Legal DX creates new business opportunities in an increasingly complex global business environment

In 2021, Fujitsu launched Fujitsu Uvance, a new business model consisting of seven key focus areas for bringing about a sustainable world. By fusing technology with cross-industry expertise, Uvance is spurring business growth for customers across diverse industries and tackling social issues worldwide.

To develop a business that is current with global standards, the legal department must also provide globally consistent services to business units, while supporting and enhancing business competitiveness by providing fast, efficient, and high-quality legal services. At the same time, responding to rapidly changing environments means there are increases in productivity. At Fujitsu, we constantly strive for transformation through a legal team that adapts to change. This was the catalyst for the Legal DX initiative that began in 2022, centered around the UK team.

Starting small in overseas offices

We created a legal platform in-house called "AskLegal," which was built on ServiceNow and initially developed in the UK. It categorizes legal cases into three levels of difficulty; high-difficulty cases receive prioritized resource allocation, while routine requests and inquiries are answered by a chatbot (Figure 1). It also visualizes the number of ongoing cases in each region, improving the overall view of legal work. Understanding workload imbalances facilitates collaboration among team members, leading to improved service through an optimized work balance.

The development was driven outside Japan since that environment proved to be more agile and conducive to powering a small start. Overseas offices have a more focused workload than the headquarters’ legal team, and the businesses they support are also relatively few in number, making them ideal for iterative testing and performance enhancement through practical application.

Since fiscal year 2022, we've progressively rolled out AskLegal to Europe, APAC, and the Americas, refining its usability as we go. We are now also undertaking a full-scale rollout in Japan, the region that represents the majority of Fujitsu's profits. However, simply transplanting the features developed overseas won’t yield maximum effectiveness, so we are continuously improving the system through trial and error, constantly incorporating feedback from business units.

This section introduces the benefits we’ve already achieved through Legal DX centered around AskLegal. I’ll also showcase how generative AI is being used in legal affairs.