The Future of Legal Operations: Agile, Value-Centric, and Tech-Enabled

 

The current environment has triggered uncertainty and has accelerated change in law departments in struggling and thriving industries. To best manage an ever-changing environment and, at the same time, advance their evolution, law departments must embrace three critical characteristics: they must be agile, value-centric, and tech-enabled. The foundation for this future state is a mature and data-driven legal operations program.

Agile: Nimble, Responsive, and Proactive

Only one thing is evident during the pandemic: everything you think you know will change—and probably more than once. Returning to the office is just one example of that uncertainty: in roundtables over the last several months, HBR asked law department leaders what percentage of their employees they expect to return to the office in 2021. Over the previous quarter, an increasing number of law department leaders anticipate less than half of their department members return to the office in 2021.

To respond to the ever-shifting environment and clients’ ever-changing needs, law departments must be agile and responsive, continually flexing to meet emerging areas of need. The ability to be responsive to emerging client needs requires effectively allocating and empowering resources in an organizational framework.

Alignment with client needs. While the practice of law is often reactive, there is now a heightened need for structured, proactive alignment with client priorities. Business needs to address a variety of new or urgent priorities quickly.

Leverage model. With the appropriate mix of experience within their attorney ranks and the proper allocation of non-attorney resources, law departments can easily assign work to the right resource level. With the right mix doing the appropriate work, productivity will increase, costs will be lower, and employees will be more engaged.

Organization structure. Concentrating repetitive work such as contracts or research into centralized resource groups (centers of excellence) can allow other resources to flex to areas of need that require more nuanced support.

Resource empowerment. Agile law departments have a culture that empowers individuals and teams to make decisions and react quickly in a fluid environment. Ongoing professional development and cross-training will give team members the skills and knowledge to be confident. In the current climate, creative and continued employee engagement is also critical.

Value Centric: Emphasizing Value While Managing Cost

Value-centric means ensuring that a department’s resources, internal and external, are focused on the highest value tasks and activities. Value centric law departments analyze the work to be done, optimize the processes for performing it, rationalize external spend on law firms and other service providers, and monitor their performance.

In the current environment, cost is a significant value consideration for law departments. Our roundtable polls indicate that law department operations leaders’ priorities have shifted since the onset of the pandemic. In April, talent-related issues were top of mind, as departments scrambled to adjust to the work-from-home environment. By June, the top priority was cost management, even in industries less adversely affected by the pandemic.

Internal value. With new work and personal issues drawing on people’s time, law departments need to maximize their leverage models’ effectiveness, finding new ways of working, and focusing on the highest value activities and tasks. Increasingly, forward-looking departments are working to track and monitor team activity to ensure the department focuses on the highest value work.

External value. To maximize the value received from outside counsel, law departments tighten their partnerships with existing preferred panel firms and rationalize which firms they choose to use based on the alignment between cost and the value received. When reviewing RFPs, leading law departments look for differentiating value—external providers’ opportunity to demonstrate their understanding of client needs.

Tech Enabled: Supporting Agility, Value Centricity and More

The current environment has brought technology to the forefront – technology tools have helped some departments thrive while others have recognized their deficiencies. Technology can drive efficiency, improve decision making, and consistency in delivering legal support and services, including providing underlying support and measurement for departments’ efforts to be agile and value-centric. But with the proliferation of available technology tools and cost management pressures, it is essential for law departments to ensure that their legal tech stack is (a) aligned with their strategic objectives and (b) adopted by end-users to provide its intended value.

Alignment with strategic objectives. Law departments should continually recalibrate their legal technology strategy, aligning technology strategy with the department’s overall strategy. In the current environment, that alignment includes taking into account the “new normal,” such as working from home and enforcing controls more effectively. Still, it is crucial not to lose sight of longer-term strategic goals.

Enabling technology tools should be right-sized for their intended purpose and support efficient processes, consistent tracking, and robust reporting. Generally, a law department’s operational model should leverage an enterprise legal management (ELM) system as one of its central tools, supported by additional tools to address practice area-specific needs. For example, while transactional functions have sometimes felt underserved by traditional, litigation-focused technology, leading law departments are now leveraging workflow and contract lifecycle management (CLM) technology to serve transactional functions better. HBR’s roundtable discussions indicate that law departments are currently prioritizing analytics tools and workflow tools instead of more nascent technology such as AI. Analytic tools can facilitate decision-making regarding spending, resource allocation, and more, and workflow tools can help a department more agilely, timely, and equitably respond to client needs.

Maximizing investment through adoption.

Based on HBR’s roundtable discussions, we find that most law departments focus on maximizing their existing investments—completing implementations and working to ensure adoption by end-users to justify the investment. Most roundtable participants are currently seeing a significant or moderate uptick in user adoption (necessity can drive use), but much of the information they gather is anecdotal or based solely on log-ins. To understand the actual level of adoption, law departments must measure actual usage and monitor relevance. As a result, HBR and others are developing new tools to help law departments better track how users are interacting with legal technology.

Conclusion  

To continue to evolve, law departments must be proactive in shaping their future, taking a strategic, forward-looking view. The concepts presented here are not new, but the current environment offers a unique opportunity to accelerate the evolution towards becoming agile, value-centric, and tech-enabled law departments of the future. Simply reacting to the pandemic’s challenges and its fallout is not enough—seize the moment because the future is now.


How CLOC Created its Virtual Institute Agenda

Earlier this year, CLOC made the decision to transition the in-person experience to an online global experience this November. While this was a difficult decision to make, it gave CLOC a chance to focus on providing valuable content for legal professionals in a multi-time zone environment. 

CLOC Institutes are known as “the event of the year” for legal professionals across the entire ecosystem to come together to connect, learn, and collaborate.  If you have ever been to one of these events,  you know it’s an experience that’s hard to replicate. But not for CLOC. We understand that during this time where our lives are adjusting, we have the opportunity to meet you where you are, regardless of where you are located. 

CLOC recognizes that transitioning to an online event requires a considerable amount of thought and timely execution. It’s also more than creating webinars and finding speakers, it’s about delivering value, engagement, education, and networking. 

Before CLOC began planning the program, it was important to hear from CLOC members and law firm participants.  CLOC launched the Personalize Your Virtual Experience survey to gain insights into what challenges legal professionals were facing, what they wanted to learn, and how they wanted to engage with other attendees. The survey received responses from legal professionals all over the world including Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Switzerland, and Hong Kong. 

People responded when asked “What is one thing that you want to learn or experience at the Global Institute?” and the responses below helped shape the agenda, topics, and speakers to give attendees exactly what they asked for. 

“I want to hear about the latest trends and how we compare to what other firms and in-house teams are experiencing.” – Director of a Law Firm

“I am curious to learn how other organizations with large legal departments are structuring their Legal Ops Team to support their business and what are their current priorities.” – Manager of Corporate Legal Department

“I want to learn how to drive innovation in the legal industry with my peers and my organization’s stakeholders.” – Vice President of a Corporate Legal Department

“I want to learn how to empower changes that need to happen in an environment that is comfortable with how things currently are.” – Program Manager for a Corporate Legal Department

CLOC is excited to bring the Institute to you and provide optimal opportunities to once again gather to connect, learn, and collaborate, an experience delivered to your desktop.

Here is what you can look forward to with an all access pass to the CLOC Global Institute:

Exhibit Hall: Over 40 technology providers, service providers, and law firms will be ready to meet you and provide more information about their products and services. Don’t be shy! Engage with them at their booth by asking questions in live chat, watch demo videos, and get access to downloadable documents, all geared to teach you how to make your role more efficient. As a bonus, you can get a chance to win a free lunch or free swag!

Meet the Change Makers: The first session will include senior executives from influential organizations including EY, Harvard, Orrick, and VMWare, as they discuss how legal disruption is an opportunity for change, ways to design for a new future and will share their bold thoughts on where you need to go and how you get there.  

General Counsel Panel Discussion: Hear general counsels from large enterprise organizations like Coca-Cola, easyJet, and Microsoft as they discuss the current state of the legal industry, trends that have impacted the way that legal does business, and what to expect moving forward despite the constant change that you experience. 

Panelists include Badley Gayton who joined Coca-Cola after nearly 20 years at Ford Motor Company, serving in various roles from Global Trade Taxation & Customs to Legal Affairs for Canada, Mexico, and South America to General Counsel. He is joined by Maaike de Bie from easyJet after several years at Royal Mail and now leads a mid-size legal team that supports an affordable airline operation that transported 96 million passengers, in more than 1000 routes to over 30 countries around the world last year.  Both are joined by Dev Stahlkopf who leads a large legal team of 500 at Microsoft, one of the world’s largest organizations, and was featured as one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in 2019. This is a session you won’t want to miss.

Breakout Sessions: The Global Institute agenda includes 14 sessions throughout the day, which gives you an opportunity to choose one of two sessions each hour to view live or on-demand. 

Here are some of the confirmed sessions today. CLOC has more abstract proposals to review and will be adding even more sessions to the agenda.

  • Making Impact as a Leader in the Distributed World will be an interactive experience to show you how to be purposeful, resilient and influential in your relationships with peers, stakeholders and your team.  
  • KM for Small Legal Departments: Maximizing Your Impact With Limited Resources will be a case study of the Asurion Legal Operations Team and how they were able to build a knowledge management solution in less than 2 months with no resources and limited technology budget. 
  • Understanding the Technology Journey: From Skillset to Planning will be a case study of the Marvell Semiconductor Legal Ops Team and how they were able to successfully implement multiple tech solutions by leveraging champions throughout the organization and using existing technology to save time and money.
  • How to Tackle Your Legal Operations Projects will discuss how to use legal project management (LPM) principles to approach legal ops projects and share stories of their  successes to the failures to help ensure you learn from their experiences.  
  • Strategic Planning for New Legal Operations Leaders will discuss how to navigate through your new role, how to create a strategy, implement your plan, and execute your vision in your first year. 
  • Other topics that we are considering adding to our agenda include Data & Diversity: The Importance and Benefits of Diversity in Today’s Legal Environment, Legal Ops Battleplans for 2021, Building a Future-Proof Legal Tech Stack, Using No-Code Automation To Improve Efficiency Without Adding New Tools, From Fighting Fires to Driving Impact: Innovating Without Change Management, and Contract Data Storytelling: Growing Legal Ops Influence Across the Org. 

CLOC will be confirming the remaining topic proposals soon, so check the CLOC Global Institute Agenda for more updates. 

Roundtable Discussions: Throughout the event, you will have the opportunity to participate in regional and committees networking, industry groups and trending topic discussions with your peers. These interactive sessions will allow you to break out into smaller groups and be inspired by actionable takeaways that not only empower efficiencies in the way you work but enable department transformation.

  • Regional Networking – EMEA, Americas, and APAC
  • CLOC Committee Networking – Diversity & Inclusion, and Legal Project Management
  • Industry Groups – Fortune 1000 & Other Large Enterprise, Legal Technology & Innovation, and Emerging Legal Departments 
  • Trending Topics – Business Intelligence, Strategic Planning, Knowledge Management, Professional Development, Process & Workflow Automation, Tech Strategy & Implementation Lessons Learned, Intake & Self Service Tools, Dashboards & BI Tools

Engagement Activities:

  • Visit the Chat Lounge to engage via live chat with other Institute attendees.
  • Add and Download the CLOC Global Playlist and listen to the vibes during breaks.
  • Pop into the CLOC break room for a stretch with an instructor and more.
  • Enter to get lunch on us with an UberEats gift card by visiting exhibitor booths in the Exhibit Hall.
  • Sign up for the CLOC Networking Event and meet 1:1 with global legal professionals. Details will be announced during the Institute. 

Like all other Institutes, CLOC is redefining the way information is delivered to its members, law firms, and the entire legal ecosystem with a jam-packed, digital Institute filled with real-talk panel sessions, impactful workshops, mentor power hours with the best, peer to peer networking, and more!

Register today!

THE ROAD AHEAD

Finding perspective in a strange time

I am a planner. Like many people in legal operations, I am constantly thinking about what comes next and how to get there. The last few months, of course, have been a real blow to all of us planners. Sometimes life takes your carefully laid out plans, rips them up, and tosses the pieces in the air.

Almost overnight, our lives changed. My days used to kick off with a mad rush to get the kids to school and fight traffic to get to the office. I used to see my kids for a half hour each morning, then maybe an hour or two in the evening. In between, I was rushing from meeting to meeting, barely taking a break to get everything done by the end of the workday. It was a good life, but it felt chaotic and rushed, and I found myself wishing for more time with my family.

The hard turn my family took into a shelter-in-place, home schooling lifestyle was a shock for sure. It also came with some important gifts, the first of which is gratitude.

Unlike so many, my husband and I can keep working remotely. The pressures we face are nothing compared to what some families confront. This is not to say we don’t feel frustrated or anxious sometimes, but we realize how fortunate we are to be safe and whole at a time when so many are not. The problems we have – homeschooling three healthy, feisty young children while juggling our work commitments – are good problems.

Another important gift: the time we have been able to spend with our loved ones. My favorite part of each day was watching my five year-old doing her P.E. class. She goes at it with impressive intensity, concentrating hard during the yoga segment and huffing and puffing through jumping jacks and burpees. After months spent in the house together, I look at her, my other girls, and my husband in a new way. We are all learning so much about each other. 

This desire to connect, and appreciation for others, extends beyond the people in my house. I have thought more about, and reconnected with, old friends around the world more in the last few months. Instead of being so caught up in the whirlwind of my busy days, I have found myself making time to reach out and catch up.

A big change in life context can sometimes bring about a big shift in perspective. We have the physical space and time, and mental distance, to see our world with more clarity. We can see the things in front of us better and value them properly. This is the silver lining of this moment, I believe.

The power of purpose

We spend so much time preoccupied with the “what” and the “how” it can be easy to lose track of the “why.” When you strip away all the noise of our busy lives and crowded minds, what rises to the top?

What matters most? This simple question has been a huge focus for us at CLOC over the last few months.

It is a good time for reflection. Our little group, that I used to call a “book club,” has grown into a world-class organization. Once just a small gathering of contrarians trying to define a new space called “legal operations,” we are now active in leading companies across the globe. Representing major industries over many geographies, our members are pushing and testing the limits of what is possible. As a result, legal operations has moved from a fringe idea, to a back-burner initiative, to a strategic mandate for most companies.

So just what are we doing? Why are we here? When my fellow board members and I recently stepped back to ask ourselves this, the answer was simple: we are a global community focused on redefining the business of law.

We are taking one of the oldest, most tradition-bound industries, into the future. We are all different, carrying our own perspectives and needs, but all connected by the power of one bedrock principle: There must be a better way.

I am talking about changing systems and processes of an entire industry. And that can sound dry and academic to some, but those systems and processes are driven by people. So what we are really talking about is actually vital and deeply human. This is about reinventing one of the oldest industries in profound ways that affect many, many people.

This is a huge task, and one that will only be possible with the contributions of every part of the ecosystem. It will take a long time, and it will only happen with the help of many entities pulling together, but it is already underway.

A new direction

Getting clear on our vision and on what really matters has helped us think about where to take CLOC. Before it is anything else, CLOC is a community, a movement of like-minded people. As that community grew larger, more diverse, and more international, we realized that we needed to evolve.

We were at a crossroads. We had come a long way, but still had a long way still to go. To launch into our next stage, we realized, would require investing in our organization. There were so many things we wanted to do that demanded more resources and infrastructure. We realized that we needed to build a professional team equal to the energy and passion of our community.

That is why I was so excited to bring in our new Executive Director, Betsi Roach. In just a few months under her leadership, and with the support of the strong team she is putting in place, CLOC has already added scale and capabilities. We are working to improve the way we serve and reach members in deep ways. I am so excited for the future.

In some ways, the pandemic has forced us to accelerate our evolution in positive ways. As an organization founded in the U.S., we have long worked to extend our value and reach internationally. Canceling our in-person events has meant that we had to develop new ways to reach and serve global audiences. I am counting down the days until our Global Institute, a fully virtual conference scheduled for November 10th (Pacific Time). This is going to be a great opportunity for the community to come together in a new way. We are hard at work on the content and the curriculum, taking the results of the feedback we received from over 400 of you. I think people will really enjoy it.

We can do better

There is a phrase that I have been hearing a lot lately: “It’s time to get back to normal.” I understand why people say that, and the desire for a return to the familiar and comfortable. When it comes to the legal industry, however, I could not disagree more strongly. The very LAST thing we need is to go back to “normal.”

We can, and must, do so much better. I look around our industry and, for all the progress we have made, I see so many places we can improve. I see huge opportunities to make our industry more effective, efficient, and equitable. From the way we make decisions, to how we identify and hire talent, to how we create value chains, we are barely scratching the surface.

Our organization has always been a catalyst accelerating change, but current events have added fuel to the fire. After many years pushing a stubborn, static industry to transform, we have a historic opportunity to create real change. The COVID shutdown, the economic shock, and the rise of racial and social justice movements are all putting pressure on the legal industry to transform.

We have the chance to help shape that new direction for the betterment of all. We have the chance to create the future rather than react to it. Let’s seize that chance together.

Facilitate Change, But Do No Harm

May 2020 |
Lorna Synan, Strategic Sourcing Manager – Legal Ideation and Transformation, Liberty Mutual Insurance
Robert Taylor, VP and Senior Corporate Counsel – Legal Ideation and Transformation, Liberty Mutual Insurance

Change is hard. Encouraging innovation and implementing change in an established and successful organization is even harder. Changing the legal service delivery model and implementing meaningful legal innovation, seemingly impossible. But it can be done. By leveraging techniques based in neuroscience, you can help people overcome emotional resistance that can be brought about by budget constraints, business imperatives, and pressures of the external marketplace. All these daily pressures and human nature itself can compete with their innate understanding and recognition of the need to innovate. Neuroscience studies the way the human brain works and how we respond to certain stimuli. It helps us understand what influences the way people make basic decisions. Learning more about motivators and stressors can help you shape how your employees or stakeholders respond to change. Which is why more and more organizations are hiring industrial psychologists and/or neuroscientists to help them better understand employees’ mindsets to unlock greater performance.

At Liberty Mutual Insurance, we began our innovation journey by asking a few questions: How do you innovate within a Legal department in an already conservative organization that is designed to measure risk? How do you overcome the psychological barriers of both individuals and groups in order to effectuate meaningful change? We sought our answers from a wide range of experts and share below neuroscience-based techniques (classification, safety, and support) from sources that helped us successfully navigate implementing legal innovation that aligned with our strategy.

Author’s note: We share a lot of content in our organization, none better than ‘Steal like an Artist’ by Austin Kleon who points out that there are very few original ideas. We will do our best to credit the ideas below where we can and impart universal concepts fairly, but we do not claim to be wicked smart professors who have all the answers and are lecturing from the front of a tiered classroom.

Classification: Innovators and Protectors

You will broadly find two equally important groups within your own work environment, typically classified as innovators and protectors. Through classification, you can better understand how to approach and harness the capabilities of both groups and facilitate change. The innovators will create, foster and thrive on new and ambitious ideas while the protectors will defend the status quo and prevent loss.

Honor the ideas of the innovators by clearly defining goals and objectives that can quantify the impact of their contributions. Harness the innovator’s energy to support your department’s vision but be aware of attempts to hijack your strategic plan for their own agenda, as this could derail progress. Engage the innovators and align their energy with the larger strategy your leadership has set for your organization. If you don’t, the people who you thought might be your biggest allies could turn into your biggest headache. In the end, assume positive intent with your innovators and let them have a voice within a structure.

Listen carefully to the concerns of the protectors by recognizing the pressures of cost containment, technology limitations, and the need for meaningful use cases. You must also make the protectors aware of the dangers of not moving forward at all, potentially resulting in a loss in market share or competitive advantage. It is critical to understand why a protector’s “fence” may have been put up in the first place. This is stressed in a principle called Chesterton’s Fence. In Chesterton’s 1929 book, The Thing, he describes the case of reformers (innovators) who notice something, such as a fence, and fail to see the reason for its existence. Before they decide to remove it, they must figure out why it exists in the first place. If they do not do this, they are likely to do more harm than good with its removal. It is a straightforward principle, but one that is often not considered by a team of eager innovators.Many of the problems we face in a legal system or highly regulated business occur when we intervene without an understanding of what the consequences might be. If a fence exists, there is likely a reason for it. In a nod to the world class design experts at IDEO, we use a Venn diagram to analyze new ideas within existing “fences.” It forces both innovators and protectors to focus on the ideas that will work and uncover what will have the greatest impact and chance at success. When looking at a new idea, examine the feasibility (technical and regulatory), desirability (will they use it) and viability (financial resources) of the project. You will find that innovators thrive on desirable projects, whereas protectors often bring up technical and financial constraints. In order to execute on innovative projects, you will need to meet all three requirements.

Creating Safety: Threat vs. Safety

When you encounter something new, your brain is alerted, neurons are activated, and hormones are released as you try and figure out what the new thing is. If you think the new item is dangerous (maybe because it changes the way you work), then your reaction may be a threat response with a fight or flight trigger. In order to minimize a threat response in your stakeholder’s reaction to a new idea or initiative, you need to create a culture of psychological safety and trust. There are various models that help facilitate trust in the workplace, including David Rock’s SCARF model. The SCARF model emphasizes the importance of recognizing a job well done, independence and autonomy, building strong team relationships, fairness and transparency to achieve a sense of reward.

Creating this environment encourages everyone to take calculated risks and share in the process of innovation. For example, introducing a new technology vendor, even one that you feel will be beneficial for your stakeholders, may threaten their autonomy or create ambiguity for them without establishing trust. By implementing “Vendor Days” (in which one or more vendors can explain their services in a casual setting) in our department, we share new legal service models and technology with senior managers, influencers, and individual contributors in a format that allows for self-discovery. Providing an open forum for learning about a potential vendor allows stakeholders to relate to the opportunity on their own terms and feels far more collaborative. The vendor can focus on presenting information and capabilities, and answering questions, rather than attempting to be purely persuasive. Making a connection between the benefits of the new technology and the stakeholder’s own work product is powerful and often results in a request to partner in the implementation (pull) rather than requiring pursuit of an implementation (push) because a threat response may have been created. This dynamic eliminates the idea that only one team or one person has innovative ideas to push on the department and instead establishes that ideas can be pulled from all areas and levels far more successfully and in a way that allows for meaningful adoption and effective deployment of new technology.

Support: Alone and Together

Collaboration between innovators and protectors and creating a culture of psychological safety depends upon people working together. But for people to work together successfully, you need to nurture the individual. If you have been exposed to a psychology class, you are likely aware of the popular theory of Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” from his book Theory of Human Motivation. Maslow’s Hierarchy (see insert) is a tiered system of needs beginning with basic survival then ascending through freedom from fear, social belonging, and self-esteem towards the end goal of self-actualization.

When considered relative to the workplace, motivation often increases as needs at each ascending level are met. In a professional work environment, we can concentrate primarily on self-esteem and self-actualization through respect and personal growth. This is where accomplished professionals thrive. At the apex of the triangle, individuals find themselves motivated to come up with new ideas to help others, the department, and the team.

Innovation may start with a single individual, but it is a team sport. All too often when someone tries to facilitate change on their own before they achieve buy-in from others, they fail. It is not necessarily that the individual is wrong to try, it just might be that their idea or the concept that they are trying to implement needs to mature. If the idea is too fragile and not enough people have gotten behind it, the idea will likely get destroyed by others. In order to grow these ideas into fruitful use cases, you must leverage diversity of thought and bring in different perspectives to analyze and strengthen the idea. One way we look to create a culture of diverse thought is through our “Design Challenges.” These day-long sessions promote human centered design and focuses on users, their issues, daily activities and goals through an empathetic lens. Many ideas presented at these events start with an individual thought but are made better through the collective experience. While these sessions occasionally lead to new creative solutions that are incorporated into department strategies, the participants are always left feeling more collaborative and motivated.

We have shared just a few of the ways we have found success implementing innovative change within a legal environment. We absolutely fell and skinned our knees along our journey, as you will. But with each fall there was a lesson and new perspective on how to move forward. There are a multitude of ways to improve the psychological safety of your employees, humble inquiry being among the best and least threatening way to get people to come to understand a problem from a new perspective. People tend to thrive when you seek to understand them and the first step before modifying any aspect of a system is to understand it. Don’t remove that “fence” before you know why it was there in the first place. Only then can you credibly propose your change. In the next 90 days, we challenge you to adopt one of these techniques and observe the results. If you do, we guarantee you will be pleased.

Five Tips for Transitioning from a Great Lawyer to a Successful Project Manager

May 2020| Rachita Maker, Vice President, Chief of Staff and Head of Legal Operations, Tata Communications Limited

Do any lawyers remember going to law school and hearing the words “project management”? I certainly did not, and I suspect most of my colleagues didn’t either. It is a different world now with a number of institutes focusing on Legal Project Management and I see there are multiple courses available on the topic. Legal Project Management or LPM is an identified functional area in The CLOC Core 12 for Legal Operations, therefore, identified as a key skill for the legal operation professional.

I chanced upon project management purely by accident in my fifth year as a lawyer. Overnight, I was handed a high-volume complex contract management project with a tight deadline. In an instant, I was made responsible for a team of twenty bright, young lawyers who were relying on me to give them guidance; a demanding client who had expectations beyond the project scope; a deliverable that I had no idea on how to execute; and a management team that wanted me to make the whole thing work. No pressure? To tell the truth, I loved the challenge and still do today.

So, for all the lawyers or legal operations professions who get thrown into large engagements or complex implementation projects, with no one to tell them how it is done – I am sharing a few of the strategies I have forged over many years of managing projects successfully in the legal services industry.

Overview of Legal Project Management

My experience has taught me to view project management as having four pillars – client management, delivery management, team and stakeholder management, and financial management.

Projects within the legal industry could include large scale contract lifecycle management implementations including data migration from old systems to new, obligations management, M&A due diligence, contract drafting and negotiations engagements, and 50-state regulatory research to name a few. Typical challenges in legal projects relate to: scope; balancing the right number resources while ensuring subject matter expertise; maintaining quality; anticipating and mitigating risks; anticipating changes in projects due to unforeseen circumstances like regulatory changes, changes in production timeline or changes in client requirements and unresponsive clients.

Below is my advice for transitioning from a great lawyer to a successful project manager that no one spoke about in law school:

1. Understand the “pulse” of your client
Understanding the “pulse” of your client – in other words, learning what they value most in the delivery of a project and why – is the key to any successful client-provider relationship. No matter what happens, you should be the go-to person for your client. Set up a communication schedule that matches your client’s needs and try to anticipate what they might need next.

I start any large project by identifying what is most critical to my client. Sometimes it is quality; other times it is timeline; and all too often it is cost. While most clients will say that ALL of those factors are equally important, there is usually one aspect that stands out as the priority.

For example, in a 50-state regulatory research project where timing is of the essence for your client, spending too much time ensuring you have researched every angle and missing the expected deadline will likely leave you with an unhappy client. In this example, setting realistic expectations up front on how the research might be restricted to meet the timeline would likely have led to the client suggesting more specific instructions to provide better focus for the research. As you build trust through a series of meetings and in meeting mutually agreed-upon expectations, the client will start to see you as an extension of their team.

The best way to set and adjust expectations is to create a regular cadence of communications that matches your client’s style. As lawyers, we tend to get so involved in our work that we wait to go to the client with our final “masterpiece”. There is nothing worse for a client than not knowing how their project is progressing. I recommend having at least a once a week check-in call, email or meeting. Depending on the timeline and scale of the project, you may want to have more frequent, shorter, or more casual conversations to establish rapport with your client. These meetings are also a great way to learn about the client and anticipate their upcoming needs.

2. Manage “scope creep”
For your clients and for your organization, success is most often measured in financial terms. As project managers, you manage the budget by avoiding “scope creep” – in other words, ensuring that the requirements of a project have not unnecessarily expanded, making the project more expensive than anticipated. Scope changes are easier to identify if a client makes explicit changes to the deliverables or timing of the project; but in practice, small accretive changes are made in smaller bits and become difficult to quantify – in other words, they creep up until the project is ultimate off-budget.

Managing scope begins even before a project starts. As more clients now want fixed pricing or alternate pricing models for projects, the days of hourly billing have almost disappeared. Clients routinely ask for a quote without giving, or sometimes not knowing, any details around the project. Imagine a template harmonization project for a large multinational company – at a minimum, it would help to know how many templates, across how many geographies, the number of business units with overlapping templates, etc. Even if you are able to get some of this information in advance, chances are that you will get answers in approximates, but the client will demand certainty on pricing. It is important to define the project scope to the best of your ability and build in strong assumptions to protect your client and your organization.

Even with the best planning, scope creep can continue through the life of the project and often happens in short bursts. Since we are anxious to maintain good client relationships and we want to earn their business, we tend to overlook the scope creep issues, often leading to unanticipated bills to the client or unsustainably low margins for your organization. I recommend logging all requested changes, no matter how small they seem at the time, and their potential impact on the project. Assess these impacts with your clients and organization at regular intervals in order to anticipate any potential changes in cost or timing. Your clients will appreciate the open communication. The alternative, which is not mentioning scope changes until it is too late, can chip away at trust with your client and your organization.

3. Measure and meet your client’s quality and timeline expectations
As lawyers, we are trained to provide high-quality work product. After all, our work product is the showcase of our talent. While it is easy to control our own deliverables and quality, it can be difficult to be responsible for what someone else is producing. The truth is that as project managers, we are responsible for the overall quality of the project. For example, whether you are overseeing 5 people working on an M&A transaction or 30 people working on a document review, you will need to ensure that quality and the timeline are met by the entire team working together.

The first step to providing quality work is to define and measure what quality means to the client. Work with your client to define quality metrics and then track them. As a project manager one should be able, at any point in time, to confidently talk about the “quality percentage” of their engagements. Tracking quality through pre-defined metrics also helps project managers identify if issues are related to a particular person or if those issues are general across the team.

While high-quality work is expected, most legal projects are deadline-driven, whether it is a deadline related to production, regulatory demands or a transaction. As lawyers, we are used to burning the midnight oil to meet our deadlines and produce the best output we can. The challenge is to help your project team stay motivated to work the extra hours when large deadlines are looming. In order to minimize all-nighters or unsustainable work hours, as well as to avoid any curveballs that may come up in a project, I usually try to build a buffer in project timelines. For example, if I have a 4-week project that needs about ten people, I will staff it with twelve people instead and set an internal timeline of 3 weeks so that I can conduct last minute checks, conduct quality review and make changes that may have come up during the life of the project.

4. Build and maintain reports that your clients and management will value
Maintaining daily, weekly and monthly reports on your engagements will benefit both your clients and your organization. As a project manager you are expected to have a real-time understanding of project metrics – whether they relate to number of documents, hours worked on the project, throughput per hour, quality measures and any other information that can be sliced and diced.

I recommend updating clients and other stakeholders with progress reports. It helps to understand your client and stakeholder communication styles and timing, and to set expectations upfront. Weekly, or sometimes daily, reports may be needed. I was once working on a project that I knew was VERY important to my CEO, and I wanted to make sure he wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night and worry about where we were on the project. I proactively set up daily reports, and it worked wonderfully to keep my CEO updated and comfortable with the project.

There are a number of tools and technologies that can help you track the progress and performance of your project. Using automated workflow tools, you can generate delivery dashboards, quality metrics, monthly information reports, etc. These tools help you collect analytics on each activity of your project. For longer-term engagements, I have also seen the Balanced Score Card approach work beautifully with clients, as they can see a holistic view of the team’s performance based on operational and delivery excellence, client satisfaction and additional value by way of innovation. As lawyers, we are not always proficient with tools and technology in the market place, but as good project managers we need to identify the best-suited person in our team who can support us in generating and maintaining reports.

5. Invest in your team’s growth
A colleague of mine once said, “After a certain point in your career, it isn’t what your boss thinks of you, but what your team thinks of you,” and I totally agreed with her. Your team is a testament of you. A great project manager knows how to get buy-in from the team, give them the right training and resources, challenge them and use their strengths to the fullest. I try to build my project teams with complementary personality types to provide balance. No one person can do everything and most project managers think that the burden of performance is on them. The truth is that we should use our team’s strength to the fullest – this not only helps them to enhance their skills and helps them feel vested, but also takes some of the burden off our shoulders.

Remember that no matter how much you plan, there are things that may be out of your control. Great project managers focus on what is in their control, escalate what is not, identify risks early on and mitigate them to the best of their ability. As lawyers and professionals, we juggle multiple projects every day, and effective project management will help us stay organized.

Leading a high performing Intergenerational-Generational Legal Operations Workforce

With excerpts from “The Ten Questions to Ask Yourself to Influence Your Future”, as Presented by Dr. Zachary Walker, Educator, Author, and International Speaker, University College London Institute of Education at the CLOC 2020 London Institute.  He can be contacted on LinkedIn or through his website at www.drzacharywalker.com.

One of the most complicated tasks facing companies today is the challenge of aligning the cultures and expectations of multiple generations in their organization. Legal departments are not immune to these challenges. Like others, legal is often composed of multiple generational influences from Boomers to Gen Xers to Millennials. Gen Z is just starting to enter the workforce which brings in yet another shift in workplace dynamics. Today’s leaders need to manage the differences and similarities between four to six generations while integrating them into a cohesive, functional, high-performing team.

Each person comes with a different set of expectations and definitions of loyalty, ethics, and skills. Leaders need to shift to make the most of these energies and skill sets that bring incredible potential to both the department and company. The generation into which one is born is an important determinant of these personal characteristics. Of course, each individual is different – however, generational trends tend to shape ideas on “big picture” issues such as the value of teamwork, workplace expectations, and the relationship between the individual and society, and each generation tends to share similar experiences as a result of growing up at the same time.

A 2014 Harvard Business Review article exclaimed that “for the first time in history, five generations will soon be working side by side.” It continued:

“The Boomer mystified by Facebook; the Millennial who wear flip-flops in the office; the Traditionalist (born prior to 1946) who seemingly won’t ever retire; the cynical Gen Xer who’s only out for himself; and the Gen 2020er [known as Gen Z today] – born after 1997- who appears surgically attached to her smartphone.”

If you’ve attended a seminar or conference on this topic, you may have learned that these stereotypes are not valid and that all generations can and do share common values and goals.  Still, generational tensions exist within our multi-generational workforces and it’s our job to help our employees recognize and respect the skill sets that each generation brings to the table.

The U.S. Government projects the number of workers over the age of 75 will double in the next decade. In many cases, workers continue to work longer because they can’t afford to retire when they reach retirement age. And many workers in the legal profession choose to work longer because they enjoy their work and value their relationships with their coworkers. 

Generation Z, our youngest generation of workers, is just entering the workforce. By 2026, that group will surpass the number of Millennials (who are now the largest) in the workforce. These two generations will define the future of work.  Whether a 35-year-old manager managing a Boomer workforce and Gen X workforce or a 65- year-old manager managing a Gen Y and Millennial workforce, or somewhere in between, it is incumbent upon leaders and managers to know who they lead. To be successful, we will have to understand what each generation wants out of their jobs and how they envision work.

Companies that shift to strike a multi-generation allegiance will have an efficiency advantage over others that don’t. A multi-generational team offers a diverse way of looking at a project or problem. Leading them can be both a challenge and an opportunity. Understanding who they are is key.

Leading an Inter-Generational Workforce

In January 2020, the CLOC London Institute ended its educational conference with a session led by Dr. Zachary Walker from the University College London. Dr. Walker’s session was one of the highest rated sessions during the Institute. His current work focuses on Generation Z, educational neuroscience and high performance leadership.

During his session, Dr. Walker explained a few of the traits of generational groups that are, or will be, employed by your organization in the future and challenged everyone to be willing to adapt their leadership style accordingly. 

Generation Z: (Born 1996 – 2015)

According to Statista, Gen Z represents 24% of the workforce worldwide. Gen Z grew up in households that were significantly affected by 911 and the 2008 recession. As a result, financial security and stability are vital to them.

Gen Z’ers are entrepreneurial and ambitious. Surveys show that about half of them want to work for themselves – because they believe they can do “it” better – while half also want to do something that will change the world. They are competitive and financially driven. They have expectations of advancing in their roles quickly and being rewarded financially. This group is prone to burn-out, so they will need your assistance to achieve work-life “harmony.”

Gen Z values authenticity and meaningful interactions. Although they are digitally astute, they prefer to communicate face-to-face and work collaboratively. Gen Z craves feedback in real-time. Waiting until their annual evaluation to provide negative feedback will likely offend them. They want mentorship and constant feedback. They appreciate it and value it.

They value inclusion, social justice, diversity, and fairness. Dr. Walker noted organizations that simply aspire to these values would not impress a Gen Z candidate. They are influenced by “Doers.”  Congruence between what organizations say and what they do is absolutely critical to Gen Z.

Millennials or Gen Y: Born 1977 – 1995  

By this year, 2020, Millennials are forecast to comprise half of the American workforce, and by 2025, 75 percent of the global workforce. 

Millennials do not want the life of their parents, who valued work over relationships. They value work-life balance suited to allow them to enjoy their lives outside of work. Work satisfaction and financial stability are essential to Millennials; however, they aspire to strike a healthy balance between work and relationships outside of work.

This generation seeks a first-name basis relationship with their employers. They treat their employers respectfully, but they expect their employer to earn their respect. They enjoy a relaxed work environment where colleagues at various levels of leadership and responsibility can easily talk, joke, and laugh with each other while maintaining the appropriate hierarchical management structure.

Millennials value honesty, are eager to learn, appreciate personal connections, efficiency, and a sense of community.  

Generation X: Born 1965-1976   

According to Statista, Gen X represents 35% of the workforce worldwide.

The income gap between Gen X and Millennials grows wider each year.  Generation X makes more money and spends more money – 11% more than Boomers and 33% more than Millennials. They spend more because they are raising a family and caring for aging parents. The dual responsibility of caring for parents and children puts a high demand on their resources. 

Gen X values freedom and responsibility in the workplace. They are more likely to question authority than their parents and prefer flexibility in work arrangements. They don’t want to be micromanaged.  

Baby Boomers: Born 1946 – 1964 

Baby Boomers represent 6% of the workforce worldwide.

Baby boomers are hard-working – some would say workaholics – and motivated by position, prestige, perks, and money. They are independent, confident, and define themselves by their professional accomplishments. Their parents grew up during the Great Depression, and Boomers grew up under the threat of global nuclear war. They were exposed to protective drills in school in the event of a nuclear attack, lived in households stocked with food and supplies, and knew where they would shelter in the event of a nuclear attack.

A “good worker” was defined as having a strong work ethic and the willingness to “do whatever it takes to get the job done.”

Baby Boomers are often critical of younger generations for what they perceive as a lack of work ethic and commitment. 

What does the future of work look like across multiple generations?

The influence of Gen Z and Gen Y is already changing what work looks like. The future of work will value health and wellness, offer flexible workspaces and work locations, emphasize continuous professional development, use technology to create efficiencies, and enable a mobile workforce. According to Dr. Walker, the future of work will include workplace neurodiversity and the use of collective intelligence to solve problems.  

“Neurodiversity is a concept where neurological differences are to be recognized and respected as any other human variation. These differences can include those labeled with Dyspraxia, Dyslexia, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Dyscalculia, Autistic Spectrum, Tourette Syndrome, and others.”

Research suggests that neurodiverse individuals receive, process, and interpret information differently and often solve problems in unconventional ways. These employees are loyal, highly dependable, and adept at fitting into different work cultures.

Collective intelligence (CI) is shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration, joint efforts, and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making. Dr. Walker explained it this way:

“[A] group-based approach to harnessing the collective intelligence of people who work together, matching different skills and knowledge sets of internal experts to address future project needs.”

Collaboration is how younger generations prefer to work. As leaders, we are responsible for “upskilling” our employees so that we can build an environment that supports collective thinking to solve problems.

What now? 

Multiple generational organizations are the future and understanding the behaviors and drivers for each generation is critical for success. There are new ways of working every day. Collaboration and communication continue to be two of the most important components in bringing the generations together, especially as the world embraces a work from home mentality. 

Every generation is expressing a need for more flexibility, the opportunity to shift hours—to start their workdays later, or earlier, for example, or put in time at night, if necessary. Work-life balance drives satisfaction for all generations. The similarities in attitudes across generations are striking when it comes to benefits that drive satisfaction.

Multi-generation organizations are here to stay. The key is to foster the intergenerational culture by respecting the varied differences each generation contributes. It also means working as a proactive leader to eliminate strife, find the similarities and strengths and establish clear communication paths to ensure loyalty and success.

Evolution of CLOC Core Competencies: Observations from a Maturing Market

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.