Robotic automation is exploding. In fact, Gartner predicts that the market size of robotics process automation (RPA) alone is projected to reach $1.3B by the end of 2019. And that’s just a single slice of the larger robotic automation pie. The concept of robotics is no longer limited to assembly lines in manufacturing, it is an overall technological approach that can have game changing impact for all workers in all industries.

However, while there is palpable momentum for robotics, its adoption is still relatively nascent in legal operations, and for good reason. Today, most software robotics technology is focused on recording user actions and building task-based bots that perform repetitive tasks like data entry. While these bots can automate individual tasks, they don’t have significant impact on processes as a whole, which require more advanced logic.

More importantly, the legal profession is an inherently human practice, which relies on the critical, strategic, and empathetic thinking from people. The common negative perception of robots replacing humans, leads to a machine vs. humans line of thinking, which for legal, is inherently impossible.

The future of software robotics

In reality, the future software robot, or bot, is neither “dumb” nor out to replace people. Rather, the next wave of software robotics will be human-centric. Human-centric bots can intelligently augment what people do by offloading routine, mundane, or tedious processes. They will also know how to actually work with people, instead of separate or in-lieu of people. By doing so, bots can help people focus on more meaningful work that bring higher value and fulfillment.

By keeping humans-in-the-loop, these bots can automate and coordinate complete processes and that has the potential to bring immense benefit to legal operations.

What are potential areas for robotics to benefit legal operations?

The best way to understand potential areas of benefit for legal ops is to think about two types of processes: intake and coordination.

Intake – Intake processes are ones where the legal team needs to handle high volumes of incoming requests or items. These processes frequently involve receiving, triaging, and routing requests from multiple sources. Examples of intake processes are legal service requests or legal matter intake. Today, legal teams have looked to streamline intake processes by creating form-based automated workflows for certain types of requests, like NDAs, SOWs, or other contracts. However, getting people to learn how to find and use new forms typically requires extensive training and change management throughout the organization.

Bots that are human-aware have the potential to streamline intake processes by plugging in to the existing organizational environment and automating tasks or coordinating with people behind the scenes. For example, a legal intake bot could be introduced to monitor various intake sources like emails, forms, systems, and even chat. The bot can then understand the incoming requests and automatically triage each request based on defined business rules, automatically responding to routine requests and routing higher risk or more complex requests to the right person on the legal team.

Coordination – Coordination processes are ones that involve managing items through multiple touchpoints with people or systems. These processes frequently involve following-up and maintaining statuses of items to ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Examples of coordination processes are legal approvals or legal holds. The main challenge with coordination processes is ensuring the proper follow-up with people to get them to take the necessary action, such as an approval or status update, in a timely manner. These follow-up tasks are mostly handled via manual emails or outreach today, which can lead to overhead and lengthy delays.

Human-centric bots have the potential to streamline coordination processes by acting as a “virtual coordinator” who proactively reaches out to people and actively monitors systems to ensure that necessary actions are being taken. An additional benefit of bots is that they have the ability to learn behavior. In cases of people coordination, bots can learn people’s habits such as what time certain individuals have a higher response rate and what platform (i.e. email or chat) people tend to spend more time in. Based on this, bots can then reach out to each individual where they’re most likely to respond, thus reducing delays in processes due to inaction by people.

The unique potential of robotics in legal operations

The fact that human-centric robotic automation software can plug into existing legal processes and technologies behind the scenes while interfacing with systems and people provides unique potential benefits:

• No change management
  One of the top challenges to legal operations teams is convincing and training your legal team or business customers to adopt new technology or change behavior. Unlike workflow automation solutions that exist today, rather than automating processes by introducing a new “front door” like a digital request form, bots can plug-in directly to existing systems and communication channels to create efficiencies without long and costly change management processes.
• Start small and iterate
  The additional benefit of not introducing brand new systems or interfaces, which requires learned behavior, is that bots can be introduced incrementally. This way, users can begin to realize benefits in days, not months or years. This also allows legal operations teams to mitigate risk by deploying bots on processes that are low risk and high value and then build on success over time.
• Reduce barriers to change
  The pace of change for enterprises is faster than ever before, and it will never be slower than it is today. Bots can give legal operations teams the flexibility they need to improve processes regardless of their existing technology environment. This allows legal operations to better respond to shifting business demands and ultimately become better business partners.

The new normal for legal operations

In the future, the new normal for organizations will be a blended workforce where bots are used to augment full time employees who can then maximize their time performing strategic, creative, and human-centric initiatives. Robotic automation can remove the limitations of today’s systems and technology, which require people to perform mundane procedural tasks to satisfy the needs of the business. Additionally, by applying the right kind of robotic automation legal operations teams can have the flexibility to take a people-first approach to process design, which first starts with answering, “What’s the best experience for my people?” and not “What functionality does my system support?” By doing so, legal operations can best accentuate the value their legal team provides to the rest of the business.

About Tonkean
Tonkean is an augmented robotics process automation platform for legal operations to empower their legal teams by automating work and coordinating people. To learn more about Tonkean, please visit www.tonkean.com/usecases/legal.

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.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers, the average Fortune 2000 company holds around 20,000-40,000 active contracts. Imagine having to manage this contract volume throughout their lifecycle without any technology! In most cases, the responsibility of drafting, authoring, reviewing and managing a huge portfolio of high-value contracts falls on the legal or contract management function where execution is largely the responsibility of the legal operations team. And unfortunately for many operations teams, automation in contract management is still not a common practice. Companies continue to rely on manual processes for contract management – making this cumbersome, time-consuming and often routine effort for the legal team – that often exposes the company to risk and omissions.

An advanced contract management solution means streamlined processes, automated workflows, predictive analytics, standardized language, pre-configured alerts and triggers, and a centralized, integrated repository with easy access across devices. These are just some of the functionalities of an advanced CLM that can enhance the working of legal departments, improve productivity, decrease turn around time, help in strategic decision making and reduce costs and manual errors.

With so many benefits, adopting a CLM technology has become a goal for many legal departments. A proper plan in place with metrics to track each step of the journey can make the adoption easy and avoid hiccups on the way. We have identified four such steps in the CLM journey to ensure high adoption:

1. Know your point of origin
   While adopting CLM, knowing where you are in the CLM maturity model can make all the difference. Understand where you had been in the past and how you have reached the present state. Study the challenges faced and draw insights from your experiences. This stage is the starting point of the CLM adoption and having a thorough understanding of the current scenario from the technology and business standpoint can go a long way.
2. Collaborate with key stakeholders
   It is best to involve all the stakeholders in your decision making to ensure you get the right contract management solution for your organization. Contracting, legal, procurement, and any other divisions who would be using the solution could have important suggestions and insights that might help in a more ideal solution, save costs and ensure higher CLM adoption. However, do so at the risk of feature and scope creep – so keep your friends close and…well you know the rest.
3. Capture use-case intricacies
   As you are capturing the as-is state, be sure to understand and reach out to the stakeholders, process owners, reference data managers, clause curators, past, present and future librarians, and don’t forget the heritage legal file administrators as well as future stewards. Now is the time to understand the intricacies and complexities – or at the least document them and have owners identified.
4. Simplify processes and integration
   The goal of implementing a Contract Lifecycle Management solution is to simplify the process. With a simplified, more straight forward process, which leverages technology to facilitate decision paths and embodies new technologies like AI and Machine Based learning to provide assistive guidance, user adoption increases through incremental and consistent gains in performance and process efficiencies.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

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

The Journey of CLM Adoption in Legal Operations
Tuesday, May 14th at 1:30pm
Speakers:

• Amy Anderson, Transdev
• Sandy Owen, Intel Corporation
• Arthur Raguette, Ultria

For a more in-depth understanding of each of the steps in the Journey of CLM adoption, along with real-world examples and insights from established market leaders from Ultria, Intel and Transdev, attend Ultria’s breakout session on ‘The Journey of CLM Adoption in Legal Operations’ on Tuesday, May 14th. The speakers will discuss their journey of CLM adoption, the challenges they faced and the learnings from the same. They will share their experiences in leveraging CLOC competencies that include defining target metrics through Data Analytics, rallying support through Cross-Functional Alignment, and leveraging agile program management disciplines in their journey of Technology & Process Support for Contract Lifecycle Management.

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.

Is it happening? Is the humble contract finally getting the tech attention it deserves?

For legal departments, contracts have long been the forgotten piece of a company’s digital transformation puzzle. An attorney in the department might be asked to enter the contract process for drafting, negotiation and review, but may place little thought about the process following execution. Confined to paper or perhaps a PDF with eSignature capabilities, the contract never got a second look by the legal department unless it was causing a delay in business or resurfacing during a dispute or, worse, litigation.

Indeed, at first glance at the CLOC Core Competency Model, you’ll be pressed to see a single competency dedicated to the importance of enterprise contract management, especially as it pertains to post-execution contract actions.

But that’s all changing, and fast. According to analysts, companies are giving a hard look at Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) technology that can be used to manage the entire contracting process, from authoring to expiry.

“Customers’ interest in CLM is stronger than ever and is a leading topic raised by users of Gartner’s client inquiry service,” according to the 2018 Gartner Market Guide for Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM).

This should be music to the ears of legal operations professionals, given the legal headaches that come with traditional contract management.

However, when it comes to deploying CLM, it’s not just a question of if but how. Enterprise-wide deployments provide clear advantages for legal operations departments and their companies—and in fact cut across several CLOC competencies: Not only “Technology and Process Support” but also “Cross Functional Alignment,” “Data Analytics” and other areas.

If you are still unfamiliar with the basics of enterprise-wide contract management, here is a quick “5 Ws” guide to this exciting technology.

What: A Contract Management System for All Contracts

Enterprise contract management allows companies to put all their contracts—sales, procurement, HR, corporate—into a single system for holistic management.

This form of contract management is considered a best practice by analysts, if not commonly practiced in the “first wave” of enterprise contract management deployments.

“Many organizations that have implemented a CLM solution have done so for just a portion of their business or a specific business function. This piecemeal approach frequently results in inefficient process workflows and deployment of multiple CLM tools,” Gartner says in its Market Report.

Often, contracts that originate in one department will have dependencies with a contract in another department. For example, a sales contract may precipitate the need for raw materials to be procured to ensure the deliverable is built to spec (in the contract management field we call this “back-to-back” contracting.) By managing all contracts on a single technology, legal operations teams can gain a holistic view across all a company’s contracts for improved analytics, better workflows and reduced risk.

2. Why? Proven ROI

For historically non-revenue-generating departments like legal, a proven return-on-investment for technology is vital. Thankfully for legal operation professionals, CLM has that covered.

“CLM presents a great opportunity for digital transformation, because it’s practical, well-scoped and executable. The technology is proven, as is the ROI, which companies can use to fund other initiatives on their digital business roadmap,” Gartner reports in its Market Guide.

The value delivered by enterprise contract management can be divided into three categories: acceleration, protection and optimization. Contract turnaround becomes faster, contract risk is proactively surfaced and monitored, and contract performance is continually evaluated to identify areas for improvement.

3. When? Now (And 5 Years from Now)

While CLM adoption has been growing in recent years, we are now at an inflection point of what the software can do for users.

As another report, this one from Forrester, puts it, “The CLM market is growing because more contract managers and legal and financial professionals use CLM to address the challenges of creating, managing, and getting the best business results from their contracts. Contract management and legal pros increasingly trust CLM providers to act as strategic partners, providing firms with the right tools to get the best value from their contracts.”

There’s a lot to unpack there, but the upshot is that contract management software is advancing to the point that legal departments—especially those responsible for managing thousands of contracts—can’t afford to manage contracts outside a CLM system.

But legal operations teams shouldn’t only be thinking about what the technology can do for them now, but also five years from now. Like the CLOC Competency Model itself, there is a maturity model to contract management that starts with basics like creating contracts and progresses to capabilities like using artificial intelligence to analyze contract negotiation data and recommend tactics for better outcomes.

This doesn’t happen overnight. Legal operations departments should consider tools that they can “grow into” as their enterprise becomes more comfortable with the technology.

4. Where: Everywhere

With enterprise contract management, everyone with proper permissions in a company can see any contract in its repository, breaking down traditional departmental and geographic silos that have historically hampered optimal contract management.

Vertiv, a global technology manufacturer, has driven a successful deployment of enterprise contract management and now enjoys instant visibility into all of its contracts, even those executed overseas. Prior to implementing an enterprise contract management system, agreements were scattered across the globe, with paper agreement locked in physical file cabinets or on the desktops of its employees. The company underwent a successful transition from a decentralized paper system to a global, searchable central repository so teams everywhere can quickly review purchasing contracts and other agreements and compare them to make sure the company is getting the best terms.

5. Who: You!

Yes, you.

When selecting a CLM vendor, procurement and sales will often advocate for a solution that is tailored specifically to their role, since they often come as part of a larger software suite.

Yet if both sales and procurement—and likely HR as well—get the CLM built for their role, legal will end up working with three or more systems, unnecessarily adding to the technology plate that legal operations would need to manage. Even worse, the body of contracts will be fragmented across the enterprise (as warned against by Gartner earlier).

To avoid this situation, it is incumbent on CLOs and legal operations professionals to lead the push for an enterprise-wide solution for contract management.

Contracts no longer need to be the forgotten piece of a company’s digital transformation puzzle. In fact, guided by these Five Ws, legal operation professionals can lead an enterprise on its journey to transforming their contracts from static documents to strategic assets.

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

Register here to attend CLOC 2019 Vegas Institute – and please join our CLOC session and learn how a leading legal department transformed through its enterprise contract management.:

Contracts from Static Documents to Strategic Assets
Wednesday, May 15th 10:30 – 11:20
Speakers:

• Colin Flannery, Vertiv Worldwide General Counsel
• Bernadette Bulacan, Icertis Legal Evangelist

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.

More is being asked of the modern day corporate legal department than ever before. General Counsel are required to function like a business within a business, optimizing people, processes, and technology to serve the company effectively and efficiently. Legal operations excellence is no longer an option; it must be top of mind.

Whether you’re in a startup or in a mature organization, building a sophisticated legal operations program from scratch can be a daunting task. It takes time away from day-to-day legal duties and requires a heavy focus on business principles. To get it off the ground, many questions must be considered: Why is it necessary? When should you start? Who do you hire? What should you build and buy? How do you manage change and measure performance?

The CLOC Core Competency Reference Model provides a cycle to walk you through the steps in building an effective legal operations function. The CLOC 2018 Conference keynote outlined below focuses on these critical and impactful competencies as pillars when developing your legal operations function, as well as other competencies as you grow the function.

• Strategic Planning
• Technology Process & Support
• Cross Functional Alignment
  & Communication

• Financial Management
• Vendor Management
• Knowledge Management

It’s time to build a legal operations function that bridges your legal department to the rest of the organization

What’s the first thing you need to think about? Start with the big picture and what you’re looking to accomplish in your legal operations function. Your primary goal in building the function should be to enable the business.A well-defined legal operations function follows twin paths of organizational and functional maturity in its growth. Functional and organizational maturity are symbiotic and depend on each other for balance.

• Organizational Maturity: How mature is the organization in relation to people, process, technology, and measurement? A mature organization operates with predictability, process, and precision. Are you reactive or proactive? Organizational maturity includes building out your team and your legal operations organization in a fashion that can serve the legal department.
• Functional Maturity: How mature is your organization based on the prevalence of specific functional areas? As you grow, functional areas may include legal finance, knowledge management, technology implementation, vendor management, etc.

The more mature your organization is along the organizational maturity X-axis, the more opportunity you have to achieve areas of functional maturity. Likewise, increased functional maturity along the Y-axis will allow you to make a better business case to add more people to your organization. It’s challenging to develop both levels of maturity at the same time; however, it’s critical to keep both of these areas in mind as you develop your legal operations department.

In the beginning, as you develop your legal operations function, you may be all by yourself. It’s just you trying to achieve a lot of different goals. As you grow in organizational maturity, you can begin to think about hiring additional functions, like an eBilling specialist. Then, as you develop your organizational and functional maturity, you can hire for additional functional areas.

The CLOC Core Competency Reference Model is designed to show functional maturity in a cycle. Starting at the top with strategic planning, you need to work with your GC to set the strategy for the legal ops function and determine how you will build out that function. Once the processes are nailed down, you can start implementing technology to automate those processes.

Steve Harmon, Cisco, “In my opinion, everything revolves around the hub of knowledge management. You need to have at least a basic level of competency in order to establish the building blocks to address various issues. A robust knowledge management exercise is critical in creating a repeatable, scalable model that will standardize process across the organization.”

Executing Your Kickoff

In the strategy phase, you need to meet with all your key business partners. This is the time to start asking questions in order to understand the issues and pain points faced by each of your strategic business partners. Supporting your business partners is a critical component of your job and you will achieve the greatest success by working in a collaborative, cross-functional way with all the business units.

Ask questions that will enable you to understand each of your stakeholders’ priorities. This will help you determine how the legal operations function will drive the overall business.

Sample questions:

1. General Counsel: Who are our clients?
2. Practice Area Leaders: What are your key processes?
3. Finance: Who are the legal department’s business partners?
4. IT: What is the universe of legal technology in place?
5. HR: How can existing talent serve operations goals?

Leverage Additional Resources
Leverage and identify talent throughout your organization who can help you. Even if you don’t have headcount, there are resources that you can leverage in other departments. Think creatively in terms of who you want to hire for your new roles. The person you hire may not have a legal operations background, but is passionate about operations and about changing the industry.

Lay the Foundation of Your Operations Organization
Laying an effective foundation will vary by organization and by priorities. Each of the pillars you select as your foundation will have underlying components. It can be overwhelming at first, but by focusing on the fundamental pillars in the CLOC Core Competency Reference Model, you can make manageable changes.

Mike Haven, Gap, “The 3 pillars for me were legal finance, partner management, and technology, with an overarching umbrella of strategy. Remember, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon and you need to focus on the pillars and mature gradually.”

The hardest part of the job is managing change. Things can become more painful before they get better. You might be going live with a new process or technology before the end users have fully adopted the idea. The key to change management is communication, engagement, and credibility.

• Communicate. Explain to both your stakeholders and end users what you are doing and why you are doing it. They need to understand “why” in order to fully engage.
• Engagement. Bring your stakeholders and end users on board with the change early and often. Get their feedback and ideas and make them a part of the change.
• Credibility. Build your credibility early in the process. Start with some quick wins that show value right away.

Examples of Quick Wins:

• Invoice Review: Take the first pass out of your attorneys’ hands to ensure compliance with policies and flag potential substantive issues.
• Workflow Automation: Firm matter, timekeeper onboarding, rate reviews, settlements processing.
• E-Signature: No more “Print, Sign, and PDF”.

Measure Your Traction as You Mature
There are a number of components you can use to measure your success. Spend, timekeeper rate management, invoice review, key matter status, and law firm performance are just a few of components that can be measured. When you first come into a legal department, make sure you measure your baseline, or starting point, for your most important initiatives. As you evolve, establish milestones to show your progression and prove your success.

Acknowledge that you are a service organization to a service organization. Why do organizations have law departments at all? The sole reason for their existence is to enable businesses to design, build, and sell products in a legally appropriate way. Ultimately, legal services must drive results.

How do you decide where you’re going to allocate resources in your department?

One way to allocate resources is to use the Core vs. Context Resource Allocation Model. This strategic method of allocating resources will allow your company to focus on what you do well and outsource the remaining activities to 3rd party firms.

First, determine which activities are mission-critical vs. non-mission critical. Second, decide if the activities are context or core. Finally, determine what percentage of your resources should be allocated to core, mission critical activities and which should be outsourced.

• Mission Critical: Activities that, if performed poorly, pose an immediate risk.
• Non-Mission Critical: Activities that, if performed poorly do not pose a risk
• Context: Activities that are necessary, but not tied to competitive advantage.
• Core: Activities that contribute to competitive advantage.

Examples of Typical Legal Operations Activities

• High stakes litigation compliance: Mission-critical and Context -> Out-task.
• IP Rights: Mission-critical and Core -> In-task.
• Smaller litigation: Non-mission Critical and Context -> Outsource.
• Routine transaction processing: Non-mission critical and Core -> Self Service.

Tools, Process, and Culture Trade-off

The three fundamental components of culture, process, and tools must be balanced when launching your legal operations function. In order to achieve your desired outcome, you need to understand your organization’s current processes and its culture.

Start with process definition. Understand how things are being done in your organization now. Define processes and map them to desired behaviors. Establish measurable metrics that are proxies for those desired behaviors. Process is going to be influenced by both tools and culture in your organization. You need to be nimble and be ready to iterate as new challenges arise.

Then, address the most challenging piece – the culture. How do the people in your organization make decisions? Culture is usually set and hard to change, especially in legal departments. You’ll need to create some motivating reason to persuade people to change the way they do work.

We recommend that you don’t start with tools/technology. It’s very tempting to just throw technology at the problem in order to achieve a quick solution. However, in the beginning we recommend that you focus on the narrowest set of tools that will solve the issues you face. By understanding your process and culture environment, you’ll be more successful implementing the right tools that will solve issues in the long term.

Key Takeaways

• Don’t make this a tools problem. Go through the exercises and develop a strong foundation.
• Start with process definition. Determine what matters to your organization and drive toward measurable results.
• Recognize that you’re not going to be successful until you address the cultural challenges.

Attend a CLOC Institute to learn more about this, and many other topics of interest to legal operations professionals. Are you an in-house legal professional? Join CLOC as a member and be part of the discussion!

So, you’re new to legal ops. Or your company is new to legal operations. Or maybe you’re in an existing role and looking to do a reset. Whatever the case, the CLOC 12 Core Competencies Reference Model can be used to structure your legal operations function.

The areas outlined below from the CLOC 2018 Conference keynote focus on three critical and impactful competencies.

• Strategic Planning
• Technology Process & Support
• Cross Functional Alignment & Communication

These competencies provide you with all the insights you need to:

• Approach goals, use and drive GC priorities, and learn how to size and staff your organization to achieve your goals.
• Understand your department’s current state through a SWOT analysis
• Create world-class strategic assets like vision/mission statements and tech roadmaps

Using strategic planning supported by technology process and support, cross-functional alignment and communication can help you build the right foundation for your legal department’s success.

Strategic Planning

A strategic plan sets you and the legal department in motion. An effective strategic plan is the difference between a reactive admin function and a partnership with your legal team where they trust you to guide them into places unknown. Without strategic planning, there’s no compass. With it, you’re at the helm and you steer the ship.

So, what exactly is a strategy? It’s the how. Or rather, a plan of action you lay out to achieve the mission, vision and goals of a legal department. You will always have competing priorities. Stakeholders and even vendors will try to influence you. Do your homework and build a strategy so that when competing priorities come up, you have a True North and can align people, projects and initiatives to that selfsame True North.

So where does one start?

The key is to start where the org is. The way to determine this is to embark on a roadshow of listening, asking probing questions and getting to know who your stakeholders are and what their needs are. You must deeply understand company goals, legal leadership goals and GC goals. Next comes a thorough analysis against CLOC foundations and core competencies. Through this high-level active analysis, you can start to get a sense of the current state, identify current opportunities and risks, what’s happening and what’s missing. To go into a framework, you have to prioritize based on company, GC, and legal leadership goals. But it all starts with the listening roadshow.

SWOT Analysis

The SWOT— strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats— Analysis is another strategic planning tool which can provide the business with a clear view of the advantages you have over competitors and your possible vulnerabilities. It’s an essential business planning tool that will help you:

• Uncover opportunities that are quick wins
• Understand the weaknesses of your business in order to help manage and eliminate threats.
• Where do you need investment? Is it process, budget, resources, etc?
• Determine strengths that serve as a foundation or starting point for a solution.

While developing your SWOT Analysis ask yourself on the following questions:

• Are you thinking about the long game?
• What are the unique priorities of your GC?
• What has the most value?

Strategy Components

To help clarify the who, the why, and the what of a legal operations strategy, formulate and document the following:

Mission Statement: Formalize the aims and goals of the org or department in order to communicate what you want to do. Make it clear, concise and useful.

• Who are your primary customers?
• What service does your department provide?
• What is the GC’s primary focus?

Vision Statement: The long-range emotional picture of what you’re striving to achieve. Building blocks:

• What are three relevant industry and technology trends?
• Who will we serve in five years?
• What problems will we solve in five years?

Goals: What are your organization’s goals for the next one, three or five years. How will your department support said goals? Are these goals SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound)?

• Establish top objectives
• Define top initiatives to support the initiatives
• Establish measurable and repeatable metrics

Don’t rely on assumptions or what the org has done previously. Leverage the people that you have. Do interviews. Discover trends. Create the mission, vision and departmental goals, overlay them onto your SWOT analysis, and create a work plan using SMART goals. SMART goals have clear objectives, initiatives, metrics, owners, deadlines and project plans.

Technology Process & Support

Legal ops focuses on increasing efficiency and productivity by optimizing the delivery of legal services to the wider business. Technology and process are a core ingredient of any successful legal operations function. As you roadshow, develop strategic goals and conduct your department SWOT analysis, there will be issues, gaps, problems, and asks that can be solved with process engineering and technology solutions. Centralize all of these, categorize them as opportunities, and place them into a technology backlog and roadmap. The backlog is where all opportunities are captured, managed and prioritized into a list of work, or roadmap. The roadmap outlines sequentially which technology or process solutions you will implement over the month, quarter, and fiscal year.

Roadmaps are another strategic planning tool in your toolkit ensuring investments meet the short and long-term goals of the organization. They can also be used as a budget, alignment and communications tool and are often accompanied by more in-depth business cases, implementation and communications plans.

“[Backlogs and Roadmaps] are the easiest way to let people know that you’re listening to them, that it’s on the radar and that you’re setting appropriate priorities and expectations.” –Frances Pomposo, Director of Legal & PEC Operations

Cross Functional Alignment & Communication

But wait, there’s more! Communication & buy in (internal & external) can make or break any initiative. A new process may rely on inputs from Procurement. A new technology may also feed data downstream to Finance.

Key Business Unit Alignment

Think about the key business units cross-functionally that work with Legal. Who do you need to start meeting with on day one? Establish relationships and align legal ops with your partners in other organizations. Not only will this provide you with an in-depth understanding of their goals and work dependencies but it will also help you get buy-in. Communicate what legal ops is aiming to achieve, establish early adopters, set up periodic meetings and get on their roadmaps.

Department Comms

A huge part of legal operations is being the department spokesperson, responsible for making sure those who need to know about projects, successes, etc. are in the know. As the head of the legal ops function you are responsible for marketing the department and keeping initiatives top of mind and bolstering the work the team does and how they positively impact the company and serve as a business partner.

Key Takeaways

• You are customer service brand for your department.
• Over-communication is key. Because legal operations is often executing behind the scenes, it is important to make sure your department knows what is going on/being worked on at all times.
• Cross-functional alignment is critical to success. Maintain and/or improve relationships with key business units.
• Think about the long game and track trends year over year. Develop a tech roadmap and make your vision a reality.

Maturity: General

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