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.

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.

May 2020| Mary O’Carroll, Director of Legal Operations at Google and President of CLOC

As legal ops professionals, we know how valuable technology can be, but also recognize how difficult a successful launch (implementation) and landing (adoption) can be. We often run into team members proving averse to new tech, competing internal pressures and priorities, and budget constraints. But perhaps one of the biggest challenges results from our very own belief that we should try to prescriptively match technology solutions to specific elements of existing workflows. In other words, we often try to address what appear to be isolated or team-specific problems with focused, point solutions.

Take, for example, one of the biggest challenges we all share—centralizing the legal department matter intake process, which is prone to bottlenecks, and relies most often on employees simply emailing or pinging contacts within legal for help. Typically, our first inclination is to create an intake form and then force people to use it to “automate the process.” This sounds like a logical and sensible approach. After all, if the legal team needs to track and assign a large number of requests, and the new intake form appears to centralize and automate elements of that process—that’s a win, right?

Unfortunately, not really. In legal ops, we often talk about the need to consider all three pillars—people, process, and technology—when solving problems in our departments. The problem is, this approach oversimplifies the challenge with a process and tech solution, and doesn’t properly appreciate “the people pillar,” nor the amount of change management needed both upstream and downstream to land a new intake form. To be sure, it impacts more than just intake itself. All your client teams will need to reprogram their muscle memory to submit requests through a new channel, and of course, doing it the old way will continue to feel faster and easier.

A new intake form can also cause confusion. (Like when the form requires clients to fill out fields that they don’t know how to fill out, or when it throws unfamiliar error messages.) In these cases, your clients will end up going around the new process by emailing their personal contacts in legal, asking for help… which is precisely the thing you wanted to avoid in the first place. Instead of centralizing and streamlining, all we’ve done is add yet another broken process and channel.

The fact is, when we implement small changes to improve specific challenges with point solutions, we often unintentionally create bigger problems. These new point solutions have to be coordinated and integrated with other existing systems and can require team members throughout the org to adjust their ways of working. It should also be noted that individual point solutions result in a proliferation of systems and tools that you now need resources to manage and integrate. When you do try to integrate them, you’ll realize these have also resulted in the propagation of multiple sources of truth—multiple places where data is stored—and an exponential increase in the number of interfaces that team members end up having to work with and learn how to use… until they stop using them all together.

To mitigate the risk of this, legal ops teams should change the way we think about problem solving with technology.

Although technology requests come to us as single pain points or specific solution proposals, we should approach problem solving more holistically. We should try to take a step back to view the bigger picture and optimize multiple processes and teams collectively, such that we create net value. And we should strive to do this in a way that considers all stakeholders (including those outside of legal), and that doesn’t create new ways of working, but rather minimizes the need for change management.

That means seeking out technology solutions that empower us as process-designers to create and manage workflows that are dynamic, customizable, and multifaceted—systems with broad, not narrow, applications.

Here’s how I’ve been going about this in my own work.

First, when thinking through how to do something like implement a new legal intake system—or, better yet, a new contract management system, which is traditionally even more complicated—we ask ourselves a series of questions:

• Does this tool actually optimize the process end-to-end? If it only solves a piece of the process, does it create bottlenecks elsewhere?
• What kind of change management will be required to use this tool effectively? (Where and how are people working today? Does this create a new place they need to go? How much communications and training is necessary? Too much and we know it won’t work)
• How will other stakeholders interface with this new tool? When sales needs to make a contract request, or when an additional approval is needed from finance on a contract, will the existence of this system impede upon their ability to do their work seamlessly?
• How much flexibility does this tool offer me from a process-management standpoint? Does it allow me to adjust parts of the workflow to address my unique or shifting needs? And how complicated is it to do that? Will I need engineering support?
• Finally, what impact does this have on day-to-day work? Is it decreasing the amount of manual work, or does it end up adding steps in other ways or in other places?

We ask ourselves these questions for a simple reason: unless you think holistically about changes you’re making internally, you risk—among other things—gaining efficiency in one area while losing it in others.

Ultimately, that’s something we should work to prevent.

Especially now. The outbreak of COVID-19 has illuminated the importance for legal ops teams to prioritize resources and leverage solutions more broadly so that we can address department challenges more holistically. Managing a portfolio of point solutions is simply not sustainable or scalable.

Moreover, COVID-19 has made urgent the need for legal ops teams to take on a more innovative role inside organizations, where operational excellence has become a top priority for many.

Now more than ever we need to be working more closely with our legal and business counterparts, doing work that—by design—exacts wide-ranging impact and encourages efficiency, creativity, and optimization.

All told, that requires a new, “bigger” way of thinking.

Interested in more Legal Ops Technology? Check out our Technology Roadmap: How To Guide

May 2020| Mary O’Carroll, Director of Legal Operations at Google and President of CLOC

As legal ops professionals, we know how valuable technology can be, but also recognize how difficult a successful launch (implementation) and landing (adoption) can be. We often run into team members proving averse to new tech, competing internal pressures and priorities, and budget constraints. But perhaps one of the biggest challenges results from our very own belief that we should try to prescriptively match technology solutions to specific elements of existing workflows. In other words, we often try to address what appear to be isolated or team-specific problems with focused, point solutions.

Take, for example, one of the biggest challenges we all share—centralizing the legal department matter intake process, which is prone to bottlenecks, and relies most often on employees simply emailing or pinging contacts within legal for help. Typically, our first inclination is to create an intake form and then force people to use it to “automate the process.” This sounds like a logical and sensible approach. After all, if the legal team needs to track and assign a large number of requests, and the new intake form appears to centralize and automate elements of that process—that’s a win, right?

Unfortunately, not really. In legal ops, we often talk about the need to consider all three pillars—people, process, and technology—when solving problems in our departments. The problem is, this approach oversimplifies the challenge with a process and tech solution, and doesn’t properly appreciate “the people pillar,” nor the amount of change management needed both upstream and downstream to land a new intake form. To be sure, it impacts more than just intake itself. All your client teams will need to reprogram their muscle memory to submit requests through a new channel, and of course, doing it the old way will continue to feel faster and easier.

A new intake form can also cause confusion. (Like when the form requires clients to fill out fields that they don’t know how to fill out, or when it throws unfamiliar error messages.) In these cases, your clients will end up going around the new process by emailing their personal contacts in legal, asking for help… which is precisely the thing you wanted to avoid in the first place. Instead of centralizing and streamlining, all we’ve done is add yet another broken process and channel.

The fact is, when we implement small changes to improve specific challenges with point solutions, we often unintentionally create bigger problems. These new point solutions have to be coordinated and integrated with other existing systems and can require team members throughout the org to adjust their ways of working. It should also be noted that individual point solutions result in a proliferation of systems and tools that you now need resources to manage and integrate. When you do try to integrate them, you’ll realize these have also resulted in the propagation of multiple sources of truth—multiple places where data is stored—and an exponential increase in the number of interfaces that team members end up having to work with and learn how to use… until they stop using them all together.

To mitigate the risk of this, legal ops teams should change the way we think about problem solving with technology.

Although technology requests come to us as single pain points or specific solution proposals, we should approach problem solving more holistically. We should try to take a step back to view the bigger picture and optimize multiple processes and teams collectively, such that we create net value. And we should strive to do this in a way that considers all stakeholders (including those outside of legal), and that doesn’t create new ways of working, but rather minimizes the need for change management.

That means seeking out technology solutions that empower us as process-designers to create and manage workflows that are dynamic, customizable, and multifaceted—systems with broad, not narrow, applications.

Here’s how I’ve been going about this in my own work.

First, when thinking through how to do something like implement a new legal intake system—or, better yet, a new contract management system, which is traditionally even more complicated—we ask ourselves a series of questions:

• Does this tool actually optimize the process end-to-end? If it only solves a piece of the process, does it create bottlenecks elsewhere?
• What kind of change management will be required to use this tool effectively? (Where and how are people working today? Does this create a new place they need to go? How much communications and training is necessary? Too much and we know it won’t work)
• How will other stakeholders interface with this new tool? When sales needs to make a contract request, or when an additional approval is needed from finance on a contract, will the existence of this system impede upon their ability to do their work seamlessly?
• How much flexibility does this tool offer me from a process-management standpoint? Does it allow me to adjust parts of the workflow to address my unique or shifting needs? And how complicated is it to do that? Will I need engineering support?
• Finally, what impact does this have on day-to-day work? Is it decreasing the amount of manual work, or does it end up adding steps in other ways or in other places?

We ask ourselves these questions for a simple reason: unless you think holistically about changes you’re making internally, you risk—among other things—gaining efficiency in one area while losing it in others.

Ultimately, that’s something we should work to prevent.

Especially now. The outbreak of COVID-19 has illuminated the importance for legal ops teams to prioritize resources and leverage solutions more broadly so that we can address department challenges more holistically. Managing a portfolio of point solutions is simply not sustainable or scalable.

Moreover, COVID-19 has made urgent the need for legal ops teams to take on a more innovative role inside organizations, where operational excellence has become a top priority for many.

Now more than ever we need to be working more closely with our legal and business counterparts, doing work that—by design—exacts wide-ranging impact and encourages efficiency, creativity, and optimization.

All told, that requires a new, “bigger” way of thinking.

Interested in more Legal Ops Technology? Check out our Technology Roadmap: How To Guide

While I have been sheltering at home in the Seattle area (where Icertis is based), I’ve had the opportunity to connect virtually with many of our customers as they weather this global crisis. In between virtual contract negotiations, home-schooling small children, or strategizing on which safety gear to wear to the grocery store, Icertis customers have generously shared their time and insights as they process what contracting and business will look like post-COVID-19.

It goes without saying that a “new normal” awaits us as we (slowly and responsibly) emerge from this crisis. But just what that normal looks like will vary person to person, organization to organization. In the commercial space, every company will have to assess what’s changed and what remains foundational to their business as they chart a path to rebounding and thriving in the months and years to come.

Still, generalizations can be made and themes are emerging. Based on my conversations, five distinct imperatives for attorneys and contract managers have surfaced amid the commercial turbulence; the operations professionals supporting these functions should also take notice. I call them the “The 5 ‘Ds’ of Managing Contracts in a Post-COVID World”:

Digitize Contract Processes

The more processes a company had digitized before their entire workforce was forced to shelter in place, the better positioned they were to react to the rapidly changing circumstances. This includes those companies that had digitized their contracts and contract processes. Imagine trying to identify tens of thousands of paper agreements that might be impacted by this pandemic. In this quarantine and work-from-home world, it would be impossible to retrieve those paper contracts that were stored in filing cabinets at physical office locations. Cloud-based contract lifecycle management (CLM) enables a level of business continuity simply not possible with paper-based systems.

As the Global Head of Contract Lifecycle Risk Management at a Fortune 500 company noted to me recently: “Any organization that has gone through this and decides not to digitize is certainly missing a big learning opportunity here.”

Discover Contract Data

Another major learning from COVID-19 is just how fast commercial conditions can change. With the COVID-19 situation evolving by the hour, legal and contract professionals had to quickly and continuously assess how the crisis impacted their company’s supplier, customer, partner and employee relationships—many or all of which are defined by contracts.

Companies that had embraced contract digitization could rapidly surface contract insights (remotely and from their homes) from a centralized pool of data, and were at a distinct advantage in crafting their strategies moving forward. Contract data can tell you with whom you’re doing business and on what terms, as well as where they are located and the commercial value of the contract. Access to contracting data and insights in fluid and uncertain times is truly invaluable when a global crisis hits. For example, one company I spoke with immediately surfaced what its contracts said about delivering services remotely, so they could confidently continue working with clients despite the travel restrictions and shelter-in-place orders.

Deliver on Commitments

Whether in crisis or in steady times, one foundational truth that will remain is the importance of trust and delivering on contractual commitments.

While attention can be diverted during a crisis to a handful of contracts that are disproportionately impacted, legal and contracting teams must be confident that the ongoing business of less-impacted agreements moves forward. Following execution, managing these ongoing obligations can be done manually and docketed in calendars. However, many companies that have embraced CLM have utilized technology to undertake this work. Some companies have optimized their obligations management process by utilizing AI/machine learning models trained on terabytes of contract data that can help discover obligations and their relationships, and manage them to fulfillment, ensuring that transactions off the contracts adhere to these obligations. This is an example of how technology can free up human capital to address those contractual relationships that take priority while contract managers remain confident that other commitments and obligations continue to be delivered.

Defend Against Risk

For our colleagues in the CFO office, the pandemic provided a crash course in enterprise risk management. As the outbreak disrupted markets, CFOs were in the hot seat to create plans that increased revenue, reduced cost, accelerated cash flow and ensured compliance.

The mandate to mitigate risk is reflected in contracts and contracting processes. Getting a vital contract under signature could mean generating the cash flow necessary to maintain operations; ensuring a contract is compliant with local regulations could save a company from crippling fines; preventing maverick contracts most certainly means no contracts go out on outdated templates that don’t reflect new business conditions and terms; visibility into all contracts across the organization means negotiations can be quickly pivoted to head off emerging threats.

That onus will never go away: COVID-19 proved that companies put risk management on the back burner at their own peril, and seamless contract management is a central component to both identifying and mitigating current risks and preventing future risks.

Don’t Delay

The companies in the best position to maintain business continuity when COVID hit were those who had already digitized core processes and developed the habits, skill sets and relationships necessary to get the most out of them. As one customer shared, “The great habits we developed with Icertis pre-COVID are now coming into play, to our benefit.” We don’t know when the next crisis will hit. But we do know that the longer you delay, the less time you’ll have to prepare.

Despite the current challenges posed by this pandemic, there will be a time when legal and contracting teams will return to some semblance of “normal” (and thankfully, educating will be removed from legions of parents-turned-homeschool teachers and back in the hands of educational professionals.) These contracting and legal teams, with the help of their legal department operations partners, will be well served to document the pain points presented in this current crisis and consider the Contracting 5 Ds before the next storm.

While I have been sheltering at home in the Seattle area (where Icertis is based), I’ve had the opportunity to connect virtually with many of our customers as they weather this global crisis. In between virtual contract negotiations, home-schooling small children, or strategizing on which safety gear to wear to the grocery store, Icertis customers have generously shared their time and insights as they process what contracting and business will look like post-COVID-19.

It goes without saying that a “new normal” awaits us as we (slowly and responsibly) emerge from this crisis. But just what that normal looks like will vary person to person, organization to organization. In the commercial space, every company will have to assess what’s changed and what remains foundational to their business as they chart a path to rebounding and thriving in the months and years to come.

Still, generalizations can be made and themes are emerging. Based on my conversations, five distinct imperatives for attorneys and contract managers have surfaced amid the commercial turbulence; the operations professionals supporting these functions should also take notice. I call them the “The 5 ‘Ds’ of Managing Contracts in a Post-COVID World”:

Digitize Contract Processes

The more processes a company had digitized before their entire workforce was forced to shelter in place, the better positioned they were to react to the rapidly changing circumstances. This includes those companies that had digitized their contracts and contract processes. Imagine trying to identify tens of thousands of paper agreements that might be impacted by this pandemic. In this quarantine and work-from-home world, it would be impossible to retrieve those paper contracts that were stored in filing cabinets at physical office locations. Cloud-based contract lifecycle management (CLM) enables a level of business continuity simply not possible with paper-based systems.

As the Global Head of Contract Lifecycle Risk Management at a Fortune 500 company noted to me recently: “Any organization that has gone through this and decides not to digitize is certainly missing a big learning opportunity here.”

Discover Contract Data

Another major learning from COVID-19 is just how fast commercial conditions can change. With the COVID-19 situation evolving by the hour, legal and contract professionals had to quickly and continuously assess how the crisis impacted their company’s supplier, customer, partner and employee relationships—many or all of which are defined by contracts.

Companies that had embraced contract digitization could rapidly surface contract insights (remotely and from their homes) from a centralized pool of data, and were at a distinct advantage in crafting their strategies moving forward. Contract data can tell you with whom you’re doing business and on what terms, as well as where they are located and the commercial value of the contract. Access to contracting data and insights in fluid and uncertain times is truly invaluable when a global crisis hits. For example, one company I spoke with immediately surfaced what its contracts said about delivering services remotely, so they could confidently continue working with clients despite the travel restrictions and shelter-in-place orders.

Deliver on Commitments

Whether in crisis or in steady times, one foundational truth that will remain is the importance of trust and delivering on contractual commitments.

While attention can be diverted during a crisis to a handful of contracts that are disproportionately impacted, legal and contracting teams must be confident that the ongoing business of less-impacted agreements moves forward. Following execution, managing these ongoing obligations can be done manually and docketed in calendars. However, many companies that have embraced CLM have utilized technology to undertake this work. Some companies have optimized their obligations management process by utilizing AI/machine learning models trained on terabytes of contract data that can help discover obligations and their relationships, and manage them to fulfillment, ensuring that transactions off the contracts adhere to these obligations. This is an example of how technology can free up human capital to address those contractual relationships that take priority while contract managers remain confident that other commitments and obligations continue to be delivered.

Defend Against Risk

For our colleagues in the CFO office, the pandemic provided a crash course in enterprise risk management. As the outbreak disrupted markets, CFOs were in the hot seat to create plans that increased revenue, reduced cost, accelerated cash flow and ensured compliance.

The mandate to mitigate risk is reflected in contracts and contracting processes. Getting a vital contract under signature could mean generating the cash flow necessary to maintain operations; ensuring a contract is compliant with local regulations could save a company from crippling fines; preventing maverick contracts most certainly means no contracts go out on outdated templates that don’t reflect new business conditions and terms; visibility into all contracts across the organization means negotiations can be quickly pivoted to head off emerging threats.

That onus will never go away: COVID-19 proved that companies put risk management on the back burner at their own peril, and seamless contract management is a central component to both identifying and mitigating current risks and preventing future risks.

Don’t Delay

The companies in the best position to maintain business continuity when COVID hit were those who had already digitized core processes and developed the habits, skill sets and relationships necessary to get the most out of them. As one customer shared, “The great habits we developed with Icertis pre-COVID are now coming into play, to our benefit.” We don’t know when the next crisis will hit. But we do know that the longer you delay, the less time you’ll have to prepare.

Despite the current challenges posed by this pandemic, there will be a time when legal and contracting teams will return to some semblance of “normal” (and thankfully, educating will be removed from legions of parents-turned-homeschool teachers and back in the hands of educational professionals.) These contracting and legal teams, with the help of their legal department operations partners, will be well served to document the pain points presented in this current crisis and consider the Contracting 5 Ds before the next storm.

With excerpts from “The Ten Questions to Ask Yourself to Influence Your Future”, as Presented by Dr. Zachary Walker, Educator, Author, and International Speaker, University College London Institute of Education at the CLOC 2020 London Institute.  He can be contacted on LinkedIn or through his website at www.drzacharywalker.com.

One of the most complicated tasks facing companies today is the challenge of aligning the cultures and expectations of multiple generations in their organization. Legal departments are not immune to these challenges. Like others, legal is often composed of multiple generational influences from Boomers to Gen Xers to Millennials. Gen Z is just starting to enter the workforce which brings in yet another shift in workplace dynamics. Today’s leaders need to manage the differences and similarities between four to six generations while integrating them into a cohesive, functional, high-performing team.

Each person comes with a different set of expectations and definitions of loyalty, ethics, and skills. Leaders need to shift to make the most of these energies and skill sets that bring incredible potential to both the department and company. The generation into which one is born is an important determinant of these personal characteristics. Of course, each individual is different – however, generational trends tend to shape ideas on “big picture” issues such as the value of teamwork, workplace expectations, and the relationship between the individual and society, and each generation tends to share similar experiences as a result of growing up at the same time.

A 2014 Harvard Business Review article exclaimed that “for the first time in history, five generations will soon be working side by side.” It continued:

“The Boomer mystified by Facebook; the Millennial who wear flip-flops in the office; the Traditionalist (born prior to 1946) who seemingly won’t ever retire; the cynical Gen Xer who’s only out for himself; and the Gen 2020er [known as Gen Z today] – born after 1997- who appears surgically attached to her smartphone.”

If you’ve attended a seminar or conference on this topic, you may have learned that these stereotypes are not valid and that all generations can and do share common values and goals.  Still, generational tensions exist within our multi-generational workforces and it’s our job to help our employees recognize and respect the skill sets that each generation brings to the table.

The U.S. Government projects the number of workers over the age of 75 will double in the next decade. In many cases, workers continue to work longer because they can’t afford to retire when they reach retirement age. And many workers in the legal profession choose to work longer because they enjoy their work and value their relationships with their coworkers. 

Generation Z, our youngest generation of workers, is just entering the workforce. By 2026, that group will surpass the number of Millennials (who are now the largest) in the workforce. These two generations will define the future of work.  Whether a 35-year-old manager managing a Boomer workforce and Gen X workforce or a 65- year-old manager managing a Gen Y and Millennial workforce, or somewhere in between, it is incumbent upon leaders and managers to know who they lead. To be successful, we will have to understand what each generation wants out of their jobs and how they envision work.

Companies that shift to strike a multi-generation allegiance will have an efficiency advantage over others that don’t. A multi-generational team offers a diverse way of looking at a project or problem. Leading them can be both a challenge and an opportunity. Understanding who they are is key.

Leading an Inter-Generational Workforce

In January 2020, the CLOC London Institute ended its educational conference with a session led by Dr. Zachary Walker from the University College London. Dr. Walker’s session was one of the highest rated sessions during the Institute. His current work focuses on Generation Z, educational neuroscience and high performance leadership.

During his session, Dr. Walker explained a few of the traits of generational groups that are, or will be, employed by your organization in the future and challenged everyone to be willing to adapt their leadership style accordingly. 

Generation Z: (Born 1996 – 2015)

According to Statista, Gen Z represents 24% of the workforce worldwide. Gen Z grew up in households that were significantly affected by 911 and the 2008 recession. As a result, financial security and stability are vital to them.

Gen Z’ers are entrepreneurial and ambitious. Surveys show that about half of them want to work for themselves – because they believe they can do “it” better – while half also want to do something that will change the world. They are competitive and financially driven. They have expectations of advancing in their roles quickly and being rewarded financially. This group is prone to burn-out, so they will need your assistance to achieve work-life “harmony.”

Gen Z values authenticity and meaningful interactions. Although they are digitally astute, they prefer to communicate face-to-face and work collaboratively. Gen Z craves feedback in real-time. Waiting until their annual evaluation to provide negative feedback will likely offend them. They want mentorship and constant feedback. They appreciate it and value it.

They value inclusion, social justice, diversity, and fairness. Dr. Walker noted organizations that simply aspire to these values would not impress a Gen Z candidate. They are influenced by “Doers.”  Congruence between what organizations say and what they do is absolutely critical to Gen Z.

Millennials or Gen Y: Born 1977 – 1995  

By this year, 2020, Millennials are forecast to comprise half of the American workforce, and by 2025, 75 percent of the global workforce. 

Millennials do not want the life of their parents, who valued work over relationships. They value work-life balance suited to allow them to enjoy their lives outside of work. Work satisfaction and financial stability are essential to Millennials; however, they aspire to strike a healthy balance between work and relationships outside of work.

This generation seeks a first-name basis relationship with their employers. They treat their employers respectfully, but they expect their employer to earn their respect. They enjoy a relaxed work environment where colleagues at various levels of leadership and responsibility can easily talk, joke, and laugh with each other while maintaining the appropriate hierarchical management structure.

Millennials value honesty, are eager to learn, appreciate personal connections, efficiency, and a sense of community.  

Generation X: Born 1965-1976   

According to Statista, Gen X represents 35% of the workforce worldwide.

The income gap between Gen X and Millennials grows wider each year.  Generation X makes more money and spends more money – 11% more than Boomers and 33% more than Millennials. They spend more because they are raising a family and caring for aging parents. The dual responsibility of caring for parents and children puts a high demand on their resources. 

Gen X values freedom and responsibility in the workplace. They are more likely to question authority than their parents and prefer flexibility in work arrangements. They don’t want to be micromanaged.  

Baby Boomers: Born 1946 – 1964 

Baby Boomers represent 6% of the workforce worldwide.

Baby boomers are hard-working – some would say workaholics – and motivated by position, prestige, perks, and money. They are independent, confident, and define themselves by their professional accomplishments. Their parents grew up during the Great Depression, and Boomers grew up under the threat of global nuclear war. They were exposed to protective drills in school in the event of a nuclear attack, lived in households stocked with food and supplies, and knew where they would shelter in the event of a nuclear attack.

A “good worker” was defined as having a strong work ethic and the willingness to “do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

Baby Boomers are often critical of younger generations for what they perceive as a lack of work ethic and commitment. 

What does the future of work look like across multiple generations?

The influence of Gen Z and Gen Y is already changing what work looks like. The future of work will value health and wellness, offer flexible workspaces and work locations, emphasize continuous professional development, use technology to create efficiencies, and enable a mobile workforce. According to Dr. Walker, the future of work will include workplace neurodiversity and the use of collective intelligence to solve problems.  

“Neurodiversity is a concept where neurological differences are to be recognized and respected as any other human variation. These differences can include those labeled with Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Dyscalculia, Autistic Spectrum, Tourette Syndrome, and others.”

Research suggests that neurodiverse individuals receive, process, and interpret information differently and often solve problems in unconventional ways. These employees are loyal, highly dependable, and adept at fitting into different work cultures.

Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, joint efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. Dr. Walker explained it this way:

“[A] group-based approach to harnessing the collective intelligence of people who work together, matching different skills and knowledge sets of internal experts to address future project needs.”

Collaboration is how younger generations prefer to work. As leaders, we are responsible for “upskilling” our employees so that we can build an environment that supports collective thinking to solve problems.

What now? 

Multiple generational organizations are the future and understanding the behaviors and drivers for each generation is critical for success. There are new ways of working every day. Collaboration and communication continue to be two of the most important components in bringing the generations together, especially as the world embraces a work from home mentality. 

Every generation is expressing a need for more flexibility, the opportunity to shift hours—to start their workdays later, or earlier, for example, or put in time at night, if necessary. Work-life balance drives satisfaction for all generations. The similarities in attitudes across generations are striking when it comes to benefits that drive satisfaction.

Multi-generation organizations are here to stay. The key is to foster the intergenerational culture by respecting the varied differences each generation contributes. It also means working as a proactive leader to eliminate strife, find the similarities and strengths and establish clear communication paths to ensure loyalty and success.

I recently had the privilege of moderating a panel with four legal operations superstars from leading organizations. On the panel were Mark Smolik (GC of DHL Americas), Preston McGowan (Chief Transformation Officer at Goldberg Segalla), Kevin Iredell (Chief Marketing Officer at Lowenstein Sandler) and Chris Ende (Chief Value Officer at Goulston and Storrs).

The central question examined by the panel was whether selection and management of outside counsel should be more relationship-based or more based on “hard” legal ops criteria where success is defined more by hitting objective performance metrics rather than the strength of personal relationships.

The panelists agreed that “pure” relationship-based management is no longer enough. Relationships will always have a place, but there are stakeholders in client organizations (think CFO’s) that are not party to those personal relationships. Those stakeholders want to see objective data that proves that what they are getting is not nepotism, but good quality at a good price. Law firms that think they can ignore the legal ops movement and get by on the strength of personal relationships will lose those relationships. By the same token, GC’s and other top corporate law department folks who do not want to undergo the temporary pain of fixing broken or nonexistent processes will be replaced by people who are on board with legal ops and open to change.

Analytics set firms apart

The above points were underscored by the example one of our panelists gave of an RFP for an important piece of litigation. The company’s tried and true law firms responded with more or less boilerplate responses about how experienced they were, their sterling reputations, etc. However, there was one firm that, rather than bragging about how awesome it was, proved it. Their RFP response was a detailed analysis of the present litigation together with a nationwide analysis of all similar litigation against the company, the judges and plaintiff’s attorneys involved, the status of those cases, and a recommendation of how to proceed with the present case based on that information. When the GC read the response, he instantly knew this was the firm he was going to use.

In the new legal ops-based world, that is the kind of demonstrated operational competence that is going to win work. The panelists, some of the most distinguished names in legal operations from both the law firm and corporate sides, underscored this idea repeatedly by making remarks like the following:

• I am going to hire you because you’ve proven to me using data that you are the best organization to solve my problem, not because you bought me Super Bowl tickets.
• Do not think you are going to get work from my organization because of your legal expertise. Legal expertise is table stakes. I want to hear about things like how you manage to budget, how you use technology, and how you realize diversity.
• Even though I value the personal relationship between us as inside and outside counsel, the reality of today’s marketplace is in five years I may be working somewhere else and so might you. So part of my job is to build a relationship between our two companies so they can continue benefitting each other without a hiccup if either or both of us move on.

Augmenting, not replacing, relationships

From the above, one might conclude, as some legal procurement professionals prematurely did a couple years ago, that “relationships are dead.” But our panelists made it clear that that way of thinking was dead on arrival. Trust matters, just like it always did. History matters. Liking another human being matters. Legal ops hasn’t changed any of that and isn’t really trying to.

In fact, our panelists described the concept of legal ops “vs.” relationship-based management as a false dichotomy. Legal ops discipline, rather than taking away from relationships, is transforming them by putting them into a structure where third parties can see that they are actual businesslike relationships and not just cronyism. Just as law firms who don’t get legal ops will lose client relationships, legal ops folks who take a hardcore “procurement”-type approach will lose law firm relationships when those law firms come to feel they are not being treated as trusted advisors but as commodities. They will take their talents elsewhere.

In conclusion, it’s not relationships VS. structure. It’s relationships AND structure. Human warmth AND process/technology. That is what modern law practice looks like.

Introduction

If you work in Sales or Legal, chances are the end-of-quarter crunch is a scenario you likely know entirely too well. It’s a mad dash to the finish line — closing deals, meeting quotas and driving revenue.

Unfortunately, the quarter-close hustle can put unnecessary strain on the relationship between Legal and Sales. Deal and contract status and rapid-fire communication can result in a lack of clarity, constant status updates and frustration. At best, the scenario is a chaotic sprint but the deals get done. At worst, Sales and Legal work in silos with little transparency, viewing each other as roadblocks instead of partners in shared success.

The good news is that a productive sales quarter-end doesn’t have to be this way. At Ironclad, I’ve worked hands-on with Damon Mino, our Vice President of Sales, to align our teams around shared processes, organization and technology.

And that’s why Damon, who spent years as an in-house attorney before transitioning to Sales, and I wanted to create this guide. Over the course of this playbook, you’ll get a glimpse of the common pitfalls in the relationship between Sales and Legal, how to address them and proven best practices you can use to set your company for success.

Aligning Resources

Every General Counsel knows that today’s legal teams are being tasked to do more with less. At the same time, sales organizations are being pushed to move faster and faster. Inevitably, something’s gotta give, right? Not necessarily.

At Ironclad, our situation is a little unique. Damon is a former lawyer who transitioned over to Sales. Given his background in law, he has an insider’s perspective into both sides of the Sales/Legal equation. He’s felt firsthand the intense stress as Sales tries to track contract redlines at the tail-end of the quarter.

And there’s one thing we’ve learned from each other. Neither one of us ever wants to ask, “Who knows if this deal is ever going to get done?”

Damon and I quickly realized that it’s a lot easier to keep things moving in the right direction — and in sync — if we discuss our available resources and how to best optimize them. Fundamentally, this starts with planning.

Here’s how we approach aligning Sales and Legal:

• Understand the risks of siloing Sales and Legal. Having these teams operating independently from each other is a recipe for chaos and, inevitably, disaster. Inefficient use of legal resources slows the sales process, contributes to frustration and increases outside counsel costs. Legal inevitably becomes a bottleneck and sales reps find workarounds to get their deals done. And who could blame them?To help avoid congestion and frustration, Ironclad’s legal team participates in Sales’ quarterly business reviews. Doing so provides both teams the opportunity to discuss pending or developing deals and prioritize Legal’s time.
• Plan to anticipate volume. High contract volume is a surefire cause of legal bottlenecks. Our Sales and Legal teams keep open lines of communication and understand the expected pipeline goals, which allows Legal to ramp up and support Sales. Such support can include shifting priorities or standardizing contract terms.
• Optimize together. Quarterly reviews aren’t just beneficial for sales teams. Together, Damon and I review the previous quarter’s data and adjust discount ceilings accordingly or review friction points to decrease deal cycles. These adjustments impact both teams, and should be approached as a point of discussion and a chance to identify and implement efficiencies.

Getting Granular With Data

Beyond fostering a culture of collaboration and open communication, there’s one thing that empowers our sales and legal teams to drive revenue even in a crunch — data. Thanks to Ironclad’s digital contracting platform, Damon and I have clear, realtime insights into where deals stand in the approval process. Supplemented by data from a CRM, we can further anticipate deals that are likely to close and how to best facilitate them, reducing the stress of tight turnarounds.

For us, working within Ironclad gives us the technical structure to:

• Leverage data. The most fruitful and meaningful conversations between Sales and Legal should start well before a quarter crunch — and they should rely on data to advise leadership. We base conversations on available data, from Salesforce or a digital contract contracting platform, so both teams can optimize for efficiency. For example, our legal team can demonstrate how much faster deals close when processed on our company’s own paper versus third-party paper.
• Aim for accountability. Strong executive relationships are also founded on empathy. Damon and I often speak candidly with each other about challenges, expectations, processes and protocols for our teams. This way, we are aligned and able to hold our direct reports accountable.Manual contracting processes require deep dives into details, writing time-consuming emails, repeating and summarizing all the relevant points, all of which soaks up valuable time. With a digital contracting platform, all necessary context is instantly available. The latest redlines, key terms and language are all there in easy-to-review audit trails, from the beginning of the deal. p
• Get all hands on deck. One of the essential responsibilities of an executive is rallying those around you. At Ironclad, we focus on encouraging our team members to contribute to planning sessions and we work to remove roadblocks on business or product decisions to better facilitate participation.The more Legal can partner and collaborate with Sales, the more empathy you build. When Sales and Legal trust each other, they’re not going to avoid each other. Instead, you can address issues together as you both help the company avoid undue risk.

Striking the Balance Between Speed and Compliance

Every business wants to move as quickly as possible — especially when it comes to sales. On the other hand, every legal team knows that speed increases risk and opportunity for error. So how do you balance the two?

At Ironclad we’ve found that establishing a mix of organizational best practices and implementing key technology can help facilitate ideal outcomes. Our tactics include:

• Review and prioritize. We take a close look at tiers of terms and conditions, bucketing them into categories of “deal killer,” “important,” “preferred” and “nice-to-have.” This, along with the context of deal size, timing in the quarter and other factors, helps us get on the same page regarding deals.
• Invest in technology. Ironclad’s digital contracting platform helps ensure our alignment, transparency and compliance. Ironclad gives us instant access to the contract data that drives deals. The trends and analyses based on this data, in turn, drive powerful partnerships with Sales and keep things ticking year-round. Even better, Ironclad enables self-service sales contracting — e.g., developing a sales contract from a CRM — to help get deals done quickly within guardrails set by the legal team.

Conclusion

Legal is evolving faster than ever before. We have new tools at our disposal and the opportunity to demonstrate value across our businesses. But the first step in doing so is to strategically align with other core business functions — especially Sales. Ironclad isn’t immune to the challenges surrounding Sales and Legal partnership. By working together, focusing on training and operating with a mind for continual improvement, Damon and I have helped build a culture that doesn’t just mitigate the end-of-quarter crunches, but supports collaborative, meaningful teamwork across Sales and Legal year round.

It’s our hope that this guide can shed some light on the intricacies of building collaborative Sales and Legal teams. Every organization has different goals, but by following this core framework, you can make significant strides toward fostering collaborative teams that share in each other’s successes and are fully vested in driving revenue.