There is no doubt that the worlds of IT, design and manufacturing are in continual flux. These industries are increasingly influencing other areas. As part of our People in Business series, we talk to Sergey Tikhonchuk, an expert in organising processes and creating IT landscapes for law firms and departments of manufacturing companies.
Sergey, why do you separate the IT landscape for the legal department from the corporate technology stack for business in general?
The legal field encompasses a large number of highly specialised areas and practices, some of which have even evolved into distinct professions over recent years, such as contract management and compliance. These specialised areas have developed an objective need for unique tools tailored to specific tasks that the corporate technology stack does not cover. Many niche specialties often use the same core data—laws, contracts, counterparties and their identifiers, judicial authorities, jurisdictions, and so on. Given this context, it makes sense to view the suite of legal IT solutions as a separate landscape, where different parts operate with the same data but address different objectives. The market for such solutions has even become a distinct category known as Legal Tech.
How do you approach the process of building an IT landscape for the legal department?
The process begins with understanding the needs of the company’s lawyers and the tasks they face. The most valuable aspect of the legal department is the knowledge of its employees, and to work effectively, they need convenient tools to leverage this knowledge, share insights with colleagues, and document their work. Simplifying knowledge extraction, organisation, and transfer is crucial for lawyers. The goal is to create a comfortable technological environment that enables lawyers to work productively, focusing on strategic rather than routine tasks.
User-friendliness is key in working with the IT landscape, especially for professionals without a technical background. In this respect, the interface and user experience (UI/UX) are critical. An intuitive application will see active use, even if it only saves a modest amount of time. It’s also essential that all tools within the IT landscape are interconnected and integrated with one another. This ensures seamless data use, minimises duplicate data entry, and reduces human error.
How do you select solutions to implement within the IT landscape?
Given the abundance of IT solutions available today, there is a vast array of technologies to choose from. This simplifies the task of building an IT landscape, especially with ready-made solutions available, but it also complicates the selection process. Many technologies on the market have distinct strengths and weaknesses. Therefore, at the initial stage, it’s crucial to visualise the entire future landscape: consider connections between elements, data flows, integration possibilities, the costs of those integrations, and possible scaling paths.
When I choose a technology, I try to think beyond the range of ready-made Legal Tech products. Almost any task can be approached in different ways and using various tools. Sometimes, solutions come from related fields. For instance, I successfully implemented predictive search for legal entities using a technology originally designed for e-commerce—namely, the auto-complete function for delivery addresses. This solution allowed us to automate and expedite the process of searching for legal entities and related data in state registries before it became a “gold standard” in the market or internet services for counterparty verification.
Another example is contract automation in construction-investment EPC (Engineering-Procurement-Construction) projects. Documentation in such projects can be as voluminous as a railway carload. We simply marked and uploaded these contracts into a familiar legal reference system, gaining morphological and semantic search capabilities, version visualisation, document comparison, and the ability to link additional reference materials to primary contracts. This greatly simplified contract management, allowing lawyers, contract managers, and project teams to focus on their primary tasks instead of spending time searching for necessary documents.
That sounds impressive. Are there differences in solution selection approaches in Russia compared to other countries?
The primary tasks and directions in legal work are similar across countries, but there are significant differences in access to technology. In the UAE, Europe, and the US, the selection of solutions is much broader than in Russia, mainly for two reasons. First, sanctions on Russia restrict access to many foreign technologies. Second, there remains a lack of trust in cloud solutions in Russia, whereas in other countries, this segment is actively developing and widely used.
That said, Russia has several well-established IT solutions, such as reference-legal systems or access to arbitration court materials, which provide quick access to essential legal information. For example, even now in 2024, the UAE does not have a unified database of regulatory acts, which creates additional challenges in legal practice.
However, the key selection criterion remains the same everywhere—economic efficiency for the given task.
How did you decide to shift your career from legal work to Legal Tech and the new specialty, Legal Operations, focused on the processes improvement ?
One pivotal moment influenced me greatly. I once saw a colleague in tears due to the overwhelming burden of repetitive manual work. She needed to notify about a thousand people about their inclusion in the company’s insiders list, which required her to manually copy data, print forms, sign them, and send letters to each individual. The work was, to put it mildly, monotonous and would have taken days. That’s when I thought of using an Excel macro to automate the process. The macro filled in the data, created letters, and sent them. What would have taken days was completed in minutes. This incident marked a turning point for me: I realised that even a simple technical solution could significantly ease workloads, save time, and free people from routine tasks.
From that point on, I became increasingly interested in the possibilities of technology, gradually moving into developing and implementing solutions to automate lawyers’ routine tasks. This approach not only boosts efficiency but also allows lawyers to focus on intellectually demanding tasks that require their expertise.
What advice would you give to lawyers or Legal Operations professionals involved in building or expanding their IT landscape?
First and foremost, I would recommend not limiting yourself solely to Legal Tech. It’s important to think broadly and seek technological solutions from related fields. New tools are constantly emerging, and many can be adapted to legal work.
Another key point is maintaining open communication with lawyers and understanding their needs. Technology should solve specific problems and make lawyers’ work easier, not more complicated. Therefore, the focus should always be on ease of use and minimising routine work. This is particularly relevant for lawyers without technical skills. Their knowledge must be delicately integrated into the data used.
How do you see the future of Legal Tech in the coming years?
I believe Legal Tech will continue to develop, with further automation of routine tasks, integration of artificial intelligence, and the use of big data to make better-informed decisions. Technologies are already helping lawyers process massive amounts of data, automate processes, and enhance analytical accuracy. In the future, I’m confident these processes will become even more advanced and integrated, and lawyers’ roles will increasingly shift towards strategic and analytical tasks.
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