How Microsoft streamlined regulatory compliance with GenAI

Microsoft stands at the vanguard of the AI revolution. Their significant investment in generative AI (GenAI) technologies is driving swift progress in the Microsoft Azure AI technology stack and the Microsoft 365 product suite. A fundamental pillar of Microsoft’s growth strategy involves embracing and exemplifying the responsible and efficient utilization of this transformative technology for their customers. Functional leaders across the organization have the mandate to actualize the technology’s potential.

The Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) team acknowledged the transformative potential that GenAI holds for the department. Their aim was to fast-track the deployment of Microsoft Azure-driven solutions that are in line with their core strategic goals, which include employing AI to enhance CELA's services in compliance, advisory and transactional work, starting with regulatory compliance.

Like other multinational corporations, Microsoft must keep abreast of changes in regulations across the jurisdictions where it operates. It must quickly assess the resulting impacts on its business, offer guidance and demonstrate compliance to regulators. These responsibilities demanded considerable manual effort from CELA lawyers to review regulations, determine their alignment with Microsoft policy and communicate advice to internal and external stakeholders.

While AI had the potential to alleviate much of this manual effort, CELA’s leadership team recognized the challenges inherent in driving adoption of rapidly evolving, new and emerging technology among legal professionals. Lawyers require high quality, consistency and predictability in their work product. Developing solutions that gain the confidence of the team requires the collective knowledge and experience of data scientists, business strategists and tenured legal professionals.

CELA’s leadership team committed to developing an approach that their legal practitioners could trust and supporting them as they adapt to this monumental shift. They also understood the role Microsoft's legal department could play in positively influencing their workforce and guiding the industry toward successful technology adoption. Armed with a growth mindset and recognizing the rapid evolution of technology, CELA’s AI leadership engaged EY Law teams to bolster the efforts of their internal transformation team as they worked through over 250 potential use cases gathered from CELA.

EY Law and CELA teams both recognized the urgency to capitalize on the growing interest and excitement with a solution that would gain the confidence of the legal department while helping to meet ambitious deadlines that would demonstrate concrete benefits in terms of adoption and return on investment.

EY Law teams worked with CELA to rapidly assemble a multidisciplinary collaboration of professionals with extensive business knowledge across industries and skills in advanced technology, AI policy, legal operations and legal work product. Together with leading academic institutions, EY Law and technology teams conducted an intensive two-day workshop to address data strategy, privacy, confidentiality and legal business needs simultaneously, while incorporating CELA feedback from the outset to achieve innovative outcomes for the end users.

CELA Technology & Operations together with EY Law and technology teams worked with CELA’s regulatory and product team members to design and refine a workflow POC for the regulatory space solution that could be automated to enhance efficiency, compliance monitoring and document creation. Within weeks, the EY technology team developed the necessary skillsets for the desired automation, which cleared the way for Microsoft to move forward with a pilot implementation of the GenAI solution in the legal department.

The key capabilities developed are designed to have a meaningful impact in helping to reduce the manual work performed by the CELA team around regulatory compliance and include:

• Summarizing regulations. The tool uses knowledge collected and summarizes new regulations, helps identify required next steps and generates a formatted email template for distribution to appropriate CELA stakeholders.

Impact: CELA lawyers can focus on analyzing the inbound regulation itself while efficiently communicating ongoing work to stakeholders.

• Drafting implementation guidance. The tool goes beyond basic chat capabilities, ingesting new regulations and completing CELA’s standard implementation guidance form capturing regulation scope, compliance date, trust domain, requirements (including any exceptions or limitations), citations, applicable domain of regulation and defined terms within the document.
  

Impact: This automation allows lawyers to quickly understand the regulation's implications for Microsoft, transforming a task that previously took hours to minutes.

• Comparing Microsoft policy against new regulation. The tool analyzes new regulations, identifies requirements and compares them with Microsoft policy to help CELA advise on alignment and necessary actions.

Impact: This speeds up lawyers' ability to assess the effect of regulations on Microsoft policy and to focus on required actions.

• Analyzing different versions. The tool detects changes in regulations over time, i.e., what has changed in an updated regulation from its original publication or what has changed in multiple versions since its original publication.

Impact: Automating this task enables lawyers to concentrate on how these changes affect Microsoft stakeholders.

The teams maintained a growth mindset over four months of development and multiple sprints of rapid iteration with user feedback which helped to bolster confidence among users and leadership in the potential for GenAI adoption across CELA. The work also resulted in four primary, scalable GenAI skillsets that can be applied to fast-track deployment of further Microsoft Azure-driven solutions for different use cases within the legal department.

1. Document understanding and summarization
2. Automated document generation
3. Predictive action
4. Position and version tracking

Following the process designed by the Microsoft CELA and EY Law teams can assist other organizations in:

• Identifying AI opportunities: Exploring areas where AI can benefit legal teams.
• Assembling the right team: Bringing together a diverse group of professionals in technology, law and business, with support from various functions as necessary to collaborate on the approach.
• Centralizing data and knowledge: Accumulating data and insights to facilitate the development of successful use cases. Start with the data you have – you don’t need a lot to go far.
• Continuously learning and adapting: Experimenting and refining solutions through user engagement and feedback.
• Effectively communicating: Broadcasting the achievements of the legal team members who contributed to stakeholders to encourage cooperative efforts.
• Staying ethical and compliant: Keeping abreast of advancements while maintaining ethical and legal standards.

As GenAI impacts the legal industry, a growth mindset is important for legal practitioners and leaders. By embracing collaboration, experimentation, continuous learning and adaptability, they can confidently and effectively navigate the rapid changes that GenAI will bring to their ways of working.