Healthcare insurance provider Bupa digitally transforms its legal team with Josef

The in-house legal team at the healthcare insurance giant Bupa APAC has digitally transformed its operations with Josef.

Since automating everyday legal tasks, the team’s working more efficiently, their lawyers have become key enablers of change and they have more time for higher-level, more complex tasks.

We spoke with Chief of Staff at Bupa APAC, Anna Lin, and Legal Manager – International & Corporate, Fleur Hewitt, to hear about the company’s automation journey and what the legal team have built so far.

Hi both, thanks for joining us! We hear that Bupa’s fast-becoming experts in digital transformation. Could you explain how this came to be?

Anna: At Bupa, we’re always looking at ways we can enhance how we:

1. Do business;
2. Serve our customers;
3. Serve our people within the organisation; and
4. Perform in a competitive way.

Digitally transforming allows us to touch on all of this, and, for the legal team, it ensures that our people are learning the skills required to stay competitive in today’s environment. Working digitally is no longer tomorrow’s problem.

Fleur: There’s definitely a technological tide turning. With tech like Josef, we can now automate repetitive legal tasks, whereas previously, technology would tend to help more with word processing, emails, document preparation and so on. Nowadays, if you select the right product, it can pay off by giving back our lawyers and the business time in their day.

What drew you both to legal tech?

Fleur: For me, it was the efficiencies and enhanced productivity. The benefits in these areas seem endless and we’re finding that legal tech helps lawyers evolve from the more traditional legal experts and risk mitigators into core business enablers.

Anna: Personally, I’ve been passionate about tech for a long time now, having previously worked in PWC Legal’s Digital and Technology team and I believe that practice is so much more important than theory. So, I love to see this come to life every day at Bupa.

Legal automation often involves managing a lot of change. Could you share Bupa’s approach to building on Josef?

Anna: Sure, we ran a pilot initially to test a few things. We wanted to find out:

1. Whether the business had the tolerance for moving to automation;
2. What preferences people had for interacting with a human versus a bot; and
3. What repetitive work could be made more efficient.

It was crucial that we brought the business along for the journey as that way we could better understand people’s needs and how to automate at a comfortable pace for everyone involved.

What tools have you built on Josef for Bupa?

Anna: We started things off with Sam the Running Elephant, a triage bot that has since become a digital front door for our business clients.

From there, users can access all sorts of bots from agreement generator tools that draft NDAs and more complex agreements like our Master Service Agreement, to a competition terms and conditions bot to assist the business to choose the correct format for competitions.

Fleur: I built a Fit Out Agreement and Corresponding Briefing Note bot. Like the NDA and MSA bots, it’s self-serve and has cut down on a lot of emails that we’d previously send back and forth with the property team.

Now the property team can start preparing and populating an agreement all by themselves. The whole process has been terrific for everyone involved.

That’s great to hear! What have you and the team learnt from automating so far?

Anna: That it’s better to take things slow and automate something that’s low risk to start, like an NDA or an internal contract briefing note.

By starting small and in categories, you can better guide stakeholders through the various technological and cultural shifts that come with new tools and processes.

Fleur: Yes, and for us lawyers who are time poor, we’ve learned that spending the time and cost upfront is a worthwhile investment. In the long term, tasks are completed quicker and you help minimise risks for your clients too.

Do you have any advice for others looking to automate too?

Anna: I’d say trust your gut, know there are no silly questions and consider integrating your new tools with platforms already used by your organisation. That way you’ll deliver solutions that work for everyone.

Fleur: Just give it a go. If you can build tools that minimise low-level, time-consuming work, you’ll have more room for everything else in your day.

I was hesitant at first, but I knew that I had to dive in to save more time in the future. I thought, ‘the future Fleur will thank me.’