Episode 31: Dennis Garcia & Jason Barnwell on Legal Teams Innovating, Transforming And Working Remotely

Microsoft attorneys Dennis Garcia and Jason Barnwell discuss how legal teams can successfully and productively work remotely. They also discuss how recent work from home orders may speed up innovation and transformation in legal departments and law firms.

Dennis is an Assistant General Counsel at Microsoft and a prior Technically Legal guest. We talked to him on Episode 4 about Automation, Cybersecurity and the Cloud. Dennis leads a team of lawyers assisting Microsoft’s Enterprise Commercial Sales and Services team, one of the company’s largest commercial businesses.

Jason is also an Assistant General Counsel and heads up Microsoft’s Modern Legal team. In that role, his mandate is to drive industry leading innovation to digitally transform and modernize the Microsoft legal department.

Dennis and Jason explain that for companies to equip their lawyers and employees to successfully work from home, they need to invest in the right tools. The first of which is good hardware—devices up for the task of running whatever software the business needs.

Jason points out that if remote workers have good hardware, they are well positioned for success because most modern software is cloud based and “meets you where you are” permitting work to be done pretty much anywhere with an internet connection. 

Dennis and Jason also explain that for successful remote work, the modern legal team needs collaboration tools to communicate and work with team members, productivity software like Word and Excel to create legal documents, remotely accessible data storage and knowledge management tools.

Both Dennis and Jason agree that change is hard, but lawyers, like everyone else, just need to make the jump and try new tools and new ways of working. And… it all starts with a mindset shift.

Technically Legal is hosted by Chad Main, an attorney and the founder of Percipient, a tech-enabled alternative legal services provider.