Before remote work became encouraged or enforced due to COVID-19, General Counsel (GC) conducted their work with virtual systems and processes. Many legal departments were already comfortable with Cloud-based file storage, collaboration, and matter management systems. Think of the virtual legal teams working in multiple jurisdictions. They are experts in ‘following the sun’ and offering legal guidance to the business in various time zones. 

If you’re a GC reading this, you probably have your remote working conditions well established in your legal department, and things are ticking along nicely. But as we begin to move beyond the current circumstances, these four tips will help your legal department look forward to more strategic and better ways of doing business.

1. Protect client and vendor data 

The threat of an internal or external data breach is a liability for all organizations. Remote working conditions exacerbate the danger by introducing more variables into the work environment. Legal departments managing trade secrets and confidential client information have an ethical duty to secure this information from unauthorized and inadvertent exposure. The Director of Aon’s Cyber Solutions Group, Chris McLaughlin, spoke to Thomson Reuters recently, alerting GCs to virtual workplace risks. 

“We know that threat actors are actively targeting individuals at home. They target virtual private networks to try and get access to corporate systems, and some organizations have had their physical premises broken into,” said Chris. 

With sophisticated global cyber-attacks occurring regularly, here are two measures you’ll want to revisit, should a policy or operational process need updating: 

• Safe and secure file sharing: Basic email attachments are risky when sharing files and spreadsheets with sensitive or confidential information. Cloud-based collaboration platforms can help your organization implement best-practices and a more connected culture as they enable users, internal and external, to quickly and securely share vast amounts of information.
• Data breach response preparedness: Do you have a response plan if your legal team or someone in your organization reports a data breach? GCs must establish policies and procedures for their legal department to manage the situation as soon as a breach occurs and to mitigate additional data breaches in the aftermath. Be mindful of the organization’s legal responsibilities in your jurisdiction when a data breach occurs. For example, all 50 states have adopted data breach notification statutes, many with sector-specific provisions. Requirements vary widely, and there is no federal-level statute.

2. Generate advanced matter and spend analytics

COVID-19 has had an impact on legal spending in some regions more than others. The 2020 edition of the Legal Department Operations (LDO) Index from Thomson Reuters found a slight trend towards increasing budgets in the US, with 22% of respondents seeing a budget decrease and 32% reporting a budget increase in the last twelve months.

Legal departments are often seen as cost centers rather than strategic partners and are always under pressure to demonstrate their value to the broader organization, usually by focusing on efficiency. Suppose you’re looking to be more strategic on your legal spend for the business. In that case, the ability to report back to your stakeholders with advanced spend and matter management analytics is a must. 

If you don’t have a dedicated matter management platform, it may be time to build a business case for one. An effective matter management platform provides you with the transparency you need to control your department’s outside counsel legal spend and the clarity your executive team requires. Matter management analytics can drive better decisions and reduce your department’s overall costs.

3. Streamline contract creation and management 

Automating legal contracts and documents is a game-changer to those familiar with the innovative practice. A contract management system customized to your needs can connect your legal team with the rest of the business. This strategic technology can reduce the burden on your lawyers for guidance on minor matters so that they can spend more time on higher-level work. 

Platform solutions provide the building blocks to deliver multiple legal and business solutions in a unified user experience. They enable you to automate contract creation and approval, identify and manage risk, and monitor obligations and compliance through one central hub. And as the business grows and evolves, it’s easy to adapt and scale a platform to accommodate new processes.

4. Champion internal and external communication

As a strategic legal adviser to your organization, responsive communication is essential. Suppose you are a leader of your legal team, such as the GC or Legal Operations Director. In this case, a strategic move could foster an internal culture of knowledge-sharing and thought leadership. You can achieve this through platform solutions that offer a complete digital workplace for your organization, giving users a better way to collaborate, communicate, and connect with their team.

Championing innovative communication with your law firm advisers is beneficial, too. For example, if you have an urgent legal matter and need to call in external counsel for expert advice, you want to submit the brief to them effectively and fast. 

Seamless collaboration and communication are inherent in platform solutions. You can work on shared files and act fast on legal matters that require you and your adviser’s urgent attention. Look for an adviser that is just as innovative as you, so you can work together to handle complex legal issues that arise when needed. 

Features like these help gain stakeholder buy-in for legal technology because cloud-based platforms have dozens of use-cases not only for your legal team but also for marketing departments and human resources.

With these four strategic, in-house tips now on your radar, which one resonates with you? Find out more about how you can build your virtual workplace through a connected legal hub with Thomson Reuters.

A recent report from Forrester Research,  called contracts the “beating heart” of a business. “Contracts,” the report noted, “define the relationships that companies have with their customers, suppliers, partners, and employees.”

For lawyers and the legal operations professionals that support them, this insight should get hearts pounding. Trained in law school 1L Contracts classrooms and finely honed in corporate boardrooms, corporate counsel pride themselves on being masters of business negotiation chess. As legal counsel, they know what they should fight for, what they can let slide, and what they can ignore; that’s why most legal departments (“Legal” manage a company’s large volume of contracts in-house and rarely outsource this work to outside counsel. It’s also why Legal Department Operations professionals (LDOs) spend considerable time thinking about how to leverage a new generation of business technology to streamline contract management across the organization—and get these critical documents out of people’s inboxes and into the Cloud. (One recent survey put LDO adoption of contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology at about 80%).

Finally, the humble paper contract, and the process to negotiate it, is getting the recognition and upgrade that it deserves.

Is Legal Living Up to the Task?

Even though Legal is one of many “touches” in a contract’s life cycle, its failure to be strategic and act as a valued partner to the business is a frequent criticism. Given Legal’s heavy involvement in the “beating heart” of an organization, it must evaluate if it is doing as much as it can to support the business through its negotiation of these documents.  

• Does it understand what the business needs from its contracts?
• Is it negotiating contracts that truly maximize the value of the business’s relationships?
• Is it negotiating contracts that are fully aligned with the business?

Data Suggests It Might Not Be.

In its recent “Most Negotiated Terms” report, World Commerce and Contracting (WCC)[1] found that legal professionals, when negotiating a contract, focus on clauses that protect the business from a potential failure than on facilitating success. The survey suggests that the contract language Legal spends the most time negotiating is not the language that will significantly impact the commercial outcomes.

Does this mean lawyers have been focusing on the wrong thing?

No, risk management remains critical. But it does suggest opportunities for Legal to expand its consideration of what makes a good contract a great one. With the help of LDOs, here are some recommendations for corporate counsel to transform themselves from being perceived as mere legal counselors to becoming strategic and valued partners to the business:

1. Consider adding “relational terms” to your templates and playbooks.

First, let’s define a better contract. There is a growing recognition in contracting circles that “relational terms” should receive more attention when drafting agreements. WCC defines “relational terms” as terms that “help us adapt and adjust.”

WCC notes:

“They may include a more formal approach to the frequency and method of communications, or clearer definitions of data exchange, or greater rigor in defining the procedures for change management.”

These relational clauses are:

 “… essential to sustaining relationships, managing uncertainty, and securing improved performance.”

Relational clauses look beyond how a contract relationship might end and focuses on sustaining the relationship and creating optionality for the business when there’s less certainty during the relationship.

The Forrester report cited above corroborates this. Among firms Forrester surveyed, 76% of firms with “mature” contract management programs focus on contracts as not only risk management tools but instruments with which their companies can create value.

• Improve Cross-Functional Alignment by Prioritizing Information Flows and Sharing

Now you might be thinking, “Easier said than done.” How can Legal fully know what the business agreed to or what its delivery teams need to keep its relationships on track?  If an organization’s workflows exist in silos, the answer is, it can’t.

Negotiating more valuable contracts requires Cross-Functional Alignment—one of the CORE 12 from CLOC. CLOC defines Cross-Functional Alignment as  the ability to “create and drive relationships with other key company functions, such as HR, IT, Finance and Workplace Resources.”

To facilitate complete alignment with the business, Legal must gain full visibility upstream and downstream. LDOs should consider working across functions to get corporate counsel involved early in deals and fine-tune the information Legal collects in its intake procedure, such as:

• What is the business trying to achieve with this agreement?
• How should this contract work?
• What are the signals that something is going awry?
• If something goes awry, what additional safety valves should Legal add to protect the business?
• Once a contract is executed, what type of information should Legal share with the business stakeholders managing the contract? 

• Get A Little Help from Organization-Wide Technology and Contract Data Pools

Some highly seasoned negotiators might already use relational terms or have relationships with the business that provide a deep understanding of a transaction or deal. But to scale it and bake it into the process for the benefit of the entire organization, the business needs a shared contracting platform that the cross-functional departments will adopt and use. (i.e., a platform not exclusively built for Legal!).

Organization-wide contract lifecycle management (CLM) creates a single source of truth that all contract stakeholders can trust, to improve contract performance. For Legal, this might mean aggregating conversations and information exchanged between the contracting parties and sharing it with Legal before any drafting and negotiations are conducted. Following execution of the contract, it might mean using obligation management tools to monitor performance and create pools of data about contract risk and performance.  

In the aggregate, Legal can pool data that will improve the entire contracting process by:

• Identifying the most frequent deviations from standard clauses.
• Facilitating template or playbook modifications to address these deviations.
• Identifying repeated sticking points that continuously slow down negotiations (potentially getting business relationships off on the wrong foot)?

Post-execution, Legal can surface insights on contract performance to make data-driven decisions on which clauses and templates are delivering the most value and which are leading to disputes or under-performance. Given the WCC data above, clauses leading to disputes should get a hard look to determine if more accommodating, mutually beneficial language can improve the template.

The Rise of Contract Intelligence

Ultimately, companies can arrive at a place where Contract Intelligence becomes Business Intelligence (another CLOC Core 12 Competency). With full visibility and continuous real-time data, Legal and Legal Ops increase their business impact on the organization – and better yet, have the metrics to prove it.

Legal can experience efficiencies by streamlining contracting processes across the organization. But more valuable will be the data pools and business intelligence created from these more efficient workflows. Contract intelligence goes well beyond contract management. It can empower organizations to continuously improve outcomes by focusing on the “heart” of their business.

[1] Formerly International Association of Commerce and Contract Management). The “Most Negotiated Terms” report relied on a broad survey of legal and contracting professionals.

Bernadette Bulacan serves as Vice President and Lead Global Evangelist, at Icertis, the recognized leader for enterprise contract management. She shares contract management best practices and innovations with corporate counsel and contracting professionals.

Minimizing the cost of change—such that we derive value from the technology we invest in at low costs of adoption is an essential goal for just about every department in every organization. It’s also a substantial challenge. And in no department is this more true than legal—and, more specifically,Legal Operations.

Here, unique challenges exist. For a good reason, lawyers focus on risk: reducing it, safeguarding their organizations against it, and combating it when it manifests into a real threat. As a result, lawyers can be wary of process-level innovations, such as those requiring change because innovation introduces new risk variables.

This wariness makes sense and is ultimately a good thing. The legal department serves as a crucial business partner within their organizations, connecting to and impacting every part of the business. Systems for completing NDAs, for example, impact how quickly business conversations can start. Ensuring contracts are quickly signed affects sales velocity. Employee agreements can influence hiring processes.

Keeping the above in mind, legal’s comparatively conservative ethos for the tech sector serves as an essential counterbalance to predominantly innovation-focused mindsets. But as the rest of the business world moves forward, embracing increasingly powerful means of innovation that differentiate companies competitively, this same counterbalance can be an obstacle to embracing innovation and adapting to the change innovation requires, threatening to hold companies back.

For Legal Operations teams to be highly strategic partners within their organizations, they should push the organization forward. But how do you overcome the pushback? And once you do that, how do you ensure the new systems create real, tangible, appreciable value without requiring change?

Here are a few strategies.

Strategy #1: Reduce app-dependency.

A primary impediment to implementing more innovative and efficient processes and technological solutions in Legal Operations is the thinking that attempting to do so requires forcing employees to learn how to use yet another app.

Or, at least we think it does.

In truth, what innovative processes do is reduce the number of applications and software tools employees use. That new processes succeed in doing this is particularly crucial in the legal ops context, seeing how the employees we serve are uniquely allergic to new tech. Our goal should be to enable our people to focus purposefully on the right work. The more the legal department relies on disparate, static, siloed apps, the harder it is for our people to do that.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, the functional limitations of the applications we employ today — Asana, Onit, TeamConnect, Slack, Jira, and email — constrict us. Worse – the more applications we introduce into a process, the more those apps lose their power. Rather than enabling us, they burden us and limit our productivity because of what they can’t do, necessitating manual workarounds and fostering bottlenecks.

To create operations that truly increase our people’s power and capacity—without annoying them—we need to make our internal processes dependent on as few apps as possible, so that these manual workarounds and bottlenecks are removed.

Strategy #2: Reduce developer & IT dependency.

Just as depending on another app to address every process challenge is impractical, it’s similarly impractical to rely on your developers and IT department to minimize the pain of change.

Look, developers are influential, but relying on them to build custom solutions all the time inevitably delays your ability to problem-solve or adapt quickly—customization in this context bogs down your developers, IT, and your Legal Ops teams.

Custom-built solutions for the legal department increase your Legal Ops team’s workload. Custom-building solutions require legal ops teams to play a product manager’s role, working directly with developers to define the department’s business requirements. As the solution moves through development, developers look to the Legal Ops team to quality engineer the app. Once the app is ready to be launched, the Legal Ops team will be responsible for training everyone to use it.

This strategy is directly counterproductive to reducing developer and design dependency. We are introducing a custom-built solution that frustrates impacted employees just as much as introducing another “off-the-shelf” app—and relying on IT to get it done.

Remember, one goal here is to empower Legal Operations to react and function as needed, without a heavy reliance on your IT department. Introducing custom-built apps won’t accomplish that.

Strategy #3: Minimize user interfaces.

Perhaps the chief problem with attempting to innovate for efficiency in the legal ops context by buying or building new apps is that both strategies require employees to learn new interfaces. That this is inherently challenging is something Legal Operations teams have to understand. And this is true not only for complicated pieces of tech but for seemingly simple applications, too.

It’s crucial that instead of continuously increasing the number of interfaces, employees learn to use and derive value from those that currently exist.

Our organizations are at an inflection point. We have a decision to make regarding how we want to work in the future. In one direction: the end is adopting new apps (and in the process, increasing risk and exposure), or remaining stagnant and falling behind as an organization.

In the other direction is a kinder, happier, more empathetic future that lends credence to people’s needs, preferences, and unique abilities. The processes and systems with which they power organizations prove flexible, dynamic, and adaptive.

We must choose the latter path, especially in the context of Legal Operations. To do so is both prudent and moral. Legal Operations can be a practical and strategic business partner, capable of introducing new processes and optimizing existing ones without pushback. In this sense, it can also be a catalyst for adopting systems that improve employees’ lives.

If you’re interested in learning more about either Tonkean or Adaptive Business Operations, visit Tonkean.com. And check out our Legal Operations ebook here!

Organizations credit digital transformation with reducing costs, increasing agility, and delivering enhanced and new services. A possible unforeseen outcome of digital transformation is a rising volume of digital documents and information generated by business systems.

Digitally managing this increasing volume of documents presents a particular challenge for the legal industry. Law firms and legal departments require easy document accessibility and specific needs around workflow and collaboration.  There is no time in history when these needs have been more acute than in 2020 when remote working is the norm rather than the exception.

Traditional document management systems focused on helping enterprises organize and manage their documents. As these systems’ use increased, users found that they could not meet modern law departments and legal professionals’ needs.

Defining Modern Document Management

Modern document management is the next stage in the evolution of productivity solutions for corporate legal departments and users. These systems deliver an intuitive, consumer-like experience that empowers professionals to work more productively and collaboratively. At the same time, they enable corporate legal departments to be more efficient, agile, and responsive to the changing business environment.

1. Value to the User: The central tenet of modern document management is to empower the user by delivering a dramatically better experience. Its platform mirrors consumer applications like Amazon and Google, with intuitive features that work the way users want to work and requires minimal training. Modern document management starts with a clean, modern interface, accessible on any device, including personal computers, phones, or tablets. These systems store documents and emails with their associated project or matter, so users see the complete picture without bouncing between information silos. And it is seamlessly integrated with the authoring applications that people use every day, including Microsoft Word, Outlook, Gmail, and others.

2. Value to the information: Modern document management adds smart features and capabilities to enhance the value of information stored in documents and emails. For example, it displays document history and other metrics in intuitive visual dashboards and timelines. It anticipates user actions with smart document previews, suggested filing locations, and personalized search. And it integrates seamlessly with the tools legal professionals use, including matter management, contract management, and workflow software.

3. Value to the organization: Improving the individual user experience while enhancing the value of information delivers profound benefits at the organizational level. Modern document management helps legal organizations become more efficient and productive and deliver better outcomes for the business. Increased user experience drives user adoption and increases the amount of content stored in an organized and secure environment.  The system reduces the time spent – across the department – searching for the correct document. More importantly, it retains the department’s institutional knowledge, captured in documents and emails.

4. Comprehensive Governance and Security: The final tenet of modern document management is comprehensive security and governance. Legal organizations have stringent requirements for document security from both internal and external threats. This content requires comprehensive security protections, built on established industry best practices, to secure information assets and govern who can access them. Data is encrypted at every stage of the process, with security permissions defined by content type and automatically applied across all documents or email.

Real-World Case Study

To further illustrate these concepts, it’s helpful to consider a real-world law department example. A large multinational corporation with operations in 180 countries worldwide recently evaluated its legal technology environment. Their in-house team found that they struggled to manage their information resources effectively and identified specific pain points associated with finding, sharing, and uploading information. Their analysis showed that legal department employees needed to search and access four documents every day. The searches fall into three main categories:

• “Easy” searches for documents the user has personally touched recently – 10-20 minutes
• “Warm” searches for documents where the user has some confidence – 30 minutes-2 hours
• “Precedent” searches where the user is looking for previously created content – 1-5 days

When calculating the business impact of this challenge across the department, it became evident that the productivity loss associated with inefficient document search was substantial. They found that data was stored in silos leaving users no single source of truth for business information. The result was a loss of speed and accuracy in searching for information, significantly limiting their ability to find and leverage precedent.

After conducting an evaluation and proof of concept, Legal Operations determined they would roll out a modern document management solution to enable knowledge sharing and leverage their information’s power. They based their decision on believing that they could deliver measurable value by better enabling legal work processes and products. Their objective was to deliver more than a traditional document management system.  They wanted to provide a complete legal information, knowledge, and workflow management solution. A modern document management solution’s core value is transforming how legal professionals get work done, improving productivity, enhancing user experience, increasing knowledge sharing, and improving the overall quality of legal services delivered to the business.

October 2020 | Raj Sethurama, Chief Technology Officer, Wolters Kluwer

Organizations and adapt, but now they must do so at a faster clip than ever. The rate of change happening today is significantly greater than it was two decades ago, making change management an ever-present challenge in every industry. Generally speaking, change is driven by both external and internal factors.

Grand technology shifts, like the release of the iPhone in 2007, are one example of the former category. No one imagined how the small, handheld device wcould transform the way customers across industries work and live.

Internal factors, on the other hand, refer to the people and processes within an organization. Some companies pride themselves on being agile. For others, the way they operate is part of their DNA, making change much harder.

No matter what your starting line looks like, the reality is that all organizations must learn to manage change to stay competitive. Because good change management means the ability to adapt, there’s no magic formula for it. Yet over the years, I’ve been able to identify some steps that consistently put business leaders on the right path.

1. Assess the current state of your organization. Before your organization can move toward its goals, you must have a good understanding of where you’re coming from. Assess your organization’s current state via the balanced scorecard approach, which offers four different measures of the status quo. Next, be sure you can make a clear business case for disrupting the current state and what that disruption should look like for various stakeholders: customers, employees, shareholders, and so on. These early steps can lay an essential foundation for long-term change.
2. Clearly define your end goal. Defining a clear end goal before you start is crucial because it allows you to outline a timeline. Everything should be time-boxed and rolled out in phases. Apply the change to a small group first and see how it goes before you iterate. It’s OK if you fail the first time. However, having a time limit on that failure is crucial to ensuring success by the established deadline.
3. Understand that it’s not a one-person job. Business leaders can’t have a savior complex when it comes to implementing change. You don’t need to make all the changes yourself, even if you have all the skills to do so. One previous employer of mine tried to drive change by assigning the task to executives. I saw this fail firsthand. Instead, identify a team of change agents with the right skill sets, mindsets, and passions regardless of their organizational level. It’s their job to inspire and support people on the ground. Sometimes, to ensure widespread buy-in, it could be useful to rotate change agents and have them recruit their own.
4. Communicate constantly. Having change agents means having an avenue to communicate with your employees on an ongoing basis about progress. Be honest and transparent — even about failures. When things don’t go as planned, say so. This shows that your organization is willing to recognize failure and quickly adapt to move in the direction of success.
5. Benchmark against best-in-class. External factors shouldn’t just be a catalyst for change; you should keep them in mind throughout the journey. It’s important to keep a pulse on the market throughout any transformation. In a previous organization, I remember one project my team had worked diligently on. We kept our head down and focused on all the steps outlined here. However, by the time we launched, others had already developed the mobile technology we were working on. The landscape had changed. To avoid such a situation, have your change agents benchmark against competitors and visit other companies for ideas on methodology and process.
6. Be prepared for resistance. Some employees will inevitably be resistant to change. In these cases, try to understand their hesitation or motivation. Ask honestly why the change is a challenge and what’s causing panic. Maybe they’re worried their job is at risk or they lack the right skill set. If you take the time to talk to employees, you can understand their mindsets and explain how the change fits into their career goals. Of course, some people will be unable to articulate their resistance and won’t want to be part of the journey. In that case, you must be prepared to make tough decisions. If you can’t get someone to buy in, they may not be the right person for the job at the time.
7. Realize that success requires failure. As already mentioned, change management is not a one-step process. You will have to iterate and learn many times over. However, with those iterations, you’ll begin to see success. People will start to see the impact of change — whether that means more quickly delivering value to customers or simply not falling behind as competition gets stiffer. When that happens, change will become a movement. Your team can organize around it, and people should buy in even more.

The reality is that change is non-negotiable, even in seemingly slower-paced industries. Technologies are changing the way employees and customers alike go about their business. If you don’t adapt, you’ll be left behind. The good news is that adapting isn’t as much of an uphill battle as many think. By engaging change agents across the organization, accepting failure, and clearly defining your goals and competition, you can help change management become a movement that breeds success.

Maturity:General

ebook by Tonkean (2020)

This ebook will provide you with strategies on how to combat these common legal ops challenges to help you and your company start designing, building, and maintaining processes and systems that will the entire organization and improve the delivery of legal services. 

– Reduce app dependency
– Reduce developer and IT dependency
– Minimize user interfaces
– Design processes that use automation, but keep humans in the loop
– Adopt an adaptive business operations platform

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