Whether it’s a fire, flood, earthquake or pandemic, disasters can strike at a moment’s notice and many organizations are unprepared to respond and still function. In times of crisis, a well-thought out business continuity plan is critical to prevent interruptions to the business.

To enable your organization to respond quickly during a disaster, you need to put a current, reliable plan in the hands of all personnel who are responsible for carrying out any part of the BCP.  The lack of a plan doesn’t just mean your organization will take longer than necessary to recover from an event or incident — you could go out of business for good. Your employees need to understand what needs to be done to get the business back on track as quickly as possible.

Your BCP should be thorough and include readiness procedures to protect against possible threats and information on roles and responsibilities. Leaders need to be identified, understand their responsibilities and be equipped with relevant information to act during a crisis situation.

Google Legal is one organization who has spent the time to develop a robust Business Continuity Plan. Here are the steps they used to prepare their plan.

Business Continuity Plan Development at Google

By Mary O’Carroll, Director of Legal Operations, Google and President of CLOC

With help from Deloitte, Google’s Legal Department embarked on a project to create a business continuity plan for the department. To help others we would like to share the process that we used during the development of our Business Continuity Plan and the learnings we experienced. This how-to guide outlines the steps that were used to create our BCP.

Project Goal

Implement an event-neutral, impact-oriented, broad business continuity program to reduce the impacts and to support the expeditious recovery of critical legal processes in the event of a disaster.

Project Objectives: Prioritize Legal Business Processes

1. Determine Qualitative and Quantitative Impacts
2. Identify Dependencies
3. Determine Recovery Requirements and Timeframes

Project Approach:

1. Understand the Process (Create process maps)
2. Conduct Business Impact Analysis (Understand the potential impacts from disruption and the resources required to perform your processes)
3. Plan for Recovery (Develop recovery plans)

UNDERSTAND THE PROCESS

Meet with leads across each practice group or area in your department.  Create high level process maps for each key process or workstream that takes place on that team.  

Things to consider in each process:

• Which location(s) is your process executed from?
• Are there other business processes / areas that you depend on to perform your process?
• What systems/tools/applications are needed?
• Are there specific skills / resources that are essential to perform your
• process?
• Are there critical documents / vital records that you need access to in order to perform your process?
• Does the process rely on a 3rd party?

CONDUCT A BUSINESS IMPACT ANALYSIS (BIA)

A BIA is a systematic process to determine and evaluate the potential effects of an interruption to critical business operations as a result of a disaster, accident or emergency. Create your list of prioritized processes based on your BIA, focusing on critical workstreams by utilizing a questionnaire to ensure consistency across impact areas.

Outputs/Deliverables: Develop a prioritized list of processes based on impacts

Take each process or workstream in the department and rank them based on the five following impact areas across multiple time frames.  Create an objective five point scale for each of these impact areas that define the magnitude of the impact.  

1. Financial impact: Impact on the finances of the organization (potential decrease in revenue, impact on cash flow) resulting from a business disruption.
2. Legal and regulatory penalties:  Exposure of the organization to legal liabilities, penalties, and regulatory sanctions due to non-compliance with applicable regulations or adherence to legal and contractual obligation following a business interruption.
3. Client experience:  Number of or percentage of clients or customers affected, how quickly the situation will impact clients, and risk of losing clients temporarily or permanently.
4. Employee experience:  Risk to employee morale/culture which could result in high employee turnover resulting from a business disruption.
5. External brand image: Impact to public confidence in the organization and negative publicity resulting from a business disruption.

Example:  Rate each workflow across this matrix on a scale from 1-5

NEXT STEPS: PLAN FOR RECOVERY

As a result of the BIA effort, we prioritized recovery efforts for the Legal Department and identified resources required for each process to be operational. The recommended next steps were to:

1. Develop recovery procedures for prioritized business areas and processes
2. Design, conduct, and evaluate tests to socialize, validate and improve procedures

Determine the recovery requirements for each critical workstream based on the following five areas:

1. Building requirements: Which of the tasks can be supported by working remotely?  Are there alternate strategies to continue operations in case the primary facility is not available?
2. Process dependency requirements: What processes within the Legal Department or other departments do you need in order to restore to normal operations? Is there a workaround available to support your team until the identified dependencies are available?
3. Technology requirements: Identify all the applications that your team requires for the identified business processes. Can the identified processes be performed without the application for a limited time – indicate the workaround where applicable?
4. Human resource requirements: What are various roles/titles within your team that are critical for defined business processes? How many personnel are available at each assigned role? How many personnel are required to support each business process at various time-periods after a disruption? How many of the personnel within each assigned role have the remote working capability? Are resources available at an alternate location?
5. Third party requirements: Is there a key third party vendor who supports the identified processes?

Effective recovery procedures address short-, medium-, and long-term outages and account for the following considerations:

• Building Specific Strategies
• Technology Specific Strategies
• Human Resources Strategies
• 3rd Party Strategies
• Dependencies
• Focus on Impacts

KEY TAKEAWAYS AND LEARNINGS

Having a concrete business continuity plan plays an essential role in today’s environment at Google Legal. We learned that the most valuable part of the entire exercise was sitting down with team leaders and having a conversation about what is critical and how we might think about recovering those workflows. Given how much organizations move and change over time, it is a lofty expectation to develop BCPs for each workflow and to ensure they are kept up to date.  Setting aside a regular time to revisit that conversation each year and talk through the “what ifs” ensures that we’re aligned on how we would proceed.  

A clear, concise and well communicated BCP is not just a nice to have, it’s a critical necessity in today’s world.

When you do an online search for, “what does an in-house legal department look like,” office images show people sitting around a table with laptops, papers, notebooks, pens, etc. None of it looks very technology- or data-driven.

But to anyone who thinks legal departments can’t be data-driven powerhouses, I have one word for you: Moneyball. That’s right, this baseball story is the perfect example of how you can use data-driven decisions—even in the most unconventional places—to drive success.

If you’re a sports fan or like inspiring stories, then you probably already know the story behind Moneyball the book, and later, the movie starring Brad Pitt. Just in case, here’s a quick recap:

When the Oakland A’s General Manager, Billy Beane is challenged with budget constraints, he decides to use deeper, data-driven strategies to recruit undervalued baseball players. Instead of relying on batting average, height, and weight normally associated with certain positions, Beane looked at in-game activity, such as how many times a player made it to base and scored a run. In the end, his data-driven team-building strategy led the Oakland A’s to win a record 20 consecutive games.

So what does all this have to do with legal departments? Billy Beane used data-driven decisions to build a winning team. Turns out, so can legal departments, using data from their vendor management solutions to build a winning team of outside counsel and law firms. In fact, baseball and vendor management overlap in several areas.

Managing Your Vendor Team

Every baseball team has a manager who oversees and is responsible for game strategy, lineup, practice, instruction, and more. Vendor management allows you to be the “team manager” of your vendor lineup with a holistic view and metrics into vendor costs, matter type distribution, efficiency, diversity, timekeeper performance, and more. These detailed metrics help you evaluate, comment, rate, and score firms, giving you the data you need to better manage and evaluate the value you receive from vendors.

Picking the Right Vendor

On a baseball team, all players have their designated position to play—a place on the field where they have proven to excel. With vendor management, you have a structured, data-driven process that shows which vendors excel at which type of legal work. With easy-to-use scorecards, you can quickly identify top, average, and low performers, making it easier to choose your key players.

Working as a Team with Your Vendors

To be successful in baseball, or any sport, the team has to work together as a cohesive unit—collaboration is essential. Vendor management makes it easier to collaborate with outside counsel and firms on matters, invoices, documents, fees, and even early payment terms. As result, you build a team roster of trusted relationships that are productive and rewarding.

From baseball to vendor management, data offers a tangible way to manage, monitor, and measure performance. For a law department, it’s important to build a winning team of vendors that it can count on to deliver results. And today, we have the technology to help in-house legal departments score unlimited homeruns using reliable data from vendor management solutions.

Some small tweaks to your RFP process can make a big difference in your results. Ideally, you want a process that both the buy and sell side find productive and efficient. That’s not always the case in many RFPs we are seeing today. Here are five questions to consider before you hit send that will help you have a better experience.

1. Did we provide the law firm enough time?
   If you are managing a large preferred panel RFP for 10+ practice groups, you should be providing the law firms a minimum of 3 weeks, and 5+ will get you the best responses. Giving a law firm only two weeks to complete a large panel RFP means you will get lower quality, rushed responses thrown together with no cohesion. If you want to ask questions that require partner time to respond to, you need to provide them time to manage their current client workload. If you are issuing a RFP for a specific matter, that’s a different timetable altogether. We typically see anything from 24 hrs to a week or more for matter specific RFPs. A good rule of thumb for the large preferred panel RFPs would be, whatever time you think it will take to add at least another week of cushion to your project schedule.
2. Did we provide ourselves enough time to manage the Q&A process? (Panel RFPs only)
   Some legal departments underestimate the volume of questions they will get back from law firms during the Q&A process when managing an RFP with dozens of firms. Some will be complex questions that will need input from the general counsel or others in the business team and you may have only provided yourself 48 hours in the RFP schedule. Once you commit to answering one, you have to answer all of them. What then happens is law firms often can’t start the response until you have provided answers ultimately leading to an extension needing to be granted.
3. Did we provide enough information?
   If you want a law firm to be able to provide a thoughtful response on a fee proposal, outside counsel guidelines or their recommended legal strategy, you need to provide them with enough background information. The biggest complaint you will hear from law firms is how can we answer question X, if they didn’t tell us Y. That goes for not only pricing but also for practice coverage and overall scope of work. For example, If you are asking for a firm to bid on your IP work, and they have never done work for you in that area before you will need to open the curtain a bit if you want responses of any merit. Otherwise you will get marketing fluff that all will sound very similar.
4. Did we create a path of communication with the marketing contact?
   At some point of your RFP process you should be collecting the name of the marketing or responder contact. Having another contact beyond the lawyer will eliminate potential bottlenecks and allow for a much better flow of information between the issuer and responders during and after the RFP process. This connection beyond the relationship lawyer allows for that process to happen more effectively. The marketing team will be the most effective way for you to collect relevant information from the law firm – they know who to contact and what the firm does and doesn’t have available. Sometimes a 30 second phone call with the marketing contact clarifies a question that otherwise would have led to 12 pages of unnecessary information.
5. Did we ensure the responses won’t be overwhelming?
   A well-crafted RFP needs to find the balance of how to collect the right level of data to help you make a decision, but not so much that the RFP review and scoring process becomes overwhelming. It’s a great idea to use word counts and page limits – but you also need to be realistic. If you are asking a law firm to describe why they may be a better choice then their peer firms – it’s next to impossible to do that in fewer than 250 characters. If you have dozens of practice groups being included in the RFP, consider the fact there are many firms who will respond in all areas. You want to consider different strategies to find that middle ground of collecting content that helps you set the table for the decision making process while not being overwhelmed with 100 page responses.

Both law firms and legal operations departments will have better experiences and get better results when the RFP provides ample time, asks smart questions and allows law firms a platform to highlight their competitive advantages.

Matthew Prinn is a Principal with RFP Advisory Group, a consulting company that specializes in RFPs for the legal industry. For more tips on the RFP process, check out RFP Advisory Group’s recent webinar we hosted with the Association for Corporate Counsel: How to use an RFP as a tool to manage outside counsel.

Today’s world is one of intertwining systems, in which many challenges are fluid, multifaceted, and undeniably human. Organizations, inside and outside of the legal sector, must come to grips with – and even embrace – disruptive forces like technology. They must ask themselves how they will evolve in response to such rapid, technological change – and how they will support team members and transform large systems simultaneously.

For many, the problem-solving methodology – known as design thinking – is an effective way to answer these and other big questions. In fact, it is slowly becoming an important part of today’s complex, interconnected world. Design thinking is vital to the development and refinement of skills – those allowing us to better understand and respond to organizational and societal changes. It helps designers, especially, carry out research and brainstorm ideas before creating prototypes and testing out viable solutions.

Design thinking is more than just a process, though. It combines the possibilities of technology, the needs of people, and the requirements for overall business success. Thinking more like a designer can help transform organizations’ products, services, and entire business strategy. That’s because the approach brings together what is the most feasible, technologically speaking, with what is the most desirable from a human standpoint.

The Evolution of Design Thinking

Compared to the centuries-old scientific method, design thinking is relatively new as a mindset and methodology. In a way, it sprung from the industrial revolution, in which the limits of what we thought was technologically possible were pushed in dramatic fashion. Industrial designers, architects, and engineers, etc. – driven by the significant societal changes of the 20th century – later came together in a demonstration of collective problem-solving.

But it was cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon who was the first to mention design thinking as a way of conceptualizing. In his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon offered many ideas considered to be the principles of design thinking. Then, in the 1970s, design thinking started to address the human and technological needs of the day.

Celebrated designers who have adopted this method include Naoto Fukasawa, Saul Bass, Florence Knoll, and Le Corbusier, as well as Ray and Charles Eames. They each knew that coming up with elegant answers requires paying attention to the context of the problems and the consequences of the solutions. It means taking into account human priorities along the way to innovation.

Today, design thinking is on its way to becoming one of the leading innovation methodologies. Across many industries and disciplines, hundreds of thousands of people have now been introduced to the most basic concepts of design thinking. Through it, many have even experienced those ‘a-ha’ moments, in which they suddenly view their work – and the world – from an entirely new perspective. Individuals realize their own creative capacity, while problem-solving teams make progress toward their goals in less time than it takes through traditionally entrenched methods. Design thinking has generated groundbreaking solutions in the most exciting, innovative ways. It has been promoted at every level of business, and is behind the success of a number of high-profile, global companies, particularly Google, Apple, and Airbnb.

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

Of course, there’s no one definition of design thinking. But most agree that it is a systematic yet adaptable approach to problem-solving and innovation. Think of it as a non-linear methodology that offers a means to think deeply outside the box in order to solve problems that are ill-defined – or even unknown. Design thinking, after all, is human-centered, intentional, experimental, and responsive, as well as completely tolerant of failure, itself.

More specifically, design thinking consists of five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The first phase allows you to better understand a problem from an empathetic standpoint. The next phase is an opportunity to analyze and synthesize all of the information gathered during the first phase, before identifying and defining the core problem. In the third phase, you can begin to think ‘outside of the box,’ looking at the problem in alternative ways and generating ideas based on the knowledge acquired during the first two phases. In the fourth phase, you can come up with possible solutions to the problem – those fully explored during the first three stages. Finally, the solutions that are identified in the previous phase are put to a rigorous test.

The Future of Design Thinking

As design thinking moves further away from being a nascent practice, more people will appreciate its value, becoming committed, leading practitioners of design thinking, themselves. Of course, design thinking takes some learning and practice. It takes time to tinker with and test, not to mention an overall willingness to fail early-on – and often – throughout the entire process.

At the end of the day, though, in-house counsels and the like should try looking at large-scale challenges in legal through the eyes of a designer. In that way, they can become dynamic and superior problem-solvers, themselves. They can help create design criteria, and brainstorm and test solutions that can eventually become real-world innovations.

Also key to problem-solving are the craft and expertise of designers across many disciplines. Design thinking calls for collaboration with a critical mass of individuals with unique mindsets and sets of skills – those who can approach the unknown with certainty and resolve, and develop new approaches and strategies. With them, legal teams can utilize design thinking to take on some of the biggest organizational challenges, such as how to drive artificial intelligence (AI) applications as part of their digital transformation. They can aspire to have CLOC’s 12 core competencies for legal operations, reaching new levels of maturity.

Learn More About Design Thinking and ContractPodAi

Want to learn to develop your own framework and best practices around the design thinking process? At CLOC 2020 Vegas Institute, ContractPodAi will lead an informative, 90-minute workshop session on this excitingly relevant topic. Join us at 3:30pm on the 12th May.

We will be joined by Hunter Simon, Vice-President of Business Affairs and General Counsel at Technicolor Production Services, the multinational media, communication and entertainment corporation. Together, we will discuss the need for outside-the-box thinking in order to solve problems; the ways to go about the design thinking process; and how exactly to leverage design thinking in order to implement – and drive the adoption of – brand-new systems.

Technology is not the answer! I repeat this phrase at least a dozen times a day to my entire legal department. Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE legal tech! My first task as a legal operations leader was to assess our current tools and devise our technology road map for the future. However, it kills me when everyone assumes that once we license a tool, everything will function as ‘clockwork’. The truth is, licensing a tool is like getting a gym membership – it doesn’t work, unless you do the work. In this article, I want to emphasize the importance of the ‘2 Ps’, people and process, that make technology work. With all the hype around legal tech, I feel that everyone forgets that any technology is only as good as the people that use it and the process it supports.

Innovation means different things to different people. Against popular belief, I don’t think innovation always means some big technology implementation is the answer. Innovation starts through an adoption mindset of our people and is reflected in the process we follow.

People:

1. Change the ‘we have always done it this way’ mindset

I mentally switch off the minute I hear this phrase, and let’s face it; we all hear it at our workplace almost every day. Most people don’t believe in changing status quo or questioning why something is being done a certain way. They assume that someone else in the organization must have thought through the process and there may be a valid reason for doing a task. Well, sorry to burst that bubble – but most times no one has really thought through a process or if they did, it was possibly eons ago and is not relevant today. Most times when you actually dig deep into any process, there could be a large chunk of tasks which are non-value add tasks. And, quickly eliminating that task will save time and energy. However, keep in mind that eliminating non-value tasks can threaten the status quo and you’ll still face challenges. In my professional journey, I have always believed in building my team with people with the right attitude because only then can my innovative ideas see the light of the day. For the extended team, it is an uphill task of constantly educating the leaders and team members to look at things from various angles and from a new perspective. No matter how you hard you try, you will have naysayers in the team who generally either fall in line or fallout over a period of time.

2. Find fearless team members

An innovative environment needs people who are not scared of making mistakes. The leadership team needs to create a psychologically safe environment to let people know that it is ok to make mistakes. This needs constant reinforcement and clear messaging from the top leadership. I do like to draw some distinctions here though. While I am happy for people to try things differently and fail, I don’t have tolerance for sloppy mistakes on a business as usual process. Most team members are bogged down with so many daily operational deliverables and KRAs that it doesn’t leave them with any mind space to think of new ways to do things. The ones who genuinely have the passion to innovate will free their mind and find time to tread on new paths.

3. The doers are better than the dreamers

Most innovative people are creative and by that nature also dreamers. I am occasionally guilty of tuning out from the realities of life and imagining a world that may be. This is the space where I get my next bright idea. Unfortunately, ideas don’t work on their own and I have to quickly roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. I give higher points to people who actually get the job done than those who spend a large part of their day talking about an organization that should, or could, have been. There is scope for improvement in most processes across organization and those improvements are not going to magically happen on their own. We will need the doers to get down to the root of the process and fix it as required.

Process:

1. Document a process

Most legal departments don’t document their processes. Most people undermine the freedom that process documentation brings to them. They fear that documenting processes will mean that no one in the organization will need those teams in the future. I was recently working with my IT team on a tech implementation and I asked my IT team to document their process for future use so that I don’t trouble them each time. The junior IT team member looked at me innocently and said I would make him lose his job. What he didn’t realize was that I was trying to free up his time to focus on other projects, rather than constantly repeating work and wasting his valuable time. I don’t necessarily blame him for his response since he was being candid with me. He may have been sharing what he had learned from his senior team members. This brings me back to my earlier point of changing people’s mindset, which has to be a top-down approach since team members tend to emulate their leaders.

2. Break down the process

This is the key to any change. Although an end to end process may overwhelm everyone, breaking process down to every single task will help identify tasks that can be eliminated, automated, or reassigned to a different resource. We recently reviewed some of our document archival processes and were able to eliminate 60% of the tasks after they were broken down. The team can now support larger volumes and is able to manage certain other tasks that they were not doing earlier. I strongly believe that process improvement can only happen once we have detailed process and procedure maps with all steps broken down to the individual task.

3. Not a one-time task

You can’t draft process maps, file them somewhere and forget about them. Process improvement is a continuous activity. Legal departments now have dedicated legal ops team which include process experts to monitor current processes and are constantly thinking of ways and means of improving processes. Once the process experts sit side by side with lawyers, they are able to see the impact of process changes and immediately recommend tweaks as needed. Infusing legal teams with business, finance, IT and process experts also instils a culture of viewing the department as a business and not purely as an advisory shop.

While discussions on legal tech continue to grow, as they should, we need to continue to state the importance of people and process. We don’t want the very critical pillars of a successful and innovative department to be lost under the bright and shiny lights of legal technology. CLOC understands the importance of the 2 Ps and the core competencies for legal ops teams include communication, cross functional alignment, and technology and process support amongst others. As I continue to look at new technology in the market, I never lose sight of my people that I continue to train and the processes I continue to improve.

The 2018 Chief Legal Officer Survey states that only thirty nine percent of law departments surveyed employ at least one legal ops professional. Of that 39%, less than 50% of the legal ops professionals came from the legal department. Of course, these numbers don’t necessarily mean that the legal operations team is led by a seasoned leader. Even the largest legal departments may have administrators, or project managers, who chanced on the role with no one to guide them. The above survey also states that most General Counsels spend only 18% of their time in the management of their department, which means that they are probably not spending too much time thinking about how legal ops needs to be structured. As new ops leaders take on the role or existing legal ops professional broaden their portfolio, it is important to set clear vision and priority for your department or you will spend most of your day dousing fires.

As I started my journey of a legal ops leader, like any other leader coming to a new role, I spoke to my existing legal team to understand their pain points and challenges. I realized very quickly that I had to draw up a roadmap for my department before I was drowned in the laundry lists of everyone’s problems.

Here are my top tips for new ops leaders coming into an existing, seasoned legal team. I am sure there are many other tips which legal ops leaders would go by, but this is what is important in my opinion.

1. Understand team dynamics

To state the obvious, it is very important to spend your first few days understanding your legal team structure, key leaders and stakeholders. If you have the opportunity to interact with legal team leaders and managers before you start in your role, take that opportunity in a heartbeat. While formal catch ups are a great way to understand about people’s work, I find informal conversations to be insightful as people drop their guard. Make notes of each person’s requirements (but make no promises at this point), this is important when you plan your roadmap as it will guide you on areas you want to focus on. It also helps to gather support if you can personalize your road map to real life problems. When I came on my role early on, one of the biggest problems was our duplicative invoicing processes. Acknowledging the problem in my stakeholder meetings and providing a plan to fix it in week three of my job helped people realize that I was there to help. And, meeting that deadline established my credibility early in my position.

2. Don’t try to churn the ocean

As a new leader you want to work on garnering support early on and you will want people to feel you are there to help. As a result, your colleagues will pour out their problems to you and expect you to wave your magic wand and solve their issues. Unfortunately, organizations are far too complex for a magical solution. As I mentioned above, listen to everyone, but make no promises and for your own sanity, don’t try to solve every single problem for every single person on the team. Prioritize your vision based on your department structure. For my organization, our commercial and regulatory teams constituted the largest part of our team and I focused on those functional areas to find the low hanging fruit and quick wins.

It is also important to steer clear of operating in solution mode in your early conversations. As natural problem solvers, many new ops leaders jump into solution mode very quickly. Spend your first few weeks understanding and mapping your current processes. Most legal departments are not likely to have detailed process maps and you will not be able to get most of your programs off the ground if you don’t understand the current processes.

3. Make a plan

Never undervalue the power of a 30 / 60 / 90-day plan. I have used this in every single new role, and it has worked brilliantly. A 90-day plan gives me structure and helps me from getting lost. I draw my plan based on big picture themes and then build tasks to support the theme.

My plan as a new ops leader looked like below. You will see that I tend to start more internally and focus on vendor management only after I had a good understanding of internal processes and stakeholders. The plan gives assurance to the Chief Legal Officer (CLO) that I know what I am talking about and that s/he made the right decision in hiring an ops lead.

4. Do a SWOT analysis

My first month in my new job, I spent all my time making notes on what works and what doesn’t. Again, some of this is very basic and simple but it is the simple that we forget. When I presented my SWOT analysis to our CLO and the legal leadership team, all I got was nods and alignment in thoughts. It was great to know that we were all on the same page. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses also gave me a foundation to build the vision for my own department.

5. Build your own vision

I was lucky to have a CLO who gave me a blank canvas and asked me to paint what I wanted. I understand not everyone would be as lucky as me. However, this is the most critical for your own success and for others on the team to show that you mean business. CLOC has amazing content that can help you build your legal ops plan. I knew I didn’t want to tackle all twelve core competencies in year 1 and based on my SWOT analysis, I picked five, or six, competencies to focus on. I structured my team based on my priorities and drew a roadmap based on the pillars I chose.

The key competencies I focused on were – Technology, Automation and Continuous Improvement; Legal Finance, MIS and Law Firm Management; Knowledge Management and Process Documentation; Resource Allocation and Professional Development.

My main goal was to document our processes within the first 12-18 months. We didn’t have any standard operating procedures and our playbook and policy documents were outdated, so we created a plan to tackle those first. As we went through the documentation process, we were able to identify gaps in our process and define what we wanted to improve early on. It was the process documentation that led us to our technology roadmap. We focused on our existing technology and increasing technology adoption became a priority. Finally, we wanted to start capturing metrics and some of the tools we put in place helped us with that process. The ability to present data to stakeholders early on sets you apart from other ops professionals. Most stakeholders like to believe that they know the pulse of their department, but they face some harsh truths when they are presented with hard data. Your data may not be perfect in the beginning, however, metrics and KPIs are the best quantifiable ROI tools.

All organizations are different, and every ops leader will have a unique journey. CLOC is a great forum with some very relevant content that helps connect you with peers in the industry who are very open to sharing ideas and collaborating. Knowing you are not alone in this journey gives solace to a lot of us.

The pace of transformation in the legal services market continues to accelerate and we’re seeing a growing enthusiasm from in-house legal teams to embrace this change. There are a growing number of opportunities to develop skillsets and embrace alternative legal careers, as well as to be at the forefront of this evolution by driving change and encouraging genuine thought leadership. In this blog we focus on the people aspects, including how the pressure to upskill teams may affect individuals in different ways; the diversification and introduction of new roles and skills, and an increased focus on wellbeing.

The lawyer of the future: One size doesn’t fit all

‘Strategic’, ‘commercial’, ‘flexible’. According to in-house legal teams, these are the key attributes needed by the future lawyer to succeed. Are the days when lawyers were expected to know the law and only the law now in the past?

With many organisations aligning their legal teams to business areas, lawyers are under pressure to become more strategic and flexible; equipped to respond to queries across multiple legal disciplines and having the commercial knowledge to support this advice and provide tangible solutions. Add to this the need to consider legal tech within these solutions, provide thorough project management and become data literate, and you can see that the role of the in-house lawyer is under immense pressure to evolve. Many lawyers are embracing this challenge with enthusiasm, hungry to be learn new skills and discover alternative career pathways. Where though does this leave those lawyers who want to remain in a specialist position and don’t have the appetite to develop further skills? Is there still a place for them in the in-house legal team structure? We recently discussed this question with a group of clients, and the answer was a resounding yes. These people are in fact integral to the success of the legal team and we need to acknowledge the value they bring to the function. Whilst they may not wish to bring new skills to the table, they too can be part of this transformation solely by adapting their mindsets and becoming more inquisitive. By challenging the status quo, identifying alternative approaches to tasks and asking colleagues if certain tasks could be done more efficiently, they will add a huge amount to the legal transformation agenda.

Whichever ‘change bucket’ you’re in, the key is to appreciate the different perspectives each individual can bring, recognising that some may be more subtle than others.

From forming to storming: The changing role of the in-house legal team

The evolution of the in-house legal team is starting to gain pace and we are seeing new areas of expertise developing. The rise of the ‘legal operations’ role is a prime example; this is now a key senior role in many firms and does not necessarily have to be performed by someone with a legal background. Rather, business, financial and strategic skill sets are key to be able to identify opportunities to maximise value for money of external legal spend and deploying strategies to make efficiency and cost savings.

Given the demands on the in-house legal function to manage complex regulatory change projects, streamline high-volume legal processes as well as perform the role of the firm’s trusted legal expert and minimise risk, we are increasingly asked by our clients whether they should be looking to hire their own legal project managers or legal technology experts to support them. The answer to this is not clear cut. It depends on the size of the organisation and the appetite for keeping the work in-house rather than leveraging law firm’s expertise in these areas. Regardless of this, if you are considering it the first step is to fully engage with these roles and understand the value they would bring to your organisation, taking into account the behavioural change which would need to be adopted to ensure the full integration of the team.

Our view is that the in-house legal function’s transformation journey is, to quote Tuckman’s group development model (forming, storming, norming and performing), currently in the ‘forming’ stage where team members with differing skills will act independently of each other. To move to the next stage of maturity, ‘storming’ where the group start to work towards the common strategic goals will require people to embrace conflict and change in order to succeed. Actions speak louder than words: a refreshing approach to mental health.

Alongside the maturing landscape of the legal services market has come the recognition that the legal industry needs to be doing more around mental health. A leadership focus on this topic, and employee wellbeing more generally, has seen this become one of the key priorities this year. Two refreshing aspects which we have seen regularly are worthy of highlighting:

1. Pledges alone are not seen as enough. Operational and behavioural change need to align to deliver the improved outcomes underpinning those pledges; and

2. A movement away from sticking plaster solutions to the problems when they arise, and much more determination to address the root causes. We expect to see this remaining a key agenda topic in coming years ahead, with an increasingly strong focus both on leadership and actions, not just words.

All in all, this is an exciting time to be in the law! New career paths, brand new roles, and new opportunities for people with diverse skills. But what is clear is that traditional roles and legal expertise still very much have a central place in this broader NewLaw community, and integration and collaboration are key to the progression of the industry.

About Ashurt Advance

Ashurst Advance combines NewLaw expertise, a positive approach, collaborative working and thinking beyond the immediate deliverables, to help solve our clients’ business challenges and create value for our clients. We bring together the firm’s legal and industry experts, our process and technology capability, and a scalable range of cost-effective resourcing options in a fully integrated, managed and quality assured offering to deliver results which are aligned with our clients’ needs. Ashurst Advance has acted successfully for over 400 clients on nearly 1300 matters across 55 workstreams globally.

We would be delighted to have a chat with you at the London CLOC institute, so please do come and visit our booth situated in the Ballroom Hall.

Many teams in organizations face challenges where resilience is needed in order to maintain high-performance and well-being. This is especially true for teams working on high-stakes matters, under time pressure, and in intense environments, much like the work your team is doing in the legal profession. Additionally, research suggests that the personality traits of high need for achievement professionals can make team formation, decision-making and leadership considerably more challenging within performance-driven professional organizations.

Resilience is the capacity for stress-related growth, and it exists at the individual and group level. Complex, changing, fast-paced work environments require that teams quickly adapt to missteps, failure, slow results, and challenges generally.

Resilient teams (1) resolve challenges as effectively as possible; (2) maintain team health and resources; (3) recover quickly; and (4) display the ability to handle future challenges together). Here are some common team challenges that require resilience:

• Difficult and/or high-stakes assignments
• High consequence work
• Unclear team roles
• Innovating – the process itself is full of missteps and setback
• Angry/upset/skeptical clients
• Poor results
• Ambiguous direction/goals

The study of what it means to build resilience at work has thrived in the past decade, and as more organizations continue to orient their work in teams, there has been an increased interest in what it means to create a resilient work team.

Here is what we know about what resilient teams do differently:

They recognize and actively mitigate against the producer-manager dilemma. Harvard Law School’s leadership programs for law firm and law department leaders always begin with cases that illustrate how the “producer-manager dilemma” significantly impedes effective leadership and team building within our profession. The dilemma occurs and worsens as professionals gain seniority and continue to need to “produce” client/technical work, as well as take on an increasingly long list of leadership, business development and organizational responsibilities. Moving from being individual contributors to team participants and leaders requires professionals to invest more time, focus and thoughtful energy into the healthy functioning of teams. Unfortunately, the urgent crowds out the important and without a strong cultural and organizational commitment, professional teams are often dramatically under-led and less likely to achieve the full benefits that a collaborative, diverse and inclusive team effort can provide. Resilient teams are more likely to be found in organizations that provide training, tools and incentives to help professionals identify and mitigate against the effects of the producer-manager dilemma. Team leaders create resilient teams through application of more formal team processes and tools and growth mindset frameworks; personally evaluating and optimizing what, how and to whom they delegate; building and using their internal and external networks to help their teams; and establishing and supporting team norms such as those described below.

They stay motivated. Professionals choosing to work in an intense environment most often exhibit the personality traits associated with a high need for achievement. Some of these traits, such as a high need for autonomy and a fierce competitiveness, can disrupt the formation of resilient teams. Team members may resist collaboration and view team members more as rivals or roadblocks than sources of new information, ideas, talents and support.

Resilient teams stay motivated and counteract those tendencies by accessing the power of intrinsic motivation, i.e., motivation from within the work itself and how it gets done. Indeed, research shows that focusing on intrinsic goals leads to higher performance, well-being, and motivation for teams. Team members become more intrinsically motivated when they have choice or a say in how their work unfolds, feel like they belong on the team and have developed high-quality relationships with their colleagues, and feel confident in their ability to learn more challenging skills The challenge is for leaders to create a team environment that supports those valuable outcomes.

They build psychological safety & belonging. A critical foundation of resilient teams is psychological safety – a climate in which people feel comfortable expressing and being themselves. In order for teams to appropriately manage adversity, people need to feel comfortable sharing their knowledge, which means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and partially-formed ideas. Research has found that teams that employ more positive emotions and focus on solidifying the connectedness of the people within their teams experience more of this type of openness, and thus higher levels of team resilience. In addition, teams that are able to openly and clearly discuss both positive and negative experiences are better able to work through adversity, have higher levels of trust, and higher levels of resilience.

They take an appreciative approach. While it’s important for teams to identify areas of where they are struggling, it is also important for teams to identify, organize, and elevate their strengths on an ongoing basis in order to maintain their energy and reach their full potential. For example, teams can apply an appreciative inquiry approach by asking team members to share and openly discuss what matters most to the team, what they want the team to look like or grow into, what obstacles stand in the way, and what changes they are willing to make to achieve this vision.

They prioritize well-being. Resilient teams openly talk about stress and burnout. Burnout is a chronic process of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy caused by a disconnect or an imbalance between key job demands and job resources, and it is highly correlated with lower levels of morale, turnover and disengagement. Interestingly, structured team debriefs or after action reviews have been linked to lower levels of team member vulnerability to burnout. Why? Debriefing facilitates information exchange and elaboration (so there is less ambiguity, a known burnout accelerant), enables team member support, and increases self-reflection and self-efficacy.

Professionals – especially lawyers in top firms and legal departments – operate in an incredibly stressful, dynamic environment. Research relating to resilience has shown that it is a trait that correlates strongly with thriving in such a demanding environment. Many legal organizations are now providing training and resources relating to the building of their lawyers’ and allied professionals’ resilience. The next frontier is for legal organizations to invest significantly more resources and attention to the building of resilient teams. Here is the big picture: the markets for talent and clients have never been more global or transparent, resulting in dramatically increased competition. As technology like AI increasingly disrupts and replaces traditional service delivery, professionals will need to distinguish themselves by providing interdisciplinary and integrated legal and business solutions. The only way to do that in a dynamic, complex environment is in a team, and it had better be a resilient one.

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

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

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

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

Uniting a complex ecosystem

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

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

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

Making it work in the real world

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a use cases cloud

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

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

Prepping for Legal 3.0

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

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

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

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

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

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

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

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

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.