In April 2018, as I closed out the Vegas Institute, I was simply blown away by the energy, the passion and the power of that event. I remember thinking at the time, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.” Well, I was wrong. Our 4th Annual CLOC Institute in Las Vegas last week was, as so many attendees pointed out, filled with an energy level and positivity that was off the charts. I returned home more energized and inspired than ever before!

In the past, I have written and posted my closing remarks from the CLOC Institutes, but this time, I will simply direct you to the video of my opening (too lazy to type it all up!). As you’ll see, we kicked things off with an inspiring welcome video featuring testimonials by GCs from some of the world’s leading companies. Each spoke on the positive impact of legal operations and of CLOC. And to think, just a few years ago, people didn’t even know what the term “legal ops” meant.

I’ve had a week to reflect upon the Institute and wanted to share some additional thoughts. First, I am so humbled to represent the CLOC community and this movement as your president. This year’s Institute, with over 2200 attendees, was the ultimate evidence of how far our once-small community has grown. Nowhere else will you find this many experts, drawn from all backgrounds, all perspectives, and all parts of the legal ecosystem, sharing their best ideas and practices, and collaborating on results.

So what’s next? As I mentioned in my opening, we’re more committed than ever to taking this community and movement forward. This year, we’re purpose driven by two major principles: 1. Focusing on the community and 2. Engaging across the ecosystem.

Focusing on the Community

First, we are returning the focus to what we believe makes this organization great — the community. The whole idea behind starting CLOC was to help Legal Ops professionals do their jobs better and to create and share best practices. We want to ensure we’re doing that by making it easier for you to interact, participate, and learn from each other. To support this principle, we’re launching a new member community platform that will allow us to create more subcommunities and topical discussions, to create more webinars and trainings, and work across the ecosystem to generate more relevant and useful content.

Engaging Across the Ecosystem (with a focus on Law Firms)

While there is more interest and belief than ever about legal operations from all the players in the ecosystem, there continues to be a significant divide in our perspectives and approaches. We believe that CLOC has a huge role to play in bridging these divides and driving real change in the industry. As such, we’re starting by actively focusing on getting law firms more involved with CLOC this year. In a couple of months, we will pilot a new membership type for law firm legal operations professionals. This will be separate from our existing in-house CLOC community, but will allow these law firm participants to network, share ideas, and actively communicate across the divide with each other and with in-house members. We foresee creating topical discussion forums like pricing, diversity and inclusion, knowledge management, and more, where individuals from both law firms and in house teams can collaborate and help each other. We believe that including the voice of the firms in our discussions is critical to better alignment and movement in our industry.

One of the concerns I expressed from the stage during my kick off at the Institute is whether or not law firms can “embrace the CLOC culture” which requires us to be courageous enough to be imperfect, to share openly, and to admit when we have no idea what we’re doing. We were afraid that we would launch this thing and no one would be willing to ask questions or contribute their experiences, learnings, or struggles. After all, law firms are used to being the expert on all things to their clients and have indicated to me in the past that they are uncomfortable admitting that they don’t have it all figured out yet. By the end of the three days, however, I feel very hopeful about what’s to come. I had so many meaningful conversations with law firm attendees who expressed excitement, initiative, and positivity about what we’ll be able to accomplish together. I feel like we’ve moved past the point of uncomfortable conversations to a new phase where we are ready to embrace the change, energy, and passion and where happily we find ourselves sharing the driver’s seat on this new adventure!

As I have said many times before, everything about legal operations is hard — every step of the way. We’ve come so far, but there is still far, far to go. This community we’ve created is full of passion and perseverance and when we have passion and perseverance, anything is possible. Just remember the quote I closed with: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

Thank you for making the 2019 Institute a success and for being such an integral part of this movement. I can’t wait to see where this rocketship goes next. See you next year!

Who’s got the right insights into designing an airplane: the pilot who’s going to be taking a seat in the cockpit, or the engineer pouring over blueprints and test data?

The answer is both, of course. Without sharing their POVs and expertise with each other, nothing gets off the ground. The same thing holds absolutely true in developing any technology for Legal Operations: The product provider, its end users, even non-user stakeholders and others impacted by tech adoption need to have a voice in the final product.

Why? Because each of them is already being affected by the problems it’s trying to solve. They’ve got their own valid angles on those problems, and their own individual needs that have to be addressed.

When this kind of “co-innovation” is done right, it doesn’t generate compromised, design-by-committee products, but useful and effective solutions to real-world, on-the-ground Legal Ops challenges. And in our view (and that of most other Legal Ops professionals, we’ve found), it’s the magic ingredient for transforming Legal Operations – and even the legal industry as a whole.

Uniting a complex ecosystem

When we were considering the topics we could highlight at our panel at this year’s CLOC Institute Vegas, it made perfect sense to focus on co-innovation…and how it’s a proven, powerful tool with limitless potential for shaping tomorrow’s evolution of Legal Operations: Legal Ops 2.0.

Legal Ops 2.0 will only be a reality when an entire corporate legal ecosystem can be united under a single broad umbrella of best practices, governance, efficiency, and collaboration. One that features seamless integration of every product in a legal tech stack that expands innovation and excellence across the entire business.

When you consider the potential complexity of that ecosystem, and the different demands put on it by different users and stakeholders, unifying it and the many varied processes it contains may seem unlikely. Yet we’ve already seen the path forward, lighted by the work of Legal Ops pioneers who are proving right now that co-innovation is key.

Making it work in the real world

For these leaders, a primary step was to commit to becoming a more strategic partner to the rest of the enterprise, in effect creating “Legal Service Centers” within their corporate legal departments. These are designed to provide a hub of best practices, technology, innovation and excellence that can lift more than just the legal department. The rest of the company can be elevated, too, as those practices and tools are adopted elsewhere in the organization.

We’ve already seen this kind of cross-departmental adoption in action at companies where Legal Ops was the first to use a tool such as SaaS workflow automation; soon enough, other departments began to ask Legal Ops’ help in adopting it for their needs, too.

The contributors to our May 14 panel – Legal Ops leaders from The Gap, Shell, Ingersoll-Rand, and Keesal Propulsion Labs – have been driving these changes by prodding everyone inside and outside of their organizations with skin in the Legal Ops game to commit to co-innovation.

Like so many in both the CLOC and Mitratech client communities, they believe in sharing their experiences, so at this presentation they’ll discuss these efforts. They’ll have real progress to demonstrate in getting Legal Ops leaders, CTOs, internal clients, corporate stakeholders, technology providers, and implementation specialists to work together to improve outcomes and results at their respective companies.

The challenges these co-innovators have faced have ranged from change management to process improvement, adopting new technologies, and considering other fresh approaches to addressing existing challenges. But meeting any of these challenges has demanded teamwork and trust between everyone involved, and the willingness to embrace a shared vision of success.

The results? Our panelists have witnessed transformational changes in culture, behavior, outcomes, KPIs, and more. Plus, they’ve encouraged the growth of both CLOC and at least one solution-specific user community dedicated to the greater success of Legal Ops technology for everyone.

Building a use cases cloud

All of our panelists are advocates of building a stronger client/user community, something Mitratech is incredibly proud to be a part of. For them, process improvement and co-innovation are absolute cornerstones of Legal 2.0. As a means of embracing and promoting these? Taking an active role in the user community, where best practices and actual workflow designs can be shared.

Mitratech found one opportunity to promote co-innovation through something that was already happening organically in its TAP user community. The concept of a “workflow use cases cloud” that allows everyone involved to take a hand in moving Legal Ops forward by continuously sharing, adapting, refining and their work with each other. In fact, this even inspired us to formally promote online sharing of workflow designs among our user community via our TAP Co-Innovation Center.

Prepping for Legal 3.0

Creating and promoting mechanisms like this for sharing expertise and experience is foundational to achieving Legal 2.0, and is also laying the groundwork for the next step: Legal 3.0.

We don’t know exactly what 3.0 will look like, but there are some market trends that cannot be ignored. Advanced analytics and data-based insights will increasingly drive decision-making, new technology will become even more pervasive and potentially disruptive to traditional ways of conducting legal business, and Legal Ops will find it now has a far bigger hand in overall business strategy, both inside and outside of the legal department.

The ultimate lesson the success of our panelists provides for everyone in CLOC, or in Legal Operations anywhere? To stay active, innovative, and collaborative within your professional community, because you’ll receive as much as you give by embracing co-innovation. And you’ll be having a real role in shaping the destiny of the legal industry for years or even decades to come.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session:

Legal Ops 2.0: How Co-Innovation is Driving the Industry’s Future
Tuesday, May 14th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Vincent J. Cordo, Central Legal Operations Officer, Shell Oil Company
• Justin Hectus, CIO/CISO, Keesal, Young & Logan
• Jason Parkman, CEO Mitratech
• Mike Russell, Lean Leader – Legal Operations, Ingersoll Rand

About the author: Kelli Negro is Chief Marketing Officer at Mitratech, charged with driving business results through omni-channel marketing and content strategies that are grounded in research, analysis and customer insight. Kelli joined Mitratech after a successful tenure at Thinksmart, a pioneer in SaaS workflow automation.

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the average Fortune 2000 company holds around 20,000-40,000 active contracts. Imagine having to manage this contract volume throughout their lifecycle without any technology! In most cases, the responsibility of drafting, authoring, reviewing and managing a huge portfolio of high-value contracts falls on the legal or contract management function where execution is largely the responsibility of the legal operations team. And unfortunately for many operations teams, automation in contract management is still not a common practice. Companies continue to rely on manual processes for contract management – making this cumbersome, time-consuming and often routine effort for the legal team – that often exposes the company to risk and omissions.

An advanced contract management solution means streamlined processes, automated workflows, predictive analytics, standardized language, pre-configured alerts and triggers, and a centralized, integrated repository with easy access across devices. These are just some of the functionalities of an advanced CLM that can enhance the working of legal departments, improve productivity, decrease turn around time, help in strategic decision making and reduce costs and manual errors.

With so many benefits, adopting a CLM technology has become a goal for many legal departments. A proper plan in place with metrics to track each step of the journey can make the adoption easy and avoid hiccups on the way. We have identified four such steps in the CLM journey to ensure high adoption:

1. Know your point of origin
   While adopting CLM, knowing where you are in the CLM maturity model can make all the difference. Understand where you had been in the past and how you have reached the present state. Study the challenges faced and draw insights from your experiences. This stage is the starting point of the CLM adoption and having a thorough understanding of the current scenario from the technology and business standpoint can go a long way.
2. Collaborate with key stakeholders
   It is best to involve all the stakeholders in your decision making to ensure you get the right contract management solution for your organization. Contracting, legal, procurement, and any other divisions who would be using the solution could have important suggestions and insights that might help in a more ideal solution, save costs and ensure higher CLM adoption. However, do so at the risk of feature and scope creep – so keep your friends close and…well you know the rest.
3. Capture use-case intricacies
   As you are capturing the as-is state, be sure to understand and reach out to the stakeholders, process owners, reference data managers, clause curators, past, present and future librarians, and don’t forget the heritage legal file administrators as well as future stewards. Now is the time to understand the intricacies and complexities – or at the least document them and have owners identified.
4. Simplify processes and integration
   The goal of implementing a Contract Lifecycle Management solution is to simplify the process. With a simplified, more straight forward process, which leverages technology to facilitate decision paths and embodies new technologies like AI and Machine Based learning to provide assistive guidance, user adoption increases through incremental and consistent gains in performance and process efficiencies.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session:

The Journey of CLM Adoption in Legal Operations
Tuesday, May 14th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Amy Anderson, Transdev
• Sandy Owen, Intel Corporation
• Arthur Raguette, Ultria

For a more in-depth understanding of each of the steps in the Journey of CLM adoption, along with real-world examples and insights from established market leaders from Ultria, Intel and Transdev, attend Ultria’s breakout session on ‘The Journey of CLM Adoption in Legal Operations’ on Tuesday, May 14th. The speakers will discuss their journey of CLM adoption, the challenges they faced and the learnings from the same. They will share their experiences in leveraging CLOC competencies that include defining target metrics through Data Analytics, rallying support through Cross-Functional Alignment, and leveraging agile program management disciplines in their journey of Technology & Process Support for Contract Lifecycle Management.

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

HBR Consulting will present an educational session at CLOC’s 2019 Corporate Legal Operations Institute — “Don’t Gamble Your Future . . . Advance Your Operations Maturity” — in which we will explore strategies to help corporate law departments advance on the CLOC Legal Operations Maturity continuum. This is the third in a three-part series of blog posts to provide CLOC members with context regarding several of the major strategic areas in which law departments can advance in their maturity.

In this post, we will be focusing on the topic of legal analytics. “Data Analytics” is one of CLOC’s advanced level core competencies. Within the field of legal analytics, however, there is a wide range of maturity. This post briefly touches on some of the broad areas where there are opportunities for law departments to use analytics. Watch in the next month or so for HBR’s forthcoming whitepaper on legal analytics maturity.

The Emergence of Analytics in Corporate Law Departments

Companies across all sectors of the economy have been investing heavily in the development and use of data analytics for years, but the truth is that the application of data science in the legal sector is still in its early stages. However, the steady expansion of business expectations for in-house legal professionals — i.e., the law department is often required to measure its business performance just like the other departments in the organization — appears to have lit a fuse in the marketplace.

No matter how late the start, corporate law departments are now increasingly embracing data science and analytics as a strategic lever for more effectively measuring, managing and reporting on their business performance. Based on our work with corporate law departments of all sizes and across multiple sectors, there are three broad areas of legal analytics that have emerged in the field:

1. Financial Analytics
   The common starting point for most departments is to focus on spend or revenue analytics. This is a natural area for investment in legal analytics, as it helps department leaders to better understand their spending patterns and gain more control over their spending on outside counsel in particular, but also other costs such as discovery providers, etc. Twenty-six percent of corporate law departments are planning to implement legal spend analytics in the next one to two years, up from 24 percent in 2016 and 2017, according to the 2018 HBR Consulting Law Department Survey. Additionally, 49 percent have already implemented a legal spend analytics solution, up from 46 percent in 2017 and 39 percent in 2016.
2. Operational Analytics
   A second area of data analytics that has emerged is the application of quantitative methods to specific functions in the department that play a supporting role in the delivery or receipt of legal services. For example, a department might create a quantitative method to rationalize the consolidation of outside counsel with whom the company does business, or perhaps to objectively evaluate a department’s progress toward diversity and inclusion. These types of applications are valuable ways to optimize the legal talent and professional services utilized by the organization.
3. Practice Analytics
   The third major area of the corporate legal analytics landscape is the application of data science to the practice of law itself. These sorts of analytics seek to inform matter strategy, refine legal advice, enable experts to make better determinations of risk or forecast possible outcomes. Examples of questions that might be answered with practice-oriented analytics include: What does a case like this typically settle for? How long will it take to resolve this matter? How have we fared against this opposing counsel in the past? What are the chances this deal will close by the end of the quarter? Practice analytics are the least explored area of corporate legal analytics, but they are a growing point of emphasis for progressive department leaders and may offer the greatest opportunity for innovation.

Driving Innovation with Analytics

Earlier this year, HBR Consulting conducted “flash surveys” at a series of roundtable events (in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and San Jose) for corporate law department professionals. The surveys focused on questions related to the internal strategy, use and staffing of data analytics within corporate legal operations.

Our findings from these surveys confirmed our anecdotal observations from conversations with in-house legal professionals over the past couple years: law departments are increasingly relying on data analytics to drive innovation, from financial reporting improvements to operational changes to high-value, practice-oriented advancements.

First, it is clear that corporate law departments are taking data analytics more seriously than ever. Three in four survey respondents reported that they either have a data analytics program in place now or have plans to develop one in the future. While our survey participants were from larger law departments (median of 123 lawyers), it is clear that the field of data science is now a top priority for in-house counsel and operational leaders.

Second, the corporate legal market appears to be at a key stage in its evolving use of analytics, with greater emphasis being placed on improving service delivery and informing legal decision-making. Using analytics for these substantive KPIs — i.e., non-financial measures, such as matter cycle time, damages realization, etc. — will allow in-house legal professionals to better understand the drivers of cost, mitigate risk and more precisely determine value provided by outside counsel. More than half (56%) of the corporate law department leaders we surveyed said they either “have” or “have plans” to implement substantive KPIs.

Third, our observation is that corporate law departments are searching for the optimal staffing approach to achieve these analytics-fueled innovation goals. Four in 10 (41%) of our flash survey respondents said they employ dedicated analytics personnel within their law departments who are solely focused on legal operations, two in 10 (22%) said they draw on shared experts who reside within another group at the company, and one in 10 (9%) said they engage third-party vendors for specific data analytics projects. The remaining respondents (28%) reported they have no formal resources in place. The analytics staffing model remains a work in progress and it will be important to monitor which approaches seem to best support corporate legal innovation.

Conclusion

After getting a late start, corporate law departments are increasing their use of data analytics and expanding their application beyond financial metrics to include higher-value uses. For those departments that have the patience to keep on the data analytics path, the continued development in perspective and capability will yield greater results over time from these more complex applications. As they become more sophisticated users of data analytics, in-house legal professionals are certain to drive the industry forward, obtaining greater visibility into their department operations and uncover new insights into how to improve their business performance.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session:

Don’t Gamble Your Future…Advance Your Operations Maturity
Wednesday, May 15th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Kevin Clem, Chief Commercial Officer, HBR Consulting
• Marc Allen, Senior Director, HBR Consulting
• Molly Perry, Chief Operating Officer, Office of Legal and Administrative Affairs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• Greg Bennett, Sr. Manager, Legal Operations, Gilead Sciences

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

HBR Consulting will present an educational session at CLOC’s 2019 Corporate Legal Operations Institute— “Don’t Gamble Your Future . . . Advance Your Operations Maturity” — in which we will explore strategies to help corporate law departments advance on the CLOC Legal Operations Maturity continuum. This article is the second in a three-part series of blog posts to provide CLOC attendees with context regarding the major strategic areas in which law departments can advance in their maturity.

In this post, I will be focusing on the topic of legal technology — “Technology & Practice Support” — as one of CLOC’s foundational level core competencies.

Becoming More Mature in the Use of Technology

The effective use of technology is a topic that gets a lot of attention these days in legal operations circles and is often a contributing factor when comparing operational effectiveness among similar law departments. For those law departments seeking to improve their technology use, there are several steps that can help your department make incremental progress along the CLOC maturity model.

A key first step is to evaluate your current state with respect to use of legal technology solutions and establish a three- to five-year technology plan. The plan should consider notable gaps you discover in key functional areas, as well as how effective current tools are at achieving their intended use. With respect to specific tools, your department’s core stack of solutions should include matter management, spend management and document management, as well as any other technology platforms that may be crucial to support key disciplines required for your industry (e.g., intellectual property management).

Once you have “checked-the-box” on having implemented the core stack of solutions, it is a good idea to routinely review how these tools are used, the level of adoption and the relevance of their design when compared to your business processes. The following questions can help assess next steps:

• Do the solutions we are using provide strategic value to our legal professionals?
• Are we presenting meaningful analytics to demonstrate the value of the information (data) we are asking our legal staff to enter and track?
• In implementing the core stack of solutions, have we equally and adequately addressed both litigation and transactional sides of the house?

Many corporate law departments discover that their existing technology investments are not providing strategic value and are perceived as “back-office systems.” Often legal professionals are asked to enter matters and update key dates, but little is done to demonstrate the way that information can inform and enrich legal decision making. Finally, a concern we are hearing more often is that the core legal stack tools are more supportive of litigation functions than of transactional work. I will focus on that last issue here. We suggest that the next major step in technology maturity for most corporate law departments should be increasing focus on tools that support transactional management.

Leveraging Technology for Workflow and Transaction Management

Transactional attorneys can benefit from the core stack of tools for features such as tracking advice and counsel, organizing work product, tracking key dates and memorializing iterations of work-in-progress. That stated, two additional sets of tools that are receiving more attention from legal professionals are legal request and workflow tools and contract lifecycle management systems. These tools provide legal professionals with the opportunity to more effectively engage with their business partners — not obviating the need for direct contact or phone calls, but rather supplementing and enriching these other points of contact so that both parties are better informed at request inception.

1. Legal request and workflow (“LR&W”) tools are gaining momentum in the corporate legal market, as more legal organizations are trying to better manage their increasing demands for legal work, while managing cycle time and regularly updating their business partners on the status of those requests. Eighty-one percent of respondents to HBR’s 2018 Law Department Survey expect their legal needs to continue to grow. The two most commonly cited practice areas in which they expect increases were regulatory and M&A.

2. Contract lifecycle management (“CLM”) systems can also help transactional attorneys work more efficiently and effectively. CLM systems provide a structured way to manage all legal work connected to the creation of a contract. Typical CLM systems can capture necessary data contracts, track key dates, serve as a repository for pre-approved templates and create contracts using those templates, manage the contract approval workflow process, flag negotiated changes, validate all required signatures and monitor contract terms for rights and obligations, for example.

CLM systems can also help ensure that contracting requests are thorough and processes are consistently followed, trigger appropriate escalations, assist in controls enforcement and provide a mechanism for easier execution. Already implemented by 55 percent of corporate law departments, 29 percent of companies plan to implement CLM solutions in the next one to two years, according to the HBR’s 2018 Law Department Survey. CLM systems were the most commonly planned technology implementations of the 19 technology types surveyed.

Along with implementing CLM systems, it is HBR’s experience that many law departments are also simultaneously leading the charge with their companies to establish contract management programs, to ensure standard processes throughout the organization. The combination of a strong, companywide program and a CLM system supporting that program not only streamlines transactional work, but also provide organization-wide consistency and can help manage an organization’s contract-related risk.

Conclusion

Technology used to support transactions can help improve the efficiency for every stage of a corporate transaction. The combination of LP&W and CLM systems gives in-house legal professionals what they need to better handle transactional work from inception to completion.

In the final post in HBR’s three-part blog series, my colleagues will explore the use of analytics to measure performance and to guide your department’s decision making.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session:

Don’t Gamble Your Future…Advance Your Operations Maturity
Wednesday, May 15th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Kevin Clem, Chief Commercial Officer, HBR Consulting
• Marc Allen, Senior Director, HBR Consulting
• Molly Perry, Chief Operating Officer, Office of Legal and Administrative Affairs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• Greg Bennett, Sr. Manager, Legal Operations, Gilead Sciences

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

Is it happening? Is the humble contract finally getting the tech attention it deserves?

For legal departments, contracts have long been the forgotten piece of a company’s digital transformation puzzle. An attorney in the department might be asked to enter the contract process for drafting, negotiation and review, but may place little thought about the process following execution. Confined to paper or perhaps a PDF with eSignature capabilities, the contract never got a second look by the legal department unless it was causing a delay in business or resurfacing during a dispute or, worse, litigation.

Indeed, at first glance at the CLOC Core Competency Model, you’ll be pressed to see a single competency dedicated to the importance of enterprise contract management, especially as it pertains to post-execution contract actions.

But that’s all changing, and fast. According to analysts, companies are giving a hard look at Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) technology that can be used to manage the entire contracting process, from authoring to expiry.

“Customers’ interest in CLM is stronger than ever and is a leading topic raised by users of Gartner’s client inquiry service,” according to the 2018 Gartner Market Guide for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).

This should be music to the ears of legal operations professionals, given the legal headaches that come with traditional contract management.

However, when it comes to deploying CLM, it’s not just a question of if but how. Enterprise-wide deployments provide clear advantages for legal operations departments and their companies—and in fact cut across several CLOC competencies: Not only “Technology and Process Support” but also “Cross Functional Alignment,” “Data Analytics” and other areas.

If you are still unfamiliar with the basics of enterprise-wide contract management, here is a quick “5 Ws” guide to this exciting technology.

What: A Contract Management System for All Contracts

Enterprise contract management allows companies to put all their contracts—sales, procurement, HR, corporate—into a single system for holistic management.

This form of contract management is considered a best practice by analysts, if not commonly practiced in the “first wave” of enterprise contract management deployments.

“Many organizations that have implemented a CLM solution have done so for just a portion of their business or a specific business function. This piecemeal approach frequently results in inefficient process workflows and deployment of multiple CLM tools,” Gartner says in its Market Report.

Often, contracts that originate in one department will have dependencies with a contract in another department. For example, a sales contract may precipitate the need for raw materials to be procured to ensure the deliverable is built to spec (in the contract management field we call this “back-to-back” contracting.) By managing all contracts on a single technology, legal operations teams can gain a holistic view across all a company’s contracts for improved analytics, better workflows and reduced risk.

2. Why? Proven ROI

For historically non-revenue-generating departments like legal, a proven return-on-investment for technology is vital. Thankfully for legal operation professionals, CLM has that covered.

“CLM presents a great opportunity for digital transformation, because it’s practical, well-scoped and executable. The technology is proven, as is the ROI, which companies can use to fund other initiatives on their digital business roadmap,” Gartner reports in its Market Guide.

The value delivered by enterprise contract management can be divided into three categories: acceleration, protection and optimization. Contract turnaround becomes faster, contract risk is proactively surfaced and monitored, and contract performance is continually evaluated to identify areas for improvement.

3. When? Now (And 5 Years from Now)

While CLM adoption has been growing in recent years, we are now at an inflection point of what the software can do for users.

As another report, this one from Forrester, puts it, “The CLM market is growing because more contract managers and legal and financial professionals use CLM to address the challenges of creating, managing, and getting the best business results from their contracts. Contract management and legal pros increasingly trust CLM providers to act as strategic partners, providing firms with the right tools to get the best value from their contracts.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but the upshot is that contract management software is advancing to the point that legal departments—especially those responsible for managing thousands of contracts—can’t afford to manage contracts outside a CLM system.

But legal operations teams shouldn’t only be thinking about what the technology can do for them now, but also five years from now. Like the CLOC Competency Model itself, there is a maturity model to contract management that starts with basics like creating contracts and progresses to capabilities like using artificial intelligence to analyze contract negotiation data and recommend tactics for better outcomes.

This doesn’t happen overnight. Legal operations departments should consider tools that they can “grow into” as their enterprise becomes more comfortable with the technology.

4. Where: Everywhere

With enterprise contract management, everyone with proper permissions in a company can see any contract in its repository, breaking down traditional departmental and geographic silos that have historically hampered optimal contract management.

Vertiv, a global technology manufacturer, has driven a successful deployment of enterprise contract management and now enjoys instant visibility into all of its contracts, even those executed overseas. Prior to implementing an enterprise contract management system, agreements were scattered across the globe, with paper agreement locked in physical file cabinets or on the desktops of its employees. The company underwent a successful transition from a decentralized paper system to a global, searchable central repository so teams everywhere can quickly review purchasing contracts and other agreements and compare them to make sure the company is getting the best terms.

5. Who: You!

Yes, you.

When selecting a CLM vendor, procurement and sales will often advocate for a solution that is tailored specifically to their role, since they often come as part of a larger software suite.

Yet if both sales and procurement—and likely HR as well—get the CLM built for their role, legal will end up working with three or more systems, unnecessarily adding to the technology plate that legal operations would need to manage. Even worse, the body of contracts will be fragmented across the enterprise (as warned against by Gartner earlier).

To avoid this situation, it is incumbent on CLOs and legal operations professionals to lead the push for an enterprise-wide solution for contract management.

Contracts no longer need to be the forgotten piece of a company’s digital transformation puzzle. In fact, guided by these Five Ws, legal operation professionals can lead an enterprise on its journey to transforming their contracts from static documents to strategic assets.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session and learn how a leading legal department transformed through its enterprise contract management.:

Contracts from Static Documents to Strategic Assets
Wednesday, May 15th 10:30 – 11:20
Speakers:

• Colin Flannery, Vertiv Worldwide General Counsel
• Bernadette Bulacan, Icertis Legal Evangelist

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

HBR Consulting is proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of CLOC’s 2019 Corporate Legal Operations Institute and to present one of the educational sessions, “Don’t Gamble Your Future . . . Advance Your Operations Maturity.” In this featured session, we will combine interactive technology with expert guidance to help attendees identify their department’s position on several dimensions of the CLOC Legal Operations Maturity continuum, and will discuss strategies to advance on that continuum in those critical areas. Participants will take home a customized roadmap tailored to help legal operations teams advance to the next level. I hope you will join us!

To help provide context for our session, the HBR team will be publishing a three-part series of blog posts regarding major strategic areas in which law departments can advance in their maturity. This post will focus on the topic of resource optimization and how departments can put the right resources in place to ensure work is done in the most cost-effective and efficient manner. Resource optimization ties to the CLOC competencies of Vendor Management and Service Delivery & Alternative Support Models, and also relates to Cross-Functional Alignment and Organizational Design, Structure & Management.

Importance of Resource Optimization

Most corporate law department professionals are facing some version of the same dilemma: you are under pressure to control costs while at the same time facing rising legal demands. In fact, “cost control and cost management” was the number-one challenge facing corporate law departments last year, according to the 2018 HBR Consulting Law Department Survey The survey also found that over 80% of law departments expect their legal needs will continue to increase this year.

This pressure to deal with increased legal work while holding the reins on spending requires managers to take a hard look at their legal service delivery models and evaluate any opportunities to drive operational efficiencies. In working with our clients, we often find that a good place to start is with identifying potential resource misalignment; for example, when senior-level attorneys are spending too much time performing lower-value tasks instead of focusing on more strategic work.

Optimizing your internal and external resources creates some important benefits for your company:

• Productivity and Client Service – when the skills and expertise of your internal and external teams are properly aligned and leveraged, it directly improves both the department’s productivity level and business clients’ level of service.
• Cost Containment – there is a direct line between more efficient resource allocation and cost expenditures by the department because the work is handled by the most cost-effective resource for the level of work, rather than paying costly resources to handle work that does not require their level of expertise or experience.
• Employee Engagement – efficiently managing your legal talent is an important way to keep attorneys engaged and invested in the roles they play in the organization, boosting morale and elevating their roles.

There are three key steps that any corporate law department can take to optimize their resources and make sure they are properly aligned to maximize efficiency.

Step One: Define the Scope of Work

It is a good idea to start by identifying the tasks and matters under the department’s purview, including an objective evaluation of whether that work is properly within the scope of the legal function. Your goal here should be to empower your business clients with training and self-service options to perform the work that is non-legal in nature, so it can be managed with more appropriate resources.

For the work that is truly is legal in nature, examine the risk and complexity connected to those tasks. Is the assignment one of high risk and/or complexity? If so, it likely has the potential to impact the organization from a financial, operational or reputational standpoint, so it should be resourced accordingly. Or, is the assignment fairly routine and/or a low-risk task? If so, the potential organizational impact is likely to be minimal and can therefore be resourced more cost-efficiently.

Step Two: Identify the Proper Resource

Now that you have defined the scope of work and identified the organizational risks associated with those tasks, it is time to determine the proper resource to get the work done. One decision is whether to keep the work in-house, send it to outside counsel or leverage an alternative legal service provider (ALSP).

For internal resource allocation decisions, seek to delegate the low-risk work as much as possible to junior attorneys or legal support staff as this work tends to require minimal oversight by management. High-complexity work, such as strategic transactions, will of course require greater expertise and should be expected to be handled by more senior and specialized attorneys.

For external resource optimization, make sure you send the right work to the right law firms. While there are some matters that, because of their high risk or high value stakes, require high-end firms, whereas other, more commoditized work can be sent to firms with lower billing rates or set at volume-based pricing. It is essential to build a value-based relationship with each of your outside law firms. Limiting the number of law firms you use to a preferred panel allows outside counsel to become familiar with your business, priorities and matter history, ultimately strengthening the relationship and providing you and the business with stronger representation and better value.

Step Three: Go to the Next Level

The third key is to make resource optimization an ongoing part of the culture of your law department. This requires stretching the limits of what your available department resources can accomplish and structuring your operations a bit differently to maximize the benefits of other potential resources. For example, you may want to create centers of excellence in your department – nimble teams that effectively leverage experienced, professional legal resources (lawyers and allied legal professionals) to handle lower-complexity work (e.g., contracts) in different ways.

In addition to the internal considerations, it is also a good idea to make sure your outside counsel understand your organizational priorities as relate to staffing and are attuned with your expectations regarding proper resource alignment and staffing on the matters they handle for your company. Clear expectations, guidelines and monitoring of matter staffing help law departments better manage their budgets with outside counsel and ensure the work is handled by the most cost-effective resource and help law firms better plan, as well.

Moreover, you may want to expand the way you think about external resources beyond the use of outside counsel. The use of ALSPs for specific types of legal work is gaining wider acceptance by in-house law departments. Challenge yourself to explore some of these new models that may provide a vehicle for greater efficiencies in the way you utilize outside resources.

Resource optimization should be a continuous improvement initiative for your department, not a one-off project exercise. This means you should regularly use data analytics, risk and complexity assessments, and business planning sessions to evaluate the work in your matter portfolio and make sure you are properly aligning your resources to that work. The goal should be to apply your available in-house legal resources to the highest value functions in the most efficient way.

In the next two posts in HBR’s three-part series, my colleagues will explore: the importance of technology to support your department’s advancement on the CLOC maturity continuum; and the use of analytics to measure performance and to guide your department’s decision making.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute!

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session:

Don’t Gamble Your Future…Advance Your Operations Maturity
Wednesday, May 15th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Kevin Clem, Chief Commercial Officer, HBR Consulting
• Marc Allen, Senior Director, HBR Consulting
• Molly Perry, Chief Operating Officer, Office of Legal and Administrative Affairs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• Gary Tully, Head of Legal Operations, Gilead Sciences

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

Annya Dushine, Solutions Consultant, CPA Global
Sam Wiley, Intellectual Property Solutions Architect, CPA Global

Best practice: The term long ago surpassed buzzword status and reached ubiquity. After all, what organisation willfully adopts (let alone admits to adopting) the worst practices when doing business?

For many in the legal operations field—including IP operations professionals—a good starting point toward best practices-oriented strategy is the Core Competency Model laid out by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC). Made up of 12 primary functions (i.e., core competencies), the model represents focus areas that every legal operations department should manage to ensure discipline, efficiency and best outcomes. These competencies also help legal operations departments gauge their own maturity, serving as a benchmark for comparison to your industry peers.

Still, there’s a significant difference between recognising best practices and actually implementing them. When it comes to the latter, many organisations have little to no idea where to start. For companies attempting to evolve their current IP strategies, this can seem particularly challenging. It’s difficult, after all, to view a situation with objectivity when you’re directly in the thick of it.

When you want to know where your IP operations business is lacking and how to implement the best practices necessary to bring it up to par, an IP diagnostic may hold the answers. Here are five ways an IP diagnostic provided by an expert third-party vendor can help your IP department comply with CLOC’s Core Competency Model, but also to make the most of it.

One: Objective Assessment

One of the first steps toward complying with any set of best practices is assessing where you currently stand in regard to them. How compliant are you? Where are you strongest and where are you lacking?

It can be difficult for any organisation to ask difficult questions of itself, and even more difficult to answer honestly. An IP diagnostic performed by a third party can provide the objective view you need to determine where you stand. CPA Global’s IP Diagnostic services, for instance uses a methodology that forces organisations to thoroughly examine itself, and our extensive client base allows for anonymized benchmarking and standards assessment.

Two: Develop a Game Plan

Done well, an IP diagnostic should provide you and your IP operations colleagues with the information and insights you need in order to devise a best practices-oriented strategy—including areas of improvement.

Once the IP diagnostic provider has correctly assessed your maturity level in each core competency, they can apply their expertise in technology and best practices to help you create a plan for improving from one level to the next.

Three: Measure Resource Needs

It’s not enough to have a list of best practices and a strategy: You also need the budget, resources, head count, and executive support to implement those practices and execute that strategy. But—even in the largest, most profitable organization—funds and jobs don’t simply appear just because they’ve been requested. They have to be justified.

Conducted in alignment with CLOC’s Core Competency Model, an IP diagnostic should provide objective, third-party data that supports your resources requests by providing evidence of their necessity and projected benefits.

Four: Expedited Evolution

A best practice IP operations strategy doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes time—and often a lot of it. Indeed, perhaps one of the most frustrating, or at least challenging aspects of implementing best practices is the lengthy amount of time it often takes to identify them, prepare for them, and execute them. Moreover, if you don’t get things right the first time, how much time is lost starting over?

Your IP diagnostic provider should not only be able to tell you how to correctly get started, but how to do so in the most efficient and timely manner. They’ll provide actionable steps along the shortest path from one maturity level to the next.

Five: Continuous Improvement

An IP diagnostic is not a one-and-done project. Instead, it should yield insights and results that your organisation can build on over time, and, if necessary, revisit and revise. After all, much like the technology and innovations produced by your company, trends and best practices in IP operations constantly change and evolve. Your strategy should lend itself to doing the same.

Choose an IP diagnostic provider you can envision working with over and over again, and who you trust to develop a deep understanding of your organization that results in the nuanced, comprehensive strategy you need to take the core competencies to the next level.

For the first time, Intellectual Property tracks will be offered during the 2019 CLOC Vegas Institute. Guided by experts in IP operations, we’ll explore some of the latest innovations and trends in the IP space—including best practices and how to implement them. Join us during the following sessions to learn more.

Don’t Gamble with Your IP: Ante Up for Patents and Trademarks
Tuesday, May 14th 10:30 – 11:20 Monet 1 & 2

Don’t Gamble with Your IP (Part 2): Know When to Hold’em in IP Litigation
Tuesday, May 14th 11:35 – 12:25 Monet 1 & 2

Sittin’ at the Table: Panel Discussion on CLOC IP Core Competency Matrix & Best Practices
Wednesday, May 15th 11:35 – 12:25 Monet 1 & 2

Hit the IP Operations Jackpot with an IP Diagnostic
Wednesday, May 15th 3:35 – 4:05 Bellagio Ballroom 4

Playing with a Full Deck: Best Practices to Build & Maintain Extended Services Teams
Wednesday, May 15th 4:20 – 5:10 Monet 3 & 4

Annya Dushine and Sam Wiley are IP solutions experts from CPA Global, the world’s leading intellectual property management and technology company.

It’s the most exciting time to be in legal operations. With more attention on the role than ever before, legal operations professionals have the opportunity to drive real change through process efficiencies, new technologies, and vendor management – and we’re just scratching the surface.

But with any emerging role comes new challenges – and myths – around the purpose, scope, and responsibilities. In today’s post, we will debunk five of the most common myths we’ve heard about legal operations.

1. Legal Operations is Clearly Defined

Many legal professionals, especially those within the CLOC community, describe legal operations in line with a definition shared by our friend, Dan Baker, Chief of Staff, Director of Legal Operations at Ancestry.

“The legal operations’ role is comprised of CLOC’s twelve core competencies with the ultimate goal of making sure your attorneys are best leveraged to do their jobs, while creating an organization where folks feel valued and want to stay.”

And while this serves as a fantastic baseline for how to define legal operations, the reality is that the function is new – it is quite broad and therefore often adapted to meet the needs of a specific legal team, its departmental maturity, and the company’s overall goals and objectives. For instance, some organizations have legal operations teams primarily handling paralegal work, while others have legal ops focus solely on managing budget or the technology stack. Legal operations comes in many flavors so don’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others when it comes to building out your own legal ops team.

2. “Our Legal Department is Too Small for Legal Operations”

Historically, only mature organizations with large legal departments could afford to bring on a dedicated legal ops function. And it was easiest for them to show the ROI with such a new role and justify headcount. This planted the seed (or in this case, the myth) that in order for legal operations to be warranted, the legal department must reach a specific size – generally VERY large.

But as the 2017 CLOC Annual Survey showed, the attorney to legal operations headcount ratio varies drastically from one industry to the next. At the end of the day, there is no “legal department size guide” to follow though there are general best practices around hiring and expanding legal ops teams.

We’ve also seen that a legal operations hire frequently becoming a GCs first hire. Early legal ops programs facilitate operational rigor and put critical infrastructure in place that can scale as the department grows and their scope of work increases alongside. And just because you don’t have a specific headcount for legal ops, or a full legal operations department, doesn’t mean you’re not investing in it.

3. Legal Operations is JUST Being Great with Technology, Data, and Metrics and Being Part of the Legal Team

There’s no arguing that legal ops plays an instrumental role in ensuring efficient and accurate data collection, which can then be used to make more informed and strategic decisions that not only benefit the department, but the entire company.

But being an excellent legal operations professional goes beyond just fluency in data, metrics, and technology. The best legal operations professionals also have an extensive skill set including:

• Project management
• Executive presence
• Change management
• Presentation skills

It is these skills that allow legal operations to drive great transformation throughout the legal department, cross-functionally with other business units, and for the entire business.

4. Legal Technology Will Solve All Operational Problems

One mistake that legal teams often make is thinking that technology is a fix-all magic button for any problems they face. This is a myth! In the wise words of Mary Shen O’Carroll, Director of Legal Operations, Technology and Strategy at Google and CLOC President, “A new set of golf clubs is not going to make you a better golfer. There are fundamentally other things that need to change and it’s not just the tools that will magically fix that for you.”

Technology doesn’t solve bad process. Legal Operations must first think about how to optimize the processes. Then, they can ask themselves, “How can technology be integrated into this process to help achieve greater results?”

Getting adoption of new technology is a whole other ballgame (and probably worthy of its own post). To ensure adoption of any technology, have a change management program in place. If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend focusing on these five key building blocks to create a successful change management program:

1. Strategy
2. Planning
3. Communication
4. Training
5. Measurement

5. Legal Operations Will Continue to be a Small Community

Legal operations is a new and emerging field, but one that is growing and evolving at lightning speed. As a proud sponsor of CLOC four years in a row (including the institutes in London, EMEA and Australia), we’ve seen it first-hand. The outpouring of support from legal operations professionals – all with different backgrounds and experiences – to swap knowledge and tackle some of the most common legal operations challenges is inspiring. Not only is legal operations is here to stay, the community supporting shows no signs of slowing down.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute!

Can’t get enough legal operations? If you’re attending the 2019 CLOC Institute – register here if you haven’t already – and please join our CLOC session:

Building and Optimizing Modern Legal Departments
Tuesday, May 14th at 10:30am
Speakers:

• Nathan Wenzel | CEO, SimpleLegal
• Frances Pomposo | Director of Legal Operations, Workday
• Lucy Bassli | VP & DGC of Legal Operations, Snowflake

We’ll be discussing what a strong legal ops team looks like, how to leverage and maximize technology, strategies for collaborating with other departments, and the future of legal tech.

And don’t forget to schedule time to meet the SimpleLegal team and check out our modern and intuitive legal operations platform. It’s also the perfect opportunity to pick up your limited edition CLOC swag – we’ve got some exciting surprises in store!