She added that Patsnap is expanding its team in Japan, hoping to boost the country's contribution to its revenues to a share of about 10% from just a fraction at the moment.

The hidden power of patents and PatSnap's USD 100 million milestone.

Sometimes it can appear from the outside that inhouse lawyers are reticent about legal innovation and tech adoption, but if you ‘follow the money’ then in reality it’s the CEO who ultimately decides. As Eric Topel, the new GC of IP platform Patsnap, told this site: ‘Not all executives have a strong understanding of legal.’‘Some CEOs are from a sales and marketing background, some from tech,’ he explained, ‘so sometimes there’s a lack of familiarity [about legal tech] and the different tools that are available.’‘Also, if there is a culture of blame at the company, then that culture encourages [the GC] to spend the money on law firms, not tools for the inhouse team,’ he added.‘The more integrated we are [with the C-suite], then the better the level of trust, and more work is kept inhouse, and so the same goes for [legal tech] tooling and AI that can help us to improve and be more efficient and save money,’ Topel said.That is to say, some companies’ C-suites don’t have a detailed understanding of what the legal team does or how they do it – nor perhaps want to have that level of engagement. This then makes them uncertain about the inhouse team’s overall value, and so they depend on law firms to handle more work, and also don’t want to invest in legal tech for their own team.In short, don’t always blame the inhouse lawyers when you see a lack of progress on legal innovation, there may be some very good corporate culture reasons for this that are beyond their control.And this goes beyond areas such as legal ops and improving the legal function. If the culture of the company is one where the CEO doesn’t have a feel for what the legal function can do to improve how it works, then that also has a follow-on impact on law firms. As, if legal advisors are under no external pressure to change due to client lack of interest, then don’t expect a powerful need to embrace legal tech there either.So, what’s the answer? Topel told Artificial Lawyer: ‘It’s incumbent on the GC to educate the C-suite.’But, will all GCs want to do that? He replied: ‘I see myself as a proactive attorney. But, if you are reactive then you may see no reason to change.’‘A lot of this is about demonstrating the value of the legal team,’ he added, and underlines that this is not always easy