Maturity: General

White Paper by Opentext

This white paper provides a primer on the duties surrounding legal holds and offers practical tips on how to improve the legal hold process.

– What is legal hold?
– Key Items to consider when implementing the hold
– When does the legal hold duty arise?
– Identify what must be persevered
– Using technology to manage legal holds
– Core functions

#Legal-Hold
#AssetType-WhitePaper
#Function-PracticeOperations

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Maturity: General 

Guide by CLOC 

This Litigation Matrix can help you advise clients on possible ways to increase their maturity level in their litigation operations, specifically as it relates to staffing matters with the right timekeepers (people) managing firm-wide and client-specific workflows (process), and selecting tools that support both the needs of firm personnel and their clients(technology). 

• Identify existing and desired competencies in the areas of Patents, Trademarks, and IP Litigation,
• Benchmark maturity level against other IP legal departments, and
• Focus on specific information, tools, and tasks that will help mature the IP operations function.

#Litigation-Management
#IP-Management
#AssetType-Guide
#Function-PracticeOperations​​​
#IP
#Litigation

Maturity: General 

Guide by CLOC 

This Trademark Matrix can help you advise clients on possible ways to increase their maturity level in their trademark and copyright operations, specifically as it relates to staffing matters with the right timekeepers (people) managing firm-wide and client-specific workflows (process), and selecting tools that support both the needs of firm personnel and their clients(technology). 

• Identify existing and desired competencies in the areas of Patents, Trademarks, and IP Litigation,
• Benchmark maturity level against other IP legal departments, and
• Focus on specific information, tools, and tasks that will help mature the IP operations function.

#Litigation-Management
#IP-Management
#AssetType-Guide
#Function-PracticeOperations​​
#IP
#Litigation

Maturity: General 

Guide by CLOC 

This Patent Matrix can help you advise clients on possible ways to increase their maturity level in their patent operations, specifically as it relates to staffing matters with the right timekeepers (people) managing firm-wide and client-specific workflows (process), and selecting tools that support both the needs of firm personnel and their clients(technology). 

• Identify existing and desired competencies in the areas of Patents, Trademarks, and IP Litigation,
• Benchmark maturity level against other IP legal departments, and
• Focus on specific information, tools, and tasks that will help mature the IP operations function.

#Litigation-Management
#IP-Management
#AssetType-Guide
#Function-PracticeOperations​​
#IP
#Litigation

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the average Fortune 2000 company holds around 20,000-40,000 active contracts. Imagine having to manage this contract volume throughout their lifecycle without any technology! In most cases, the responsibility of drafting, authoring, reviewing and managing a huge portfolio of high-value contracts falls on the legal or contract management function where execution is largely the responsibility of the legal operations team. And unfortunately for many operations teams, automation in contract management is still not a common practice. Companies continue to rely on manual processes for contract management – making this cumbersome, time-consuming and often routine effort for the legal team – that often exposes the company to risk and omissions.

An advanced contract management solution means streamlined processes, automated workflows, predictive analytics, standardized language, pre-configured alerts and triggers, and a centralized, integrated repository with easy access across devices. These are just some of the functionalities of an advanced CLM that can enhance the working of legal departments, improve productivity, decrease turn around time, help in strategic decision making and reduce costs and manual errors.

With so many benefits, adopting a CLM technology has become a goal for many legal departments. A proper plan in place with metrics to track each step of the journey can make the adoption easy and avoid hiccups on the way. We have identified four such steps in the CLM journey to ensure high adoption:

1. Know your point of origin
   While adopting CLM, knowing where you are in the CLM maturity model can make all the difference. Understand where you had been in the past and how you have reached the present state. Study the challenges faced and draw insights from your experiences. This stage is the starting point of the CLM adoption and having a thorough understanding of the current scenario from the technology and business standpoint can go a long way.
2. Collaborate with key stakeholders
   It is best to involve all the stakeholders in your decision making to ensure you get the right contract management solution for your organization. Contracting, legal, procurement, and any other divisions who would be using the solution could have important suggestions and insights that might help in a more ideal solution, save costs and ensure higher CLM adoption. However, do so at the risk of feature and scope creep – so keep your friends close and…well you know the rest.
3. Capture use-case intricacies
   As you are capturing the as-is state, be sure to understand and reach out to the stakeholders, process owners, reference data managers, clause curators, past, present and future librarians, and don’t forget the heritage legal file administrators as well as future stewards. Now is the time to understand the intricacies and complexities – or at the least document them and have owners identified.
4. Simplify processes and integration
   The goal of implementing a Contract Lifecycle Management solution is to simplify the process. With a simplified, more straight forward process, which leverages technology to facilitate decision paths and embodies new technologies like AI and Machine Based learning to provide assistive guidance, user adoption increases through incremental and consistent gains in performance and process efficiencies.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

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

The Journey of CLM Adoption in Legal Operations
Tuesday, May 14th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Amy Anderson, Transdev
• Sandy Owen, Intel Corporation
• Arthur Raguette, Ultria

For a more in-depth understanding of each of the steps in the Journey of CLM adoption, along with real-world examples and insights from established market leaders from Ultria, Intel and Transdev, attend Ultria’s breakout session on ‘The Journey of CLM Adoption in Legal Operations’ on Tuesday, May 14th. The speakers will discuss their journey of CLM adoption, the challenges they faced and the learnings from the same. They will share their experiences in leveraging CLOC competencies that include defining target metrics through Data Analytics, rallying support through Cross-Functional Alignment, and leveraging agile program management disciplines in their journey of Technology & Process Support for Contract Lifecycle Management.

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

HBR Consulting will present an educational session at CLOC’s 2019 Corporate Legal Operations Institute — “Don’t Gamble Your Future . . . Advance Your Operations Maturity” — in which we will explore strategies to help corporate law departments advance on the CLOC Legal Operations Maturity continuum. This is the third in a three-part series of blog posts to provide CLOC members with context regarding several of the major strategic areas in which law departments can advance in their maturity.

In this post, we will be focusing on the topic of legal analytics. “Data Analytics” is one of CLOC’s advanced level core competencies. Within the field of legal analytics, however, there is a wide range of maturity. This post briefly touches on some of the broad areas where there are opportunities for law departments to use analytics. Watch in the next month or so for HBR’s forthcoming whitepaper on legal analytics maturity.

The Emergence of Analytics in Corporate Law Departments

Companies across all sectors of the economy have been investing heavily in the development and use of data analytics for years, but the truth is that the application of data science in the legal sector is still in its early stages. However, the steady expansion of business expectations for in-house legal professionals — i.e., the law department is often required to measure its business performance just like the other departments in the organization — appears to have lit a fuse in the marketplace.

No matter how late the start, corporate law departments are now increasingly embracing data science and analytics as a strategic lever for more effectively measuring, managing and reporting on their business performance. Based on our work with corporate law departments of all sizes and across multiple sectors, there are three broad areas of legal analytics that have emerged in the field:

1. Financial Analytics
   The common starting point for most departments is to focus on spend or revenue analytics. This is a natural area for investment in legal analytics, as it helps department leaders to better understand their spending patterns and gain more control over their spending on outside counsel in particular, but also other costs such as discovery providers, etc. Twenty-six percent of corporate law departments are planning to implement legal spend analytics in the next one to two years, up from 24 percent in 2016 and 2017, according to the 2018 HBR Consulting Law Department Survey. Additionally, 49 percent have already implemented a legal spend analytics solution, up from 46 percent in 2017 and 39 percent in 2016.
2. Operational Analytics
   A second area of data analytics that has emerged is the application of quantitative methods to specific functions in the department that play a supporting role in the delivery or receipt of legal services. For example, a department might create a quantitative method to rationalize the consolidation of outside counsel with whom the company does business, or perhaps to objectively evaluate a department’s progress toward diversity and inclusion. These types of applications are valuable ways to optimize the legal talent and professional services utilized by the organization.
3. Practice Analytics
   The third major area of the corporate legal analytics landscape is the application of data science to the practice of law itself. These sorts of analytics seek to inform matter strategy, refine legal advice, enable experts to make better determinations of risk or forecast possible outcomes. Examples of questions that might be answered with practice-oriented analytics include: What does a case like this typically settle for? How long will it take to resolve this matter? How have we fared against this opposing counsel in the past? What are the chances this deal will close by the end of the quarter? Practice analytics are the least explored area of corporate legal analytics, but they are a growing point of emphasis for progressive department leaders and may offer the greatest opportunity for innovation.

Driving Innovation with Analytics

Earlier this year, HBR Consulting conducted “flash surveys” at a series of roundtable events (in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and San Jose) for corporate law department professionals. The surveys focused on questions related to the internal strategy, use and staffing of data analytics within corporate legal operations.

Our findings from these surveys confirmed our anecdotal observations from conversations with in-house legal professionals over the past couple years: law departments are increasingly relying on data analytics to drive innovation, from financial reporting improvements to operational changes to high-value, practice-oriented advancements.

First, it is clear that corporate law departments are taking data analytics more seriously than ever. Three in four survey respondents reported that they either have a data analytics program in place now or have plans to develop one in the future. While our survey participants were from larger law departments (median of 123 lawyers), it is clear that the field of data science is now a top priority for in-house counsel and operational leaders.

Second, the corporate legal market appears to be at a key stage in its evolving use of analytics, with greater emphasis being placed on improving service delivery and informing legal decision-making. Using analytics for these substantive KPIs — i.e., non-financial measures, such as matter cycle time, damages realization, etc. — will allow in-house legal professionals to better understand the drivers of cost, mitigate risk and more precisely determine value provided by outside counsel. More than half (56%) of the corporate law department leaders we surveyed said they either “have” or “have plans” to implement substantive KPIs.

Third, our observation is that corporate law departments are searching for the optimal staffing approach to achieve these analytics-fueled innovation goals. Four in 10 (41%) of our flash survey respondents said they employ dedicated analytics personnel within their law departments who are solely focused on legal operations, two in 10 (22%) said they draw on shared experts who reside within another group at the company, and one in 10 (9%) said they engage third-party vendors for specific data analytics projects. The remaining respondents (28%) reported they have no formal resources in place. The analytics staffing model remains a work in progress and it will be important to monitor which approaches seem to best support corporate legal innovation.

Conclusion

After getting a late start, corporate law departments are increasing their use of data analytics and expanding their application beyond financial metrics to include higher-value uses. For those departments that have the patience to keep on the data analytics path, the continued development in perspective and capability will yield greater results over time from these more complex applications. As they become more sophisticated users of data analytics, in-house legal professionals are certain to drive the industry forward, obtaining greater visibility into their department operations and uncover new insights into how to improve their business performance.

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
• Greg Bennett, Sr. Manager, Legal Operations, Gilead Sciences

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

Job Description by Rakuten

Experience: 3+ years

#Topic-JobDescriptionsandOtherResources​​

Is it happening? Is the humble contract finally getting the tech attention it deserves?

For legal departments, contracts have long been the forgotten piece of a company’s digital transformation puzzle. An attorney in the department might be asked to enter the contract process for drafting, negotiation and review, but may place little thought about the process following execution. Confined to paper or perhaps a PDF with eSignature capabilities, the contract never got a second look by the legal department unless it was causing a delay in business or resurfacing during a dispute or, worse, litigation.

Indeed, at first glance at the CLOC Core Competency Model, you’ll be pressed to see a single competency dedicated to the importance of enterprise contract management, especially as it pertains to post-execution contract actions.

But that’s all changing, and fast. According to analysts, companies are giving a hard look at Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) technology that can be used to manage the entire contracting process, from authoring to expiry.

“Customers’ interest in CLM is stronger than ever and is a leading topic raised by users of Gartner’s client inquiry service,” according to the 2018 Gartner Market Guide for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).

This should be music to the ears of legal operations professionals, given the legal headaches that come with traditional contract management.

However, when it comes to deploying CLM, it’s not just a question of if but how. Enterprise-wide deployments provide clear advantages for legal operations departments and their companies—and in fact cut across several CLOC competencies: Not only “Technology and Process Support” but also “Cross Functional Alignment,” “Data Analytics” and other areas.

If you are still unfamiliar with the basics of enterprise-wide contract management, here is a quick “5 Ws” guide to this exciting technology.

What: A Contract Management System for All Contracts

Enterprise contract management allows companies to put all their contracts—sales, procurement, HR, corporate—into a single system for holistic management.

This form of contract management is considered a best practice by analysts, if not commonly practiced in the “first wave” of enterprise contract management deployments.

“Many organizations that have implemented a CLM solution have done so for just a portion of their business or a specific business function. This piecemeal approach frequently results in inefficient process workflows and deployment of multiple CLM tools,” Gartner says in its Market Report.

Often, contracts that originate in one department will have dependencies with a contract in another department. For example, a sales contract may precipitate the need for raw materials to be procured to ensure the deliverable is built to spec (in the contract management field we call this “back-to-back” contracting.) By managing all contracts on a single technology, legal operations teams can gain a holistic view across all a company’s contracts for improved analytics, better workflows and reduced risk.

2. Why? Proven ROI

For historically non-revenue-generating departments like legal, a proven return-on-investment for technology is vital. Thankfully for legal operation professionals, CLM has that covered.

“CLM presents a great opportunity for digital transformation, because it’s practical, well-scoped and executable. The technology is proven, as is the ROI, which companies can use to fund other initiatives on their digital business roadmap,” Gartner reports in its Market Guide.

The value delivered by enterprise contract management can be divided into three categories: acceleration, protection and optimization. Contract turnaround becomes faster, contract risk is proactively surfaced and monitored, and contract performance is continually evaluated to identify areas for improvement.

3. When? Now (And 5 Years from Now)

While CLM adoption has been growing in recent years, we are now at an inflection point of what the software can do for users.

As another report, this one from Forrester, puts it, “The CLM market is growing because more contract managers and legal and financial professionals use CLM to address the challenges of creating, managing, and getting the best business results from their contracts. Contract management and legal pros increasingly trust CLM providers to act as strategic partners, providing firms with the right tools to get the best value from their contracts.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but the upshot is that contract management software is advancing to the point that legal departments—especially those responsible for managing thousands of contracts—can’t afford to manage contracts outside a CLM system.

But legal operations teams shouldn’t only be thinking about what the technology can do for them now, but also five years from now. Like the CLOC Competency Model itself, there is a maturity model to contract management that starts with basics like creating contracts and progresses to capabilities like using artificial intelligence to analyze contract negotiation data and recommend tactics for better outcomes.

This doesn’t happen overnight. Legal operations departments should consider tools that they can “grow into” as their enterprise becomes more comfortable with the technology.

4. Where: Everywhere

With enterprise contract management, everyone with proper permissions in a company can see any contract in its repository, breaking down traditional departmental and geographic silos that have historically hampered optimal contract management.

Vertiv, a global technology manufacturer, has driven a successful deployment of enterprise contract management and now enjoys instant visibility into all of its contracts, even those executed overseas. Prior to implementing an enterprise contract management system, agreements were scattered across the globe, with paper agreement locked in physical file cabinets or on the desktops of its employees. The company underwent a successful transition from a decentralized paper system to a global, searchable central repository so teams everywhere can quickly review purchasing contracts and other agreements and compare them to make sure the company is getting the best terms.

5. Who: You!

Yes, you.

When selecting a CLM vendor, procurement and sales will often advocate for a solution that is tailored specifically to their role, since they often come as part of a larger software suite.

Yet if both sales and procurement—and likely HR as well—get the CLM built for their role, legal will end up working with three or more systems, unnecessarily adding to the technology plate that legal operations would need to manage. Even worse, the body of contracts will be fragmented across the enterprise (as warned against by Gartner earlier).

To avoid this situation, it is incumbent on CLOs and legal operations professionals to lead the push for an enterprise-wide solution for contract management.

Contracts no longer need to be the forgotten piece of a company’s digital transformation puzzle. In fact, guided by these Five Ws, legal operation professionals can lead an enterprise on its journey to transforming their contracts from static documents to strategic assets.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session and learn how a leading legal department transformed through its enterprise contract management.:

Contracts from Static Documents to Strategic Assets
Wednesday, May 15th 10:30 – 11:20
Speakers:

• Colin Flannery, Vertiv Worldwide General Counsel
• Bernadette Bulacan, Icertis Legal Evangelist

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

It’s the most exciting time to be in legal operations. With more attention on the role than ever before, legal operations professionals have the opportunity to drive real change through process efficiencies, new technologies, and vendor management – and we’re just scratching the surface.

But with any emerging role comes new challenges – and myths – around the purpose, scope, and responsibilities. In today’s post, we will debunk five of the most common myths we’ve heard about legal operations.

1. Legal Operations is Clearly Defined

Many legal professionals, especially those within the CLOC community, describe legal operations in line with a definition shared by our friend, Dan Baker, Chief of Staff, Director of Legal Operations at Ancestry.

“The legal operations’ role is comprised of CLOC’s twelve core competencies with the ultimate goal of making sure your attorneys are best leveraged to do their jobs, while creating an organization where folks feel valued and want to stay.”

And while this serves as a fantastic baseline for how to define legal operations, the reality is that the function is new – it is quite broad and therefore often adapted to meet the needs of a specific legal team, its departmental maturity, and the company’s overall goals and objectives. For instance, some organizations have legal operations teams primarily handling paralegal work, while others have legal ops focus solely on managing budget or the technology stack. Legal operations comes in many flavors so don’t fall into the trap of comparing yourself to others when it comes to building out your own legal ops team.

2. “Our Legal Department is Too Small for Legal Operations”

Historically, only mature organizations with large legal departments could afford to bring on a dedicated legal ops function. And it was easiest for them to show the ROI with such a new role and justify headcount. This planted the seed (or in this case, the myth) that in order for legal operations to be warranted, the legal department must reach a specific size – generally VERY large.

But as the 2017 CLOC Annual Survey showed, the attorney to legal operations headcount ratio varies drastically from one industry to the next. At the end of the day, there is no “legal department size guide” to follow though there are general best practices around hiring and expanding legal ops teams.

We’ve also seen that a legal operations hire frequently becoming a GCs first hire. Early legal ops programs facilitate operational rigor and put critical infrastructure in place that can scale as the department grows and their scope of work increases alongside. And just because you don’t have a specific headcount for legal ops, or a full legal operations department, doesn’t mean you’re not investing in it.

3. Legal Operations is JUST Being Great with Technology, Data, and Metrics and Being Part of the Legal Team

There’s no arguing that legal ops plays an instrumental role in ensuring efficient and accurate data collection, which can then be used to make more informed and strategic decisions that not only benefit the department, but the entire company.

But being an excellent legal operations professional goes beyond just fluency in data, metrics, and technology. The best legal operations professionals also have an extensive skill set including:

• Project management
• Executive presence
• Change management
• Presentation skills

It is these skills that allow legal operations to drive great transformation throughout the legal department, cross-functionally with other business units, and for the entire business.

4. Legal Technology Will Solve All Operational Problems

One mistake that legal teams often make is thinking that technology is a fix-all magic button for any problems they face. This is a myth! In the wise words of Mary Shen O’Carroll, Director of Legal Operations, Technology and Strategy at Google and CLOC President, “A new set of golf clubs is not going to make you a better golfer. There are fundamentally other things that need to change and it’s not just the tools that will magically fix that for you.”

Technology doesn’t solve bad process. Legal Operations must first think about how to optimize the processes. Then, they can ask themselves, “How can technology be integrated into this process to help achieve greater results?”

Getting adoption of new technology is a whole other ballgame (and probably worthy of its own post). To ensure adoption of any technology, have a change management program in place. If you’re not sure where to start, we recommend focusing on these five key building blocks to create a successful change management program:

1. Strategy
2. Planning
3. Communication
4. Training
5. Measurement

5. Legal Operations Will Continue to be a Small Community

Legal operations is a new and emerging field, but one that is growing and evolving at lightning speed. As a proud sponsor of CLOC four years in a row (including the institutes in London, EMEA and Australia), we’ve seen it first-hand. The outpouring of support from legal operations professionals – all with different backgrounds and experiences – to swap knowledge and tackle some of the most common legal operations challenges is inspiring. Not only is legal operations is here to stay, the community supporting shows no signs of slowing down.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute!

Can’t get enough legal operations? If you’re attending the 2019 CLOC Institute – register here if you haven’t already – and please join our CLOC session:

Building and Optimizing Modern Legal Departments
Tuesday, May 14th at 10:30am
Speakers:

• Nathan Wenzel | CEO, SimpleLegal
• Frances Pomposo | Director of Legal Operations, Workday
• Lucy Bassli | VP & DGC of Legal Operations, Snowflake

We’ll be discussing what a strong legal ops team looks like, how to leverage and maximize technology, strategies for collaborating with other departments, and the future of legal tech.

And don’t forget to schedule time to meet the SimpleLegal team and check out our modern and intuitive legal operations platform. It’s also the perfect opportunity to pick up your limited edition CLOC swag – we’ve got some exciting surprises in store!