Get the Tech Right: Lawyers Weekly Joined by Anthony Bekker

Intro by Robyn Tongol at Lawyers Weekly

As a general counsel, Anthony Bekker was able to grow the business he worked for from having a national presence to an international one. Looking back on his time in-house, there are lessons he wishes he knew that he thinks other GCs can learn from if they too wish to grow their businesses across the globe.

On the below episode of The Corporate Counsel Show, host Jerome Doraisamy is joined by BizTech Lawyers managing director Anthony Bekker, who is the former general counsel of Rokt, to discuss the practical and professional ways that he was able to grow Rokt from a national operation to having a presence in eight countries, and how best other GCs can replicate such success in a post-pandemic world.

The pair also talk about Mr Bekker’s reflections on what he wishes he’d known when he was a GC, how these lessons apply to current or aspiring GCs, and what they need to do in order to thrive in the face of adversity and roadblocks.

Listen to the Podcast at Lawyers Weekly

Anthony Bekker on being an in-house corporate lawyer

Many GCs are aware of the need to better employ technology, particular as the post-pandemic marketplace approaches. At a base level, Mr Bekker argued, systemising what the law department does is non-negotiable in enabling the organisation to move forward.

“Part of that can be done manually, such as having a filing system or having a spreadsheet that sets out all of the contracts that you’ve worked on and key terms of those contracts. Depending on the scale of the organisation that you’re working with, it’s either a manual job that you do yourself, or you might have someone to delegate it to, or you might try and deploy AI if you’re at the other end of the spectrum to pull all of those key terms out of a contract. It really is a spectrum and it’s something that evolves over time,” he said.

Mr Bekker’s approach while at Rokt was to try and keep records as he was going. He recalled: “It was as simple as having, at first instance, an Excel spreadsheet to keep a record of all the contracts. It was painful, and it was slow, and it took an extra five minutes per thing that I was doing. But in the end, when you got to the end of that four-and-a-half-year process, the output was actually very valuable, and then that’s something that you can then upload into a contract management system. It’s easy to do it as you go than try and reverse engineer a solution at the end.”

For the full interview transcript check our Lawyers Weekly

Interview by Jerome Doraisamy | 10 May 2021

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