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.

The Vital Role Of Reporting For Legal Operations

Easy to use, clear and comprehensive reporting functionality has evolved from an added bonus to a must-have requirement for corporate legal teams when evaluating legal technology. The pressure on legal operations to demonstrate improvements and return has led to reporting features being almost as important as the fundamental benefits of the software tool in use.

Where legal operations is missing a trick is when data analysis from a particular tool is used in isolation. To use legal spend management software as an example, out-of-the-box spend reports and user-friendly analytics wizards allow legal departments to monitor work in progress, measure actual spend, and forecast budgets accurately.

That’s not to say legal spend data isn’t useful on its own. On the contrary, legal operations teams use spend data to make better matter resourcing decisions, negotiate discounts, get more value from firms, and hire more internal staff.

Combining Legal Data To Better Manage Risk

Where the in-house legal function is working closely and in partnership with the business units across the company, the range of information and data it holds will often put it in a unique position within the organisation. This data not only supports an awareness of what the business is doing but also forms part of the historic corporate knowledge that is built up over the years; such as previous contracts, decisions and outcomes. Historically, this information was not held in a structured electronic format, which meant any form of data and trend analysis, as well as knowledge management, was extremely manual and time consuming.

With the increase in legal matter management and legal spend management solutions as well as better document search and retrieval there is a growing need and clamour for data processing, data analysis and knowledge management. Capturing basic contract terms and/or details of legal opinions in a matter management system provides a very simple knowledge management tool and a rich source of data. Other tools that will help provide data are any solutions used to create standard contracts, access to benchmark reports, as well as internal resources (finance reports etc.).

Those legal operations teams that are seeing the most value are those that combine data from various technology tools to take their strategic input to the next level. One such area is management and mitigation of risk.

A legal operations team that is carrying out data analysis on all the data at its disposal will be in a position to identify trends that will lead to a range of questions that should spark further debate, such as;

• How much work is done “in-house” versus being sent externally?
• Are the correct processes being followed?
• Are we getting the right level of technical support for the type of transaction?
• Is there a growth in the types of transactions either at a business unit or country level?
• Is one firm being used more than others for similar types of transaction from a particular part of the business / legal team?
• How does the firm perform against others for similar types of transaction both on price and performance?
• How does the business differ to market peers?
• What is required to manage a specific regulatory change?
• Is the in-house legal function and its staff compliant with the relevant regulatory authority guidelines, such as the Solicitor Regulation Authority (SRA) etc.?

Below are some examples of how the answers to these questions could demonstrate a change in the risk profile and risk appetite.

By monitoring the volumes of work, what type of work is being done, who is doing it (in-house lawyers, external lawyers or a combination of both), the time taken, the costs etc. the legal operations teams will be better placed to advise on the organisational design, support and management of the legal function as well as the risk profile and the risk appetite of the legal function and in certain cases, the supported businesses.

A better understanding of what is being done and by whom, will help ensure that the legal function is properly resourced, is not taking on activities that are better placed in other parts of the organisation, and that the appropriate processes and procedures are in place and controls are being administered. For the legal function and its in-house staff, this might include ensuring that they are complying with the rules of the governing bodies such as the SRA, NALP, the Federal Bar Association in Germany etc.

Spotting an uplift in a particular type of work (such as litigation) or activity (such as drafting) could indicate a lack of understanding of the contract terms within the business front line areas who are requesting contract changes, bad working practices, poor standard documentation, or changes in the markets and/or economic climate (each of which also presents opportunities). Legal operations teams can help to mitigate these by highlighting trends and ensuring that the legal function;

• Delivers better training and communication to the business and legal function
• Carries out regular reviews of standard documentation,
• Supports reviews of policies, practices and procedures, and
• Develops a better understanding of the market.

Consistent use of one firm over others should provoke questions as to why that firm is being used. It may be that they are very competitive on price or they have the appropriate skill sets. Fixed fee arrangements are increasingly popular, but if the firm is not providing any supporting timekeeper activity data, it becomes difficult to know whether the firm is providing the right level of technical support and whether the fee structure is still fair and balanced. As part of the legal operations team’s vendor management programme, they should ensure that that firms are maintaining the right level of skill sets for the work they are being asked to undertake, as this will help mitigate legal risk caused by a lack of technical knowledge and support. For the more complex deals it would be normal to see more senior lawyers engaged with the matter.

With the increase in cyber security and greater scrutiny by regulators who are starting to require more rapid, robust, evidence-based reporting, the need for greater use of these solutions is becoming more prevalent to avoid data being compromised and fines being levied. Understanding what data has been passed to which supplier helps ensure that those suppliers have appropriate controls in place to manage that information in line with Information Governance and Records Management policies and procedures and that any breaches promptly reported.

It is also worth noting that a lack of data in the legal systems is equally as insightful as it will show where parts of the business and/or legal function are not following agreed practices and procedures. Furthermore, using “gap” reports in the legal systems helps identify problems within the data that will distort any data analysis.

For legal operations teams to deliver process improvements and efficiencies, ensure compliance with policies and regulatory requirements, optimise their spend and manage risk, they should analyse the data that is available to them from all the data sources at their disposal. As they start to analyse all their data, instead of analysing point solution data in isolation, they will start to discover new trends and insights not previously seen or understood.

About BusyLamp

Founded by a team of lawyers and powered by frustrated users of endless spreadsheets and clunky legacy legal tech systems, BusyLamp is the leading SaaS alternative for efficient legal operations. We help legal departments save time, significantly reduce costs, and collaborate more effectively with in-house and outside counsel by simplifying and improving their legal processes. Legal departments leverage our end-to-end solution to improve visibility and efficiency from pitch to completion. Become a member of the BusyLamp user family and take advantage of our sophisticated sourcing, fee tracking, e-billing, matter management and vendor management features, all with powerful reporting and analytics.

www.BusyLamp.com

Who’s got the right insights into designing an airplane: the pilot who’s going to be taking a seat in the cockpit, or the engineer pouring over blueprints and test data?

The answer is both, of course. Without sharing their POVs and expertise with each other, nothing gets off the ground. The same thing holds absolutely true in developing any technology for Legal Operations: The product provider, its end users, even non-user stakeholders and others impacted by tech adoption need to have a voice in the final product.

Why? Because each of them is already being affected by the problems it’s trying to solve. They’ve got their own valid angles on those problems, and their own individual needs that have to be addressed.

When this kind of “co-innovation” is done right, it doesn’t generate compromised, design-by-committee products, but useful and effective solutions to real-world, on-the-ground Legal Ops challenges. And in our view (and that of most other Legal Ops professionals, we’ve found), it’s the magic ingredient for transforming Legal Operations – and even the legal industry as a whole.

Uniting a complex ecosystem

When we were considering the topics we could highlight at our panel at this year’s CLOC Institute Vegas, it made perfect sense to focus on co-innovation…and how it’s a proven, powerful tool with limitless potential for shaping tomorrow’s evolution of Legal Operations: Legal Ops 2.0.

Legal Ops 2.0 will only be a reality when an entire corporate legal ecosystem can be united under a single broad umbrella of best practices, governance, efficiency, and collaboration. One that features seamless integration of every product in a legal tech stack that expands innovation and excellence across the entire business.

When you consider the potential complexity of that ecosystem, and the different demands put on it by different users and stakeholders, unifying it and the many varied processes it contains may seem unlikely. Yet we’ve already seen the path forward, lighted by the work of Legal Ops pioneers who are proving right now that co-innovation is key.

Making it work in the real world

For these leaders, a primary step was to commit to becoming a more strategic partner to the rest of the enterprise, in effect creating “Legal Service Centers” within their corporate legal departments. These are designed to provide a hub of best practices, technology, innovation and excellence that can lift more than just the legal department. The rest of the company can be elevated, too, as those practices and tools are adopted elsewhere in the organization.

We’ve already seen this kind of cross-departmental adoption in action at companies where Legal Ops was the first to use a tool such as SaaS workflow automation; soon enough, other departments began to ask Legal Ops’ help in adopting it for their needs, too.

The contributors to our May 14 panel – Legal Ops leaders from The Gap, Shell, Ingersoll-Rand, and Keesal Propulsion Labs – have been driving these changes by prodding everyone inside and outside of their organizations with skin in the Legal Ops game to commit to co-innovation.

Like so many in both the CLOC and Mitratech client communities, they believe in sharing their experiences, so at this presentation they’ll discuss these efforts. They’ll have real progress to demonstrate in getting Legal Ops leaders, CTOs, internal clients, corporate stakeholders, technology providers, and implementation specialists to work together to improve outcomes and results at their respective companies.

The challenges these co-innovators have faced have ranged from change management to process improvement, adopting new technologies, and considering other fresh approaches to addressing existing challenges. But meeting any of these challenges has demanded teamwork and trust between everyone involved, and the willingness to embrace a shared vision of success.

The results? Our panelists have witnessed transformational changes in culture, behavior, outcomes, KPIs, and more. Plus, they’ve encouraged the growth of both CLOC and at least one solution-specific user community dedicated to the greater success of Legal Ops technology for everyone.

Building a use cases cloud

All of our panelists are advocates of building a stronger client/user community, something Mitratech is incredibly proud to be a part of. For them, process improvement and co-innovation are absolute cornerstones of Legal 2.0. As a means of embracing and promoting these? Taking an active role in the user community, where best practices and actual workflow designs can be shared.

Mitratech found one opportunity to promote co-innovation through something that was already happening organically in its TAP user community. The concept of a “workflow use cases cloud” that allows everyone involved to take a hand in moving Legal Ops forward by continuously sharing, adapting, refining and their work with each other. In fact, this even inspired us to formally promote online sharing of workflow designs among our user community via our TAP Co-Innovation Center.

Prepping for Legal 3.0

Creating and promoting mechanisms like this for sharing expertise and experience is foundational to achieving Legal 2.0, and is also laying the groundwork for the next step: Legal 3.0.

We don’t know exactly what 3.0 will look like, but there are some market trends that cannot be ignored. Advanced analytics and data-based insights will increasingly drive decision-making, new technology will become even more pervasive and potentially disruptive to traditional ways of conducting legal business, and Legal Ops will find it now has a far bigger hand in overall business strategy, both inside and outside of the legal department.

The ultimate lesson the success of our panelists provides for everyone in CLOC, or in Legal Operations anywhere? To stay active, innovative, and collaborative within your professional community, because you’ll receive as much as you give by embracing co-innovation. And you’ll be having a real role in shaping the destiny of the legal industry for years or even decades to come.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session:

Legal Ops 2.0: How Co-Innovation is Driving the Industry’s Future
Tuesday, May 14th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Vincent J. Cordo, Central Legal Operations Officer, Shell Oil Company
• Justin Hectus, CIO/CISO, Keesal, Young & Logan
• Jason Parkman, CEO Mitratech
• Mike Russell, Lean Leader – Legal Operations, Ingersoll Rand

About the author: Kelli Negro is Chief Marketing Officer at Mitratech, charged with driving business results through omni-channel marketing and content strategies that are grounded in research, analysis and customer insight. Kelli joined Mitratech after a successful tenure at Thinksmart, a pioneer in SaaS workflow automation.

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

HBR Consulting will present an educational session at CLOC’s 2019 Corporate Legal Operations Institute— “Don’t Gamble Your Future . . . Advance Your Operations Maturity” — in which we will explore strategies to help corporate law departments advance on the CLOC Legal Operations Maturity continuum. This article is the second in a three-part series of blog posts to provide CLOC attendees with context regarding the major strategic areas in which law departments can advance in their maturity.

In this post, I will be focusing on the topic of legal technology — “Technology & Practice Support” — as one of CLOC’s foundational level core competencies.

Becoming More Mature in the Use of Technology

The effective use of technology is a topic that gets a lot of attention these days in legal operations circles and is often a contributing factor when comparing operational effectiveness among similar law departments. For those law departments seeking to improve their technology use, there are several steps that can help your department make incremental progress along the CLOC maturity model.

A key first step is to evaluate your current state with respect to use of legal technology solutions and establish a three- to five-year technology plan. The plan should consider notable gaps you discover in key functional areas, as well as how effective current tools are at achieving their intended use. With respect to specific tools, your department’s core stack of solutions should include matter management, spend management and document management, as well as any other technology platforms that may be crucial to support key disciplines required for your industry (e.g., intellectual property management).

Once you have “checked-the-box” on having implemented the core stack of solutions, it is a good idea to routinely review how these tools are used, the level of adoption and the relevance of their design when compared to your business processes. The following questions can help assess next steps:

• Do the solutions we are using provide strategic value to our legal professionals?
• Are we presenting meaningful analytics to demonstrate the value of the information (data) we are asking our legal staff to enter and track?
• In implementing the core stack of solutions, have we equally and adequately addressed both litigation and transactional sides of the house?

Many corporate law departments discover that their existing technology investments are not providing strategic value and are perceived as “back-office systems.” Often legal professionals are asked to enter matters and update key dates, but little is done to demonstrate the way that information can inform and enrich legal decision making. Finally, a concern we are hearing more often is that the core legal stack tools are more supportive of litigation functions than of transactional work. I will focus on that last issue here. We suggest that the next major step in technology maturity for most corporate law departments should be increasing focus on tools that support transactional management.

Leveraging Technology for Workflow and Transaction Management

Transactional attorneys can benefit from the core stack of tools for features such as tracking advice and counsel, organizing work product, tracking key dates and memorializing iterations of work-in-progress. That stated, two additional sets of tools that are receiving more attention from legal professionals are legal request and workflow tools and contract lifecycle management systems. These tools provide legal professionals with the opportunity to more effectively engage with their business partners — not obviating the need for direct contact or phone calls, but rather supplementing and enriching these other points of contact so that both parties are better informed at request inception.

1. Legal request and workflow (“LR&W”) tools are gaining momentum in the corporate legal market, as more legal organizations are trying to better manage their increasing demands for legal work, while managing cycle time and regularly updating their business partners on the status of those requests. Eighty-one percent of respondents to HBR’s 2018 Law Department Survey expect their legal needs to continue to grow. The two most commonly cited practice areas in which they expect increases were regulatory and M&A.

2. Contract lifecycle management (“CLM”) systems can also help transactional attorneys work more efficiently and effectively. CLM systems provide a structured way to manage all legal work connected to the creation of a contract. Typical CLM systems can capture necessary data contracts, track key dates, serve as a repository for pre-approved templates and create contracts using those templates, manage the contract approval workflow process, flag negotiated changes, validate all required signatures and monitor contract terms for rights and obligations, for example.

CLM systems can also help ensure that contracting requests are thorough and processes are consistently followed, trigger appropriate escalations, assist in controls enforcement and provide a mechanism for easier execution. Already implemented by 55 percent of corporate law departments, 29 percent of companies plan to implement CLM solutions in the next one to two years, according to the HBR’s 2018 Law Department Survey. CLM systems were the most commonly planned technology implementations of the 19 technology types surveyed.

Along with implementing CLM systems, it is HBR’s experience that many law departments are also simultaneously leading the charge with their companies to establish contract management programs, to ensure standard processes throughout the organization. The combination of a strong, companywide program and a CLM system supporting that program not only streamlines transactional work, but also provide organization-wide consistency and can help manage an organization’s contract-related risk.

Conclusion

Technology used to support transactions can help improve the efficiency for every stage of a corporate transaction. The combination of LP&W and CLM systems gives in-house legal professionals what they need to better handle transactional work from inception to completion.

In the final post in HBR’s three-part blog series, my colleagues will explore the use of analytics to measure performance and to guide your department’s decision making.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session:

Don’t Gamble Your Future…Advance Your Operations Maturity
Wednesday, May 15th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Kevin Clem, Chief Commercial Officer, HBR Consulting
• Marc Allen, Senior Director, HBR Consulting
• Molly Perry, Chief Operating Officer, Office of Legal and Administrative Affairs, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
• Greg Bennett, Sr. Manager, Legal Operations, Gilead Sciences

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

Annya Dushine, Solutions Consultant, CPA Global
Sam Wiley, Intellectual Property Solutions Architect, CPA Global

Best practice: The term long ago surpassed buzzword status and reached ubiquity. After all, what organisation willfully adopts (let alone admits to adopting) the worst practices when doing business?

For many in the legal operations field—including IP operations professionals—a good starting point toward best practices-oriented strategy is the Core Competency Model laid out by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC). Made up of 12 primary functions (i.e., core competencies), the model represents focus areas that every legal operations department should manage to ensure discipline, efficiency and best outcomes. These competencies also help legal operations departments gauge their own maturity, serving as a benchmark for comparison to your industry peers.

Still, there’s a significant difference between recognising best practices and actually implementing them. When it comes to the latter, many organisations have little to no idea where to start. For companies attempting to evolve their current IP strategies, this can seem particularly challenging. It’s difficult, after all, to view a situation with objectivity when you’re directly in the thick of it.

When you want to know where your IP operations business is lacking and how to implement the best practices necessary to bring it up to par, an IP diagnostic may hold the answers. Here are five ways an IP diagnostic provided by an expert third-party vendor can help your IP department comply with CLOC’s Core Competency Model, but also to make the most of it.

One: Objective Assessment

One of the first steps toward complying with any set of best practices is assessing where you currently stand in regard to them. How compliant are you? Where are you strongest and where are you lacking?

It can be difficult for any organisation to ask difficult questions of itself, and even more difficult to answer honestly. An IP diagnostic performed by a third party can provide the objective view you need to determine where you stand. CPA Global’s IP Diagnostic services, for instance uses a methodology that forces organisations to thoroughly examine itself, and our extensive client base allows for anonymized benchmarking and standards assessment.

Two: Develop a Game Plan

Done well, an IP diagnostic should provide you and your IP operations colleagues with the information and insights you need in order to devise a best practices-oriented strategy—including areas of improvement.

Once the IP diagnostic provider has correctly assessed your maturity level in each core competency, they can apply their expertise in technology and best practices to help you create a plan for improving from one level to the next.

Three: Measure Resource Needs

It’s not enough to have a list of best practices and a strategy: You also need the budget, resources, head count, and executive support to implement those practices and execute that strategy. But—even in the largest, most profitable organization—funds and jobs don’t simply appear just because they’ve been requested. They have to be justified.

Conducted in alignment with CLOC’s Core Competency Model, an IP diagnostic should provide objective, third-party data that supports your resources requests by providing evidence of their necessity and projected benefits.

Four: Expedited Evolution

A best practice IP operations strategy doesn’t just happen overnight. It takes time—and often a lot of it. Indeed, perhaps one of the most frustrating, or at least challenging aspects of implementing best practices is the lengthy amount of time it often takes to identify them, prepare for them, and execute them. Moreover, if you don’t get things right the first time, how much time is lost starting over?

Your IP diagnostic provider should not only be able to tell you how to correctly get started, but how to do so in the most efficient and timely manner. They’ll provide actionable steps along the shortest path from one maturity level to the next.

Five: Continuous Improvement

An IP diagnostic is not a one-and-done project. Instead, it should yield insights and results that your organisation can build on over time, and, if necessary, revisit and revise. After all, much like the technology and innovations produced by your company, trends and best practices in IP operations constantly change and evolve. Your strategy should lend itself to doing the same.

Choose an IP diagnostic provider you can envision working with over and over again, and who you trust to develop a deep understanding of your organization that results in the nuanced, comprehensive strategy you need to take the core competencies to the next level.

For the first time, Intellectual Property tracks will be offered during the 2019 CLOC Vegas Institute. Guided by experts in IP operations, we’ll explore some of the latest innovations and trends in the IP space—including best practices and how to implement them. Join us during the following sessions to learn more.

Don’t Gamble with Your IP: Ante Up for Patents and Trademarks
Tuesday, May 14th 10:30 – 11:20 Monet 1 & 2

Don’t Gamble with Your IP (Part 2): Know When to Hold’em in IP Litigation
Tuesday, May 14th 11:35 – 12:25 Monet 1 & 2

Sittin’ at the Table: Panel Discussion on CLOC IP Core Competency Matrix & Best Practices
Wednesday, May 15th 11:35 – 12:25 Monet 1 & 2

Hit the IP Operations Jackpot with an IP Diagnostic
Wednesday, May 15th 3:35 – 4:05 Bellagio Ballroom 4

Playing with a Full Deck: Best Practices to Build & Maintain Extended Services Teams
Wednesday, May 15th 4:20 – 5:10 Monet 3 & 4

Annya Dushine and Sam Wiley are IP solutions experts from CPA Global, the world’s leading intellectual property management and technology company.