By Brian McGovern

It used to be that there were good – though not existential – business reasons to create a technology roadmap for the legal department. When developing such a roadmap, one criterion upon which legal operations evaluated legal tech products, in addition to their ROI performance, was their ability to deliver value for an extended duration. Still, developing a technology roadmap hardly seemed like a life-or-death concern. That was pre-COVID-19.  

Today, organizations find themselves with urgent, immediate reasons to put that roadmap in place. 

Why? Because technology is, of course, one of the three pillars of operational success, alongside people and process.  And people and processes have been disrupted during this pandemic. How the legal department/organization’s technology behaves in this new normal will either sustain or pose a risk to business continuity. Therefore, the legal tech stack’s ability to help support business continuity during periods of profound disruption is required. The legal ops team must build a legal tech stack that enables the legal department and the organization to adjust to predictable and unanticipated disruptions. 

When building a legal tech stack capable of delivering both bottom-line business value and resilience over the long term, keep these best practices in mind.

Avoid being reactive

It’s not easy: At a time like this, it’s very tempting to make technology decisions based on the immediate demands placed upon your department and organization. 

Last year, a study by Hyperion Global Partners found that 39% of tech investment decisions were strategic, with an eye on long-term value, and guided by understanding the need to integrate technology with operational requirements.  However, 35% of tech investment decisions were reactive, spurred by the arrival of new versions of legacy software, shiny new technologies, or other “perfunctory factors” like changes in the technology market. 

I’d suggest that 2020 legal tech stack purchase decisions run the risk of being very reactive due to the pandemic’s challenges, including most if not all employees working from home.  Rather than merely adopting “quick fixes,” though, you need to consider whether or not a solution has the flexibility and scalability to deliver value beyond the immediate circumstances.   

Put a data strategy in place first

According to bestselling author Bernard Marr, 

“Data is revolutionizing the way we all do business. Every business is now a data business and needs a robust Data Strategy. However, less than 0.5% of all data is ever analyzed and used, offering huge potential for organizations when trying to leverage this key strategic asset.” 

Legal departments possess a staggering amount of data. Still, it may be silo’ed or located in disparate locations – from emails to matter files to personal databases – so putting it to use can be difficult.  It’s crucial to develop a comprehensive data strategy that aligns with business objectives, resulting in meaningful legal metrics to drive better decision-making, better outcomes, and maximum business value.

Your legal tech stack should support that strategy and be built around collecting, managing, analyzing, and reporting the correct data to execute it. Don’t make a technology investment unless it supports that strategy.  The tail shouldn’t wag the dog, but that’s what’s happening if the technologies you’ve deployed are dictating your data strategy.  A lousy tech investment decision made because there was no data strategy in place can hang over your head – and drag on your KPIs – for a long time to come.

Accelerate your power to pivot

No matter how sophisticated a company’s tech stack may seem, it has to support efficient and agile processes to sustain business continuity during “normal” times and crises.  

Therefore, process automation must be a cornerstone technology for a legal tech stack.  It empowers legal ops teams to quickly and easily design, build, and deploy processes that are incredibly cost-effective and error-free, which are essential benefits even during “normalcy.” When disruptions strike, its ability to help you pivot immediately to implement new processes to cope with sudden impacts can be critical.   

For example: Some of the processes that were developed and deployed by providers and users during the early weeks of COVID-19 included workflows for vetting legal vendor continuity, tracking health checks, obtaining onsite visit request approvals, even for remote work management.

This ability to quickly react to a global pandemic’s challenges illustrates the day-to-day value of process automation to a legal tech stack.  Starting, you can address high-volume, immediate-need tasks. Your success in streamlining them builds your case for automating more and more processes, even outside of the legal department, which means “Legal” can lead the way toward organization-wide agility and resilience.  Another benefit?  To your internal reputation.  As Jeff Marple, Innovation Director for Liberty Mutual Insurance told us:

“Legal wasn’t originally a process or tech-forward organization within Liberty Mutual. Now we have developed several internal client-facing workflows that our clients just love, and that has changed the reputation.  Legal now leads the organization with process automation deployments.”

Drive legal staff adoption

A key measure of long term success for any legal tech stack?  Immediate and ongoing legal staff adoption.  So find ways to get users excited about the business value these new tools offer: 

• Improve client service by decreasing response times and client frustration
• Improve legal department efficiency and performance
• Reduce menial and mundane work, and increase time for substantive work 

What’s also important?  Who you involve in your initial adoption efforts.  Focus on people who will be impacted by new technology who represent different functional areas; target people who are always coming up with new ideas and are passionate about operational improvement.

To convert those who may be reluctant, here’s a tactic suggested by George Grawe, SVP and Deputy Chief Counsel at Allstate and a longtime pioneer in driving legal process innovation:

“(People) will say they have a more efficient way to do things…you need to get in the trenches with folks to see how they do their job. If you can find a way to have the technology complement the way they do their work, they become your change champions.”

By co-opting adopters who are enthusiastic about the technology, you’ll be able to manage early adoption issues better and make steady progress in improving the stack over time.  By enlisting them, you’re building a core of legal tech evangelists who’ll help you drive even broader adoption and make your tech stack “future-proof” in a very fundamental way: By making it invaluable to the entire organization.

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Brian McGovern is General Manager, Workflow Solutions at Mitratech, and led one of the largest global enterprise legal management software implementations ever at a global insurance provider. At Mitratech, he’s obsessed with helping clients navigate selecting and implementing legal technology so they can drive meaningful value that positively impacts their business.

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.

June 2020 | Jamie Wodetzki, VP, Contract Strategy, Coupa

A fundamental question for any Legal Ops team is this: how do we know if we’re doing a good job? What would we measure to answer this question? More importantly, what would we measure to compare our performance to that of our legal peers?

To answer these questions, you need a legal data strategy. You need to start collecting and tracking data that measures various performance measures, and how these change over time. And where possible, you need to use data models that are normalized or standardized, such that you can compare contracts and contract performance against your departmental or corporate benchmarks.

But what is Legal Data? Where do you start? What sort of things can you realistically measure?

In no particular order, there are several obvious things to track:

First, internal legal team process and productivity. How long does the team take to complete common tasks? Who’s got what on their plate and are there any painful bottlenecks? Measuring these and other process data allows you to benchmark internal productivity, understand where incoming requests are allocated, and focus on actual problems rather than vague complaints about legal being too slow.

Second, external legal performance and value. How much legal work is farmed out to external counsel, and how do they perform in terms of speed, cost and outcome. What are the trends in terms of rates, billing models, and are you paying more or less than the market? Data not only helps you optimize your own process and performance, but that of your contractors, as well. Eliminating outsourced work in some instances and reducing cost and increasing value of external legal services in others.

Third, legal and compliance risks facing your company. Do you have trusted data on third party relationships and risks? Are you tracking golden customer and supplier data that satisfies KYC and other regulatory compliance demands? Do you have trusted data about your contracts and the obligations they contain? Can you measure the risks buried in your contracts, including liability risk, termination risk, IP risk and price risk, to name just a few? Are you able to foresee concerns before they become big issues? Can you identify provisions within contracts that put your organization at risk, including liability, termination, intellectual property ownership, and price? The role of attorneys is to minimize exposure and risk to the company, but are forced to become reactive instead of proactive when litigation matters arise. Since legal operations engages with each practice area, they have visibility into data that other practice areas may not know exists, and therefore are able to identify gaps without our processes and systems.

It’s safe to say the legal data landscape can be complex and confusing. Some data could reveal an existential threat to your business. Other data could save you a few bucks. You need to sort through and figure out what matters to your business.

Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch. In some cases, there are industry standards you can adopt. In other cases, there are technology suppliers that offer well-designed data models out of the box (with the added bonus of being connected to a community against whom you can benchmark). And you don’t need to get everything perfect on day one.

Coupa has spent two decades drilling into these questions and developing a blueprint for getting your legal data strategy started. Our goal is to set you on the path to making your legal ops team a top performer, and to give you the data to prove it. To learn more about Coupa’s approach to operationalizing data, visit us online at https://www.coupa.com/products/contract-lifecycle-management/.

May 2020| Mary O’Carroll, Director of Legal Operations at Google and President of CLOC

As legal ops professionals, we know how valuable technology can be, but also recognize how difficult a successful launch (implementation) and landing (adoption) can be. We often run into team members proving averse to new tech, competing internal pressures and priorities, and budget constraints. But perhaps one of the biggest challenges results from our very own belief that we should try to prescriptively match technology solutions to specific elements of existing workflows. In other words, we often try to address what appear to be isolated or team-specific problems with focused, point solutions.

Take, for example, one of the biggest challenges we all share—centralizing the legal department matter intake process, which is prone to bottlenecks, and relies most often on employees simply emailing or pinging contacts within legal for help. Typically, our first inclination is to create an intake form and then force people to use it to “automate the process.” This sounds like a logical and sensible approach. After all, if the legal team needs to track and assign a large number of requests, and the new intake form appears to centralize and automate elements of that process—that’s a win, right?

Unfortunately, not really. In legal ops, we often talk about the need to consider all three pillars—people, process, and technology—when solving problems in our departments. The problem is, this approach oversimplifies the challenge with a process and tech solution, and doesn’t properly appreciate “the people pillar,” nor the amount of change management needed both upstream and downstream to land a new intake form. To be sure, it impacts more than just intake itself. All your client teams will need to reprogram their muscle memory to submit requests through a new channel, and of course, doing it the old way will continue to feel faster and easier.

A new intake form can also cause confusion. (Like when the form requires clients to fill out fields that they don’t know how to fill out, or when it throws unfamiliar error messages.) In these cases, your clients will end up going around the new process by emailing their personal contacts in legal, asking for help… which is precisely the thing you wanted to avoid in the first place. Instead of centralizing and streamlining, all we’ve done is add yet another broken process and channel.

The fact is, when we implement small changes to improve specific challenges with point solutions, we often unintentionally create bigger problems. These new point solutions have to be coordinated and integrated with other existing systems and can require team members throughout the org to adjust their ways of working. It should also be noted that individual point solutions result in a proliferation of systems and tools that you now need resources to manage and integrate. When you do try to integrate them, you’ll realize these have also resulted in the propagation of multiple sources of truth—multiple places where data is stored—and an exponential increase in the number of interfaces that team members end up having to work with and learn how to use… until they stop using them all together.

To mitigate the risk of this, legal ops teams should change the way we think about problem solving with technology.

Although technology requests come to us as single pain points or specific solution proposals, we should approach problem solving more holistically. We should try to take a step back to view the bigger picture and optimize multiple processes and teams collectively, such that we create net value. And we should strive to do this in a way that considers all stakeholders (including those outside of legal), and that doesn’t create new ways of working, but rather minimizes the need for change management.

That means seeking out technology solutions that empower us as process-designers to create and manage workflows that are dynamic, customizable, and multifaceted—systems with broad, not narrow, applications.

Here’s how I’ve been going about this in my own work.

First, when thinking through how to do something like implement a new legal intake system—or, better yet, a new contract management system, which is traditionally even more complicated—we ask ourselves a series of questions:

• Does this tool actually optimize the process end-to-end? If it only solves a piece of the process, does it create bottlenecks elsewhere?
• What kind of change management will be required to use this tool effectively? (Where and how are people working today? Does this create a new place they need to go? How much communications and training is necessary? Too much and we know it won’t work)
• How will other stakeholders interface with this new tool? When sales needs to make a contract request, or when an additional approval is needed from finance on a contract, will the existence of this system impede upon their ability to do their work seamlessly?
• How much flexibility does this tool offer me from a process-management standpoint? Does it allow me to adjust parts of the workflow to address my unique or shifting needs? And how complicated is it to do that? Will I need engineering support?
• Finally, what impact does this have on day-to-day work? Is it decreasing the amount of manual work, or does it end up adding steps in other ways or in other places?

We ask ourselves these questions for a simple reason: unless you think holistically about changes you’re making internally, you risk—among other things—gaining efficiency in one area while losing it in others.

Ultimately, that’s something we should work to prevent.

Especially now. The outbreak of COVID-19 has illuminated the importance for legal ops teams to prioritize resources and leverage solutions more broadly so that we can address department challenges more holistically. Managing a portfolio of point solutions is simply not sustainable or scalable.

Moreover, COVID-19 has made urgent the need for legal ops teams to take on a more innovative role inside organizations, where operational excellence has become a top priority for many.

Now more than ever we need to be working more closely with our legal and business counterparts, doing work that—by design—exacts wide-ranging impact and encourages efficiency, creativity, and optimization.

All told, that requires a new, “bigger” way of thinking.

Interested in more Legal Ops Technology? Check out our Technology Roadmap: How To Guide

May 2020| Mary O’Carroll, Director of Legal Operations at Google and President of CLOC

As legal ops professionals, we know how valuable technology can be, but also recognize how difficult a successful launch (implementation) and landing (adoption) can be. We often run into team members proving averse to new tech, competing internal pressures and priorities, and budget constraints. But perhaps one of the biggest challenges results from our very own belief that we should try to prescriptively match technology solutions to specific elements of existing workflows. In other words, we often try to address what appear to be isolated or team-specific problems with focused, point solutions.

Take, for example, one of the biggest challenges we all share—centralizing the legal department matter intake process, which is prone to bottlenecks, and relies most often on employees simply emailing or pinging contacts within legal for help. Typically, our first inclination is to create an intake form and then force people to use it to “automate the process.” This sounds like a logical and sensible approach. After all, if the legal team needs to track and assign a large number of requests, and the new intake form appears to centralize and automate elements of that process—that’s a win, right?

Unfortunately, not really. In legal ops, we often talk about the need to consider all three pillars—people, process, and technology—when solving problems in our departments. The problem is, this approach oversimplifies the challenge with a process and tech solution, and doesn’t properly appreciate “the people pillar,” nor the amount of change management needed both upstream and downstream to land a new intake form. To be sure, it impacts more than just intake itself. All your client teams will need to reprogram their muscle memory to submit requests through a new channel, and of course, doing it the old way will continue to feel faster and easier.

A new intake form can also cause confusion. (Like when the form requires clients to fill out fields that they don’t know how to fill out, or when it throws unfamiliar error messages.) In these cases, your clients will end up going around the new process by emailing their personal contacts in legal, asking for help… which is precisely the thing you wanted to avoid in the first place. Instead of centralizing and streamlining, all we’ve done is add yet another broken process and channel.

The fact is, when we implement small changes to improve specific challenges with point solutions, we often unintentionally create bigger problems. These new point solutions have to be coordinated and integrated with other existing systems and can require team members throughout the org to adjust their ways of working. It should also be noted that individual point solutions result in a proliferation of systems and tools that you now need resources to manage and integrate. When you do try to integrate them, you’ll realize these have also resulted in the propagation of multiple sources of truth—multiple places where data is stored—and an exponential increase in the number of interfaces that team members end up having to work with and learn how to use… until they stop using them all together.

To mitigate the risk of this, legal ops teams should change the way we think about problem solving with technology.

Although technology requests come to us as single pain points or specific solution proposals, we should approach problem solving more holistically. We should try to take a step back to view the bigger picture and optimize multiple processes and teams collectively, such that we create net value. And we should strive to do this in a way that considers all stakeholders (including those outside of legal), and that doesn’t create new ways of working, but rather minimizes the need for change management.

That means seeking out technology solutions that empower us as process-designers to create and manage workflows that are dynamic, customizable, and multifaceted—systems with broad, not narrow, applications.

Here’s how I’ve been going about this in my own work.

First, when thinking through how to do something like implement a new legal intake system—or, better yet, a new contract management system, which is traditionally even more complicated—we ask ourselves a series of questions:

• Does this tool actually optimize the process end-to-end? If it only solves a piece of the process, does it create bottlenecks elsewhere?
• What kind of change management will be required to use this tool effectively? (Where and how are people working today? Does this create a new place they need to go? How much communications and training is necessary? Too much and we know it won’t work)
• How will other stakeholders interface with this new tool? When sales needs to make a contract request, or when an additional approval is needed from finance on a contract, will the existence of this system impede upon their ability to do their work seamlessly?
• How much flexibility does this tool offer me from a process-management standpoint? Does it allow me to adjust parts of the workflow to address my unique or shifting needs? And how complicated is it to do that? Will I need engineering support?
• Finally, what impact does this have on day-to-day work? Is it decreasing the amount of manual work, or does it end up adding steps in other ways or in other places?

We ask ourselves these questions for a simple reason: unless you think holistically about changes you’re making internally, you risk—among other things—gaining efficiency in one area while losing it in others.

Ultimately, that’s something we should work to prevent.

Especially now. The outbreak of COVID-19 has illuminated the importance for legal ops teams to prioritize resources and leverage solutions more broadly so that we can address department challenges more holistically. Managing a portfolio of point solutions is simply not sustainable or scalable.

Moreover, COVID-19 has made urgent the need for legal ops teams to take on a more innovative role inside organizations, where operational excellence has become a top priority for many.

Now more than ever we need to be working more closely with our legal and business counterparts, doing work that—by design—exacts wide-ranging impact and encourages efficiency, creativity, and optimization.

All told, that requires a new, “bigger” way of thinking.

Interested in more Legal Ops Technology? Check out our Technology Roadmap: How To Guide