The Intake stage is intended to 1) initiate and receive requests for legal service, and 2) define and reach agreement on the goals, objectives and scope of what is to be accomplished. This is one of the most important stages, as it drives everything that follows. This stage asks in-house teams to collaborate with their clients to clarify the scope of request, the anticipated resources, outcome and value of the work and the expected timetable prior to its execution in order to ensure appropriate assignment and efficient delivery throughout subsequent stages.
The Review stage is a critical opportunity for legal teams to demonstrate the value of the legal department and to continuously improve. It is often overlooked by legal teams since it happens after the matter has been completed because of lack of process, time or motivation. In this stage, the client, in-house lead [and outside counsel lead (if involved)] should evaluate the results, particularly, how the matter was planned, managed and executed so the team can gain insight for achieving successful outcomes and better work processes for future matters. This stage also may include a meeting amongst relevant team members to review the lessons learned and how they may be addressed. If possible, standard lessons learned templates should be captured, in addition to matter plans that represent best practice starting points for planning future matters. The result includes significant time and money savings for future matters, but moreover, increased potential to repeat successful outcomes (and avoid unsuccessful ones).
The Execution stage combines the traditional project management elements of execution and monitoring and controlling into a single stage where the matter is delivered according to the intended goals and outcomes set forth in the intake and planning stages. This stage heavily focuses on the deliverables, the need for change requests and the use of quality control and quality assurance to confirm that deliverables meet expectations.
The Planning stage draws upon the information gathered in the Intake stage to build out the details of the delivery of the legal service or the project plan. This stage sets out the activities to be performed, the team members who will perform the activities, the matter schedule or the estimated time to complete the activities, the matter budget or potential costs (estimates) for executing the matter and any assumptions factored into the estimate and the communication preferences of the client. The tools in this stage are intended to be used for both internal projects and for those projects that may involve vendors such as outside counsel.
October 2020 | Raj Sethurama, Chief Technology Officer, Wolters Kluwer
Organizations and adapt, but now they must do so at a faster clip than ever. The rate of change happening today is significantly greater than it was two decades ago, making change management an ever-present challenge in every industry. Generally speaking, change is driven by both external and internal factors.
Grand technology shifts, like the release of the iPhone in 2007, are one example of the former category. No one imagined how the small, handheld device wcould transform the way customers across industries work and live.
Internal factors, on the other hand, refer to the people and processes within an organization. Some companies pride themselves on being agile. For others, the way they operate is part of their DNA, making change much harder.
No matter what your starting line looks like, the reality is that all organizations must learn to manage change to stay competitive. Because good change management means the ability to adapt, there’s no magic formula for it. Yet over the years, I’ve been able to identify some steps that consistently put business leaders on the right path.
Assess the current state of your organization. Before your organization can move toward its goals, you must have a good understanding of where you’re coming from. Assess your organization’s current state via the balanced scorecard approach, which offers four different measures of the status quo. Next, be sure you can make a clear business case for disrupting the current state and what that disruption should look like for various stakeholders: customers, employees, shareholders, and so on. These early steps can lay an essential foundation for long-term change.
Clearly define your end goal. Defining a clear end goal before you start is crucial because it allows you to outline a timeline. Everything should be time-boxed and rolled out in phases. Apply the change to a small group first and see how it goes before you iterate. It’s OK if you fail the first time. However, having a time limit on that failure is crucial to ensuring success by the established deadline.
Understand that it’s not a one-person job. Business leaders can’t have a savior complex when it comes to implementing change. You don’t need to make all the changes yourself, even if you have all the skills to do so. One previous employer of mine tried to drive change by assigning the task to executives. I saw this fail firsthand. Instead, identify a team of change agents with the right skill sets, mindsets, and passions regardless of their organizational level. It’s their job to inspire and support people on the ground. Sometimes, to ensure widespread buy-in, it could be useful to rotate change agents and have them recruit their own.
Communicate constantly. Having change agents means having an avenue to communicate with your employees on an ongoing basis about progress. Be honest and transparent — even about failures. When things don’t go as planned, say so. This shows that your organization is willing to recognize failure and quickly adapt to move in the direction of success.
Benchmark against best-in-class. External factors shouldn’t just be a catalyst for change; you should keep them in mind throughout the journey. It’s important to keep a pulse on the market throughout any transformation. In a previous organization, I remember one project my team had worked diligently on. We kept our head down and focused on all the steps outlined here. However, by the time we launched, others had already developed the mobile technology we were working on. The landscape had changed. To avoid such a situation, have your change agents benchmark against competitors and visit other companies for ideas on methodology and process.
Be prepared for resistance. Some employees will inevitably be resistant to change. In these cases, try to understand their hesitation or motivation. Ask honestly why the change is a challenge and what’s causing panic. Maybe they’re worried their job is at risk or they lack the right skill set. If you take the time to talk to employees, you can understand their mindsets and explain how the change fits into their career goals. Of course, some people will be unable to articulate their resistance and won’t want to be part of the journey. In that case, you must be prepared to make tough decisions. If you can’t get someone to buy in, they may not be the right person for the job at the time.
Realize that success requires failure. As already mentioned, change management is not a one-step process. You will have to iterate and learn many times over. However, with those iterations, you’ll begin to see success. People will start to see the impact of change — whether that means more quickly delivering value to customers or simply not falling behind as competition gets stiffer. When that happens, change will become a movement. Your team can organize around it, and people should buy in even more.
The reality is that change is non-negotiable, even in seemingly slower-paced industries. Technologies are changing the way employees and customers alike go about their business. If you don’t adapt, you’ll be left behind. The good news is that adapting isn’t as much of an uphill battle as many think. By engaging change agents across the organization, accepting failure, and clearly defining your goals and competition, you can help change management become a movement that breeds success.
May 2020 | Lorna Synan, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Legal Ideation and Transformation, Liberty Mutual Insurance Robert Taylor, VP and Senior Corporate Counsel – Legal Ideation and Transformation, Liberty Mutual Insurance
Change is hard. Encouraging innovation and implementing change in an established and successful organization is even harder. Changing the legal service delivery model and implementing meaningful legal innovation, seemingly impossible. But it can be done. By leveraging techniques based in neuroscience, you can help people overcome emotional resistance that can be brought about by budget constraints, business imperatives, and pressures of the external marketplace. All these daily pressures and human nature itself can compete with their innate understanding and recognition of the need to innovate. Neuroscience studies the way the human brain works and how we respond to certain stimuli. It helps us understand what influences the way people make basic decisions. Learning more about motivators and stressors can help you shape how your employees or stakeholders respond to change. Which is why more and more organizations are hiring industrial psychologists and/or neuroscientists to help them better understand employees’ mindsets to unlock greater performance.
At Liberty Mutual Insurance, we began our innovation journey by asking a few questions: How do you innovate within a Legal department in an already conservative organization that is designed to measure risk? How do you overcome the psychological barriers of both individuals and groups in order to effectuate meaningful change? We sought our answers from a wide range of experts and share below neuroscience-based techniques (classification, safety, and support) from sources that helped us successfully navigate implementing legal innovation that aligned with our strategy.
Author’s note: We share a lot of content in our organization, none better than ‘Steal like an Artist’ by Austin Kleon who points out that there are very few original ideas. We will do our best to credit the ideas below where we can and impart universal concepts fairly, but we do not claim to be wicked smart professors who have all the answers and are lecturing from the front of a tiered classroom.
Classification: Innovators and Protectors
You will broadly find two equally important groups within your own work environment, typically classified as innovators and protectors. Through classification, you can better understand how to approach and harness the capabilities of both groups and facilitate change. The innovators will create, foster and thrive on new and ambitious ideas while the protectors will defend the status quo and prevent loss.
Honor the ideas of the innovators by clearly defining goals and objectives that can quantify the impact of their contributions. Harness the innovator’s energy to support your department’s vision but be aware of attempts to hijack your strategic plan for their own agenda, as this could derail progress. Engage the innovators and align their energy with the larger strategy your leadership has set for your organization. If you don’t, the people who you thought might be your biggest allies could turn into your biggest headache. In the end, assume positive intent with your innovators and let them have a voice within a structure.
Listen carefully to the concerns of the protectors by recognizing the pressures of cost containment, technology limitations, and the need for meaningful use cases. You must also make the protectors aware of the dangers of not moving forward at all, potentially resulting in a loss in market share or competitive advantage. It is critical to understand why a protector’s “fence” may have been put up in the first place. This is stressed in a principle called Chesterton’s Fence. In Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing, he describes the case of reformers (innovators) who notice something, such as a fence, and fail to see the reason for its existence. Before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. It is a straightforward principle, but one that is often not considered by a team of eager innovators.Many of the problems we face in a legal system or highly regulated business occur when we intervene without an understanding of what the consequences might be. If a fence exists, there is likely a reason for it. In a nod to the world class design experts at IDEO, we use a Venn diagram to analyze new ideas within existing “fences.” It forces both innovators and protectors to focus on the ideas that will work and uncover what will have the greatest impact and chance at success. When looking at a new idea, examine the feasibility (technical and regulatory), desirability (will they use it) and viability (financial resources) of the project. You will find that innovators thrive on desirable projects, whereas protectors often bring up technical and financial constraints. In order to execute on innovative projects, you will need to meet all three requirements.
Creating Safety: Threat vs. Safety
When you encounter something new, your brain is alerted, neurons are activated, and hormones are released as you try and figure out what the new thing is. If you think the new item is dangerous (maybe because it changes the way you work), then your reaction may be a threat response with a fight or flight trigger. In order to minimize a threat response in your stakeholder’s reaction to a new idea or initiative, you need to create a culture of psychological safety and trust. There are various models that help facilitate trust in the workplace, including David Rock’s SCARF model. The SCARF model emphasizes the importance of recognizing a job well done, independence and autonomy, building strong team relationships, fairness and transparency to achieve a sense of reward.
Creating this environment encourages everyone to take calculated risks and share in the process of innovation. For example, introducing a new technology vendor, even one that you feel will be beneficial for your stakeholders, may threaten their autonomy or create ambiguity for them without establishing trust. By implementing “Vendor Days” (in which one or more vendors can explain their services in a casual setting) in our department, we share new legal service models and technology with senior managers, influencers, and individual contributors in a format that allows for self-discovery. Providing an open forum for learning about a potential vendor allows stakeholders to relate to the opportunity on their own terms and feels far more collaborative. The vendor can focus on presenting information and capabilities, and answering questions, rather than attempting to be purely persuasive. Making a connection between the benefits of the new technology and the stakeholder’s own work product is powerful and often results in a request to partner in the implementation (pull) rather than requiring pursuit of an implementation (push) because a threat response may have been created. This dynamic eliminates the idea that only one team or one person has innovative ideas to push on the department and instead establishes that ideas can be pulled from all areas and levels far more successfully and in a way that allows for meaningful adoption and effective deployment of new technology.
Support: Alone and Together
Collaboration between innovators and protectors and creating a culture of psychological safety depends upon people working together. But for people to work together successfully, you need to nurture the individual. If you have been exposed to a psychology class, you are likely aware of the popular theory of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” from his book Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow’s Hierarchy (see insert) is a tiered system of needs beginning with basic survival then ascending through freedom from fear, social belonging, and self-esteem towards the end goal of self-actualization.
When considered relative to the workplace, motivation often increases as needs at each ascending level are met. In a professional work environment, we can concentrate primarily on self-esteem and self-actualization through respect and personal growth. This is where accomplished professionals thrive. At the apex of the triangle, individuals find themselves motivated to come up with new ideas to help others, the department, and the team.
Innovation may start with a single individual, but it is a team sport. All too often when someone tries to facilitate change on their own before they achieve buy-in from others, they fail. It is not necessarily that the individual is wrong to try, it just might be that their idea or the concept that they are trying to implement needs to mature. If the idea is too fragile and not enough people have gotten behind it, the idea will likely get destroyed by others. In order to grow these ideas into fruitful use cases, you must leverage diversity of thought and bring in different perspectives to analyze and strengthen the idea. One way we look to create a culture of diverse thought is through our “Design Challenges.” These day-long sessions promote human centered design and focuses on users, their issues, daily activities and goals through an empathetic lens. Many ideas presented at these events start with an individual thought but are made better through the collective experience. While these sessions occasionally lead to new creative solutions that are incorporated into department strategies, the participants are always left feeling more collaborative and motivated.
We have shared just a few of the ways we have found success implementing innovative change within a legal environment. We absolutely fell and skinned our knees along our journey, as you will. But with each fall there was a lesson and new perspective on how to move forward. There are a multitude of ways to improve the psychological safety of your employees, humble inquiry being among the best and least threatening way to get people to come to understand a problem from a new perspective. People tend to thrive when you seek to understand them and the first step before modifying any aspect of a system is to understand it. Don’t remove that “fence” before you know why it was there in the first place. Only then can you credibly propose your change. In the next 90 days, we challenge you to adopt one of these techniques and observe the results. If you do, we guarantee you will be pleased.
May 2020| Rachita Maker, Vice President, Chief of Staff and Head of Legal Operations, Tata Communications Limited
Do any lawyers remember going to law school and hearing the words “project management”? I certainly did not, and I suspect most of my colleagues didn’t either. It is a different world now with a number of institutes focusing on Legal Project Management and I see there are multiple courses available on the topic. Legal Project Management or LPM is an identified functional area in The CLOC Core 12 for Legal Operations, therefore, identified as a key skill for the legal operation professional.
I chanced upon project management purely by accident in my fifth year as a lawyer. Overnight, I was handed a high-volume complex contract management project with a tight deadline. In an instant, I was made responsible for a team of twenty bright, young lawyers who were relying on me to give them guidance; a demanding client who had expectations beyond the project scope; a deliverable that I had no idea on how to execute; and a management team that wanted me to make the whole thing work. No pressure? To tell the truth, I loved the challenge and still do today.
So, for all the lawyers or legal operations professions who get thrown into large engagements or complex implementation projects, with no one to tell them how it is done – I am sharing a few of the strategies I have forged over many years of managing projects successfully in the legal services industry.
Overview of Legal Project Management
My experience has taught me to view project management as having four pillars – client management, delivery management, team and stakeholder management, and financial management.
Projects within the legal industry could include large scale contract lifecycle management implementations including data migration from old systems to new, obligations management, M&A due diligence, contract drafting and negotiations engagements, and 50-state regulatory research to name a few. Typical challenges in legal projects relate to: scope; balancing the right number resources while ensuring subject matter expertise; maintaining quality; anticipating and mitigating risks; anticipating changes in projects due to unforeseen circumstances like regulatory changes, changes in production timeline or changes in client requirements and unresponsive clients.
Below is my advice for transitioning from a great lawyer to a successful project manager that no one spoke about in law school:
1. Understand the “pulse” of your client Understanding the “pulse” of your client – in other words, learning what they value most in the delivery of a project and why – is the key to any successful client-provider relationship. No matter what happens, you should be the go-to person for your client. Set up a communication schedule that matches your client’s needs and try to anticipate what they might need next.
I start any large project by identifying what is most critical to my client. Sometimes it is quality; other times it is timeline; and all too often it is cost. While most clients will say that ALL of those factors are equally important, there is usually one aspect that stands out as the priority.
For example, in a 50-state regulatory research project where timing is of the essence for your client, spending too much time ensuring you have researched every angle and missing the expected deadline will likely leave you with an unhappy client. In this example, setting realistic expectations up front on how the research might be restricted to meet the timeline would likely have led to the client suggesting more specific instructions to provide better focus for the research. As you build trust through a series of meetings and in meeting mutually agreed-upon expectations, the client will start to see you as an extension of their team.
The best way to set and adjust expectations is to create a regular cadence of communications that matches your client’s style. As lawyers, we tend to get so involved in our work that we wait to go to the client with our final “masterpiece”. There is nothing worse for a client than not knowing how their project is progressing. I recommend having at least a once a week check-in call, email or meeting. Depending on the timeline and scale of the project, you may want to have more frequent, shorter, or more casual conversations to establish rapport with your client. These meetings are also a great way to learn about the client and anticipate their upcoming needs.
2. Manage “scope creep” For your clients and for your organization, success is most often measured in financial terms. As project managers, you manage the budget by avoiding “scope creep” – in other words, ensuring that the requirements of a project have not unnecessarily expanded, making the project more expensive than anticipated. Scope changes are easier to identify if a client makes explicit changes to the deliverables or timing of the project; but in practice, small accretive changes are made in smaller bits and become difficult to quantify – in other words, they creep up until the project is ultimate off-budget.
Managing scope begins even before a project starts. As more clients now want fixed pricing or alternate pricing models for projects, the days of hourly billing have almost disappeared. Clients routinely ask for a quote without giving, or sometimes not knowing, any details around the project. Imagine a template harmonization project for a large multinational company – at a minimum, it would help to know how many templates, across how many geographies, the number of business units with overlapping templates, etc. Even if you are able to get some of this information in advance, chances are that you will get answers in approximates, but the client will demand certainty on pricing. It is important to define the project scope to the best of your ability and build in strong assumptions to protect your client and your organization.
Even with the best planning, scope creep can continue through the life of the project and often happens in short bursts. Since we are anxious to maintain good client relationships and we want to earn their business, we tend to overlook the scope creep issues, often leading to unanticipated bills to the client or unsustainably low margins for your organization. I recommend logging all requested changes, no matter how small they seem at the time, and their potential impact on the project. Assess these impacts with your clients and organization at regular intervals in order to anticipate any potential changes in cost or timing. Your clients will appreciate the open communication. The alternative, which is not mentioning scope changes until it is too late, can chip away at trust with your client and your organization.
3. Measure and meet your client’s quality and timeline expectations As lawyers, we are trained to provide high-quality work product. After all, our work product is the showcase of our talent. While it is easy to control our own deliverables and quality, it can be difficult to be responsible for what someone else is producing. The truth is that as project managers, we are responsible for the overall quality of the project. For example, whether you are overseeing 5 people working on an M&A transaction or 30 people working on a document review, you will need to ensure that quality and the timeline are met by the entire team working together.
The first step to providing quality work is to define and measure what quality means to the client. Work with your client to define quality metrics and then track them. As a project manager one should be able, at any point in time, to confidently talk about the “quality percentage” of their engagements. Tracking quality through pre-defined metrics also helps project managers identify if issues are related to a particular person or if those issues are general across the team.
While high-quality work is expected, most legal projects are deadline-driven, whether it is a deadline related to production, regulatory demands or a transaction. As lawyers, we are used to burning the midnight oil to meet our deadlines and produce the best output we can. The challenge is to help your project team stay motivated to work the extra hours when large deadlines are looming. In order to minimize all-nighters or unsustainable work hours, as well as to avoid any curveballs that may come up in a project, I usually try to build a buffer in project timelines. For example, if I have a 4-week project that needs about ten people, I will staff it with twelve people instead and set an internal timeline of 3 weeks so that I can conduct last minute checks, conduct quality review and make changes that may have come up during the life of the project.
4. Build and maintain reports that your clients and management will value Maintaining daily, weekly and monthly reports on your engagements will benefit both your clients and your organization. As a project manager you are expected to have a real-time understanding of project metrics – whether they relate to number of documents, hours worked on the project, throughput per hour, quality measures and any other information that can be sliced and diced.
I recommend updating clients and other stakeholders with progress reports. It helps to understand your client and stakeholder communication styles and timing, and to set expectations upfront. Weekly, or sometimes daily, reports may be needed. I was once working on a project that I knew was VERY important to my CEO, and I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night and worry about where we were on the project. I proactively set up daily reports, and it worked wonderfully to keep my CEO updated and comfortable with the project.
There are a number of tools and technologies that can help you track the progress and performance of your project. Using automated workflow tools, you can generate delivery dashboards, quality metrics, monthly information reports, etc. These tools help you collect analytics on each activity of your project. For longer-term engagements, I have also seen the Balanced Score Card approach work beautifully with clients, as they can see a holistic view of the team’s performance based on operational and delivery excellence, client satisfaction and additional value by way of innovation. As lawyers, we are not always proficient with tools and technology in the market place, but as good project managers we need to identify the best-suited person in our team who can support us in generating and maintaining reports.
5. Invest in your team’s growth A colleague of mine once said, “After a certain point in your career, it isn’t what your boss thinks of you, but what your team thinks of you,” and I totally agreed with her. Your team is a testament of you. A great project manager knows how to get buy-in from the team, give them the right training and resources, challenge them and use their strengths to the fullest. I try to build my project teams with complementary personality types to provide balance. No one person can do everything and most project managers think that the burden of performance is on them. The truth is that we should use our team’s strength to the fullest – this not only helps them to enhance their skills and helps them feel vested, but also takes some of the burden off our shoulders.
Remember that no matter how much you plan, there are things that may be out of your control. Great project managers focus on what is in their control, escalate what is not, identify risks early on and mitigate them to the best of their ability. As lawyers and professionals, we juggle multiple projects every day, and effective project management will help us stay organized.
We’ve met with more than 50 clients in the past 12 months and have enjoyed a front seat to the transformation happening across legal departments. Our meetings have reinforced that CLOC’s 12 core competencies are not stagnant and continue to evolve in their application and impact. Here is a taste of what we are seeing you all accomplish. You can use these to plan your next project, benchmark with your colleagues, and to continue to show the value that you bring to your legal departments and companies.
Financial Management: This has evolved into so much more than simply reporting on spend or managing to the budget. Legal departments are overlaying spend against key objectives of the company to ensure that the allocation of legal resources aligns with the strategic priorities of the company.
Vendor Management: We started with preferred vendors and negotiating favorable pricing. Legal departments are working with vendors to solve common challenges in technology, ediscovery, and more. They are also asking vendors for data dashboarding to spot trends and inform future action.
Cross-Functional Alignment: Legal operations roles are often filled with business professionals from within the company, including finance, products and IT. These hires bring with them relationships and institutional know-how, and allow companies to repurpose people, process, and technology used in the business for use in the legal department.
Technology & Process Support: Legal operations is changing the culture of legal departments by driving the adoption of technology and incorporating process-driven workflows into serving the business.
Service Delivery & Alternative Support Models: This is not just about insourcing versus outsourcing. It is about right sourcing the work to ensure that tasks are assigned to the right resource. This allows everyone on the team to focus on the high-impact and high-value work. Legal operations professionals are shining a light on churn and helping legal departments to stop doing tasks that don’t bring value.
Organizational Design, Support & Management: Legal operations departments are no longer behind the scenes. The groups are front and center within legal departments and the business. Legal operations professionals are increasingly leading pitch meetings, panel selection, fee negotiations, and outside counsel evaluations, and have more optics into organizational changes impacting their legal departments.
Communications: Together with their GCs, legal operations departments are helping accelerate change and are creating innovation fluency about the company’s business and legal industry. At legal department meetings, they are highlighting how technology is transforming their business, mapping legal goals to innovation objectives of the business, and are training on skills core to legal operations. At legal department retreats, they are changing the curriculum to include design thinking sessions, technology updates, and data metrics discussions. They are also bringing together outside counsel to share innovation success stories so that they may be replicated across all firms supporting the company.
Data Analytics: Using data, legal operations is changing the conversation about value. What is the business goal for the matter? How will success be measured? Are legal resources aligned to the business’s strategies? Legal operations departments are driving the creation of dashboards to spot trends, inform future action, and identify missed opportunities. They are also capturing knowledge about the performance and use of their outside counsel. This includes tracking who at what firms have done work in particular areas for the company, working toward a future where legal operations can provide predictive analytics on who is best suited to solve a specific problem for the business.
Litigation Support & IP Management: Legal departments are partnering with IT to bring even more of the ediscovery lifecycle in-house. Teams from information security, IT, internal investigations, and legal operations are working together to show how particular license offerings can reduce spend exponentially. They are using advanced features to identify risk before litigation and are reducing their digital footprint with their vendors by 50 to 90%.
Knowledge Management: In response to the needs of the business, especially during periods of rapid growth, legal operations departments are creating on-demand, self-service legal solutions for their internal customers. To do so, they scope what the business needs, how much of the need requires interaction with a lawyer, and what portion can be solved with automation and standardization. These solutions are driven by playbooks, AI and legal bots.
Information Governance & Records Management: Legal operations departments are creating programs that provide the business better access to information so that it can harness data for a strategic advantage and, in some cases, monetize that data. They are driving the creation of policy and procedure that is practical and enhances service to the business. They are also complying with emerging data privacy laws and protecting against data breach and the associated reputational damage.
Strategic Planning: Legal operations leaders are reporting directly to their general counsel and are helping set the strategy and goals for the legal department. They increasingly have a seat at the table and are measuring their achievement and performance against the established goals for the legal department.
