Case Study: Australia Red Cross Lifeblood digitises legal arm

Australia Red Cross Lifeblood, formally known as the Blood Service has digitised the legal arm of the organisation.

Digital Nation Australia spoke to Marion Hemphill, general counsel and chief privacy officer at Lifeblood to discuss the not-for-profit’s deployment of the Checkbox no-code app development solution.

Hemphill said that much like many legal in-house teams, the legal arm of Lifeblood was behind when it came to innovation.

“The technology seems to happen in other parts of the business and we were quite a traditional legal service, very manual, very human based. And what we've been looking to do over the last few years is to make better use of our resources and make sure that we are spending our time in the best way that we can, and right-sizing our resource allocation,” she said.

After undertaking a diagnosis of the elements of the legal process that needed to be streamlined, Hemphill’s suspicions were confirmed that the organisation was directing too many resources to low risk, and low value matters business-wide.

“We noticed that a lot of businesses were starting with big contract automation pieces their most high valued, most critical contracts, but we found that it wasn't actually where we wanted to apply our technology. It's the low value high repetition matters that we want to focus on,” said Hemphill.

Lifeblood started with a privacy impact assessment, and then moved to privacy breach notifications, confidentiality agreements and have now automated a number of simple contracts.

“It basically just means that at any time of the day or night, someone in the business who is owning a low risk, low value contract, and they can test that electronically as well, can answer a few questions and they'll just be provided with a contract and a checklist of how to take it forward without the legal team having to actually be involved in it.”

Despite reaching out to a number of providers offering what Hemphill defines as “amazing and slick” solutions, Lifeblood was looking for a bespoke option at low cost.

“We wanted the minimum viable product to do what we wanted to do,” she said.

“It does actually clear us for more innovative and interesting work and we can use our skills in a much more impactful way, which is much more satisfying.”

For individuals considering donating blood, plasma or mothers giving human milk to Australia Red Cross Lifeblood, Hemphill stressed, “These are human tissues that there's no other source for and there's a consistent need throughout Australia. So, if you feel that you can help, you'd be very welcome to do so.”