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.

Lisa Konie discusses how to create an internship program at your organization by using a step-by-step process developed through her personal experience at Adobe Inc. By utilizing these steps and guidelines you will be well on your way to developing your own successful internship program at your organization.

Setting Up an Internship Program – Tips for Success

Creating an internship program requires thoughtful effort. Interns take a lot of work and you shouldn’t just create an intern program lightly. There are a number of components to consider before starting a program, especially for legal interns.

For example, many interns do not have practical experience, or knowledge, and will require a considerable amount of guidance. Throughout the program, the interns will need to have frequent check ins, access to systems and tools, schedule of activities, and complete training programs before they can begin working on projects. In order to have a successful program, it will require dedicated support.

Keep in mind that these young adults come with their own set of ideals and priorities. It’s important to ensure your intern fits into your corporate culture, but also demonstrates their curiosity to learn more about how your organization operates. Before starting an internship program, it’s critical to evaluate whether you have sufficient time to mentor, monitor and train your interns. Without this component your interns and your program will not be set up for success.

Getting Started

Why do you want to implement an internship program?

What are you trying to accomplish with your program? Although internship programs can offer a tremendous benefit to your business, and help with your recruiting and staffing needs, you need to have a plan in place before you start. A well crafted, structured and robust internship program will increase your chances of success and keep you on track to meet your goals.

What are you hoping to gain from an internship program?

1. Do you just need help with projects?
2. Are you looking to pay it forward?
3. Is there a diversity component?
4. Are you looking to create a pipeline of talent and hire as full time employees (FTE’s)?
5. Do you want an infusion of eager minds with a new point of view?

Once you’ve come to an alignment within your organization on why you want to bring on an intern, consider what characteristics you are targeting. Are you looking for 1L’s, 2L’s, 3L’s, MBA candidates, areas of interest, etc?

Is your organization ready for an internship program?

It’s up to you to make sure that your intern fits into your organization and that they have a great experience. Keep in mind that interns are a marketing vehicle for your company. You want the intern to return to their school and tell all their classmates that they had an amazing experience at your company. Take some time to answer the following to consider whether your company is ready to implement an internship program.

• Has your company bought into the concept of the internship program? Without buy-in from all levels of the organization, especially at the executive levels, the intern won’t feel welcome.
• Do you have someone who can oversee the intern throughout the entire period of the internship?
• Can you assign a buddy for the intern, someone that is “safe” for their questions?
• Does your organization have a general internship program at the corporate level? Can you tap into that resource and combine your efforts with theirs?
• Will your intern fit into your company culture? Keep in mind there are likely to be age differences between your interns and the general internship pool. Lots of corporate intern programs are focused on college interns and your law students might feel differentiated and out of place.
• Consider your brand. Can you afford to bring on interns without hiring them at the end of the internship?
• Will the work they are assigned to be challenging and insightful, rather than just repetitive busy work? Interns are willing to step out of their comfort zone and learn practical concepts that they haven’t experienced or learned about. Give them an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.

When should you start?

Find out your own organization’s H.R. hiring schedule. H.R. schedules are typically not in sync with law schools.

It’s important to know key dates for campus recruitment. Schools are usually soliciting participation at on campus interviews (OCIs) in late spring and in early summer. Top law students are getting recruited by law firms in early fall. Create a plan for recruiting and set appropriate expectations internally, as well as with your intern.

Since campus interview season starts in August, you may miss some great talent if you start interviewing in January or February. If you’re targeting certain schools, reach out to the career development center at those schools to understand the time table for their OCIs.

Keep in mind that 1L students cannot be recruited until December 1st, as opposed to the typical August timeframe with 2Ls. There is less expectation for a 1L to receive a returning offer since they aren’t in as high a demand as 2L candidates, so this may be an option if you miss the key recruiting window or don’t anticipate hiring as a FTE. By considering a 1L for your internship, you can still get top talent well into the beginning of the year to help source your internship program for that summer.

Design Your Program

Develop the Structure.

A comprehensive and robust internship program should include information on learning objectives and goals, daily responsibilities, short and long-term projects, supervisor assignments, evaluation procedures, policies and expectations, orientation and off-boarding processes, just to name the basics. What will the intern do and what are they expected to accomplish? Will they have daily tasks, or will they be working on special projects? What is the reporting structure?

Secure budget and establish compensation.

Ensure that you have enough budget and whether it’s going to cover relocation or housing while your intern is on-site at your location. You’ll also need to determine compensation for the individual during the timeframe that you will have them on board.

Develop a job description, open a job requisition and get ready to post the position.

Make sure your job descriptions are all in order well before you post your internships. Open a job requisition, if that’s something that your company requires. Also, determine whether you’ll have recruiting support from your H.R team.

There are a number of recruiting platforms that many schools are tied into, so don’t lose hope if you don’t have support from your H.R. organization. You can still post intern job openings directly with school career development organizations.

You don’t have to be a large corporation with lots of bodies and resources to have a great program. You can recruit on your own through phone screening, or by leveraging job boards directly at law schools.

Plan your projects in advance.

Make sure that you have a sufficient amount of work for the intern to do. Sitting idly with nothing to do is a horrible experience. It’s critical to make sure that your interns always have enough to do, but are not completely overwhelmed. You don’t want them to feel like they have to put in a 60-hour work week, but at the same time, you want to make sure that they have enough interesting work to do.

Pay attention to the projects and the work that you have scoped out for your interns. You do not want your interns to go through an experience where they do not have enough to do. You also need to recognize that sometimes interns might be a little reluctant to put their hand up and say that they’re not busy enough because they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. It’s up to you, or the person who is overseeing your intern program, to make sure that you’ve got consistent touch points and that you know that your intern is busy to the appropriate level.

Onboarding, Orientation and Evaluation

1. Assign a mentorAssigning a buddy is a great way to allow the intern to have a connection with your department that is beyond just the manager. It also gives them a “safe” way to ask questions and get training.
   1. Identify people across your legal and organization that want to mentor and enlist their support. You may also need their support in interviewing or in assisting the intern throughout the summer.
   2. There are many ways for people across your organization to get involved. It’s up to you to make sure that you have lined up those resources in advance and that they understand their role. This will help ensure that your intern has a valuable summer and becomes part of the team.
2. Set the tone for the intern on arrival.You may need to do things differently for your intern than you do for your usual FTE’s. For some of them, this may be their first exposure to a “corporate” position.
   1. Welcome the intern and introduce them to the team in which they will reside and to the organization. This will help integrate them more quickly and help them adjust to the social and performance aspects of their projects and their internship so that they can be successful.
   2. Take your intern to lunch, walk them around your department, send out an email communication about their arrival to your department.
   3. Make the intern feel included in all things. This is the theme that you will need to continue throughout the summer to ensure that your intern has an amazing experience.
3. Schedule meet and greets.Scheduling meet and greets between your intern and your key leadership team allows your interns to get a better understanding of what happens across the entire legal department at the beginning of their internship. This gives them the confidence to reach out to their managers to provide input about certain areas, tasks or kinds of work that may be of interest to them. It will also help them determine if they are a good fit for a full time role, if offered.
4. Plan a team building and networking event.It’s important for your intern to realize how valuable this experience is and to gather information about what the practice of law is really like, and to meet the people who work in the industry.
   1. Early team building events will integrate the intern quickly into the organization. This can be just a fun activity that takes place during the summer, or if you want to partner with other people at different companies, you can pull all of your interns together and have a broader and more inclusive experience.
   2. Using defined touch points, interns will better understand how to leverage their time with your organization to “fine tune” the remainder of their law school education. They will also better understand what they want to do in the future and how to map out their career.
5. Set up frequent check-ins.Ensure that you meet with the intern on a regular basis and have formal midpoint and endpoint evaluations. Discuss how the intern is contributing, strengths and areas that need growth, and any other feedback for the intern. Invite the intern to report on project statuses and ask questions to better understand their role, project and your organization.
6. Don’t spread the interns out too thinly.Co-located interns are much easier to oversee and you will be able to create a more inclusive experience for those interns. Remember, if you do not have co-located interns, team building becomes even more critical. You will need to work harder to integrate those interns who are not co-located. Team building outings, or exercises, will help to connect your interns not only to the teams with whom they are embedded, but also to other interns.
7. Send out an after internship survey.Gather feedback about what worked and what you can do differently from the interns. Integrate that feedback into the program design for the following year.
8. Prepare to hire outstanding candidates.Make sure you have budget allocated and the paperwork underway so that your internal processed doesn’t delay your ability to make an offer. If you want to extend an offer at the end of summer, prepare early so that your interns are not left hanging wondering whether they’re going to get a job offer. Early planning ensures that you won’t miss out on hiring top talent that you have invested in.

Key Takeaways

• Just Start. Don’t make this a tools problem. Go through the exercises and develop a strong foundation.
• Prepare. Start with process definition. Determine what matters to your organization and drive toward measurable results.
• Make it a Amazing for Your Intern, Your Team and Yourself. Keep in mind that these students are all looking for an experience that will build their career and help them refine their focus. Make sure at every turn you have created an outstanding experience for them during their summer. Whether it’s filled with cool transactional work,interesting meetings with different individuals across your organization, or even informational interviews, take the time and effort to exceed expectations.
• Stand Out From the Crowd Think about all of the little nuances that will allow your intern program to stand out and be something different from all the other intern programs out there. This will ensure that your program will be a success.

The above information is based on a podcast that is accessible to members only. Listen to the Podcast. For detailed documentation on intern programs, including sample generic job descriptions, and more details on key dates, access the Internship Initiative on CLOC.org.

Attend a CLOC Institute to learn more about this, and many other topics of interest to legal operations professionals. Are you an in-house legal professional? Join CLOC as a member and be part of the discussion!

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.

There is a lot of buzz regarding the change AI is bringing to the legal space–who hasn’t read an article about “robot lawyers” coming to take our jobs? On some level we know this isn’t an accurate forecast, but the media thrives on the vagueness and uncertainty surrounding AI. Meanwhile, it’s often difficult for GCs to determine if a software pitch is the right solution for their legal operation needs.

Some of this interpretative struggle is due to the seemingly endless applications for legal tech solutions. That’s why it is critical to understand that AI brings new processes to the table, but that lawyers and legal professionals will always work in tandem with AI. It’s not humans or machines; it’s “Humans + Machines.”.

What is LIBOR?

In July 2017, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced that by the end of 2021 British banks would no longer be required to submit rates for the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). This means that LIBOR will play a diminished role in the global financial system going forward, and may disappear altogether.

Ever since that announcement, law firms, corporate legal departments, ALSPs, and everyone in between have been asking: How many of our clients have “LIBOR-infected” contracts? How much money is at stake? How do we prioritize and facilitate re-negotiation and re-papering?

The first hurdle is to identify the LIBOR-infected contracts. After that, teams of lawyers and legal professionals can work on remediation. That’s a two-pronged problem, requiring a two-pronged solution.

Identifying LIBOR Contracts with Machine Learning

Discussing machine learning (ML) solutions brings us back to that “robot lawyers” misunderstanding. A well-trained ML platform will find a lot of relevant data points in a large set of documents and can be adapted and customized with additional ML techniques to meet the unique challenges posed by the LIBOR problem. Designing and building these robust techniques requires strategic planning and communication between various types of subject matter experts . A software development team can build ML algorithms in multiple different ways, but it takes experts in law and finance to fully flesh out all they need from a custom LIBOR analysis tool. Basically, “robot lawyers” don’t exist; effective ML requires a range of human experts to sit down and discuss how best to solve incredibly complex problems in a sophisticated and results-oriented way.

ML is not a conveyor belt where data goes in and perfect results come out. It takes time and iteration. This is actually what makes ML a natural companion discipline for legal: both disciplines require taking in imperfect data, then developing creative and effective solutions with that data.

For example, an ML implementation team handling “LIBOR-infected” contracts must ask whether a few natural language processing (NLP) techniques can find all the required data, or whether more complex vectorization models are needed. Data points are neither simple nor intuitive: spread percentages; governing law clauses; jurisdiction-specific legal language; synonymous or nearly-synonymous terms such as “Eurodollar”; and fallback clauses tied to other reference rates such as SOFR and SONIA.

ML can solve a lot of problems in legal, but sometimes it’s forgotten just how vital the contributions by experts are. At the end of the day, ML is just complex software. ML is only as good as the team that builds it, oversees it, and shepherds its evolution.

Solving LIBOR Remediation with Expert Services

The LIBOR problem requires teams of various specialists. Many organizations already have such teams, or at least a set of processes in place. Service teams from law companies like Elevate must be nimble enough to integrate with clients and their processes in order to augment what is already there. A client may not want to use ML, but an outside services team may recognize the potential for ML deployment or see that it is wiser to simply ramp up the human review team.

Either way, for an acute problem such as LIBOR, a services team must bring necessary resources, processes, and technology to their client’s team, and help deliver efficiency and cost savings in four major ways: quantification, action planning, remediation, and reporting.

Quantification

To properly determine the level of repapering a client needs to remain compliant and reduce risk, any outside services team should know how to quantify their client’s LIBOR exposure with a full historical assessment of the contract paper in question.

This initial quantification is effort-intensive, which is why many organizations bring in the efficient expertise found in law companies. Moving fast and iterating is just as important for AI developer teams as it is for a specialized services team.

Quantification efforts will typically include:

• Scoping
• Targeting data repositories for relevant contract data
• Identifying the contracts most impacted by LIBOR (perhaps using a platform like ContraxSuite)
• Reviewing and summarizing contract information for further analysis
• Working with a client’s pre-existing methodologies to provide internal stakeholders with the clearest picture: which agreements are impacted, their level of exposure, and actions needed

Action Planning

After quantification comes the action plan. For a services team, this may mean:

• Supporting Legal Project Managers as they help their teams map out necessary steps and delegate tasks
• Coordinating parties for effort estimates and accountability
• Identifying, assisting, and leveraging third parties (e.g., outside counsel, law companies, technology providers, and/or experts)
• Building consensus and internal buy-in for final action plan

Remediation

After quantification and action planning, it’s time to finalize the review and tally up the contracts that require remediation. The following are five general types of remediation:

• Level 1: Tracking all “no action” contracts
• Level 2: Notification (outgoing) of LIBOR rate transition
• Level 3: Notification and simple remediation of contract (no countersignature required)
• Level 4: Notification and simple remediation of contract (countersignature required)
• Level 5: Notification and full remediation of contract

To assist with the facilitation and resolution of these items, organizations will most likely need to hire temporary contractors or outsource the remediation process to a legal service provider.

Reporting

Throughout the process, it is important for legal teams to be aware of the progress being made, agreements pending, agreements remediated, cycle time, type of remediation, etc. A good services team knows how to support the management, tracking, and presentation of reports for internal stakeholders, ensuring accuracy on scope, quality, and budget over time. Again, the use of AI tools by a services team can take this even further, providing deeper data- based insights for future projects.

Conclusion

“Humans + Machines” is better than humans or machines by themselves. We have delivered contract insights on existing and remediated agreements, using the specialized skills of our services teams, and powerful software tools like contract analytics platforms that sift through thousands of LIBOR-infected contracts. The current centrality of the LIBOR problem is just one of the many examples of “Humans + Machines” completing high-quality enterprise legal work. It will only get better from here.

About Elevate

Elevate is a law company, providing consulting, technology and services to law departments and law firms. The company’s multi-disciplinary team of legal professionals, business professionals, and technology professionals extend and enable the resources and capabilities of customers worldwide. Learn more at elevateservices.com.

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.

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

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

Importance of Resource Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

Step One: Define the Scope of Work

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

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

Step Two: Identify the Proper Resource

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

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

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

Step Three: Go to the Next Level

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

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

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

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

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

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute!

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

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

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

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

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

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

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

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

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

One: Objective Assessment

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

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

Two: Develop a Game Plan

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

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

Three: Measure Resource Needs

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

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

Four: Expedited Evolution

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

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

Five: Continuous Improvement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More is being asked of the modern day corporate legal department than ever before. General Counsel are required to function like a business within a business, optimizing people, processes, and technology to serve the company effectively and efficiently. Legal operations excellence is no longer an option; it must be top of mind.

Whether you’re in a startup or in a mature organization, building a sophisticated legal operations program from scratch can be a daunting task. It takes time away from day-to-day legal duties and requires a heavy focus on business principles. To get it off the ground, many questions must be considered: Why is it necessary? When should you start? Who do you hire? What should you build and buy? How do you manage change and measure performance?

The CLOC Core Competency Reference Model provides a cycle to walk you through the steps in building an effective legal operations function. The CLOC 2018 Conference keynote outlined below focuses on these critical and impactful competencies as pillars when developing your legal operations function, as well as other competencies as you grow the function.

• Strategic Planning
• Technology Process & Support
• Cross Functional Alignment
  & Communication

• Financial Management
• Vendor Management
• Knowledge Management

It’s time to build a legal operations function that bridges your legal department to the rest of the organization

What’s the first thing you need to think about? Start with the big picture and what you’re looking to accomplish in your legal operations function. Your primary goal in building the function should be to enable the business.A well-defined legal operations function follows twin paths of organizational and functional maturity in its growth. Functional and organizational maturity are symbiotic and depend on each other for balance.

• Organizational Maturity: How mature is the organization in relation to people, process, technology, and measurement? A mature organization operates with predictability, process, and precision. Are you reactive or proactive? Organizational maturity includes building out your team and your legal operations organization in a fashion that can serve the legal department.
• Functional Maturity: How mature is your organization based on the prevalence of specific functional areas? As you grow, functional areas may include legal finance, knowledge management, technology implementation, vendor management, etc.

The more mature your organization is along the organizational maturity X-axis, the more opportunity you have to achieve areas of functional maturity. Likewise, increased functional maturity along the Y-axis will allow you to make a better business case to add more people to your organization. It’s challenging to develop both levels of maturity at the same time; however, it’s critical to keep both of these areas in mind as you develop your legal operations department.

In the beginning, as you develop your legal operations function, you may be all by yourself. It’s just you trying to achieve a lot of different goals. As you grow in organizational maturity, you can begin to think about hiring additional functions, like an eBilling specialist. Then, as you develop your organizational and functional maturity, you can hire for additional functional areas.

The CLOC Core Competency Reference Model is designed to show functional maturity in a cycle. Starting at the top with strategic planning, you need to work with your GC to set the strategy for the legal ops function and determine how you will build out that function. Once the processes are nailed down, you can start implementing technology to automate those processes.

Steve Harmon, Cisco, “In my opinion, everything revolves around the hub of knowledge management. You need to have at least a basic level of competency in order to establish the building blocks to address various issues. A robust knowledge management exercise is critical in creating a repeatable, scalable model that will standardize process across the organization.”

Executing Your Kickoff

In the strategy phase, you need to meet with all your key business partners. This is the time to start asking questions in order to understand the issues and pain points faced by each of your strategic business partners. Supporting your business partners is a critical component of your job and you will achieve the greatest success by working in a collaborative, cross-functional way with all the business units.

Ask questions that will enable you to understand each of your stakeholders’ priorities. This will help you determine how the legal operations function will drive the overall business.

Sample questions:

1. General Counsel: Who are our clients?
2. Practice Area Leaders: What are your key processes?
3. Finance: Who are the legal department’s business partners?
4. IT: What is the universe of legal technology in place?
5. HR: How can existing talent serve operations goals?

Leverage Additional Resources
Leverage and identify talent throughout your organization who can help you. Even if you don’t have headcount, there are resources that you can leverage in other departments. Think creatively in terms of who you want to hire for your new roles. The person you hire may not have a legal operations background, but is passionate about operations and about changing the industry.

Lay the Foundation of Your Operations Organization
Laying an effective foundation will vary by organization and by priorities. Each of the pillars you select as your foundation will have underlying components. It can be overwhelming at first, but by focusing on the fundamental pillars in the CLOC Core Competency Reference Model, you can make manageable changes.

Mike Haven, Gap, “The 3 pillars for me were legal finance, partner management, and technology, with an overarching umbrella of strategy. Remember, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon and you need to focus on the pillars and mature gradually.”

The hardest part of the job is managing change. Things can become more painful before they get better. You might be going live with a new process or technology before the end users have fully adopted the idea. The key to change management is communication, engagement, and credibility.

• Communicate. Explain to both your stakeholders and end users what you are doing and why you are doing it. They need to understand “why” in order to fully engage.
• Engagement. Bring your stakeholders and end users on board with the change early and often. Get their feedback and ideas and make them a part of the change.
• Credibility. Build your credibility early in the process. Start with some quick wins that show value right away.

Examples of Quick Wins:

• Invoice Review: Take the first pass out of your attorneys’ hands to ensure compliance with policies and flag potential substantive issues.
• Workflow Automation: Firm matter, timekeeper onboarding, rate reviews, settlements processing.
• E-Signature: No more “Print, Sign, and PDF”.

Measure Your Traction as You Mature
There are a number of components you can use to measure your success. Spend, timekeeper rate management, invoice review, key matter status, and law firm performance are just a few of components that can be measured. When you first come into a legal department, make sure you measure your baseline, or starting point, for your most important initiatives. As you evolve, establish milestones to show your progression and prove your success.

Acknowledge that you are a service organization to a service organization. Why do organizations have law departments at all? The sole reason for their existence is to enable businesses to design, build, and sell products in a legally appropriate way. Ultimately, legal services must drive results.

How do you decide where you’re going to allocate resources in your department?

One way to allocate resources is to use the Core vs. Context Resource Allocation Model. This strategic method of allocating resources will allow your company to focus on what you do well and outsource the remaining activities to 3rd party firms.

First, determine which activities are mission-critical vs. non-mission critical. Second, decide if the activities are context or core. Finally, determine what percentage of your resources should be allocated to core, mission critical activities and which should be outsourced.

• Mission Critical: Activities that, if performed poorly, pose an immediate risk.
• Non-Mission Critical: Activities that, if performed poorly do not pose a risk
• Context: Activities that are necessary, but not tied to competitive advantage.
• Core: Activities that contribute to competitive advantage.

Examples of Typical Legal Operations Activities

• High stakes litigation compliance: Mission-critical and Context -> Out-task.
• IP Rights: Mission-critical and Core -> In-task.
• Smaller litigation: Non-mission Critical and Context -> Outsource.
• Routine transaction processing: Non-mission critical and Core -> Self Service.

Tools, Process, and Culture Trade-off

The three fundamental components of culture, process, and tools must be balanced when launching your legal operations function. In order to achieve your desired outcome, you need to understand your organization’s current processes and its culture.

Start with process definition. Understand how things are being done in your organization now. Define processes and map them to desired behaviors. Establish measurable metrics that are proxies for those desired behaviors. Process is going to be influenced by both tools and culture in your organization. You need to be nimble and be ready to iterate as new challenges arise.

Then, address the most challenging piece – the culture. How do the people in your organization make decisions? Culture is usually set and hard to change, especially in legal departments. You’ll need to create some motivating reason to persuade people to change the way they do work.

We recommend that you don’t start with tools/technology. It’s very tempting to just throw technology at the problem in order to achieve a quick solution. However, in the beginning we recommend that you focus on the narrowest set of tools that will solve the issues you face. By understanding your process and culture environment, you’ll be more successful implementing the right tools that will solve issues in the long term.

Key Takeaways

• Don’t make this a tools problem. Go through the exercises and develop a strong foundation.
• Start with process definition. Determine what matters to your organization and drive toward measurable results.
• Recognize that you’re not going to be successful until you address the cultural challenges.

Attend a CLOC Institute to learn more about this, and many other topics of interest to legal operations professionals. Are you an in-house legal professional? Join CLOC as a member and be part of the discussion!