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

Whether it’s a fire, flood, earthquake or pandemic, disasters can strike at a moment’s notice and many organizations are unprepared to respond and still function. In times of crisis, a well-thought out business continuity plan is critical to prevent interruptions to the business.

To enable your organization to respond quickly during a disaster, you need to put a current, reliable plan in the hands of all personnel who are responsible for carrying out any part of the BCP.  The lack of a plan doesn’t just mean your organization will take longer than necessary to recover from an event or incident — you could go out of business for good. Your employees need to understand what needs to be done to get the business back on track as quickly as possible.

Your BCP should be thorough and include readiness procedures to protect against possible threats and information on roles and responsibilities. Leaders need to be identified, understand their responsibilities and be equipped with relevant information to act during a crisis situation.

Google Legal is one organization who has spent the time to develop a robust Business Continuity Plan. Here are the steps they used to prepare their plan.

Business Continuity Plan Development at Google

By Mary O’Carroll, Director of Legal Operations, Google and President of CLOC

With help from Deloitte, Google’s Legal Department embarked on a project to create a business continuity plan for the department. To help others we would like to share the process that we used during the development of our Business Continuity Plan and the learnings we experienced. This how-to guide outlines the steps that were used to create our BCP.

Project Goal

Implement an event-neutral, impact-oriented, broad business continuity program to reduce the impacts and to support the expeditious recovery of critical legal processes in the event of a disaster.

Project Objectives: Prioritize Legal Business Processes

1. Determine Qualitative and Quantitative Impacts
2. Identify Dependencies
3. Determine Recovery Requirements and Timeframes

Project Approach:

1. Understand the Process (Create process maps)
2. Conduct Business Impact Analysis (Understand the potential impacts from disruption and the resources required to perform your processes)
3. Plan for Recovery (Develop recovery plans)

UNDERSTAND THE PROCESS

Meet with leads across each practice group or area in your department.  Create high level process maps for each key process or workstream that takes place on that team.  

Things to consider in each process:

• Which location(s) is your process executed from?
• Are there other business processes / areas that you depend on to perform your process?
• What systems/tools/applications are needed?
• Are there specific skills / resources that are essential to perform your
• process?
• Are there critical documents / vital records that you need access to in order to perform your process?
• Does the process rely on a 3rd party?

CONDUCT A BUSINESS IMPACT ANALYSIS (BIA)

A BIA is a systematic process to determine and evaluate the potential effects of an interruption to critical business operations as a result of a disaster, accident or emergency. Create your list of prioritized processes based on your BIA, focusing on critical workstreams by utilizing a questionnaire to ensure consistency across impact areas.

Outputs/Deliverables: Develop a prioritized list of processes based on impacts

Take each process or workstream in the department and rank them based on the five following impact areas across multiple time frames.  Create an objective five point scale for each of these impact areas that define the magnitude of the impact.  

1. Financial impact: Impact on the finances of the organization (potential decrease in revenue, impact on cash flow) resulting from a business disruption.
2. Legal and regulatory penalties:  Exposure of the organization to legal liabilities, penalties, and regulatory sanctions due to non-compliance with applicable regulations or adherence to legal and contractual obligation following a business interruption.
3. Client experience:  Number of or percentage of clients or customers affected, how quickly the situation will impact clients, and risk of losing clients temporarily or permanently.
4. Employee experience:  Risk to employee morale/culture which could result in high employee turnover resulting from a business disruption.
5. External brand image: Impact to public confidence in the organization and negative publicity resulting from a business disruption.

Example:  Rate each workflow across this matrix on a scale from 1-5

NEXT STEPS: PLAN FOR RECOVERY

As a result of the BIA effort, we prioritized recovery efforts for the Legal Department and identified resources required for each process to be operational. The recommended next steps were to:

1. Develop recovery procedures for prioritized business areas and processes
2. Design, conduct, and evaluate tests to socialize, validate and improve procedures

Determine the recovery requirements for each critical workstream based on the following five areas:

1. Building requirements: Which of the tasks can be supported by working remotely?  Are there alternate strategies to continue operations in case the primary facility is not available?
2. Process dependency requirements: What processes within the Legal Department or other departments do you need in order to restore to normal operations? Is there a workaround available to support your team until the identified dependencies are available?
3. Technology requirements: Identify all the applications that your team requires for the identified business processes. Can the identified processes be performed without the application for a limited time – indicate the workaround where applicable?
4. Human resource requirements: What are various roles/titles within your team that are critical for defined business processes? How many personnel are available at each assigned role? How many personnel are required to support each business process at various time-periods after a disruption? How many of the personnel within each assigned role have the remote working capability? Are resources available at an alternate location?
5. Third party requirements: Is there a key third party vendor who supports the identified processes?

Effective recovery procedures address short-, medium-, and long-term outages and account for the following considerations:

• Building Specific Strategies
• Technology Specific Strategies
• Human Resources Strategies
• 3rd Party Strategies
• Dependencies
• Focus on Impacts

KEY TAKEAWAYS AND LEARNINGS

Having a concrete business continuity plan plays an essential role in today’s environment at Google Legal. We learned that the most valuable part of the entire exercise was sitting down with team leaders and having a conversation about what is critical and how we might think about recovering those workflows. Given how much organizations move and change over time, it is a lofty expectation to develop BCPs for each workflow and to ensure they are kept up to date.  Setting aside a regular time to revisit that conversation each year and talk through the “what ifs” ensures that we’re aligned on how we would proceed.  

A clear, concise and well communicated BCP is not just a nice to have, it’s a critical necessity in today’s world.

Maturity: General 

White Paper by Allen & Overy

In this white paper, Allen & Overy condenses their experience into 10 essential lessons that in-house leaders can share with their peers about managing the ‘future-fit’ legal function, as they have found themselves facing new opportunities, learning about the emergence of new technologies, and discovered new innovative approaches to solving legal problems. 

– Lesson 1: Align your legal innovation priorities with enterprise goals
– Lesson 2: Divide your transformation vision into short term and long term horizons
– Lesson 3: Create a clear innovation roadmpa
– Lesson 4: Diversity your team to foster innovation capabilities at all levels
– Lesson 5: Adopt the disruptors’s mindset to face brave decisions head-on
– Lesson 6: Analyse current activitiy to diagnose the most frequent pain points
– Lesson 7: Focus efforts on process standardisation to create real efficiency gains
– Lesson 8: Build a credible use case for technology investment to secure investment and adoption
– Lesson 9: Harness the know-how of external partners to accelrate progress
– Lesson 10: Pilot new approaches to prove quick wins and convince spectics
– Conclusion: Tackling the innovation challenge

#Legal-Function
#Industry-Trends
#AssetType-WhitePaper​​​
#Legal-Operations-General

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.

Technology is not the answer! I repeat this phrase at least a dozen times a day to my entire legal department. Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE legal tech! My first task as a legal operations leader was to assess our current tools and devise our technology road map for the future. However, it kills me when everyone assumes that once we license a tool, everything will function as ‘clockwork’. The truth is, licensing a tool is like getting a gym membership – it doesn’t work, unless you do the work. In this article, I want to emphasize the importance of the ‘2 Ps’, people and process, that make technology work. With all the hype around legal tech, I feel that everyone forgets that any technology is only as good as the people that use it and the process it supports.

Innovation means different things to different people. Against popular belief, I don’t think innovation always means some big technology implementation is the answer. Innovation starts through an adoption mindset of our people and is reflected in the process we follow.

People:

1. Change the ‘we have always done it this way’ mindset

I mentally switch off the minute I hear this phrase, and let’s face it; we all hear it at our workplace almost every day. Most people don’t believe in changing status quo or questioning why something is being done a certain way. They assume that someone else in the organization must have thought through the process and there may be a valid reason for doing a task. Well, sorry to burst that bubble – but most times no one has really thought through a process or if they did, it was possibly eons ago and is not relevant today. Most times when you actually dig deep into any process, there could be a large chunk of tasks which are non-value add tasks. And, quickly eliminating that task will save time and energy. However, keep in mind that eliminating non-value tasks can threaten the status quo and you’ll still face challenges. In my professional journey, I have always believed in building my team with people with the right attitude because only then can my innovative ideas see the light of the day. For the extended team, it is an uphill task of constantly educating the leaders and team members to look at things from various angles and from a new perspective. No matter how you hard you try, you will have naysayers in the team who generally either fall in line or fallout over a period of time.

2. Find fearless team members

An innovative environment needs people who are not scared of making mistakes. The leadership team needs to create a psychologically safe environment to let people know that it is ok to make mistakes. This needs constant reinforcement and clear messaging from the top leadership. I do like to draw some distinctions here though. While I am happy for people to try things differently and fail, I don’t have tolerance for sloppy mistakes on a business as usual process. Most team members are bogged down with so many daily operational deliverables and KRAs that it doesn’t leave them with any mind space to think of new ways to do things. The ones who genuinely have the passion to innovate will free their mind and find time to tread on new paths.

3. The doers are better than the dreamers

Most innovative people are creative and by that nature also dreamers. I am occasionally guilty of tuning out from the realities of life and imagining a world that may be. This is the space where I get my next bright idea. Unfortunately, ideas don’t work on their own and I have to quickly roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty. I give higher points to people who actually get the job done than those who spend a large part of their day talking about an organization that should, or could, have been. There is scope for improvement in most processes across organization and those improvements are not going to magically happen on their own. We will need the doers to get down to the root of the process and fix it as required.

Process:

1. Document a process

Most legal departments don’t document their processes. Most people undermine the freedom that process documentation brings to them. They fear that documenting processes will mean that no one in the organization will need those teams in the future. I was recently working with my IT team on a tech implementation and I asked my IT team to document their process for future use so that I don’t trouble them each time. The junior IT team member looked at me innocently and said I would make him lose his job. What he didn’t realize was that I was trying to free up his time to focus on other projects, rather than constantly repeating work and wasting his valuable time. I don’t necessarily blame him for his response since he was being candid with me. He may have been sharing what he had learned from his senior team members. This brings me back to my earlier point of changing people’s mindset, which has to be a top-down approach since team members tend to emulate their leaders.

2. Break down the process

This is the key to any change. Although an end to end process may overwhelm everyone, breaking process down to every single task will help identify tasks that can be eliminated, automated, or reassigned to a different resource. We recently reviewed some of our document archival processes and were able to eliminate 60% of the tasks after they were broken down. The team can now support larger volumes and is able to manage certain other tasks that they were not doing earlier. I strongly believe that process improvement can only happen once we have detailed process and procedure maps with all steps broken down to the individual task.

3. Not a one-time task

You can’t draft process maps, file them somewhere and forget about them. Process improvement is a continuous activity. Legal departments now have dedicated legal ops team which include process experts to monitor current processes and are constantly thinking of ways and means of improving processes. Once the process experts sit side by side with lawyers, they are able to see the impact of process changes and immediately recommend tweaks as needed. Infusing legal teams with business, finance, IT and process experts also instils a culture of viewing the department as a business and not purely as an advisory shop.

While discussions on legal tech continue to grow, as they should, we need to continue to state the importance of people and process. We don’t want the very critical pillars of a successful and innovative department to be lost under the bright and shiny lights of legal technology. CLOC understands the importance of the 2 Ps and the core competencies for legal ops teams include communication, cross functional alignment, and technology and process support amongst others. As I continue to look at new technology in the market, I never lose sight of my people that I continue to train and the processes I continue to improve.

The 2018 Chief Legal Officer Survey states that only thirty nine percent of law departments surveyed employ at least one legal ops professional. Of that 39%, less than 50% of the legal ops professionals came from the legal department. Of course, these numbers don’t necessarily mean that the legal operations team is led by a seasoned leader. Even the largest legal departments may have administrators, or project managers, who chanced on the role with no one to guide them. The above survey also states that most General Counsels spend only 18% of their time in the management of their department, which means that they are probably not spending too much time thinking about how legal ops needs to be structured. As new ops leaders take on the role or existing legal ops professional broaden their portfolio, it is important to set clear vision and priority for your department or you will spend most of your day dousing fires.

As I started my journey of a legal ops leader, like any other leader coming to a new role, I spoke to my existing legal team to understand their pain points and challenges. I realized very quickly that I had to draw up a roadmap for my department before I was drowned in the laundry lists of everyone’s problems.

Here are my top tips for new ops leaders coming into an existing, seasoned legal team. I am sure there are many other tips which legal ops leaders would go by, but this is what is important in my opinion.

1. Understand team dynamics

To state the obvious, it is very important to spend your first few days understanding your legal team structure, key leaders and stakeholders. If you have the opportunity to interact with legal team leaders and managers before you start in your role, take that opportunity in a heartbeat. While formal catch ups are a great way to understand about people’s work, I find informal conversations to be insightful as people drop their guard. Make notes of each person’s requirements (but make no promises at this point), this is important when you plan your roadmap as it will guide you on areas you want to focus on. It also helps to gather support if you can personalize your road map to real life problems. When I came on my role early on, one of the biggest problems was our duplicative invoicing processes. Acknowledging the problem in my stakeholder meetings and providing a plan to fix it in week three of my job helped people realize that I was there to help. And, meeting that deadline established my credibility early in my position.

2. Don’t try to churn the ocean

As a new leader you want to work on garnering support early on and you will want people to feel you are there to help. As a result, your colleagues will pour out their problems to you and expect you to wave your magic wand and solve their issues. Unfortunately, organizations are far too complex for a magical solution. As I mentioned above, listen to everyone, but make no promises and for your own sanity, don’t try to solve every single problem for every single person on the team. Prioritize your vision based on your department structure. For my organization, our commercial and regulatory teams constituted the largest part of our team and I focused on those functional areas to find the low hanging fruit and quick wins.

It is also important to steer clear of operating in solution mode in your early conversations. As natural problem solvers, many new ops leaders jump into solution mode very quickly. Spend your first few weeks understanding and mapping your current processes. Most legal departments are not likely to have detailed process maps and you will not be able to get most of your programs off the ground if you don’t understand the current processes.

3. Make a plan

Never undervalue the power of a 30 / 60 / 90-day plan. I have used this in every single new role, and it has worked brilliantly. A 90-day plan gives me structure and helps me from getting lost. I draw my plan based on big picture themes and then build tasks to support the theme.

My plan as a new ops leader looked like below. You will see that I tend to start more internally and focus on vendor management only after I had a good understanding of internal processes and stakeholders. The plan gives assurance to the Chief Legal Officer (CLO) that I know what I am talking about and that s/he made the right decision in hiring an ops lead.

4. Do a SWOT analysis

My first month in my new job, I spent all my time making notes on what works and what doesn’t. Again, some of this is very basic and simple but it is the simple that we forget. When I presented my SWOT analysis to our CLO and the legal leadership team, all I got was nods and alignment in thoughts. It was great to know that we were all on the same page. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses also gave me a foundation to build the vision for my own department.

5. Build your own vision

I was lucky to have a CLO who gave me a blank canvas and asked me to paint what I wanted. I understand not everyone would be as lucky as me. However, this is the most critical for your own success and for others on the team to show that you mean business. CLOC has amazing content that can help you build your legal ops plan. I knew I didn’t want to tackle all twelve core competencies in year 1 and based on my SWOT analysis, I picked five, or six, competencies to focus on. I structured my team based on my priorities and drew a roadmap based on the pillars I chose.

The key competencies I focused on were – Technology, Automation and Continuous Improvement; Legal Finance, MIS and Law Firm Management; Knowledge Management and Process Documentation; Resource Allocation and Professional Development.

My main goal was to document our processes within the first 12-18 months. We didn’t have any standard operating procedures and our playbook and policy documents were outdated, so we created a plan to tackle those first. As we went through the documentation process, we were able to identify gaps in our process and define what we wanted to improve early on. It was the process documentation that led us to our technology roadmap. We focused on our existing technology and increasing technology adoption became a priority. Finally, we wanted to start capturing metrics and some of the tools we put in place helped us with that process. The ability to present data to stakeholders early on sets you apart from other ops professionals. Most stakeholders like to believe that they know the pulse of their department, but they face some harsh truths when they are presented with hard data. Your data may not be perfect in the beginning, however, metrics and KPIs are the best quantifiable ROI tools.

All organizations are different, and every ops leader will have a unique journey. CLOC is a great forum with some very relevant content that helps connect you with peers in the industry who are very open to sharing ideas and collaborating. Knowing you are not alone in this journey gives solace to a lot of us.