Read the full message here.

We begin this new year in gratitude for this community. The qualities that have always defined CLOC members – innovation, resilience, and a willingness to support others – were on full display in a turbulent, challenging 2020. Our community stepped up, driving our volunteer programs and working hard to find creative answers to our shared problems. We are so appreciative of all of you who contribute your time, energy, and ideas to advancing the cause of legal operations. You remind us that CLOC is so much more than an organization – it is a global movement, powered by the amazing people of this community.

For all its chaos and unpredictability, 2020 was a great year for CLOC. As COVID upended our world, we were forced to scrap our plans, canceling live events and programs. We changed to fit the world around us and to better reach and serve our most important constituents: our members. We adjusted our approach and our organization, strengthening our leadership and professional staff while shifting to digital engagement and virtual programs. We grew our member base and international presence, took big steps forward in redefining our digital experience, and delivered our first ever all-virtual Global Institute.

2021 promises to be just as momentous for our community and our industry. We can expect the most influential factors of the past year – the global shift to a work-from-home model, the increasing pressure on corporate budgets, and the rising emphasis on social justice and representation – to continue to shape our world. After years of slow progress, we are now seeing change at an unprecedented pace and scale.
We are changing too, expanding our membership programs to grow our community and serve more of our ecosystem.

We thrive on transformation. Our mission – to redefine the business of law – is more urgent and relevant than ever. This community has always been about creating and harnessing change. While none of us can say what the future holds, you can be sure that CLOC will have a big role in shaping and improving the Legal industry of tomorrow.

Continue reading the full 2021 Leadership Message >

To stay connected to CLOC, subscribe to our communications in the footer of this page and follow us on LinkedIn. Interested in becoming a member? By joining CLOC, you will open doors to resources and networking opportunities for every stage of your career and become part of a diverse network of people eager to share and collaborate. Learn more and join today.

The current environment has triggered uncertainty and has accelerated change in law departments in struggling and thriving industries. To best manage an ever-changing environment and, at the same time, advance their evolution, law departments must embrace three critical characteristics: they must be agile, value-centric, and tech-enabled. The foundation for this future state is a mature and data-driven legal operations program.

Agile: Nimble, Responsive, and Proactive

Only one thing is evident during the pandemic: everything you think you know will change—and probably more than once. Returning to the office is just one example of that uncertainty: in roundtables over the last several months, HBR asked law department leaders what percentage of their employees they expect to return to the office in 2021. Over the previous quarter, an increasing number of law department leaders anticipate less than half of their department members return to the office in 2021.

To respond to the ever-shifting environment and clients’ ever-changing needs, law departments must be agile and responsive, continually flexing to meet emerging areas of need. The ability to be responsive to emerging client needs requires effectively allocating and empowering resources in an organizational framework.

Alignment with client needs. While the practice of law is often reactive, there is now a heightened need for structured, proactive alignment with client priorities. Business needs to address a variety of new or urgent priorities quickly.

Leverage model. With the appropriate mix of experience within their attorney ranks and the proper allocation of non-attorney resources, law departments can easily assign work to the right resource level. With the right mix doing the appropriate work, productivity will increase, costs will be lower, and employees will be more engaged.

Organization structure. Concentrating repetitive work such as contracts or research into centralized resource groups (centers of excellence) can allow other resources to flex to areas of need that require more nuanced support.

Resource empowerment. Agile law departments have a culture that empowers individuals and teams to make decisions and react quickly in a fluid environment. Ongoing professional development and cross-training will give team members the skills and knowledge to be confident. In the current climate, creative and continued employee engagement is also critical.

Value Centric: Emphasizing Value While Managing Cost

Value-centric means ensuring that a department’s resources, internal and external, are focused on the highest value tasks and activities. Value centric law departments analyze the work to be done, optimize the processes for performing it, rationalize external spend on law firms and other service providers, and monitor their performance.

In the current environment, cost is a significant value consideration for law departments. Our roundtable polls indicate that law department operations leaders’ priorities have shifted since the onset of the pandemic. In April, talent-related issues were top of mind, as departments scrambled to adjust to the work-from-home environment. By June, the top priority was cost management, even in industries less adversely affected by the pandemic.

Internal value. With new work and personal issues drawing on people’s time, law departments need to maximize their leverage models’ effectiveness, finding new ways of working, and focusing on the highest value activities and tasks. Increasingly, forward-looking departments are working to track and monitor team activity to ensure the department focuses on the highest value work.

External value. To maximize the value received from outside counsel, law departments tighten their partnerships with existing preferred panel firms and rationalize which firms they choose to use based on the alignment between cost and the value received. When reviewing RFPs, leading law departments look for differentiating value—external providers’ opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of client needs.

Tech Enabled: Supporting Agility, Value Centricity and More

The current environment has brought technology to the forefront – technology tools have helped some departments thrive while others have recognized their deficiencies. Technology can drive efficiency, improve decision making, and consistency in delivering legal support and services, including providing underlying support and measurement for departments’ efforts to be agile and value-centric. But with the proliferation of available technology tools and cost management pressures, it is essential for law departments to ensure that their legal tech stack is (a) aligned with their strategic objectives and (b) adopted by end-users to provide its intended value.

Alignment with strategic objectives. Law departments should continually recalibrate their legal technology strategy, aligning technology strategy with the department’s overall strategy. In the current environment, that alignment includes taking into account the “new normal,” such as working from home and enforcing controls more effectively. Still, it is crucial not to lose sight of longer-term strategic goals.

Enabling technology tools should be right-sized for their intended purpose and support efficient processes, consistent tracking, and robust reporting. Generally, a law department’s operational model should leverage an enterprise legal management (ELM) system as one of its central tools, supported by additional tools to address practice area-specific needs. For example, while transactional functions have sometimes felt underserved by traditional, litigation-focused technology, leading law departments are now leveraging workflow and contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to serve transactional functions better. HBR’s roundtable discussions indicate that law departments are currently prioritizing analytics tools and workflow tools instead of more nascent technology such as AI. Analytic tools can facilitate decision-making regarding spending, resource allocation, and more, and workflow tools can help a department more agilely, timely, and equitably respond to client needs.

Maximizing investment through adoption.

Based on HBR’s roundtable discussions, we find that most law departments focus on maximizing their existing investments—completing implementations and working to ensure adoption by end-users to justify the investment. Most roundtable participants are currently seeing a significant or moderate uptick in user adoption (necessity can drive use), but much of the information they gather is anecdotal or based solely on log-ins. To understand the actual level of adoption, law departments must measure actual usage and monitor relevance. As a result, HBR and others are developing new tools to help law departments better track how users are interacting with legal technology.

Conclusion  

To continue to evolve, law departments must be proactive in shaping their future, taking a strategic, forward-looking view. The concepts presented here are not new, but the current environment offers a unique opportunity to accelerate the evolution towards becoming agile, value-centric, and tech-enabled law departments of the future. Simply reacting to the pandemic’s challenges and its fallout is not enough—seize the moment because the future is now.

By Brian McGovern

It used to be that there were good – though not existential – business reasons to create a technology roadmap for the legal department. When developing such a roadmap, one criterion upon which legal operations evaluated legal tech products, in addition to their ROI performance, was their ability to deliver value for an extended duration. Still, developing a technology roadmap hardly seemed like a life-or-death concern. That was pre-COVID-19.  

Today, organizations find themselves with urgent, immediate reasons to put that roadmap in place. 

Why? Because technology is, of course, one of the three pillars of operational success, alongside people and process.  And people and processes have been disrupted during this pandemic. How the legal department/organization’s technology behaves in this new normal will either sustain or pose a risk to business continuity. Therefore, the legal tech stack’s ability to help support business continuity during periods of profound disruption is required. The legal ops team must build a legal tech stack that enables the legal department and the organization to adjust to predictable and unanticipated disruptions. 

When building a legal tech stack capable of delivering both bottom-line business value and resilience over the long term, keep these best practices in mind.

Avoid being reactive

It’s not easy: At a time like this, it’s very tempting to make technology decisions based on the immediate demands placed upon your department and organization. 

Last year, a study by Hyperion Global Partners found that 39% of tech investment decisions were strategic, with an eye on long-term value, and guided by understanding the need to integrate technology with operational requirements.  However, 35% of tech investment decisions were reactive, spurred by the arrival of new versions of legacy software, shiny new technologies, or other “perfunctory factors” like changes in the technology market. 

I’d suggest that 2020 legal tech stack purchase decisions run the risk of being very reactive due to the pandemic’s challenges, including most if not all employees working from home.  Rather than merely adopting “quick fixes,” though, you need to consider whether or not a solution has the flexibility and scalability to deliver value beyond the immediate circumstances.   

Put a data strategy in place first

According to bestselling author Bernard Marr, 

“Data is revolutionizing the way we all do business. Every business is now a data business and needs a robust Data Strategy. However, less than 0.5% of all data is ever analyzed and used, offering huge potential for organizations when trying to leverage this key strategic asset.” 

Legal departments possess a staggering amount of data. Still, it may be silo’ed or located in disparate locations – from emails to matter files to personal databases – so putting it to use can be difficult.  It’s crucial to develop a comprehensive data strategy that aligns with business objectives, resulting in meaningful legal metrics to drive better decision-making, better outcomes, and maximum business value.

Your legal tech stack should support that strategy and be built around collecting, managing, analyzing, and reporting the correct data to execute it. Don’t make a technology investment unless it supports that strategy.  The tail shouldn’t wag the dog, but that’s what’s happening if the technologies you’ve deployed are dictating your data strategy.  A lousy tech investment decision made because there was no data strategy in place can hang over your head – and drag on your KPIs – for a long time to come.

Accelerate your power to pivot

No matter how sophisticated a company’s tech stack may seem, it has to support efficient and agile processes to sustain business continuity during “normal” times and crises.  

Therefore, process automation must be a cornerstone technology for a legal tech stack.  It empowers legal ops teams to quickly and easily design, build, and deploy processes that are incredibly cost-effective and error-free, which are essential benefits even during “normalcy.” When disruptions strike, its ability to help you pivot immediately to implement new processes to cope with sudden impacts can be critical.   

For example: Some of the processes that were developed and deployed by providers and users during the early weeks of COVID-19 included workflows for vetting legal vendor continuity, tracking health checks, obtaining onsite visit request approvals, even for remote work management.

This ability to quickly react to a global pandemic’s challenges illustrates the day-to-day value of process automation to a legal tech stack.  Starting, you can address high-volume, immediate-need tasks. Your success in streamlining them builds your case for automating more and more processes, even outside of the legal department, which means “Legal” can lead the way toward organization-wide agility and resilience.  Another benefit?  To your internal reputation.  As Jeff Marple, Innovation Director for Liberty Mutual Insurance told us:

“Legal wasn’t originally a process or tech-forward organization within Liberty Mutual. Now we have developed several internal client-facing workflows that our clients just love, and that has changed the reputation.  Legal now leads the organization with process automation deployments.”

Drive legal staff adoption

A key measure of long term success for any legal tech stack?  Immediate and ongoing legal staff adoption.  So find ways to get users excited about the business value these new tools offer: 

• Improve client service by decreasing response times and client frustration
• Improve legal department efficiency and performance
• Reduce menial and mundane work, and increase time for substantive work 

What’s also important?  Who you involve in your initial adoption efforts.  Focus on people who will be impacted by new technology who represent different functional areas; target people who are always coming up with new ideas and are passionate about operational improvement.

To convert those who may be reluctant, here’s a tactic suggested by George Grawe, SVP and Deputy Chief Counsel at Allstate and a longtime pioneer in driving legal process innovation:

“(People) will say they have a more efficient way to do things…you need to get in the trenches with folks to see how they do their job. If you can find a way to have the technology complement the way they do their work, they become your change champions.”

By co-opting adopters who are enthusiastic about the technology, you’ll be able to manage early adoption issues better and make steady progress in improving the stack over time.  By enlisting them, you’re building a core of legal tech evangelists who’ll help you drive even broader adoption and make your tech stack “future-proof” in a very fundamental way: By making it invaluable to the entire organization.

—-

Brian McGovern is General Manager, Workflow Solutions at Mitratech, and led one of the largest global enterprise legal management software implementations ever at a global insurance provider. At Mitratech, he’s obsessed with helping clients navigate selecting and implementing legal technology so they can drive meaningful value that positively impacts their business.

Before remote work became encouraged or enforced due to COVID-19, General Counsel (GC) conducted their work with virtual systems and processes. Many legal departments were already comfortable with Cloud-based file storage, collaboration, and matter management systems. Think of the virtual legal teams working in multiple jurisdictions. They are experts in ‘following the sun’ and offering legal guidance to the business in various time zones. 

If you’re a GC reading this, you probably have your remote working conditions well established in your legal department, and things are ticking along nicely. But as we begin to move beyond the current circumstances, these four tips will help your legal department look forward to more strategic and better ways of doing business.

1. Protect client and vendor data 

The threat of an internal or external data breach is a liability for all organizations. Remote working conditions exacerbate the danger by introducing more variables into the work environment. Legal departments managing trade secrets and confidential client information have an ethical duty to secure this information from unauthorized and inadvertent exposure. The Director of Aon’s Cyber Solutions Group, Chris McLaughlin, spoke to Thomson Reuters recently, alerting GCs to virtual workplace risks. 

“We know that threat actors are actively targeting individuals at home. They target virtual private networks to try and get access to corporate systems, and some organizations have had their physical premises broken into,” said Chris. 

With sophisticated global cyber-attacks occurring regularly, here are two measures you’ll want to revisit, should a policy or operational process need updating: 

• Safe and secure file sharing: Basic email attachments are risky when sharing files and spreadsheets with sensitive or confidential information. Cloud-based collaboration platforms can help your organization implement best-practices and a more connected culture as they enable users, internal and external, to quickly and securely share vast amounts of information.
• Data breach response preparedness: Do you have a response plan if your legal team or someone in your organization reports a data breach? GCs must establish policies and procedures for their legal department to manage the situation as soon as a breach occurs and to mitigate additional data breaches in the aftermath. Be mindful of the organization’s legal responsibilities in your jurisdiction when a data breach occurs. For example, all 50 states have adopted data breach notification statutes, many with sector-specific provisions. Requirements vary widely, and there is no federal-level statute.

2. Generate advanced matter and spend analytics

COVID-19 has had an impact on legal spending in some regions more than others. The 2020 edition of the Legal Department Operations (LDO) Index from Thomson Reuters found a slight trend towards increasing budgets in the US, with 22% of respondents seeing a budget decrease and 32% reporting a budget increase in the last twelve months.

Legal departments are often seen as cost centers rather than strategic partners and are always under pressure to demonstrate their value to the broader organization, usually by focusing on efficiency. Suppose you’re looking to be more strategic on your legal spend for the business. In that case, the ability to report back to your stakeholders with advanced spend and matter management analytics is a must. 

If you don’t have a dedicated matter management platform, it may be time to build a business case for one. An effective matter management platform provides you with the transparency you need to control your department’s outside counsel legal spend and the clarity your executive team requires. Matter management analytics can drive better decisions and reduce your department’s overall costs.

3. Streamline contract creation and management 

Automating legal contracts and documents is a game-changer to those familiar with the innovative practice. A contract management system customized to your needs can connect your legal team with the rest of the business. This strategic technology can reduce the burden on your lawyers for guidance on minor matters so that they can spend more time on higher-level work. 

Platform solutions provide the building blocks to deliver multiple legal and business solutions in a unified user experience. They enable you to automate contract creation and approval, identify and manage risk, and monitor obligations and compliance through one central hub. And as the business grows and evolves, it’s easy to adapt and scale a platform to accommodate new processes.

4. Champion internal and external communication

As a strategic legal adviser to your organization, responsive communication is essential. Suppose you are a leader of your legal team, such as the GC or Legal Operations Director. In this case, a strategic move could foster an internal culture of knowledge-sharing and thought leadership. You can achieve this through platform solutions that offer a complete digital workplace for your organization, giving users a better way to collaborate, communicate, and connect with their team.

Championing innovative communication with your law firm advisers is beneficial, too. For example, if you have an urgent legal matter and need to call in external counsel for expert advice, you want to submit the brief to them effectively and fast. 

Seamless collaboration and communication are inherent in platform solutions. You can work on shared files and act fast on legal matters that require you and your adviser’s urgent attention. Look for an adviser that is just as innovative as you, so you can work together to handle complex legal issues that arise when needed. 

Features like these help gain stakeholder buy-in for legal technology because cloud-based platforms have dozens of use-cases not only for your legal team but also for marketing departments and human resources.

With these four strategic, in-house tips now on your radar, which one resonates with you? Find out more about how you can build your virtual workplace through a connected legal hub with Thomson Reuters.

A recent report from Forrester Research,  called contracts the “beating heart” of a business. “Contracts,” the report noted, “define the relationships that companies have with their customers, suppliers, partners, and employees.”

For lawyers and the legal operations professionals that support them, this insight should get hearts pounding. Trained in law school 1L Contracts classrooms and finely honed in corporate boardrooms, corporate counsel pride themselves on being masters of business negotiation chess. As legal counsel, they know what they should fight for, what they can let slide, and what they can ignore; that’s why most legal departments (“Legal” manage a company’s large volume of contracts in-house and rarely outsource this work to outside counsel. It’s also why Legal Department Operations professionals (LDOs) spend considerable time thinking about how to leverage a new generation of business technology to streamline contract management across the organization—and get these critical documents out of people’s inboxes and into the Cloud. (One recent survey put LDO adoption of contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology at about 80%).

Finally, the humble paper contract, and the process to negotiate it, is getting the recognition and upgrade that it deserves.

Is Legal Living Up to the Task?

Even though Legal is one of many “touches” in a contract’s life cycle, its failure to be strategic and act as a valued partner to the business is a frequent criticism. Given Legal’s heavy involvement in the “beating heart” of an organization, it must evaluate if it is doing as much as it can to support the business through its negotiation of these documents.  

• Does it understand what the business needs from its contracts?
• Is it negotiating contracts that truly maximize the value of the business’s relationships?
• Is it negotiating contracts that are fully aligned with the business?

Data Suggests It Might Not Be.

In its recent “Most Negotiated Terms” report, World Commerce and Contracting (WCC)[1] found that legal professionals, when negotiating a contract, focus on clauses that protect the business from a potential failure than on facilitating success. The survey suggests that the contract language Legal spends the most time negotiating is not the language that will significantly impact the commercial outcomes.

Does this mean lawyers have been focusing on the wrong thing?

No, risk management remains critical. But it does suggest opportunities for Legal to expand its consideration of what makes a good contract a great one. With the help of LDOs, here are some recommendations for corporate counsel to transform themselves from being perceived as mere legal counselors to becoming strategic and valued partners to the business:

1. Consider adding “relational terms” to your templates and playbooks.

First, let’s define a better contract. There is a growing recognition in contracting circles that “relational terms” should receive more attention when drafting agreements. WCC defines “relational terms” as terms that “help us adapt and adjust.”

WCC notes:

“They may include a more formal approach to the frequency and method of communications, or clearer definitions of data exchange, or greater rigor in defining the procedures for change management.”

These relational clauses are:

 “… essential to sustaining relationships, managing uncertainty, and securing improved performance.”

Relational clauses look beyond how a contract relationship might end and focuses on sustaining the relationship and creating optionality for the business when there’s less certainty during the relationship.

The Forrester report cited above corroborates this. Among firms Forrester surveyed, 76% of firms with “mature” contract management programs focus on contracts as not only risk management tools but instruments with which their companies can create value.

• Improve Cross-Functional Alignment by Prioritizing Information Flows and Sharing

Now you might be thinking, “Easier said than done.” How can Legal fully know what the business agreed to or what its delivery teams need to keep its relationships on track?  If an organization’s workflows exist in silos, the answer is, it can’t.

Negotiating more valuable contracts requires Cross-Functional Alignment—one of the CORE 12 from CLOC. CLOC defines Cross-Functional Alignment as  the ability to “create and drive relationships with other key company functions, such as HR, IT, Finance and Workplace Resources.”

To facilitate complete alignment with the business, Legal must gain full visibility upstream and downstream. LDOs should consider working across functions to get corporate counsel involved early in deals and fine-tune the information Legal collects in its intake procedure, such as:

• What is the business trying to achieve with this agreement?
• How should this contract work?
• What are the signals that something is going awry?
• If something goes awry, what additional safety valves should Legal add to protect the business?
• Once a contract is executed, what type of information should Legal share with the business stakeholders managing the contract? 

• Get A Little Help from Organization-Wide Technology and Contract Data Pools

Some highly seasoned negotiators might already use relational terms or have relationships with the business that provide a deep understanding of a transaction or deal. But to scale it and bake it into the process for the benefit of the entire organization, the business needs a shared contracting platform that the cross-functional departments will adopt and use. (i.e., a platform not exclusively built for Legal!).

Organization-wide contract lifecycle management (CLM) creates a single source of truth that all contract stakeholders can trust, to improve contract performance. For Legal, this might mean aggregating conversations and information exchanged between the contracting parties and sharing it with Legal before any drafting and negotiations are conducted. Following execution of the contract, it might mean using obligation management tools to monitor performance and create pools of data about contract risk and performance.  

In the aggregate, Legal can pool data that will improve the entire contracting process by:

• Identifying the most frequent deviations from standard clauses.
• Facilitating template or playbook modifications to address these deviations.
• Identifying repeated sticking points that continuously slow down negotiations (potentially getting business relationships off on the wrong foot)?

Post-execution, Legal can surface insights on contract performance to make data-driven decisions on which clauses and templates are delivering the most value and which are leading to disputes or under-performance. Given the WCC data above, clauses leading to disputes should get a hard look to determine if more accommodating, mutually beneficial language can improve the template.

The Rise of Contract Intelligence

Ultimately, companies can arrive at a place where Contract Intelligence becomes Business Intelligence (another CLOC Core 12 Competency). With full visibility and continuous real-time data, Legal and Legal Ops increase their business impact on the organization – and better yet, have the metrics to prove it.

Legal can experience efficiencies by streamlining contracting processes across the organization. But more valuable will be the data pools and business intelligence created from these more efficient workflows. Contract intelligence goes well beyond contract management. It can empower organizations to continuously improve outcomes by focusing on the “heart” of their business.

[1] Formerly International Association of Commerce and Contract Management). The “Most Negotiated Terms” report relied on a broad survey of legal and contracting professionals.

Bernadette Bulacan serves as Vice President and Lead Global Evangelist, at Icertis, the recognized leader for enterprise contract management. She shares contract management best practices and innovations with corporate counsel and contracting professionals.

Minimizing the cost of change—such that we derive value from the technology we invest in at low costs of adoption is an essential goal for just about every department in every organization. It’s also a substantial challenge. And in no department is this more true than legal—and, more specifically,Legal Operations.

Here, unique challenges exist. For a good reason, lawyers focus on risk: reducing it, safeguarding their organizations against it, and combating it when it manifests into a real threat. As a result, lawyers can be wary of process-level innovations, such as those requiring change because innovation introduces new risk variables.

This wariness makes sense and is ultimately a good thing. The legal department serves as a crucial business partner within their organizations, connecting to and impacting every part of the business. Systems for completing NDAs, for example, impact how quickly business conversations can start. Ensuring contracts are quickly signed affects sales velocity. Employee agreements can influence hiring processes.

Keeping the above in mind, legal’s comparatively conservative ethos for the tech sector serves as an essential counterbalance to predominantly innovation-focused mindsets. But as the rest of the business world moves forward, embracing increasingly powerful means of innovation that differentiate companies competitively, this same counterbalance can be an obstacle to embracing innovation and adapting to the change innovation requires, threatening to hold companies back.

For Legal Operations teams to be highly strategic partners within their organizations, they should push the organization forward. But how do you overcome the pushback? And once you do that, how do you ensure the new systems create real, tangible, appreciable value without requiring change?

Here are a few strategies.

Strategy #1: Reduce app-dependency.

A primary impediment to implementing more innovative and efficient processes and technological solutions in Legal Operations is the thinking that attempting to do so requires forcing employees to learn how to use yet another app.

Or, at least we think it does.

In truth, what innovative processes do is reduce the number of applications and software tools employees use. That new processes succeed in doing this is particularly crucial in the legal ops context, seeing how the employees we serve are uniquely allergic to new tech. Our goal should be to enable our people to focus purposefully on the right work. The more the legal department relies on disparate, static, siloed apps, the harder it is for our people to do that.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, the functional limitations of the applications we employ today — Asana, Onit, TeamConnect, Slack, Jira, and email — constrict us. Worse – the more applications we introduce into a process, the more those apps lose their power. Rather than enabling us, they burden us and limit our productivity because of what they can’t do, necessitating manual workarounds and fostering bottlenecks.

To create operations that truly increase our people’s power and capacity—without annoying them—we need to make our internal processes dependent on as few apps as possible, so that these manual workarounds and bottlenecks are removed.

Strategy #2: Reduce developer & IT dependency.

Just as depending on another app to address every process challenge is impractical, it’s similarly impractical to rely on your developers and IT department to minimize the pain of change.

Look, developers are influential, but relying on them to build custom solutions all the time inevitably delays your ability to problem-solve or adapt quickly—customization in this context bogs down your developers, IT, and your Legal Ops teams.

Custom-built solutions for the legal department increase your Legal Ops team’s workload. Custom-building solutions require legal ops teams to play a product manager’s role, working directly with developers to define the department’s business requirements. As the solution moves through development, developers look to the Legal Ops team to quality engineer the app. Once the app is ready to be launched, the Legal Ops team will be responsible for training everyone to use it.

This strategy is directly counterproductive to reducing developer and design dependency. We are introducing a custom-built solution that frustrates impacted employees just as much as introducing another “off-the-shelf” app—and relying on IT to get it done.

Remember, one goal here is to empower Legal Operations to react and function as needed, without a heavy reliance on your IT department. Introducing custom-built apps won’t accomplish that.

Strategy #3: Minimize user interfaces.

Perhaps the chief problem with attempting to innovate for efficiency in the legal ops context by buying or building new apps is that both strategies require employees to learn new interfaces. That this is inherently challenging is something Legal Operations teams have to understand. And this is true not only for complicated pieces of tech but for seemingly simple applications, too.

It’s crucial that instead of continuously increasing the number of interfaces, employees learn to use and derive value from those that currently exist.

Our organizations are at an inflection point. We have a decision to make regarding how we want to work in the future. In one direction: the end is adopting new apps (and in the process, increasing risk and exposure), or remaining stagnant and falling behind as an organization.

In the other direction is a kinder, happier, more empathetic future that lends credence to people’s needs, preferences, and unique abilities. The processes and systems with which they power organizations prove flexible, dynamic, and adaptive.

We must choose the latter path, especially in the context of Legal Operations. To do so is both prudent and moral. Legal Operations can be a practical and strategic business partner, capable of introducing new processes and optimizing existing ones without pushback. In this sense, it can also be a catalyst for adopting systems that improve employees’ lives.

If you’re interested in learning more about either Tonkean or Adaptive Business Operations, visit Tonkean.com. And check out our Legal Operations ebook here!

Organizations credit digital transformation with reducing costs, increasing agility, and delivering enhanced and new services. A possible unforeseen outcome of digital transformation is a rising volume of digital documents and information generated by business systems.

Digitally managing this increasing volume of documents presents a particular challenge for the legal industry. Law firms and legal departments require easy document accessibility and specific needs around workflow and collaboration.  There is no time in history when these needs have been more acute than in 2020 when remote working is the norm rather than the exception.

Traditional document management systems focused on helping enterprises organize and manage their documents. As these systems’ use increased, users found that they could not meet modern law departments and legal professionals’ needs.

Defining Modern Document Management

Modern document management is the next stage in the evolution of productivity solutions for corporate legal departments and users. These systems deliver an intuitive, consumer-like experience that empowers professionals to work more productively and collaboratively. At the same time, they enable corporate legal departments to be more efficient, agile, and responsive to the changing business environment.

1. Value to the User: The central tenet of modern document management is to empower the user by delivering a dramatically better experience. Its platform mirrors consumer applications like Amazon and Google, with intuitive features that work the way users want to work and requires minimal training. Modern document management starts with a clean, modern interface, accessible on any device, including personal computers, phones, or tablets. These systems store documents and emails with their associated project or matter, so users see the complete picture without bouncing between information silos. And it is seamlessly integrated with the authoring applications that people use every day, including Microsoft Word, Outlook, Gmail, and others.

2. Value to the information: Modern document management adds smart features and capabilities to enhance the value of information stored in documents and emails. For example, it displays document history and other metrics in intuitive visual dashboards and timelines. It anticipates user actions with smart document previews, suggested filing locations, and personalized search. And it integrates seamlessly with the tools legal professionals use, including matter management, contract management, and workflow software.

3. Value to the organization: Improving the individual user experience while enhancing the value of information delivers profound benefits at the organizational level. Modern document management helps legal organizations become more efficient and productive and deliver better outcomes for the business. Increased user experience drives user adoption and increases the amount of content stored in an organized and secure environment.  The system reduces the time spent – across the department – searching for the correct document. More importantly, it retains the department’s institutional knowledge, captured in documents and emails.

4. Comprehensive Governance and Security: The final tenet of modern document management is comprehensive security and governance. Legal organizations have stringent requirements for document security from both internal and external threats. This content requires comprehensive security protections, built on established industry best practices, to secure information assets and govern who can access them. Data is encrypted at every stage of the process, with security permissions defined by content type and automatically applied across all documents or email.

Real-World Case Study

To further illustrate these concepts, it’s helpful to consider a real-world law department example. A large multinational corporation with operations in 180 countries worldwide recently evaluated its legal technology environment. Their in-house team found that they struggled to manage their information resources effectively and identified specific pain points associated with finding, sharing, and uploading information. Their analysis showed that legal department employees needed to search and access four documents every day. The searches fall into three main categories:

• “Easy” searches for documents the user has personally touched recently – 10-20 minutes
• “Warm” searches for documents where the user has some confidence – 30 minutes-2 hours
• “Precedent” searches where the user is looking for previously created content – 1-5 days

When calculating the business impact of this challenge across the department, it became evident that the productivity loss associated with inefficient document search was substantial. They found that data was stored in silos leaving users no single source of truth for business information. The result was a loss of speed and accuracy in searching for information, significantly limiting their ability to find and leverage precedent.

After conducting an evaluation and proof of concept, Legal Operations determined they would roll out a modern document management solution to enable knowledge sharing and leverage their information’s power. They based their decision on believing that they could deliver measurable value by better enabling legal work processes and products. Their objective was to deliver more than a traditional document management system.  They wanted to provide a complete legal information, knowledge, and workflow management solution. A modern document management solution’s core value is transforming how legal professionals get work done, improving productivity, enhancing user experience, increasing knowledge sharing, and improving the overall quality of legal services delivered to the business.

October 2020 | Raj Sethurama, Chief Technology Officer, Wolters Kluwer

Organizations and adapt, but now they must do so at a faster clip than ever. The rate of change happening today is significantly greater than it was two decades ago, making change management an ever-present challenge in every industry. Generally speaking, change is driven by both external and internal factors.

Grand technology shifts, like the release of the iPhone in 2007, are one example of the former category. No one imagined how the small, handheld device wcould transform the way customers across industries work and live.

Internal factors, on the other hand, refer to the people and processes within an organization. Some companies pride themselves on being agile. For others, the way they operate is part of their DNA, making change much harder.

No matter what your starting line looks like, the reality is that all organizations must learn to manage change to stay competitive. Because good change management means the ability to adapt, there’s no magic formula for it. Yet over the years, I’ve been able to identify some steps that consistently put business leaders on the right path.

1. Assess the current state of your organization. Before your organization can move toward its goals, you must have a good understanding of where you’re coming from. Assess your organization’s current state via the balanced scorecard approach, which offers four different measures of the status quo. Next, be sure you can make a clear business case for disrupting the current state and what that disruption should look like for various stakeholders: customers, employees, shareholders, and so on. These early steps can lay an essential foundation for long-term change.
2. Clearly define your end goal. Defining a clear end goal before you start is crucial because it allows you to outline a timeline. Everything should be time-boxed and rolled out in phases. Apply the change to a small group first and see how it goes before you iterate. It’s OK if you fail the first time. However, having a time limit on that failure is crucial to ensuring success by the established deadline.
3. Understand that it’s not a one-person job. Business leaders can’t have a savior complex when it comes to implementing change. You don’t need to make all the changes yourself, even if you have all the skills to do so. One previous employer of mine tried to drive change by assigning the task to executives. I saw this fail firsthand. Instead, identify a team of change agents with the right skill sets, mindsets, and passions regardless of their organizational level. It’s their job to inspire and support people on the ground. Sometimes, to ensure widespread buy-in, it could be useful to rotate change agents and have them recruit their own.
4. Communicate constantly. Having change agents means having an avenue to communicate with your employees on an ongoing basis about progress. Be honest and transparent — even about failures. When things don’t go as planned, say so. This shows that your organization is willing to recognize failure and quickly adapt to move in the direction of success.
5. Benchmark against best-in-class. External factors shouldn’t just be a catalyst for change; you should keep them in mind throughout the journey. It’s important to keep a pulse on the market throughout any transformation. In a previous organization, I remember one project my team had worked diligently on. We kept our head down and focused on all the steps outlined here. However, by the time we launched, others had already developed the mobile technology we were working on. The landscape had changed. To avoid such a situation, have your change agents benchmark against competitors and visit other companies for ideas on methodology and process.
6. Be prepared for resistance. Some employees will inevitably be resistant to change. In these cases, try to understand their hesitation or motivation. Ask honestly why the change is a challenge and what’s causing panic. Maybe they’re worried their job is at risk or they lack the right skill set. If you take the time to talk to employees, you can understand their mindsets and explain how the change fits into their career goals. Of course, some people will be unable to articulate their resistance and won’t want to be part of the journey. In that case, you must be prepared to make tough decisions. If you can’t get someone to buy in, they may not be the right person for the job at the time.
7. Realize that success requires failure. As already mentioned, change management is not a one-step process. You will have to iterate and learn many times over. However, with those iterations, you’ll begin to see success. People will start to see the impact of change — whether that means more quickly delivering value to customers or simply not falling behind as competition gets stiffer. When that happens, change will become a movement. Your team can organize around it, and people should buy in even more.

The reality is that change is non-negotiable, even in seemingly slower-paced industries. Technologies are changing the way employees and customers alike go about their business. If you don’t adapt, you’ll be left behind. The good news is that adapting isn’t as much of an uphill battle as many think. By engaging change agents across the organization, accepting failure, and clearly defining your goals and competition, you can help change management become a movement that breeds success.

Earlier this year, CLOC made the decision to transition the in-person experience to an online global experience this November. While this was a difficult decision to make, it gave CLOC a chance to focus on providing valuable content for legal professionals in a multi-time zone environment. 

CLOC Institutes are known as “the event of the year” for legal professionals across the entire ecosystem to come together to connect, learn, and collaborate.  If you have ever been to one of these events,  you know it’s an experience that’s hard to replicate. But not for CLOC. We understand that during this time where our lives are adjusting, we have the opportunity to meet you where you are, regardless of where you are located. 

CLOC recognizes that transitioning to an online event requires a considerable amount of thought and timely execution. It’s also more than creating webinars and finding speakers, it’s about delivering value, engagement, education, and networking. 

Before CLOC began planning the program, it was important to hear from CLOC members and law firm participants.  CLOC launched the Personalize Your Virtual Experience survey to gain insights into what challenges legal professionals were facing, what they wanted to learn, and how they wanted to engage with other attendees. The survey received responses from legal professionals all over the world including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. 

People responded when asked “What is one thing that you want to learn or experience at the Global Institute?” and the responses below helped shape the agenda, topics, and speakers to give attendees exactly what they asked for. 

“I want to hear about the latest trends and how we compare to what other firms and in-house teams are experiencing.” – Director of a Law Firm

“I am curious to learn how other organizations with large legal departments are structuring their Legal Ops Team to support their business and what are their current priorities.” – Manager of Corporate Legal Department

“I want to learn how to drive innovation in the legal industry with my peers and my organization’s stakeholders.” – Vice President of a Corporate Legal Department

“I want to learn how to empower changes that need to happen in an environment that is comfortable with how things currently are.” – Program Manager for a Corporate Legal Department

CLOC is excited to bring the Institute to you and provide optimal opportunities to once again gather to connect, learn, and collaborate, an experience delivered to your desktop.

Here is what you can look forward to with an all access pass to the CLOC Global Institute:

Exhibit Hall: Over 40 technology providers, service providers, and law firms will be ready to meet you and provide more information about their products and services. Don’t be shy! Engage with them at their booth by asking questions in live chat, watch demo videos, and get access to downloadable documents, all geared to teach you how to make your role more efficient. As a bonus, you can get a chance to win a free lunch or free swag!

Meet the Change Makers: The first session will include senior executives from influential organizations including EY, Harvard, Orrick, and VMWare, as they discuss how legal disruption is an opportunity for change, ways to design for a new future and will share their bold thoughts on where you need to go and how you get there.  

General Counsel Panel Discussion: Hear general counsels from large enterprise organizations like Coca-Cola, easyJet, and Microsoft as they discuss the current state of the legal industry, trends that have impacted the way that legal does business, and what to expect moving forward despite the constant change that you experience. 

Panelists include Badley Gayton who joined Coca-Cola after nearly 20 years at Ford Motor Company, serving in various roles from Global Trade Taxation & Customs to Legal Affairs for Canada, Mexico, and South America to General Counsel. He is joined by Maaike de Bie from easyJet after several years at Royal Mail and now leads a mid-size legal team that supports an affordable airline operation that transported 96 million passengers, in more than 1000 routes to over 30 countries around the world last year.  Both are joined by Dev Stahlkopf who leads a large legal team of 500 at Microsoft, one of the world’s largest organizations, and was featured as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in 2019. This is a session you won’t want to miss.

Breakout Sessions: The Global Institute agenda includes 14 sessions throughout the day, which gives you an opportunity to choose one of two sessions each hour to view live or on-demand. 

Here are some of the confirmed sessions today. CLOC has more abstract proposals to review and will be adding even more sessions to the agenda.

• Making Impact as a Leader in the Distributed World will be an interactive experience to show you how to be purposeful, resilient and influential in your relationships with peers, stakeholders and your team.  
• KM for Small Legal Departments: Maximizing Your Impact With Limited Resources will be a case study of the Asurion Legal Operations Team and how they were able to build a knowledge management solution in less than 2 months with no resources and limited technology budget. 
• Understanding the Technology Journey: From Skillset to Planning will be a case study of the Marvell Semiconductor Legal Ops Team and how they were able to successfully implement multiple tech solutions by leveraging champions throughout the organization and using existing technology to save time and money.
• How to Tackle Your Legal Operations Projects will discuss how to use legal project management (LPM) principles to approach legal ops projects and share stories of their  successes to the failures to help ensure you learn from their experiences.  
• Strategic Planning for New Legal Operations Leaders will discuss how to navigate through your new role, how to create a strategy, implement your plan, and execute your vision in your first year. 
• Other topics that we are considering adding to our agenda include Data & Diversity: The Importance and Benefits of Diversity in Today’s Legal Environment, Legal Ops Battleplans for 2021, Building a Future-Proof Legal Tech Stack, Using No-Code Automation To Improve Efficiency Without Adding New Tools, From Fighting Fires to Driving Impact: Innovating Without Change Management, and Contract Data Storytelling: Growing Legal Ops Influence Across the Org. 

CLOC will be confirming the remaining topic proposals soon, so check the CLOC Global Institute Agenda for more updates. 

Roundtable Discussions: Throughout the event, you will have the opportunity to participate in regional and committees networking, industry groups and trending topic discussions with your peers. These interactive sessions will allow you to break out into smaller groups and be inspired by actionable takeaways that not only empower efficiencies in the way you work but enable department transformation.

• Regional Networking – EMEA, Americas, and APAC
• CLOC Committee Networking – Diversity & Inclusion, and Legal Project Management
• Industry Groups – Fortune 1000 & Other Large Enterprise, Legal Technology & Innovation, and Emerging Legal Departments 
• Trending Topics – Business Intelligence, Strategic Planning, Knowledge Management, Professional Development, Process & Workflow Automation, Tech Strategy & Implementation Lessons Learned, Intake & Self Service Tools, Dashboards & BI Tools

Engagement Activities:

• Visit the Chat Lounge to engage via live chat with other Institute attendees.
• Add and Download the CLOC Global Playlist and listen to the vibes during breaks.
• Pop into the CLOC break room for a stretch with an instructor and more.
• Enter to get lunch on us with an UberEats gift card by visiting exhibitor booths in the Exhibit Hall.
• Sign up for the CLOC Networking Event and meet 1:1 with global legal professionals. Details will be announced during the Institute. 

Like all other Institutes, CLOC is redefining the way information is delivered to its members, law firms, and the entire legal ecosystem with a jam-packed, digital Institute filled with real-talk panel sessions, impactful workshops, mentor power hours with the best, peer to peer networking, and more!

Register today!