Today Jenn welcomes Katrina Gowans, Director of Legal Operations & Senior Legal Counsel at IFM Investors, and Anna Golovsky, Executive Manager of Legal and Company Secretariat Operations at IAG … both of whom lead the CLOC Australia chapter. The three CLOC leaders sit down to discuss their point of view on the current state of legal operations Down Under.
And if you are wondering why they have an audience, this conversation kicked off our live programming from the CLOC Talk stage at our 2024 Global Institute in Las Vegas. We chatted about all of the greatest hits of legal operations, like knowledge management, matter management, CLM, and the adoption of new technologies, and yes, we even touched on the prevailing topic, generative AI.
I can’t wait to see these two powerhouses again next month when I travel to the CLOC APAC Summit, happening on August 20-21st in Sydney. See you there!!
Special thanks to Icertis for sponsoring this episode.
In today’s episode, Jenn is joined by Laura Dieudonne, fellow CLOC Board Member, and Legal Operations and Administration Director at Delta Airlines. We continue the CLOC Core conversation by diving into the nuances and importance of knowledge management systems (KM) within legal departments.
Laura shares her first-hand experience in establishing a centralized KM platform, starting with a successful pilot program run by the commercial transactions team. The platform helps store templates, responses to routine questions, and key documents, which improves efficiency and self-service access for the legal team.
They also discuss KM challenges such as resistance from seasoned professionals and maintaining up-to-date information. Laura shares her strategies for involving practice group leaders and incentivizing buy-in through incremental steps and executive endorsement.
Join us for this in-depth conversation as we discover the best KM strategies in the legal operations biz. Enjoy!
Organizations find themselves locked in a fierce struggle against their own data. Legal teams are being engulfed by an overwhelming avalanche of information and enterprise data volumes are doubling every 2 years. In this whitepaper, we provide 7 crucial readiness steps to conquer the data avalanche and emerge victorious in your legal use cases.
Organizations credit digital transformation with reducing costs, increasing agility, and delivering enhanced and new services. A possible unforeseen outcome of digital transformation is a rising volume of digital documents and information generated by business systems.
Digitally managing this increasing volume of documents presents a particular challenge for the legal industry. Law firms and legal departments require easy document accessibility and specific needs around workflow and collaboration. There is no time in history when these needs have been more acute than in 2020 when remote working is the norm rather than the exception.
Traditional document management systems focused on helping enterprises organize and manage their documents. As these systems’ use increased, users found that they could not meet modern law departments and legal professionals’ needs.
Defining Modern Document Management
Modern document management is the next stage in the evolution of productivity solutions for corporate legal departments and users. These systems deliver an intuitive, consumer-like experience that empowers professionals to work more productively and collaboratively. At the same time, they enable corporate legal departments to be more efficient, agile, and responsive to the changing business environment.
1. Value to the User: The central tenet of modern document management is to empower the user by delivering a dramatically better experience. Its platform mirrors consumer applications like Amazon and Google, with intuitive features that work the way users want to work and requires minimal training. Modern document management starts with a clean, modern interface, accessible on any device, including personal computers, phones, or tablets. These systems store documents and emails with their associated project or matter, so users see the complete picture without bouncing between information silos. And it is seamlessly integrated with the authoring applications that people use every day, including Microsoft Word, Outlook, Gmail, and others.
2. Value to the information: Modern document management adds smart features and capabilities to enhance the value of information stored in documents and emails. For example, it displays document history and other metrics in intuitive visual dashboards and timelines. It anticipates user actions with smart document previews, suggested filing locations, and personalized search. And it integrates seamlessly with the tools legal professionals use, including matter management, contract management, and workflow software.
3. Value to the organization: Improving the individual user experience while enhancing the value of information delivers profound benefits at the organizational level. Modern document management helps legal organizations become more efficient and productive and deliver better outcomes for the business. Increased user experience drives user adoption and increases the amount of content stored in an organized and secure environment. The system reduces the time spent – across the department – searching for the correct document. More importantly, it retains the department’s institutional knowledge, captured in documents and emails.
4. Comprehensive Governance and Security: The final tenet of modern document management is comprehensive security and governance. Legal organizations have stringent requirements for document security from both internal and external threats. This content requires comprehensive security protections, built on established industry best practices, to secure information assets and govern who can access them. Data is encrypted at every stage of the process, with security permissions defined by content type and automatically applied across all documents or email.
Real-World Case Study
To further illustrate these concepts, it’s helpful to consider a real-world law department example. A large multinational corporation with operations in 180 countries worldwide recently evaluated its legal technology environment. Their in-house team found that they struggled to manage their information resources effectively and identified specific pain points associated with finding, sharing, and uploading information. Their analysis showed that legal department employees needed to search and access four documents every day. The searches fall into three main categories:
“Easy” searches for documents the user has personally touched recently – 10-20 minutes
“Warm” searches for documents where the user has some confidence – 30 minutes-2 hours
“Precedent” searches where the user is looking for previously created content – 1-5 days
When calculating the business impact of this challenge across the department, it became evident that the productivity loss associated with inefficient document search was substantial. They found that data was stored in silos leaving users no single source of truth for business information. The result was a loss of speed and accuracy in searching for information, significantly limiting their ability to find and leverage precedent.
After conducting an evaluation and proof of concept, Legal Operations determined they would roll out a modern document management solution to enable knowledge sharing and leverage their information’s power. They based their decision on believing that they could deliver measurable value by better enabling legal work processes and products. Their objective was to deliver more than a traditional document management system. They wanted to provide a complete legal information, knowledge, and workflow management solution. A modern document management solution’s core value is transforming how legal professionals get work done, improving productivity, enhancing user experience, increasing knowledge sharing, and improving the overall quality of legal services delivered to the business.
October 2020 | Raj Sethurama, Chief Technology Officer, Wolters Kluwer
Organizations and adapt, but now they must do so at a faster clip than ever. The rate of change happening today is significantly greater than it was two decades ago, making change management an ever-present challenge in every industry. Generally speaking, change is driven by both external and internal factors.
Grand technology shifts, like the release of the iPhone in 2007, are one example of the former category. No one imagined how the small, handheld device wcould transform the way customers across industries work and live.
Internal factors, on the other hand, refer to the people and processes within an organization. Some companies pride themselves on being agile. For others, the way they operate is part of their DNA, making change much harder.
No matter what your starting line looks like, the reality is that all organizations must learn to manage change to stay competitive. Because good change management means the ability to adapt, there’s no magic formula for it. Yet over the years, I’ve been able to identify some steps that consistently put business leaders on the right path.
Assess the current state of your organization. Before your organization can move toward its goals, you must have a good understanding of where you’re coming from. Assess your organization’s current state via the balanced scorecard approach, which offers four different measures of the status quo. Next, be sure you can make a clear business case for disrupting the current state and what that disruption should look like for various stakeholders: customers, employees, shareholders, and so on. These early steps can lay an essential foundation for long-term change.
Clearly define your end goal. Defining a clear end goal before you start is crucial because it allows you to outline a timeline. Everything should be time-boxed and rolled out in phases. Apply the change to a small group first and see how it goes before you iterate. It’s OK if you fail the first time. However, having a time limit on that failure is crucial to ensuring success by the established deadline.
Understand that it’s not a one-person job. Business leaders can’t have a savior complex when it comes to implementing change. You don’t need to make all the changes yourself, even if you have all the skills to do so. One previous employer of mine tried to drive change by assigning the task to executives. I saw this fail firsthand. Instead, identify a team of change agents with the right skill sets, mindsets, and passions regardless of their organizational level. It’s their job to inspire and support people on the ground. Sometimes, to ensure widespread buy-in, it could be useful to rotate change agents and have them recruit their own.
Communicate constantly. Having change agents means having an avenue to communicate with your employees on an ongoing basis about progress. Be honest and transparent — even about failures. When things don’t go as planned, say so. This shows that your organization is willing to recognize failure and quickly adapt to move in the direction of success.
Benchmark against best-in-class. External factors shouldn’t just be a catalyst for change; you should keep them in mind throughout the journey. It’s important to keep a pulse on the market throughout any transformation. In a previous organization, I remember one project my team had worked diligently on. We kept our head down and focused on all the steps outlined here. However, by the time we launched, others had already developed the mobile technology we were working on. The landscape had changed. To avoid such a situation, have your change agents benchmark against competitors and visit other companies for ideas on methodology and process.
Be prepared for resistance. Some employees will inevitably be resistant to change. In these cases, try to understand their hesitation or motivation. Ask honestly why the change is a challenge and what’s causing panic. Maybe they’re worried their job is at risk or they lack the right skill set. If you take the time to talk to employees, you can understand their mindsets and explain how the change fits into their career goals. Of course, some people will be unable to articulate their resistance and won’t want to be part of the journey. In that case, you must be prepared to make tough decisions. If you can’t get someone to buy in, they may not be the right person for the job at the time.
Realize that success requires failure. As already mentioned, change management is not a one-step process. You will have to iterate and learn many times over. However, with those iterations, you’ll begin to see success. People will start to see the impact of change — whether that means more quickly delivering value to customers or simply not falling behind as competition gets stiffer. When that happens, change will become a movement. Your team can organize around it, and people should buy in even more.
The reality is that change is non-negotiable, even in seemingly slower-paced industries. Technologies are changing the way employees and customers alike go about their business. If you don’t adapt, you’ll be left behind. The good news is that adapting isn’t as much of an uphill battle as many think. By engaging change agents across the organization, accepting failure, and clearly defining your goals and competition, you can help change management become a movement that breeds success.
June 2020 | Jamie Berry, Executive Vice President – Litigation Business Unit Leader, Integreon Maureen Atta, Senior Director, Integreon
Corporate legal operations (“ops”) in today’s pandemic-stricken world is challenging and unpredictable, mirroring the overall impact COVID-19 has had on our daily lives. In a matter of weeks, as governments worldwide issued “social isolation” mandates, most organizations were forced to completely transform to a Work from Home (WFH) environment, equipping most, or perhaps all, employees and contractors to work remotely, in order to continue operations.
In this new “normal,” corporate legal ops professionals and the constituencies they serve must steadily navigate forward to keep business moving and ensure that off-site workers are productive and compliant. Since many of the WFH arrangements–technology, security, and workflows–were established under duress as the pandemic swept the globe, it is time to reflect on some of the best practices being established day by day as legal ops professionals learn and innovate.
Find, Monitor and Fix
Just as there are issues to be addressed in our traditional brick and mortar workplaces, there are disconnects and problems with a virtual, WFH workplace that require the attention of legal ops professionals. To bridge the divide, proactive, frequent, open communication among team members and leveraging monitoring tools and KPI metrics to identify potential issues is critical.
Establish a culture of improvement that encourages team members to proactively bring issues forward so they can be resolved, and provide incentives for reporting problems and suggesting resolutions. Utilize mechanisms to draw out useful insights from personnel such as short, focused employee surveys.
Business intelligence and productivity monitoring tools can be used to glean substantial data from behind-the-scenes. Establishing baseline metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be monitored and used to evaluate employee performance is a helpful step in gauging success. Analyze where employees are doing well, and where they are having trouble. Notice which level of help they need, with a goal of increasing their independence and identifying areas requiring additional training. Self-reliant workers have great value in a WFH era, and metrics can tell you how well employees are accomplishing work independently – or not.
Technology Touch-Base
Since technology makes WFH possible, frequent communication with corporate IT helps legal ops determine whether internet bandwidth/telecom issues, security threats, inadequate software training, or lack of daily in-person supervision are hindering legal workflow. Legal ops experts provide human resources to bridge the gap between the GC’s office and IT so technology is optimally serving legal professionals.
Legal ops professionals play a pivotal role in protecting confidential data as it flows between corporate legal, IT solutions, law firms and ALSPs (alternative legal service providers). Even before COVID-19 hit, cyber incidents were on the rise. Now, the previous volume of phishing, virus, ransomware and malware cases has been further compounded by WFH related factors. Malicious hackers are capitalizing on COVID-related chaos, confusion and potentially at-risk home technology environments. Therefore, now is an ideal time to remind employees and vendors of cyber threats and corporate data security policies which safeguard information and uphold compliance regulations.
Drafting of new or revised procedure language may be warranted as WFH business practices evolve. Policy documents from 2-3 months ago may be already obsolete since new cyber threats and jurisdictional specifics have possibly changed. Policies must be rigid enough to protect the organization while also flexible enough to pivot as external changes arise.
External service providers such as independent contractors, ALSPs and law firms must be able to demonstrate their ongoing commitment to upholding the company’s data security and confidentiality. Adherence to security policy is important now that documents and emails are primarily being received and sent from home computers and wireless devices. Data security must be a priority for everyone. Legal ops can take the lead to ensure its integrity stays intact throughout the pandemic and beyond.
Hiring During COVID-19
Many organizations have reduced headcount during this crisis. However, other legal departments and legal organizations have had to hire new or repurpose existing talent to manage existing litigation, revise contracts, review documents, and more. Even if they are not hiring right now, companies must prepare to ingest a wave of new litigation that will likely be coming as a result of this crisis. Some work can be done internally, but much will also be outsourced to law firms or ALSPs.
When onboarding new team members, coordinate with HR and IT to ensure that their hardware, software and security are optimized from the beginning. Consider providing a fully equipped “start-up kit” if this is feasible. Assess new hires’ technology acumen and make sure they have skills and training to become self-sufficient as soon as possible. Since employees are working on their own without supervision, they must be self-starters so they can work independently.
Legal Ops Builds the Bridges
No one knows how much longer the COVID-19 crisis will continue, or whether it will recur at future dates. One thing that is certain is that legal services delivery, and business in general, will likely never be the same again. As corporations and legal service providers have been forced to adopt WFH measures, they have learned to innovate, leverage technology, and build greater efficiency. The sharp focus of legal ops professionals on these exact topics means that their expertise will continue to be indispensable to their employers. Legal ops professionals are the architects who build and maintain the bridges that can prevent organizations from falling into deep chasms during a crisis like COVID.
About the Authors
Jamie Berry is Executive Vice President – Litigation Business Unit Leader at Integreon and Adjunct Professor at The Catholic University of America (CUA) Law School. Maureen Atta is a Senior Director at Integreon. Integreon, a trusted, global provider of award-winning legal and business solutions to leading law firms, corporations and professional services firms with over 3000 employees globally.
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.
We’ve met with more than 50 clients in the past 12 months and have enjoyed a front seat to the transformation happening across legal departments. Our meetings have reinforced that CLOC’s 12 core competencies are not stagnant and continue to evolve in their application and impact. Here is a taste of what we are seeing you all accomplish. You can use these to plan your next project, benchmark with your colleagues, and to continue to show the value that you bring to your legal departments and companies.
Financial Management: This has evolved into so much more than simply reporting on spend or managing to the budget. Legal departments are overlaying spend against key objectives of the company to ensure that the allocation of legal resources aligns with the strategic priorities of the company.
Vendor Management: We started with preferred vendors and negotiating favorable pricing. Legal departments are working with vendors to solve common challenges in technology, ediscovery, and more. They are also asking vendors for data dashboarding to spot trends and inform future action.
Cross-Functional Alignment: Legal operations roles are often filled with business professionals from within the company, including finance, products and IT. These hires bring with them relationships and institutional know-how, and allow companies to repurpose people, process, and technology used in the business for use in the legal department.
Technology & Process Support: Legal operations is changing the culture of legal departments by driving the adoption of technology and incorporating process-driven workflows into serving the business.
Service Delivery & Alternative Support Models: This is not just about insourcing versus outsourcing. It is about right sourcing the work to ensure that tasks are assigned to the right resource. This allows everyone on the team to focus on the high-impact and high-value work. Legal operations professionals are shining a light on churn and helping legal departments to stop doing tasks that don’t bring value.
Organizational Design, Support & Management: Legal operations departments are no longer behind the scenes. The groups are front and center within legal departments and the business. Legal operations professionals are increasingly leading pitch meetings, panel selection, fee negotiations, and outside counsel evaluations, and have more optics into organizational changes impacting their legal departments.
Communications: Together with their GCs, legal operations departments are helping accelerate change and are creating innovation fluency about the company’s business and legal industry. At legal department meetings, they are highlighting how technology is transforming their business, mapping legal goals to innovation objectives of the business, and are training on skills core to legal operations. At legal department retreats, they are changing the curriculum to include design thinking sessions, technology updates, and data metrics discussions. They are also bringing together outside counsel to share innovation success stories so that they may be replicated across all firms supporting the company.
Data Analytics: Using data, legal operations is changing the conversation about value. What is the business goal for the matter? How will success be measured? Are legal resources aligned to the business’s strategies? Legal operations departments are driving the creation of dashboards to spot trends, inform future action, and identify missed opportunities. They are also capturing knowledge about the performance and use of their outside counsel. This includes tracking who at what firms have done work in particular areas for the company, working toward a future where legal operations can provide predictive analytics on who is best suited to solve a specific problem for the business.
Litigation Support & IP Management: Legal departments are partnering with IT to bring even more of the ediscovery lifecycle in-house. Teams from information security, IT, internal investigations, and legal operations are working together to show how particular license offerings can reduce spend exponentially. They are using advanced features to identify risk before litigation and are reducing their digital footprint with their vendors by 50 to 90%.
Knowledge Management: In response to the needs of the business, especially during periods of rapid growth, legal operations departments are creating on-demand, self-service legal solutions for their internal customers. To do so, they scope what the business needs, how much of the need requires interaction with a lawyer, and what portion can be solved with automation and standardization. These solutions are driven by playbooks, AI and legal bots.
Information Governance & Records Management: Legal operations departments are creating programs that provide the business better access to information so that it can harness data for a strategic advantage and, in some cases, monetize that data. They are driving the creation of policy and procedure that is practical and enhances service to the business. They are also complying with emerging data privacy laws and protecting against data breach and the associated reputational damage.
Strategic Planning: Legal operations leaders are reporting directly to their general counsel and are helping set the strategy and goals for the legal department. They increasingly have a seat at the table and are measuring their achievement and performance against the established goals for the legal department.
