KPMG Legal Reimagined Nordic and Baltic’s Newsletter

This is a newsletter issued by the KPMG Legal Reimagined Nordic and Baltic Group, a collaborative initiative since 2021 with the aim to revolutionize the legal landscape within our region. 

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We wanted to take the opportunity to say hi and welcome to Victoria Swedjemark, who joined KPMG as Head of Legal Transformation & Operations Services Sweden after several years of running her own business within the legal transformation and operations area.

Hi Victoria! Tell us a bit more about your background

“Sure! I’m a lawyer, with a business degree too, and I’ve been in the legal space for almost 25 years. My first job was at a law firm, during the dot com era, when all these amazing opportunities of technology first emerged. I worked a lot with tech clients and digital law, so that triggered my passion for tech and innovation. I then transitioned in-house, to head up legal functions for 14 years in three different companies, including at Tele2. My portfolio also extended to regulatory & compliance, sustainability, and security for example. I got the opportunity to be part of the management team of all these companies and in that role gained a lot of insights into strategy, organisation & leadership, operational development and change management. It also opened my eyes on how HR, Finance, Marketing and Procurement are heavily investing in and steadily progressing on the transformation journeys for their functions.

This experience made me realize we need to fundamentally transform the legal function, both in terms of running it more professionally, like a business, and in future-proofing it in times of digital transformation, to stay relevant. It struck me that I loved those aspects of my work, and I decided I wanted to pivot into a more dedicated role in this area, “the business of law”. I saw an opportunity to help legal leaders succeed with these new challenges, and started consulting in 2019, then in my own business. So that was when I onboarded this new mission to help optimize and transform Legal and Compliance. And so much has happened just in these past few years!”

You will now head up legal transformation and operations services in Sweden at KPMG. What made you want to join KMPG?

KPMG has been working with legal operations and transformation consulting for many years and have hundreds of people around the world doing this type of work for clients, including for many of the world’s most progressive legal functions. I feel KPMG is on the same mission as I’ve been for the past years. Not to mention that the firm brings so many different skillsets and perspectives to the table, like people who can actually build tech solutions for clients, data analysts and AI gurus, implementation experts, alongside a whole team of talented lawyers too. I’ve always felt that this area is a blend of legal domain understanding and management consulting type of skillsets and capabilities. It’s going to be great fun to work together in the team at KPMG to help clients with their efforts to evolve.

Why should legal transformation and legal operations be top of mind with legal leaders and teams?

Actually, I don’t think there is another way, to cope. The new risk landscape and the increasing regulatory burden and the steadily growing workload push everyone to have to zoom out and look at how work is carried out. What is the most important work for lawyers, what should they focus on? How will we be effective, be on top of the most important things, and bring value, as business defines it? How can we free up time, such as through technology, like automation and AI, and offer better service to business? How can we become data-driven and make better decisions, and plan better?

I’d say key drivers are the need to target the team to the most important work, meet new business expectations on legal and modernize and future-proof the legal function to keep up with the business more broadly. Legal teams often want to take a more strategic role, be more proactive and find ways to manage growing workload better. You can’t just keep recruiting more lawyers, especially not when there are better and more cost-effective ways to scale now and the business expects a more evolved service delivery.”

What are the main challenges for legal leaders and teams within the next couple of years, do you think?

“Resources are always a challenge – to have the time, money and people to be able to plan, design and implement the changes necessary. That is also why it’s so helpful to bring in external support, like us at KPMG, to speed these efforts up, get more accomplished and bring in relevant expertise. The lawyers are often too busy to manage this work too.

Meeting new expectations from the business will also be a challenge. It can be the CEO or the CFO expecting you to run the function more cost-efficiently, but also broader expectations on more speed and better service, like easy access to legal information, and more self-serve solutions. Legal is also increasingly expected to back up their views and decisions on data, and leverage data in contracts and the risk or compliance area for example. Data is also a great way to back up your business case to invest in this new area, which is another common challenge – that legal leaders don’t think they can get funding for legal operations and transformation initiatives. But why wouldn’t they when it makes perfect business sense?  

Another challenge is how to include Legal & Compliance more into end-to-end business processes and systems, and adopting new ways of working and incorporating technology, including AI, as simply a natural part of legal work, especially taking into account that there is also a lot of change management involved, and human transformation.”  

How can legal leaders and teams start their journey on futureproofing the legal function?

“First of all, understand what the biggest pain points are, and clarify the aspirational state – identify the key opportunities to go after. Understand where you want to go, and why. That also helps with the storytelling around the change.

A good first step is to do a current state assessment. This will offer a good base to identify opportunities for improvement, whether it be in relation to governance, risk & compliance, processes and technology, rightsourcing work or people development. It will help you get your priorities right, so you do things in the right order, and will also help you understand your current maturity and what investments are needed. Gather insights, and get buy-in, both from the team and internal stakeholders outside legal, for the journey. Set your vision and objectives and build the business case. You will need both a budget and new types of competencies for this journey. Align with the rest of the business too so that the return of the investment extends to the business more broadly too.”

Thank you Victoria! Interested in learning more how KPMG can support with legal transformation and operations services? Please reach out to Victoria or any of our local contacts below.  

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