Anyone joining Sharon Jenkins on a video call from the garden room that has become her base of operations benefits from a few inspirational words of wisdom displayed behind her head: “Everything starts with an idea.”
She acknowledges that the sentiment may seem “cheesy”, but as personal philosophies go, it is one that has served her well. After 15 years as a real estate lawyer with Nabarro, Jenkins found that the big deals she enjoyed the most “went off a cliff” following the Brexit vote in 2016. Still busy with smaller-scale work but feeling bored, she seized the opportunity to move into a project management role in the run-up to the firm’s blockbuster merger with CMS and Olswang.
Five years later, she serves as the senior innovation manager for the combined CMS, and her work driving its adoption of cutting-edge technology recently earned her the Real Estate Digital Rising Star Award at EG’s Tech Awards. It isn’t just a phrase on her wall: Jenkins has plenty of ideas, and now has the trophy to prove it.
Overcoming scepticism
Jenkins describes her role as “exceptionally varied”, with responsibilities include implementing new tech products after running pilot testing and securing business case approval; working closely with real estate and finance lawyers to answer queries on how to use tech effectively; and running training sessions. She also has regular meetings with clients to discuss their internal innovation strategies, share knowledge and consider areas where they can work together, and holds meetings and demonstrations with new tech providers.
“I’m kind of the lynchpin or the conduit who connects a lot of people,” she says. “Even if I don’t know an answer, I’ll know who does. The common thread is helping people with a problem, trying to come up with the best solution for them.”
For Jenkins, innovation isn’t just about technology, it’s about getting the right combination of “technology, people and process” to create efficiencies for clients. “At its core, it’s about looking at what we do and how we can make it better,” she adds. “There’s no more fanciness to it than that. Innovation in the legal sphere at times can be a really small change but which makes a big difference.”
The legal and real estate sectors have a reputation for being traditional and, in some ways, resistant to change, and fee-earners at major firms such as CMS are notoriously busy, posing a time barrier to learning and adopting new technologies. One of Jenkins’ tasks is to help guide them and persuade them that embracing the right tech can unlock efficiencies and win them back vital minutes, which can quickly add up to those all-important billable hours.
Inevitably, that will be met with a mixture of eagerness and resistance from different people – a balance Jenkins feels was “probably 50/50” when she first started working on innovation.
“We had a fair share of people really enthused and a fair share who were a bit sceptical,” she says. “Fast-forward a couple of years and we see the pendulum swing, because they’ve seen change happen and they hear more people talking about it. Document automation is an example. In the early months, there were a handful of documents that were automated. Last year, 5,300 documents were produced through HotDocs. That’s a lot of documents, not just a couple of people having a dabble with something. Now the majority of people, when they’re producing a draft document for a deal, will be using HotDocs.”
Jenkins asks lawyers who have had a positive experience with new tech to share a “two-minute story” of their experiences in team meetings, which encourages wider adoption and innovation.
“Saying you want to build a culture – and we’ve ummed and aahed about using that word – means we need people to self-serve a lot,” Jenkins says. “We need to guide them and help them, but they need to be willing to embrace it. You can put the seeds in place and then you have to wait for things to grow. It doesn’t happen overnight. I think we’ve done some really good things in the team over the past couple of years that we’re now starting to see bear fruit.”
She cites the firm’s 100-strong “community” of innovation reps drawn from every team as the “people on the ground” spreading the message to colleagues, and the introduction of “innovation hours” – actual billable time that incentivises fee-earners to learn and implement new ways of doing things – as initiatives that have made a real difference.
She also says the support from co-head of real estate John Cumpson has been “empowering”, as has the firm strategy relaunch this year that includes innovation as one of its six key pillars. “That’s a new emphasis that hasn’t been there before,” she says. “It just feels like it’s never been a better time for everyone to understand its importance.”
No turning back
Tech has been central to society’s response to Covid-19, with widespread remote working calling for fast adoption of new habits in an industry – indeed an entire legal system – that was still committed to paper.
“People being forced to be at home online means they are printing a bit, but nowhere near as much,” Jenkins says. “Some of the tools that previously weren’t particularly helpful because people weren’t reviewing on screen are now more attractive. Things like DocuSign, which I would have otherwise been slowly pushing, didn’t need any push – they sold themselves.”
And that widespread adoption by necessity of DocuSign for handling agreements electronically has been a step change, with those who have used it given the confidence to embrace other products, such as Avail (an AI tool to assist with title reviews), Kira (another AI tool used to expedite lease reviews) and CMS Collaborate (the firm’s HighQ cloud storage portal).
Even as lawyers return to the office, these changes will be permanent, Jenkins feels: “Once you’ve got the hang of document automation, there’s no reason you would go back to suddenly taking twice as long to do something.”
Asked about where things are going, Jenkins makes an analogy with how mobile phones developed incrementally for years before making an evolutionary leap that changed all our lives. Once the technology reaches a certain level, things can “catapult” forward very quickly. That, she believes, is the moment that legal tech is approaching.
She is excited about robotic process automation, a solution the firm recently settled on in other areas of practise, and its potential applications in real estate work. She suggests conflict checks as being one of the repetitive and time-consuming tasks that robotics could be trained to carry out.
Meanwhile, her ambition is for full end-to-end digitisation of real estate transactions. While Avail has transformed the process of Land Registry searches during the due diligence process, a similar solution for lease reporting isn’t quite there yet – largely because leases are far from standardised across the industry. The next step is a tool that has a “decent stab at a well-formatted first draft lease report for lawyers to review”, rather than them spending valuable time doing so much of the routine work of comprehension and information extraction.
“The technology and the machine learning takes a lot of time,” Jenkins says. “They need to see a lot of leases, thousands and thousands. But it’s within reach. I’ve seen a few really complicated AI platforms that are awesome but haven’t been applied in this context. They don’t yet have a lease product.”
One of the aspects of the job that Jenkins enjoys the most is connecting tech providers, and she has made some introductions between parties that might have the tech but not the documents to train it, and those that have the leases but lack the right quality of tech.
“What I will see, I hope – and some of this is maybe not even five years off – is consolidation in terms of people linking together,” she adds. “People have got solutions at the moment for one little element and if they were to join up with a few others, they’d have an end-to-end solution. Where I’d like to get to is that digitalised end-to-end process. That’s where hopefully things will go in the not-too-distant future.”
Open door
Though clearly at the forefront of her field, Jenkins was nevertheless “genuinely shocked” at her EG Tech Awards success and overwhelmed by the subsequent reaction that demonstrated how much her contribution to the firm is valued.
She confesses to a measure of vindication from the congratulations she has received from lawyers who previously may have felt she had “given up a legal career – and for what?” Meanwhile, nobody is more delighted than her mother – and even Jenkins’ daughter is “semi-impressed” that her win comes up when you Google her name.
Not only does the accolade illustrate to anyone that a change in professional direction can be hugely rewarding, it also illustrates that you don’t have to be an 18-year-old with your own start-up to be hailed as a “rising star”.
“I think it shows that in all industries there are opportunities to be innovative and bring tech through, no matter what you’re doing,” Jenkins says. “I think if you can bring it through in law and at my age then it’s an open door to anyone else, hopefully.”
With her “humongous” award on her desk, her family basking in her glory, and her head filled with ideas for what comes next for CMS, things are definitely going well for Jenkins, amply justifying the other phrase on the wall of her garden room: life is good.
To send feedback, e-mail jess.harrold@eg.co.uk or tweet @EGPropertyNews
