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

While I have been sheltering at home in the Seattle area (where Icertis is based), I’ve had the opportunity to connect virtually with many of our customers as they weather this global crisis. In between virtual contract negotiations, home-schooling small children, or strategizing on which safety gear to wear to the grocery store, Icertis customers have generously shared their time and insights as they process what contracting and business will look like post-COVID-19.

It goes without saying that a “new normal” awaits us as we (slowly and responsibly) emerge from this crisis. But just what that normal looks like will vary person to person, organization to organization. In the commercial space, every company will have to assess what’s changed and what remains foundational to their business as they chart a path to rebounding and thriving in the months and years to come.

Still, generalizations can be made and themes are emerging. Based on my conversations, five distinct imperatives for attorneys and contract managers have surfaced amid the commercial turbulence; the operations professionals supporting these functions should also take notice. I call them the “The 5 ‘Ds’ of Managing Contracts in a Post-COVID World”:

Digitize Contract Processes

The more processes a company had digitized before their entire workforce was forced to shelter in place, the better positioned they were to react to the rapidly changing circumstances. This includes those companies that had digitized their contracts and contract processes. Imagine trying to identify tens of thousands of paper agreements that might be impacted by this pandemic. In this quarantine and work-from-home world, it would be impossible to retrieve those paper contracts that were stored in filing cabinets at physical office locations. Cloud-based contract lifecycle management (CLM) enables a level of business continuity simply not possible with paper-based systems.

As the Global Head of Contract Lifecycle Risk Management at a Fortune 500 company noted to me recently: “Any organization that has gone through this and decides not to digitize is certainly missing a big learning opportunity here.”

Discover Contract Data

Another major learning from COVID-19 is just how fast commercial conditions can change. With the COVID-19 situation evolving by the hour, legal and contract professionals had to quickly and continuously assess how the crisis impacted their company’s supplier, customer, partner and employee relationships—many or all of which are defined by contracts.

Companies that had embraced contract digitization could rapidly surface contract insights (remotely and from their homes) from a centralized pool of data, and were at a distinct advantage in crafting their strategies moving forward. Contract data can tell you with whom you’re doing business and on what terms, as well as where they are located and the commercial value of the contract. Access to contracting data and insights in fluid and uncertain times is truly invaluable when a global crisis hits. For example, one company I spoke with immediately surfaced what its contracts said about delivering services remotely, so they could confidently continue working with clients despite the travel restrictions and shelter-in-place orders.

Deliver on Commitments

Whether in crisis or in steady times, one foundational truth that will remain is the importance of trust and delivering on contractual commitments.

While attention can be diverted during a crisis to a handful of contracts that are disproportionately impacted, legal and contracting teams must be confident that the ongoing business of less-impacted agreements moves forward. Following execution, managing these ongoing obligations can be done manually and docketed in calendars. However, many companies that have embraced CLM have utilized technology to undertake this work. Some companies have optimized their obligations management process by utilizing AI/machine learning models trained on terabytes of contract data that can help discover obligations and their relationships, and manage them to fulfillment, ensuring that transactions off the contracts adhere to these obligations. This is an example of how technology can free up human capital to address those contractual relationships that take priority while contract managers remain confident that other commitments and obligations continue to be delivered.

Defend Against Risk

For our colleagues in the CFO office, the pandemic provided a crash course in enterprise risk management. As the outbreak disrupted markets, CFOs were in the hot seat to create plans that increased revenue, reduced cost, accelerated cash flow and ensured compliance.

The mandate to mitigate risk is reflected in contracts and contracting processes. Getting a vital contract under signature could mean generating the cash flow necessary to maintain operations; ensuring a contract is compliant with local regulations could save a company from crippling fines; preventing maverick contracts most certainly means no contracts go out on outdated templates that don’t reflect new business conditions and terms; visibility into all contracts across the organization means negotiations can be quickly pivoted to head off emerging threats.

That onus will never go away: COVID-19 proved that companies put risk management on the back burner at their own peril, and seamless contract management is a central component to both identifying and mitigating current risks and preventing future risks.

Don’t Delay

The companies in the best position to maintain business continuity when COVID hit were those who had already digitized core processes and developed the habits, skill sets and relationships necessary to get the most out of them. As one customer shared, “The great habits we developed with Icertis pre-COVID are now coming into play, to our benefit.” We don’t know when the next crisis will hit. But we do know that the longer you delay, the less time you’ll have to prepare.

Despite the current challenges posed by this pandemic, there will be a time when legal and contracting teams will return to some semblance of “normal” (and thankfully, educating will be removed from legions of parents-turned-homeschool teachers and back in the hands of educational professionals.) These contracting and legal teams, with the help of their legal department operations partners, will be well served to document the pain points presented in this current crisis and consider the Contracting 5 Ds before the next storm.

While I have been sheltering at home in the Seattle area (where Icertis is based), I’ve had the opportunity to connect virtually with many of our customers as they weather this global crisis. In between virtual contract negotiations, home-schooling small children, or strategizing on which safety gear to wear to the grocery store, Icertis customers have generously shared their time and insights as they process what contracting and business will look like post-COVID-19.

It goes without saying that a “new normal” awaits us as we (slowly and responsibly) emerge from this crisis. But just what that normal looks like will vary person to person, organization to organization. In the commercial space, every company will have to assess what’s changed and what remains foundational to their business as they chart a path to rebounding and thriving in the months and years to come.

Still, generalizations can be made and themes are emerging. Based on my conversations, five distinct imperatives for attorneys and contract managers have surfaced amid the commercial turbulence; the operations professionals supporting these functions should also take notice. I call them the “The 5 ‘Ds’ of Managing Contracts in a Post-COVID World”:

Digitize Contract Processes

The more processes a company had digitized before their entire workforce was forced to shelter in place, the better positioned they were to react to the rapidly changing circumstances. This includes those companies that had digitized their contracts and contract processes. Imagine trying to identify tens of thousands of paper agreements that might be impacted by this pandemic. In this quarantine and work-from-home world, it would be impossible to retrieve those paper contracts that were stored in filing cabinets at physical office locations. Cloud-based contract lifecycle management (CLM) enables a level of business continuity simply not possible with paper-based systems.

As the Global Head of Contract Lifecycle Risk Management at a Fortune 500 company noted to me recently: “Any organization that has gone through this and decides not to digitize is certainly missing a big learning opportunity here.”

Discover Contract Data

Another major learning from COVID-19 is just how fast commercial conditions can change. With the COVID-19 situation evolving by the hour, legal and contract professionals had to quickly and continuously assess how the crisis impacted their company’s supplier, customer, partner and employee relationships—many or all of which are defined by contracts.

Companies that had embraced contract digitization could rapidly surface contract insights (remotely and from their homes) from a centralized pool of data, and were at a distinct advantage in crafting their strategies moving forward. Contract data can tell you with whom you’re doing business and on what terms, as well as where they are located and the commercial value of the contract. Access to contracting data and insights in fluid and uncertain times is truly invaluable when a global crisis hits. For example, one company I spoke with immediately surfaced what its contracts said about delivering services remotely, so they could confidently continue working with clients despite the travel restrictions and shelter-in-place orders.

Deliver on Commitments

Whether in crisis or in steady times, one foundational truth that will remain is the importance of trust and delivering on contractual commitments.

While attention can be diverted during a crisis to a handful of contracts that are disproportionately impacted, legal and contracting teams must be confident that the ongoing business of less-impacted agreements moves forward. Following execution, managing these ongoing obligations can be done manually and docketed in calendars. However, many companies that have embraced CLM have utilized technology to undertake this work. Some companies have optimized their obligations management process by utilizing AI/machine learning models trained on terabytes of contract data that can help discover obligations and their relationships, and manage them to fulfillment, ensuring that transactions off the contracts adhere to these obligations. This is an example of how technology can free up human capital to address those contractual relationships that take priority while contract managers remain confident that other commitments and obligations continue to be delivered.

Defend Against Risk

For our colleagues in the CFO office, the pandemic provided a crash course in enterprise risk management. As the outbreak disrupted markets, CFOs were in the hot seat to create plans that increased revenue, reduced cost, accelerated cash flow and ensured compliance.

The mandate to mitigate risk is reflected in contracts and contracting processes. Getting a vital contract under signature could mean generating the cash flow necessary to maintain operations; ensuring a contract is compliant with local regulations could save a company from crippling fines; preventing maverick contracts most certainly means no contracts go out on outdated templates that don’t reflect new business conditions and terms; visibility into all contracts across the organization means negotiations can be quickly pivoted to head off emerging threats.

That onus will never go away: COVID-19 proved that companies put risk management on the back burner at their own peril, and seamless contract management is a central component to both identifying and mitigating current risks and preventing future risks.

Don’t Delay

The companies in the best position to maintain business continuity when COVID hit were those who had already digitized core processes and developed the habits, skill sets and relationships necessary to get the most out of them. As one customer shared, “The great habits we developed with Icertis pre-COVID are now coming into play, to our benefit.” We don’t know when the next crisis will hit. But we do know that the longer you delay, the less time you’ll have to prepare.

Despite the current challenges posed by this pandemic, there will be a time when legal and contracting teams will return to some semblance of “normal” (and thankfully, educating will be removed from legions of parents-turned-homeschool teachers and back in the hands of educational professionals.) These contracting and legal teams, with the help of their legal department operations partners, will be well served to document the pain points presented in this current crisis and consider the Contracting 5 Ds before the next storm.

Maturity: Emerging

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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.

There is a lot of buzz regarding the change AI is bringing to the legal space–who hasn’t read an article about “robot lawyers” coming to take our jobs? On some level we know this isn’t an accurate forecast, but the media thrives on the vagueness and uncertainty surrounding AI. Meanwhile, it’s often difficult for GCs to determine if a software pitch is the right solution for their legal operation needs.

Some of this interpretative struggle is due to the seemingly endless applications for legal tech solutions. That’s why it is critical to understand that AI brings new processes to the table, but that lawyers and legal professionals will always work in tandem with AI. It’s not humans or machines; it’s “Humans + Machines.”.

What is LIBOR?

In July 2017, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) announced that by the end of 2021 British banks would no longer be required to submit rates for the London Interbank Offered Rate (LIBOR). This means that LIBOR will play a diminished role in the global financial system going forward, and may disappear altogether.

Ever since that announcement, law firms, corporate legal departments, ALSPs, and everyone in between have been asking: How many of our clients have “LIBOR-infected” contracts? How much money is at stake? How do we prioritize and facilitate re-negotiation and re-papering?

The first hurdle is to identify the LIBOR-infected contracts. After that, teams of lawyers and legal professionals can work on remediation. That’s a two-pronged problem, requiring a two-pronged solution.

Identifying LIBOR Contracts with Machine Learning

Discussing machine learning (ML) solutions brings us back to that “robot lawyers” misunderstanding. A well-trained ML platform will find a lot of relevant data points in a large set of documents and can be adapted and customized with additional ML techniques to meet the unique challenges posed by the LIBOR problem. Designing and building these robust techniques requires strategic planning and communication between various types of subject matter experts . A software development team can build ML algorithms in multiple different ways, but it takes experts in law and finance to fully flesh out all they need from a custom LIBOR analysis tool. Basically, “robot lawyers” don’t exist; effective ML requires a range of human experts to sit down and discuss how best to solve incredibly complex problems in a sophisticated and results-oriented way.

ML is not a conveyor belt where data goes in and perfect results come out. It takes time and iteration. This is actually what makes ML a natural companion discipline for legal: both disciplines require taking in imperfect data, then developing creative and effective solutions with that data.

For example, an ML implementation team handling “LIBOR-infected” contracts must ask whether a few natural language processing (NLP) techniques can find all the required data, or whether more complex vectorization models are needed. Data points are neither simple nor intuitive: spread percentages; governing law clauses; jurisdiction-specific legal language; synonymous or nearly-synonymous terms such as “Eurodollar”; and fallback clauses tied to other reference rates such as SOFR and SONIA.

ML can solve a lot of problems in legal, but sometimes it’s forgotten just how vital the contributions by experts are. At the end of the day, ML is just complex software. ML is only as good as the team that builds it, oversees it, and shepherds its evolution.

Solving LIBOR Remediation with Expert Services

The LIBOR problem requires teams of various specialists. Many organizations already have such teams, or at least a set of processes in place. Service teams from law companies like Elevate must be nimble enough to integrate with clients and their processes in order to augment what is already there. A client may not want to use ML, but an outside services team may recognize the potential for ML deployment or see that it is wiser to simply ramp up the human review team.

Either way, for an acute problem such as LIBOR, a services team must bring necessary resources, processes, and technology to their client’s team, and help deliver efficiency and cost savings in four major ways: quantification, action planning, remediation, and reporting.

Quantification

To properly determine the level of repapering a client needs to remain compliant and reduce risk, any outside services team should know how to quantify their client’s LIBOR exposure with a full historical assessment of the contract paper in question.

This initial quantification is effort-intensive, which is why many organizations bring in the efficient expertise found in law companies. Moving fast and iterating is just as important for AI developer teams as it is for a specialized services team.

Quantification efforts will typically include:

• Scoping
• Targeting data repositories for relevant contract data
• Identifying the contracts most impacted by LIBOR (perhaps using a platform like ContraxSuite)
• Reviewing and summarizing contract information for further analysis
• Working with a client’s pre-existing methodologies to provide internal stakeholders with the clearest picture: which agreements are impacted, their level of exposure, and actions needed

Action Planning

After quantification comes the action plan. For a services team, this may mean:

• Supporting Legal Project Managers as they help their teams map out necessary steps and delegate tasks
• Coordinating parties for effort estimates and accountability
• Identifying, assisting, and leveraging third parties (e.g., outside counsel, law companies, technology providers, and/or experts)
• Building consensus and internal buy-in for final action plan

Remediation

After quantification and action planning, it’s time to finalize the review and tally up the contracts that require remediation. The following are five general types of remediation:

• Level 1: Tracking all “no action” contracts
• Level 2: Notification (outgoing) of LIBOR rate transition
• Level 3: Notification and simple remediation of contract (no countersignature required)
• Level 4: Notification and simple remediation of contract (countersignature required)
• Level 5: Notification and full remediation of contract

To assist with the facilitation and resolution of these items, organizations will most likely need to hire temporary contractors or outsource the remediation process to a legal service provider.

Reporting

Throughout the process, it is important for legal teams to be aware of the progress being made, agreements pending, agreements remediated, cycle time, type of remediation, etc. A good services team knows how to support the management, tracking, and presentation of reports for internal stakeholders, ensuring accuracy on scope, quality, and budget over time. Again, the use of AI tools by a services team can take this even further, providing deeper data- based insights for future projects.

Conclusion

“Humans + Machines” is better than humans or machines by themselves. We have delivered contract insights on existing and remediated agreements, using the specialized skills of our services teams, and powerful software tools like contract analytics platforms that sift through thousands of LIBOR-infected contracts. The current centrality of the LIBOR problem is just one of the many examples of “Humans + Machines” completing high-quality enterprise legal work. It will only get better from here.

About Elevate

Elevate is a law company, providing consulting, technology and services to law departments and law firms. The company’s multi-disciplinary team of legal professionals, business professionals, and technology professionals extend and enable the resources and capabilities of customers worldwide. Learn more at elevateservices.com.

Maturity: Developing & Leading

Guide by Liquid Legal Institute

This guide will help you pinpoint triggers within your legal department to successfully navigate change management of digitalisation projects, especially as you receive demands from all sides. 

– Elevate Your Mind by understanding the need for change, identifying the pain points, assessing the digital potential, planing the budget
– Act Quickly and Decisively by initiating the project, defining your requirements, designing the solution, conducting market research, analyzing the application landscape and integration requirements, procuring/installing your solution, on-boarding users, and conducting user acceptance
– Fail Often and Early by providing support, troubleshooting, managing success, and enhancing the product

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In the wake of what’s known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution, many businesses are undergoing a process called Digital Transformation (DX) in order to adopt and adapt to new technologies that are changing the way we live and work. Digital Transformation has evolved into a mega trend, fundamentally changing both how we do things, and customer expectations of how we will interact with them.

As organisations look for a starting point in their transformations, many focus on areas that affect business most. This is where documents come in. Documents are essential to business, with contracts, in particular, governing 60-80 percent of B2B transactions, according to Gartner. When documents and contracts are handled or managed ineffectively, it creates drag as well as unnecessary risks. And while many companies are still using outdated or ineffective processes to manage their contracts, they’re also up against an ever-growing volume of contracts, increasing compliance requirements, and, often, staffing challenges in their legal and contract management teams. As businesses realise Digital Transformation is essential to success, they’re embracing Digital Document Transformation (DDX) as a logical first step in the process.

Even organisations who have implemented a contract management lifecycle (CLM) process are not working as efficiently and accurately as they could. Many are using basic document repositories, that aren’t equipped with the tools or abilities necessary to comply with relevant government, industry, or corporate requirements or compliance. Not only that, but they lack visibility into the contract process, and typically average slow completion cycles. There is no guarantee that the right people are getting the right documents when they need them, or that methods in place to ensure best practices are consistently followed and updated based on real-world experiences and market changes.

A modern CLM solution can set businesses up for success, and help as they embark on their DDX journey. Intelligent contracts will cover the bases from creation to negotiation to signature. Templates can be set up so contracts will always come out professional-looking and compliant with the click of a button. Clause libraries provide peace of mind in that reps are always pulling the most up-to-date, accurate, and compliant clauses. A secure, centralised repository allows for easy searching and the storing and management of unlimited contracts. Finally, an intelligent solution will also provide more robust analytics and visibility, with AI-powered insights and integrations with CRM tools to help organisations work smarter.

Let’s dig a little deeper on a few of the key capabilities of an intelligent CLM solution, starting with lowered risk. Connecting the legal requirements with the needs of the sales team reduces risk by maintaining compliance and increasing visibility across the business. The CLM application will help legal control the terms that can be included in any contract and limit one-off changes. When the sales team is always up-to-speed on the latest terms and staying compliant, they can shorten the time spent in negotiation. Similarly, these functions can also support ongoing needs like addendums, renewals, and terminations.

An ideal modern CLM solution will take contract processes through signature, and beyond. By using a CLM system with a built-in eSignature feature, documents will be automatically routed to the right people to sign when they need to, and as a result, sales cycles can shrink significantly. In addition to eSignature, a CLM tool can provide tracking information, delivering visibility into where all agreements are in the process, who has viewed or is currently viewing a contract, and where any bottlenecks lie. All versions, audit trails, and final agreements will be stored in the system of record, allowing managers to leverage advanced analytics to drill down on issues with past contracts and identify key areas for improvement. Every contract can then be accessed, managed, and tracked throughout the course of their lifecycle (and beyond) from the centralised, secure repository.

To recap, a modern CLM solution should include:

• Advanced features that group common terms and conditions, leverage pre-approved terms and conditions, and vet new language as you make revisions.
• The ability to negotiate terms in Microsoft Word while tracking the process in a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Salesforce.
• Professional final documents that incorporate all relevant logos and branding.
• eSignature capabilities to ensure every document is signed.
• A secure, centralised repository to store contracts that have been approved and signed.
• A CLM application should be able to handle third-party contracts from suppliers or partners.
• Analytics and charts to deliver insight into the types of language and trends users are encountering in contract creation.
• An end-to-end solution that will deliver all the CLM features needed to take a deal from creation to negotiation to signature, in a single, integrated tool.

Digital Transformation is impacting almost every business process in almost every organisation. CLM is no exception, and by using an intelligent contracts solution to improve the CLM process, companies can see measurable gains in productivity, shrink sales negotiations and cycle times, and ensure all documents meet government and corporate legal standards and requirements.

About Conga
Conga is the leader in end-to-end Digital Document Transformation. From collaboration and creation, through contract management and negotiation, to agreement and e-signature, the Conga Suite has set the standard for automating business productivity and CRM investment through end-to-end Digital Document Transformation.