change and legal operations projects for ASX-listed and international organisations.

In 2023, Karen spoke at the plenary session on Cybercrime at the ARCS Australia Annual Conference and presented on AI and the law in digital health at the Australasian Institute of Digital Health AI+ Care Conference in Sydney. She presented on creative communication for lawyers at the 2023 Legal Innovation and Tech Fest and co-led an AI Masterclass at the 2023 Association of Corporate Counsel Australia National Conference in Canberra. Karen is currently the chair of the Association of Corporate Counsel Australia’s Legal Technology and Innovation Committee, is part of the LexTalk World Global Advisory Board and was a judge for the 2023 Asia-Pacific Legal innovation and Technology Association awards.