Descubra cómo los principios de CLOC pueden transformar las operaciones legales de su equipo. En este webinar, exploraremos cómo un General Counsel ha aprovechado estas prácticas para optimizar la eficiencia y fomentar la innovación dentro de su departamento legal. Analizaremos métodos para mejorar la colaboración, optimizar procesos y gestionar presupuestos de manera más efectiva. Esta sesión le proporcionará enfoques prácticos y probados que pueden maximizar el valor de las operaciones legales en su organización. No se pierda esta oportunidad de obtener insights valiosos y aplicables para su propio equipo.

Associated with Mexico

Join your CLOC New York peers for this in-person discussion focused on optimizing your legal department. We’ll dive into measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPI), calculating Return on Investment (ROI), and using these metrics to guide strategic planning as we look ahead to next year. Learn beside peers while networking and connecting with legal operations professionals in the New York region.

Space is limited -register now to save your spot and check back for additional event details.

AGENDA

• 4pm-5pm: Arrival and open networking
• 5pm-5:20pm: Critical KPI’s for a Legal Department and How to Calculate ROI to Establish Metrics
  • Jessica Jones Escalera, Managing Director, Head of Legal Operations – Americas @ HSBC 
• 5:20pm-5:40pm: Utilizing Metrics to Guide Operations and the Legal Departments Strategic Planning
  • Jessica Williams, Director of Legal Team Strategy and Operations, FanDuel 
• 5:40pm – 6:00pm: The General Counsel’s Perspective: Impact of Strategic Planning on the Organization
  • Alexia Maas, Founder & CEO | General Counsel & Business Adviser, Stratevix 
• 6:00pm – 7:00pm: Happy hour & open networking

Hors d’oeuvres and beverages provided. This event is graciously supported by Malbek.

Associated with CLOC New York

Join your CLOC peers in the Pittsburgh/Ohio region for a virtual roundtable discussion sharing insights around your legal ops opportunities and challenges.

AGENDA

1. Welcome
2. Regional Group Updates
   1. ACC & CLOC Event
3. Discussion Topics
   1. Share & Tell – recent/current projects
   2. What are you budgeting for in 2025?
   3. ALSPs and Contractors
   4. LegalOps interns?
   5. Latest and greatest in Legal Tech
      1. AI
      2. CLM
      3. Process Orchestration / Workflow
      4. Chatbots
      5. Other?
4. Closing Remarks

Associated with Pittsburgh/Ohio

This webinar will share the findings from an upcoming white paper produced by CLOC and Priori, as well as feature discussion with some of the legal operations professionals who participated in the white paper. You’ll learn about trends in how legal departments of all sizes are approaching legal spend and gain insights into their decision-making processes. 

Topics to be covered include a framework for prioritizing legal spend projects, key considerations for analyzing legal spend (such as internal resources and work assessment, legal technology and outside counsel and other external resources), and how departments consider these factors and make decisions that optimize spend. 

Modern legal entity management has finally transcended its traditional confines in the general counsel’s office, and not a moment too soon. In fact, we see this happening more frequently, with legal departments increasingly involving compliance (48%), governance (38%), finance (35%) and tax (25%) business units in entity management activities.

By no longer limiting itself to a small team of legal colleagues, the corporate record can finally be used for strategic decision-making. However, even with more business units participating in entity management, is there room to make this an even more powerful partnership? The answer lies with your colleagues in Finance & Tax.

Finance: Follow the money

Formally engaging the finance department can help more senior executives beyond the general counsel’s office understand entity management as an important business priority. Finance departments are often profit centers (as opposed to the legal department, which is often viewed as a cost center).

And for finance teams, entity data is increasingly important to their strategic planning processes. This year, the volatile markets and increased financing costs have pushed companies and funds to act more cautiously than in years past, with a higher priority on entity restructuring (and spinoffs), smaller M&A deals, and looking at past opportunities with fresh eyes. However, these short-term activities are only setting up for a bigger potential play in 2023; with high rates of undeployed capital — or dry powder — in the capital markets, 80% of Deloitte’s survey respondents believed that may be an opportunity to catch the wave and invest their cash as targets rise in value.

These opportunities, both short and long term, require a comprehensive understanding of entity data and a strong compliance track record to be competitive. Yet, 49% of companies still report using Excel to manage their entity data and a quarter reported at least one entity out of good standing in the last 24 months.

It is in the finance department’s best interest to find and invest in solutions that ensure the meticulous execution of entity management processes and empowers them to stay competitive for whatever opportunity arises.

Tax: Fighting complexity with collaboration

The Head of Tax seeks out opportunities that minimize costs and drive efficiency. Yet global complexity has hampered their agility in a trend that only seems to increase: in 2023, 45% of TMF Group’s accounting and tax experts anticipated compliance to grow over the next five years, which demonstrates the operational strain these business units are increasingly facing.

However, there’s acute awareness that with access to the right data at the right time, these heads of tax can ward off complexity. Focusing on global tax provisioning and integrating tax data company-wide are the top two priority for tax professionals in 2023, of which entity data is interlinked. By using technology to create a holistic view of the organization’s tax burden, this alignment with the legal team breeds efficiency, reduces redundancies and maximizes the potential for growth.

Entity technology: The path to partnership

In a world where collaboration reigns supreme, technology’s importance in connecting disparate business units cannot be underestimated. By creating a single source of truth for your entity data stored in a self-service database, tax, finance and legal teams can finally strategize from a collective playbook. This playbook can unlock the potential for growth, risk mitigation, and efficient decision-making. The era of entity management as a cross-functional responsibility has arrived, transforming it from an individual effort into the team sport it was always meant to be.

Diligent

Diligent Entities is the world’s leading purpose-driven entity management technology solution.  With solutions across governance, risk, compliance, audit and ESG, Diligent empowers more than 1 million users and 700,000 board members and leaders to make better decisions, faster. No matter the challenge.

Now that you know the value of partnering with tax and finance teams, take a closer look at how entity management technology can help you solidify that partnership and practice more efficient entity management.

We, the legal operators, love working with you, GCs, and we are impressed every day by how quickly you get to the heart of complicated problems that are presented to you from across the company regularly and frequently. We admire you for mastering the art of building up your arguments to present compelling cases. And we experience you to be modest, humble, and humorous. 

Thank you for offering us a seat at the legal leadership table and for thoughtfully, intelligently, and supportively sponsoring our initiatives to reimagine the delivery of legal services. We have done well together and came far. Amongst other things, we figured out outside counsel collaboration, eDiscovery, contract automation, and litigation management. We have also made considerable progress in enticing our colleagues – the legal function – to move from consultation to collaboration, which has led to more tangible results and given greater purpose to our lawyers. 

As we have increased the functional maturity of legal teams, we are now ready to address the fact that not every piece of legal work requires tailored attention and a perfect solution. In fact, half of the work that we do should be looked at from a perspective of operational excellence to help our business partners obtain faster, more consistent, and simpler legal solutions. We are convinced that this is a logical next step, and in pockets, for example in contracting, we are well on the way to doing this already – it is about harmonizing, simplifying, and automating these services. The questions that we need to address are: 

“How do we lead a legal function that will cover workstyles that range from providing a commodity service to the extraordinarily complex and bespoke nature of developing a litigation or acquisition strategy?” 

“How do we do justice to our people that want and need to be developed on these extreme ends of the spectrum?” 

 As always we come prepared with three archetypical options: 

• Focus on core legal activities and delegate everything else to business partners 
• Split the legal function and have an independent legal solutions team manage the day-to-day operational activities 
• Broaden the legal leadership approach to accommodate both groups, those that work to support the day-to-day business and those that take care of the extraordinary matters that companies face a couple of times a year. 

 All options will lead to spectacular outcomes, happy business partners, and satisfied and engaged legal professionals on both ends of the complexity spectrum. 

Author: Maurus Schreyvogel, Chief Legal Innovation Officer at Novartis International AG.

Like much of the rest of the world, I have been Wordling. Every. Day. Today, they said I was Splendid! Beyond the quick endorphin shot that gave me, I’ve been spending more time lately thinking about the magic formula behind this simple word game. What is it that makes it so engaging, and how can we make the technology we use every day in our professional lives this easy and fun?  

Here are my top takeaways on what makes Wordle such a delightful product experience and what inspiration the LegalTech community can take from those insights. First, the three things that really make Wordle connect with users:   
 

1. Wordle aces Time to Value – it gives users value back within seconds (in this case, value being fun). It doesn’t require a huge learning curve, implementation time or onboarding time. The onboarding instruction guide is 85 words long and took me 40 seconds to read. 

2. Wordle avoids the Build Trap – it only has a few capabilities, and it makes those features work really well. Plus, it only lets you play once a day – meaning you can’t binge it and then get bored. It makes you want to come back again and again. It just works by doing a few things really well.  

3. Wordle is Agile –  Wordle was recently acquired by The New York Times, and some small hiccups ensued. We learned we weren’t all solving the same puzzle with our friends and families and speculation started growing that the acquisition would ruin the thing we all loved.  The brand needed an intentional, well thought-through approach to making the integration successful, protecting the essence of all that is good about Wordle. But the team recovered quickly! Our lesson is to listen, iterate and make improvements fast! 

So how can we take the essence of what Wordle does so well and apply it to the much more complex LegalTech space? We can start by bringing some joy into the equation. 

We all know the last two years have not been kind to corporate legal departments. A perfect storm of record M&A volume, a slew of new regulatory and compliance challenges – including a rapidly growing list of environmental, social, and governance (ESG)-related issues – and a pandemic that disrupted traditional workflows and created widespread staffing shortages, has left many corporate legal departments feeling exhausted. 

I’ve seen the phenomenon first-hand. As chief product officer for LegalTech at Thomson Reuters, I help create technology to help legal teams confront their challenges. As those challenges have grown considerably over the past few years, I’ve felt a very real urgency to address the existential question: Can technology really help improve the experience of our people? 

As I’ve continued to talk with clients – one of whom started a call by apologizing for looking disheveled because he hadn’t slept in 48 hours – We’ve landed on three key criteria to inform LegalTech product development experience from the customer’s perspective.   

1. LegalTech needs to be Smart – The LegalTech industry needs to ensure we are truly saving people time, not asking them to spend more time monitoring and second-guessing the technology. That’s a really big deal when it comes to leveraging AI for things like automated contract review and spend management analytics. It means the technology must understand the language and nuance of each industry to inform the next best actions – and explain those recommendations by showing the logic. It means we need to be able to trust that the AI is fair, representative, and accurate. We need a human-centered approach to AI that instills trust and confidence.  

2. Proprietary platforms need to be Open – The way we work and collaborate has changed in the last few years, with cats and alien eyes joining us on virtual meetings. We must bring technology to where people are already working. For decades, tech companies have built software on their own proprietary platforms hoping to win clients over to their product universe. In fact, it is a far more effective strategy to build an open platform that can work seamlessly through existing platforms, which legal departments are already using to collaborate, both with their in-house colleagues as well as outside counsel.  
    

3. Technology is all about staying Connected – Over 50% of large legal departments use more than nine legal technologies, often disconnected from each other. This leads to a fragmented and inconsistent experience, and the effect is the opposite of what  we all want – needing technology to just work, seamlessly. Law departments have a role to play – asking for industry standards like LEDES and SALI, asking for open APIs, asking for ownership of their data. Raise the issue with software providers, asking for your suite of solutions to cooperate with and complement one another. And tech companies need to listen, learn and innovate. 

Tying this all together, tech providers need to think like partners. For some product development that means rolling, iterative software development schedules make incremental refinements and improvements every day or every week, allowing end-users to learn and absorb new product enhancements gradually as part of their workflow. 

The world has changed. The way people work has changed. In LegalTech, this means we need to be smarter, with human-centered AI capabilities, open, with the ability to meet people where they work, and connected, intersecting the choice of technology with the integration of technology.   

LegalTech can not only be better, but it can also be – dare I say – Splendid! 

Author: Kriti Sharma is Chief Product Officer, LegalTech at Thomson Reuters.

By Jeffrey Solomon, Senior Director of Product Management, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions 

Corporate legal departments (CLDs) are becoming increasingly technology-driven, and yet most CLDs would probably not consider themselves full of technology experts. After all, who gets into the business of law to become the next Elon Musk?  

Still, there’s no doubt technology is an essential component of a successful, well-run CLD. That’s why, according to Gartner, legal departments are expected to increase their spending on legal technology threefold by 2025. Indeed, if you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance you probably have some form of legal bill review software or another type of legal operations application a click or two away.  

And while it’s great that you’re likely already using some form of technology to accomplish everyday tasks and (hopefully) make your department more efficient, there are bigger questions at hand beyond just “How can I save time on bill review?” Questions like:  

• Which technology investments will help me achieve my departmental and corporate goals? 
• Will AI or similar kinds of modern technologies help me reach my goals more quickly or more strategically? 
• If so, which solutions are most appropriate for my department today, and which should I plan for in the future? 

A technology roadmap is essential to successful legal operations 

To answer these and other questions–and to make sure you end up investing in the right technologies– you need to develop a roadmap that will help you get from whatever technology maturity stage you’re in right now to where you want to be. A technology roadmap is a long-term, multi-year plan that allows you to assess your current technology resources and align existing and future investments to both your CLD’s and the company’s goals. 

Creating a well-considered and solidly planned roadmap is essential if you want your lawyers to work more productively, intelligently, and efficiently. It will allow you to achieve three things: 

• Plan for and invest in the technologies that will add the most value to your organization in the short term and long term 
• Keep you from wasting money on “shiny objects” that will not help you achieve your business objectives or simply won’t be adopted 
• Ultimately generate greater efficiencies, better business outcomes, and help your teams work smarter and faster 

Building your technology roadmap 

How can you generate your legal technology roadmap—one that’s unique to your business, is adaptable enough to evolve as your organization’s needs change, and sets you up for current and future success? 

That’s the question at the heart of our latest whitepaper, A Practical Guide to Creating a Legal Technology Roadmap. It is a step-by-step guide to creating a technology roadmap to ensure you’re aligning your technology investments with your corporate objectives and your current reality. You’ll learn: 

• How to get started 
• Which questions to ask 
• How to analyze your department’s legal technology maturity level 

• How to prioritize technology needs for the stage you are in and the next stage in your development 
• How to get buy-in from senior leadership and the day-to-day users in your core processes 
• And more 

Download the white paper today to learn how to build a roadmap that is aligned with your CLD’s vision for the future.