“Technology is changing the delivery of legal and other business services globally, and this – along with globalisation and competition – means lawyers’ time is transforming into legal products and online services,” says Chapman Tripp technology partner, and head of Zeren, Bruce McClintock.
Zeren is law firm Chapman Tripp’s foray into the technology and innovation business. Zeren delivers legal documentation and advice in new ways. This reduces cost, saves time and enables legal teams and other business users to “self-serve” legal advice through the cloud.
“Zeren combines Chapman Tripp’s unique legal, client and business knowledge with technology, meaning legal and quality assurance are built in. Clients get a Chapman Tripp-quality document, without having to go through a Chapman Tripp lawyer every time.”
“It is an initiative to create new services, new products and new ways of delivering our traditional high value, high quality, people services,” he tells CIO New Zealand.
The services are accessed on cloud platforms, they provide automated legal advice contracts, documentation compliance services and so on.
“That is not something that we have or other law firms have traditionally offered," he says.
“Just as you have software as a service, this is 'law as a service', where we use a platform which are like [what] technology companies use to deliver as a service.
“We are exactly trying to offer services in a way that clients are increasingly valuing in other areas,” he says.
“We think about what we know really, really well, which is legal advice, and about how our customers make use of our legal advice,” says McClintock on what worked for them as they developed Zeren.
“Well, what if we could take that personal, high cost, high value legal advice and put it in a form as a service over the cloud? What problems would that solve for you?”
“And, incidentally, what would that adjacent opportunities from the law firm’s perspective would that open up, what new areas would that be able to access?
“When you ask those sorts of questions, you discover that customers and clients are very interested in more productive, more efficient higher quality ways of receiving things,” he says. “That is the sort of journey we went on into our own understanding of the market and in discussions with our customers and clients about their pain points.”
With Zeren, he explains clients automatically generate legal documents by filling out dynamic, web-based forms created from their existing legal and business templates, or from Chapman Tripp’s.
This process includes workflows to trigger internal reviews and approvals or to connect with external stakeholders. Clients can store their documents, as well as capture the data they contain, to improve activities such as contract management, risk management and other business processes.
This means businesses can produce and access various legal documents – from legal contracts and letters to other advice – faster, with greater accuracy and reduced cost. This frees up time for higher value and strategic work, and reduces reliance on in-house legal teams or external firms for lower value tasks.
Zeren also gives clients access to artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to speed up large scale document reviews, such as M&A due diligence.
Zeren and Chapman Tripp’s AI service, Luminance, clusters and classifies data in a way that project teams can immediately prioritise their review. The more the technology is used, the more effective it becomes, greatly increasing the efficiency of due diligence.
Datacom has received the Frost & Sullivan 2017 Australia Contact Center Services Growth Excellence Leadership Award for market-leading growth and business innovation.
Kirsty Hunter, managing director, Datacom Connect, says the award is a recognition of the company’s investment and growing capability in service design, AI and intelligent automation and customer experience consulting.
“This means bringing customer-centric service design to the fore, and adding value across the entire experience,” adds Stacey Tomasoni, director at Datacom Connect. “We are driven by the desire to build an outstanding customer experience and find new and unique ways to put the customer first.
MYOB is partnering with new startup accelerator Kōkiri to help Māori entrepreneurs turn their ideas into innovative start-up businesses.
The online accounting software provider will open its technology platforms and provide mentoring to 10 Māori start-ups as part of a four-month Te Wānanga o Aotearoa programme in partnership with Callaghan Innovation.
Kōkiri is co-funded by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s Te Pūnaha Hiringa Māori Innovation Fund and will see students join the course in 2018.
It aims to get new Māori ventures market-ready with the help of business insights from partners MYOB, Air New Zealand and Spark, and provide selected teams with initial funding and connections to potential investors.
There is an opportunity to introduce more Māori worldviews into our start-up communities and give Maori-based businesses the tools they need to succeed, says MYOB New Zealand general manager Carolyn Luey. “We see Kōkiri improving the breadth of our country’s start-up sector at the same time as supporting Maori-based businesses and entrepreneurs to scale up.”
Kōkiri programme director Ian Musson says the accelerator is designed to speed up the process of getting local business ideas into the hands of customers, while increasing the representation of Māori entrepreneurs in early-stage ventures. “We’ll be providing the teams with the support they need to successfully prove, build and launch their ideas to market.”
API Talent CEO Wyn Ackroyd says the company has been ranked 130 on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific 2017. The rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over three years.
API Talent grew 408 percent during this period, says Ackroyd, and credits this to the company’s intimate understanding of what the current technology changes mean to New Zealand’s businesses and having the largest team of certified cloud specialists in the country.
Jodie Tran is now New Zealand partner manager for F5 Networks. She was most recently the Business Development Manager at Hypermedia NZ. Prior to that, she has worked at SecureData Europe and GrabOne New Zealand.
Fergus, the job management platform for growing trades businesses in New Zealand, has received a A$3.5 million investment led by Sydney-based Microequities Venture Capital Fund.
The financing will be used to accelerate growth in Australia, and further its global expansion as the go-to job management software for the trades industry.
Fergus was founded in 2011 by veteran trades businessman, Dan Pollard, who has over 20 years experience in the trades industry. Pollard’s experience includes founding and managing one of the largest plumbing maintenance companies in New Zealand, giving him an intimate understanding of the many challenges faced in the sector.
“Fergus was built because I needed a software solution to help manage my business and the products available in the market just weren’t up to scratch,” says Pollard.
As part of the financing, Howard Leibman, from the Microequities Venture Capital Fund, will join the Fergus board of directors.
"Fergus is becoming increasingly embedded in the Australian trades and services sector and is enjoying early traction in key international markets. Funds raised in this round will allow Fergus to appropriately resource its sales and marketing capabilities, and to ultimately replicate the success achieved in New Zealand, in Australia andbeyond,” says Leibman.
nib is now one of the first corporate organisations in New Zealand to be awarded the “CQ Tick”, reflecting the health insurer’s commitment to exploring and responding to gender and cultural diversity both within the workplace and their customer base.
The CQ (Cultural Quotient) Tick is a formal certification by the Superdiversity Centre on Law, Policy and Business to recognise the progress that organisations are making to recognise, respect and improve cultural capability within their own structure and in terms of customer facing practices.
nib Chief Executive Officer, Rob Hennin, says the health insurer was proud and humbled to receive the CQ Tick, adding that the CQ journey had made a significant positive impact on the organisation and its employees.
“We’ve always valued cultural capability, but the CQ audit conducted by the Superdiversity Centre showed just how diverse we are, and demonstrated that we have huge potential to be a high-performing CQ company,” says Hennin.
“It revealed some really interesting facts about us as a workforce. For instance we found that we have over 50 ethnicities, we speak 50 languages and almost half of us were born outside New Zealand. We also have a high number of millennials with 42 per cent of our employees falling into this demographic.”
Mai Chen, chair of the Superdiversity Centre, says nib was quick to recognise the potential benefits from committing to a programme to explore, identify and understand the extent to which diversity exists within their organisation, and to provide its employees with opportunities to grow and develop that diversity through training.
“An organisation like nib which commits to a formal programme to enhance and grow its own diversity is recognising the need to pioneer new strategies to succeed in New Zealand’s rapidly changing client and staffing demographic environment.
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