Introduction

If you work in Sales or Legal, chances are the end-of-quarter crunch is a scenario you likely know entirely too well. It’s a mad dash to the finish line — closing deals, meeting quotas and driving revenue.

Unfortunately, the quarter-close hustle can put unnecessary strain on the relationship between Legal and Sales. Deal and contract status and rapid-fire communication can result in a lack of clarity, constant status updates and frustration. At best, the scenario is a chaotic sprint but the deals get done. At worst, Sales and Legal work in silos with little transparency, viewing each other as roadblocks instead of partners in shared success.

The good news is that a productive sales quarter-end doesn’t have to be this way. At Ironclad, I’ve worked hands-on with Damon Mino, our Vice President of Sales, to align our teams around shared processes, organization and technology.

And that’s why Damon, who spent years as an in-house attorney before transitioning to Sales, and I wanted to create this guide. Over the course of this playbook, you’ll get a glimpse of the common pitfalls in the relationship between Sales and Legal, how to address them and proven best practices you can use to set your company for success.

Aligning Resources

Every General Counsel knows that today’s legal teams are being tasked to do more with less. At the same time, sales organizations are being pushed to move faster and faster. Inevitably, something’s gotta give, right? Not necessarily.

At Ironclad, our situation is a little unique. Damon is a former lawyer who transitioned over to Sales. Given his background in law, he has an insider’s perspective into both sides of the Sales/Legal equation. He’s felt firsthand the intense stress as Sales tries to track contract redlines at the tail-end of the quarter.

And there’s one thing we’ve learned from each other. Neither one of us ever wants to ask, “Who knows if this deal is ever going to get done?”

Damon and I quickly realized that it’s a lot easier to keep things moving in the right direction — and in sync — if we discuss our available resources and how to best optimize them. Fundamentally, this starts with planning.

Here’s how we approach aligning Sales and Legal:

• Understand the risks of siloing Sales and Legal. Having these teams operating independently from each other is a recipe for chaos and, inevitably, disaster. Inefficient use of legal resources slows the sales process, contributes to frustration and increases outside counsel costs. Legal inevitably becomes a bottleneck and sales reps find workarounds to get their deals done. And who could blame them?To help avoid congestion and frustration, Ironclad’s legal team participates in Sales’ quarterly business reviews. Doing so provides both teams the opportunity to discuss pending or developing deals and prioritize Legal’s time.
• Plan to anticipate volume. High contract volume is a surefire cause of legal bottlenecks. Our Sales and Legal teams keep open lines of communication and understand the expected pipeline goals, which allows Legal to ramp up and support Sales. Such support can include shifting priorities or standardizing contract terms.
• Optimize together. Quarterly reviews aren’t just beneficial for sales teams. Together, Damon and I review the previous quarter’s data and adjust discount ceilings accordingly or review friction points to decrease deal cycles. These adjustments impact both teams, and should be approached as a point of discussion and a chance to identify and implement efficiencies.

Getting Granular With Data

Beyond fostering a culture of collaboration and open communication, there’s one thing that empowers our sales and legal teams to drive revenue even in a crunch — data. Thanks to Ironclad’s digital contracting platform, Damon and I have clear, realtime insights into where deals stand in the approval process. Supplemented by data from a CRM, we can further anticipate deals that are likely to close and how to best facilitate them, reducing the stress of tight turnarounds.

For us, working within Ironclad gives us the technical structure to:

• Leverage data. The most fruitful and meaningful conversations between Sales and Legal should start well before a quarter crunch — and they should rely on data to advise leadership. We base conversations on available data, from Salesforce or a digital contract contracting platform, so both teams can optimize for efficiency. For example, our legal team can demonstrate how much faster deals close when processed on our company’s own paper versus third-party paper.
• Aim for accountability. Strong executive relationships are also founded on empathy. Damon and I often speak candidly with each other about challenges, expectations, processes and protocols for our teams. This way, we are aligned and able to hold our direct reports accountable.Manual contracting processes require deep dives into details, writing time-consuming emails, repeating and summarizing all the relevant points, all of which soaks up valuable time. With a digital contracting platform, all necessary context is instantly available. The latest redlines, key terms and language are all there in easy-to-review audit trails, from the beginning of the deal. p
• Get all hands on deck. One of the essential responsibilities of an executive is rallying those around you. At Ironclad, we focus on encouraging our team members to contribute to planning sessions and we work to remove roadblocks on business or product decisions to better facilitate participation.The more Legal can partner and collaborate with Sales, the more empathy you build. When Sales and Legal trust each other, they’re not going to avoid each other. Instead, you can address issues together as you both help the company avoid undue risk.

Striking the Balance Between Speed and Compliance

Every business wants to move as quickly as possible — especially when it comes to sales. On the other hand, every legal team knows that speed increases risk and opportunity for error. So how do you balance the two?

At Ironclad we’ve found that establishing a mix of organizational best practices and implementing key technology can help facilitate ideal outcomes. Our tactics include:

• Review and prioritize. We take a close look at tiers of terms and conditions, bucketing them into categories of “deal killer,” “important,” “preferred” and “nice-to-have.” This, along with the context of deal size, timing in the quarter and other factors, helps us get on the same page regarding deals.
• Invest in technology. Ironclad’s digital contracting platform helps ensure our alignment, transparency and compliance. Ironclad gives us instant access to the contract data that drives deals. The trends and analyses based on this data, in turn, drive powerful partnerships with Sales and keep things ticking year-round. Even better, Ironclad enables self-service sales contracting — e.g., developing a sales contract from a CRM — to help get deals done quickly within guardrails set by the legal team.

Conclusion

Legal is evolving faster than ever before. We have new tools at our disposal and the opportunity to demonstrate value across our businesses. But the first step in doing so is to strategically align with other core business functions — especially Sales. Ironclad isn’t immune to the challenges surrounding Sales and Legal partnership. By working together, focusing on training and operating with a mind for continual improvement, Damon and I have helped build a culture that doesn’t just mitigate the end-of-quarter crunches, but supports collaborative, meaningful teamwork across Sales and Legal year round.

It’s our hope that this guide can shed some light on the intricacies of building collaborative Sales and Legal teams. Every organization has different goals, but by following this core framework, you can make significant strides toward fostering collaborative teams that share in each other’s successes and are fully vested in driving revenue.

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

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

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

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

Business Continuity Plan Development at Google

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

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

Project Goal

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

Project Objectives: Prioritize Legal Business Processes

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

Project Approach:

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

UNDERSTAND THE PROCESS

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

Things to consider in each process:

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

CONDUCT A BUSINESS IMPACT ANALYSIS (BIA)

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

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

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

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

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

NEXT STEPS: PLAN FOR RECOVERY

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

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

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

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

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

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

KEY TAKEAWAYS AND LEARNINGS

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

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

When you do an online search for, “what does an in-house legal department look like,” office images show people sitting around a table with laptops, papers, notebooks, pens, etc. None of it looks very technology- or data-driven.

But to anyone who thinks legal departments can’t be data-driven powerhouses, I have one word for you: Moneyball. That’s right, this baseball story is the perfect example of how you can use data-driven decisions—even in the most unconventional places—to drive success.

If you’re a sports fan or like inspiring stories, then you probably already know the story behind Moneyball the book, and later, the movie starring Brad Pitt. Just in case, here’s a quick recap:

When the Oakland A’s General Manager, Billy Beane is challenged with budget constraints, he decides to use deeper, data-driven strategies to recruit undervalued baseball players. Instead of relying on batting average, height, and weight normally associated with certain positions, Beane looked at in-game activity, such as how many times a player made it to base and scored a run. In the end, his data-driven team-building strategy led the Oakland A’s to win a record 20 consecutive games.

So what does all this have to do with legal departments? Billy Beane used data-driven decisions to build a winning team. Turns out, so can legal departments, using data from their vendor management solutions to build a winning team of outside counsel and law firms. In fact, baseball and vendor management overlap in several areas.

Managing Your Vendor Team

Every baseball team has a manager who oversees and is responsible for game strategy, lineup, practice, instruction, and more. Vendor management allows you to be the “team manager” of your vendor lineup with a holistic view and metrics into vendor costs, matter type distribution, efficiency, diversity, timekeeper performance, and more. These detailed metrics help you evaluate, comment, rate, and score firms, giving you the data you need to better manage and evaluate the value you receive from vendors.

Picking the Right Vendor

On a baseball team, all players have their designated position to play—a place on the field where they have proven to excel. With vendor management, you have a structured, data-driven process that shows which vendors excel at which type of legal work. With easy-to-use scorecards, you can quickly identify top, average, and low performers, making it easier to choose your key players.

Working as a Team with Your Vendors

To be successful in baseball, or any sport, the team has to work together as a cohesive unit—collaboration is essential. Vendor management makes it easier to collaborate with outside counsel and firms on matters, invoices, documents, fees, and even early payment terms. As result, you build a team roster of trusted relationships that are productive and rewarding.

From baseball to vendor management, data offers a tangible way to manage, monitor, and measure performance. For a law department, it’s important to build a winning team of vendors that it can count on to deliver results. And today, we have the technology to help in-house legal departments score unlimited homeruns using reliable data from vendor management solutions.

Some small tweaks to your RFP process can make a big difference in your results. Ideally, you want a process that both the buy and sell side find productive and efficient. That’s not always the case in many RFPs we are seeing today. Here are five questions to consider before you hit send that will help you have a better experience.

1. Did we provide the law firm enough time?
   If you are managing a large preferred panel RFP for 10+ practice groups, you should be providing the law firms a minimum of 3 weeks, and 5+ will get you the best responses. Giving a law firm only two weeks to complete a large panel RFP means you will get lower quality, rushed responses thrown together with no cohesion. If you want to ask questions that require partner time to respond to, you need to provide them time to manage their current client workload. If you are issuing a RFP for a specific matter, that’s a different timetable altogether. We typically see anything from 24 hrs to a week or more for matter specific RFPs. A good rule of thumb for the large preferred panel RFPs would be, whatever time you think it will take to add at least another week of cushion to your project schedule.
2. Did we provide ourselves enough time to manage the Q&A process? (Panel RFPs only)
   Some legal departments underestimate the volume of questions they will get back from law firms during the Q&A process when managing an RFP with dozens of firms. Some will be complex questions that will need input from the general counsel or others in the business team and you may have only provided yourself 48 hours in the RFP schedule. Once you commit to answering one, you have to answer all of them. What then happens is law firms often can’t start the response until you have provided answers ultimately leading to an extension needing to be granted.
3. Did we provide enough information?
   If you want a law firm to be able to provide a thoughtful response on a fee proposal, outside counsel guidelines or their recommended legal strategy, you need to provide them with enough background information. The biggest complaint you will hear from law firms is how can we answer question X, if they didn’t tell us Y. That goes for not only pricing but also for practice coverage and overall scope of work. For example, If you are asking for a firm to bid on your IP work, and they have never done work for you in that area before you will need to open the curtain a bit if you want responses of any merit. Otherwise you will get marketing fluff that all will sound very similar.
4. Did we create a path of communication with the marketing contact?
   At some point of your RFP process you should be collecting the name of the marketing or responder contact. Having another contact beyond the lawyer will eliminate potential bottlenecks and allow for a much better flow of information between the issuer and responders during and after the RFP process. This connection beyond the relationship lawyer allows for that process to happen more effectively. The marketing team will be the most effective way for you to collect relevant information from the law firm – they know who to contact and what the firm does and doesn’t have available. Sometimes a 30 second phone call with the marketing contact clarifies a question that otherwise would have led to 12 pages of unnecessary information.
5. Did we ensure the responses won’t be overwhelming?
   A well-crafted RFP needs to find the balance of how to collect the right level of data to help you make a decision, but not so much that the RFP review and scoring process becomes overwhelming. It’s a great idea to use word counts and page limits – but you also need to be realistic. If you are asking a law firm to describe why they may be a better choice then their peer firms – it’s next to impossible to do that in fewer than 250 characters. If you have dozens of practice groups being included in the RFP, consider the fact there are many firms who will respond in all areas. You want to consider different strategies to find that middle ground of collecting content that helps you set the table for the decision making process while not being overwhelmed with 100 page responses.

Both law firms and legal operations departments will have better experiences and get better results when the RFP provides ample time, asks smart questions and allows law firms a platform to highlight their competitive advantages.

Matthew Prinn is a Principal with RFP Advisory Group, a consulting company that specializes in RFPs for the legal industry. For more tips on the RFP process, check out RFP Advisory Group’s recent webinar we hosted with the Association for Corporate Counsel: How to use an RFP as a tool to manage outside counsel.

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.

Today’s world is one of intertwining systems, in which many challenges are fluid, multifaceted, and undeniably human. Organizations, inside and outside of the legal sector, must come to grips with – and even embrace – disruptive forces like technology. They must ask themselves how they will evolve in response to such rapid, technological change – and how they will support team members and transform large systems simultaneously.

For many, the problem-solving methodology – known as design thinking – is an effective way to answer these and other big questions. In fact, it is slowly becoming an important part of today’s complex, interconnected world. Design thinking is vital to the development and refinement of skills – those allowing us to better understand and respond to organizational and societal changes. It helps designers, especially, carry out research and brainstorm ideas before creating prototypes and testing out viable solutions.

Design thinking is more than just a process, though. It combines the possibilities of technology, the needs of people, and the requirements for overall business success. Thinking more like a designer can help transform organizations’ products, services, and entire business strategy. That’s because the approach brings together what is the most feasible, technologically speaking, with what is the most desirable from a human standpoint.

The Evolution of Design Thinking

Compared to the centuries-old scientific method, design thinking is relatively new as a mindset and methodology. In a way, it sprung from the industrial revolution, in which the limits of what we thought was technologically possible were pushed in dramatic fashion. Industrial designers, architects, and engineers, etc. – driven by the significant societal changes of the 20th century – later came together in a demonstration of collective problem-solving.

But it was cognitive scientist and Nobel Prize laureate Herbert A. Simon who was the first to mention design thinking as a way of conceptualizing. In his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, Simon offered many ideas considered to be the principles of design thinking. Then, in the 1970s, design thinking started to address the human and technological needs of the day.

Celebrated designers who have adopted this method include Naoto Fukasawa, Saul Bass, Florence Knoll, and Le Corbusier, as well as Ray and Charles Eames. They each knew that coming up with elegant answers requires paying attention to the context of the problems and the consequences of the solutions. It means taking into account human priorities along the way to innovation.

Today, design thinking is on its way to becoming one of the leading innovation methodologies. Across many industries and disciplines, hundreds of thousands of people have now been introduced to the most basic concepts of design thinking. Through it, many have even experienced those ‘a-ha’ moments, in which they suddenly view their work – and the world – from an entirely new perspective. Individuals realize their own creative capacity, while problem-solving teams make progress toward their goals in less time than it takes through traditionally entrenched methods. Design thinking has generated groundbreaking solutions in the most exciting, innovative ways. It has been promoted at every level of business, and is behind the success of a number of high-profile, global companies, particularly Google, Apple, and Airbnb.

The Five Stages of Design Thinking

Of course, there’s no one definition of design thinking. But most agree that it is a systematic yet adaptable approach to problem-solving and innovation. Think of it as a non-linear methodology that offers a means to think deeply outside the box in order to solve problems that are ill-defined – or even unknown. Design thinking, after all, is human-centered, intentional, experimental, and responsive, as well as completely tolerant of failure, itself.

More specifically, design thinking consists of five phases: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. The first phase allows you to better understand a problem from an empathetic standpoint. The next phase is an opportunity to analyze and synthesize all of the information gathered during the first phase, before identifying and defining the core problem. In the third phase, you can begin to think ‘outside of the box,’ looking at the problem in alternative ways and generating ideas based on the knowledge acquired during the first two phases. In the fourth phase, you can come up with possible solutions to the problem – those fully explored during the first three stages. Finally, the solutions that are identified in the previous phase are put to a rigorous test.

The Future of Design Thinking

As design thinking moves further away from being a nascent practice, more people will appreciate its value, becoming committed, leading practitioners of design thinking, themselves. Of course, design thinking takes some learning and practice. It takes time to tinker with and test, not to mention an overall willingness to fail early-on – and often – throughout the entire process.

At the end of the day, though, in-house counsels and the like should try looking at large-scale challenges in legal through the eyes of a designer. In that way, they can become dynamic and superior problem-solvers, themselves. They can help create design criteria, and brainstorm and test solutions that can eventually become real-world innovations.

Also key to problem-solving are the craft and expertise of designers across many disciplines. Design thinking calls for collaboration with a critical mass of individuals with unique mindsets and sets of skills – those who can approach the unknown with certainty and resolve, and develop new approaches and strategies. With them, legal teams can utilize design thinking to take on some of the biggest organizational challenges, such as how to drive artificial intelligence (AI) applications as part of their digital transformation. They can aspire to have CLOC’s 12 core competencies for legal operations, reaching new levels of maturity.

Learn More About Design Thinking and ContractPodAi

Want to learn to develop your own framework and best practices around the design thinking process? At CLOC 2020 Vegas Institute, ContractPodAi will lead an informative, 90-minute workshop session on this excitingly relevant topic. Join us at 3:30pm on the 12th May.

We will be joined by Hunter Simon, Vice-President of Business Affairs and General Counsel at Technicolor Production Services, the multinational media, communication and entertainment corporation. Together, we will discuss the need for outside-the-box thinking in order to solve problems; the ways to go about the design thinking process; and how exactly to leverage design thinking in order to implement – and drive the adoption of – brand-new systems.

The third annual CLOC London Institute kicked off on January 20th, 2020, at the Landmark Hotel, London. Over the course of two days, an energetic crowd of 430 attendees from 27 countries came together to CONNECT, LEARN, and COLLABORATE.

Legal Operations professionals from corporate teams and law firms filled the educational sessions and networked with legal vendors and service providers in the exhibit hall to exchange ideas, share information, learn about new services and technologies, and to challenge each other to reach new heights in 2021.

The structured meet-and-greets were fantastic opportunities to forge new partnerships and to rekindle existing ones. Members of the CLOC community also got together quite organically during the Institute to share dinner, or a cocktail, and built even stronger connections. These “Off the CLOC” social and business gatherings presented additional networking opportunities for participants, that will have a ripple effect throughout the year.

The Institute kicked off with opening remarks from Mary O’Carroll and me, followed by an always inspiring opening keynote by Dan Katz, who spoke on (yes, you guessed it) where legal technology and innovation has taken the industry over the last 10 years and his top predictions for the future.

Our goal for the Institute was to provide content that was tailored to the European legal ecosystem, while being practical and providing actions that could be implemented immediately. CLOC’s 2020 priorities seemed to resonate well across the community in Europe.

Here are a few key insights that I took away from London:

• Better Together: We are stronger as a connected community. In an ecosystem in a rapid state of evolution, everyone acknowledged that working in silos will hamper our ability to drive sustainable transformation. We need to work even more closely together to be successful. All boats rise with this collaborative approach, and we all become more invested in each other’s success when we work together to build solutions. Hearing the results of these types of collaborations will be a focus for CLOC London 2021!
• The CLOC Community is a Powerful Movement and Force for Good in the Industry. In an industry that is in a rapid state of transition, harnessing our collective ingenuity and diverse skills and thought will be an imperative for law firms and in-house teams that want to be agile, innovative and impactful to the clients and businesses they serve. We have the opportunity to leverage our collective power to drive positive change across the legal industry and create space for conversations on how we can make a difference. Let’s take on this challenge together!

• As GC roles evolve, Legal Ops is an Imperative Hire. Our panel of General Counsels leading the “General Counsel and their Legal Operations Lead” session demonstrated the powerful and strategic nature of the GC/Legal Ops Lead partnership and how working together, they are driving transformation and delivering value to the businesses they serve. Legal Operations Leads are now essential hires for GCs.
• Technology is an Enabler, Not a Silver Bullet. Technology implementations are still very challenging: user adoption and change management are still areas of underinvestment. Efforts to gain consensus on both the problem being solved and the potential products and services that will lead to better adoption of the selected solution is key. This will be another area of focus in 2021!
• The Proliferation of Legal-tech and Legal Services Providers is Overwhelming for In-House Teams. The new CLOC Legal Ops Directory is a good start in identifying all the vendors; however, this proliferation of vendors represents a more significant challenge for in-house Legal Ops teams . We would like to see more vendor consolidation within legal-tech. We need enterprise systems that work together seamlessly.
• This interoperability between systems will only be possible when vendors across the legal technology industry begin to collaborate to solve the problems challenging Legal Ops and their teams.
• Data is Power. Leveraging data and analytics to measure Legal Teams impact on the business is imperative in driving strategic decisions with business leaders and law firms. Many teams are struggling with access to easily consumable data due to multiple tools and integration challenges. Consolidated platform systems will help to access data and legal service providers can help with cleansing data and the human effort to build foundational dashboards to leverage predictive analytics capabilities.
• AI Needs HI. AI is still in the nascent stages with multiple tools solving unique use cases that need significant Human Intervention (HI). We need to see more vendor consolidation and collaborating in this space to reduce the heavy lift for in house teams. Legal service providers working with AI vendors can present better solutions to clients if they work together.

• Human Capital is Still Our Most Significant Asset! Are we doing enough to nurture and grow our Legal Leaders? The “Legal Leaders of the Future” session reminded us of the need to invest in our people and not leave anyone behind. This will require an intentional effort and investment in the development of resilience skills to prepare leaders for a more VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world. The CLOC community can help chart a new course for those in our community who feel rudderless and fearful of the changes ahead. Together, we can inspire confidence in our ability to operate successfully in a new future by sharing ideas and leveraging next-gen development programs.
• Progress, not Perfection, is Our Mantra. The Legal Ops Journey panel offered a fascinating insight into the different approaches each of the panellists took when prioritizing their initiatives in the first year of their roles. Progress, not perfection, is an essential mantra to adopt. Investments in change management initiatives are crucial to bringing people with you on the transformation journey.
• Law Firm Leaders Need to Solve Client Challenges. Law Firm COO and Innovation roles will help drive change, but in-house teams need to use their influence and buying power to invest in and reward innovative firms.

The 2020 London Institute was a great success in bringing our members together to Connect, Learn, and Collaborate. We are excited to begin planning the 2021 London Institute and hearing how the connections and collaborations forged this year have impacted each of you and your journeys as Legal Ops Leaders.

Mark your calendars for January 18-19, 2021. We’ll be meeting at the Grand Lancaster, London. See you there!

Lisa Konie discusses how to create an internship program at your organization by using a step-by-step process developed through her personal experience at Adobe Inc. By utilizing these steps and guidelines you will be well on your way to developing your own successful internship program at your organization.

Setting Up an Internship Program – Tips for Success

Creating an internship program requires thoughtful effort. Interns take a lot of work and you shouldn’t just create an intern program lightly. There are a number of components to consider before starting a program, especially for legal interns.

For example, many interns do not have practical experience, or knowledge, and will require a considerable amount of guidance. Throughout the program, the interns will need to have frequent check ins, access to systems and tools, schedule of activities, and complete training programs before they can begin working on projects. In order to have a successful program, it will require dedicated support.

Keep in mind that these young adults come with their own set of ideals and priorities. It’s important to ensure your intern fits into your corporate culture, but also demonstrates their curiosity to learn more about how your organization operates. Before starting an internship program, it’s critical to evaluate whether you have sufficient time to mentor, monitor and train your interns. Without this component your interns and your program will not be set up for success.

Getting Started

Why do you want to implement an internship program?

What are you trying to accomplish with your program? Although internship programs can offer a tremendous benefit to your business, and help with your recruiting and staffing needs, you need to have a plan in place before you start. A well crafted, structured and robust internship program will increase your chances of success and keep you on track to meet your goals.

What are you hoping to gain from an internship program?

1. Do you just need help with projects?
2. Are you looking to pay it forward?
3. Is there a diversity component?
4. Are you looking to create a pipeline of talent and hire as full time employees (FTE’s)?
5. Do you want an infusion of eager minds with a new point of view?

Once you’ve come to an alignment within your organization on why you want to bring on an intern, consider what characteristics you are targeting. Are you looking for 1L’s, 2L’s, 3L’s, MBA candidates, areas of interest, etc?

Is your organization ready for an internship program?

It’s up to you to make sure that your intern fits into your organization and that they have a great experience. Keep in mind that interns are a marketing vehicle for your company. You want the intern to return to their school and tell all their classmates that they had an amazing experience at your company. Take some time to answer the following to consider whether your company is ready to implement an internship program.

• Has your company bought into the concept of the internship program? Without buy-in from all levels of the organization, especially at the executive levels, the intern won’t feel welcome.
• Do you have someone who can oversee the intern throughout the entire period of the internship?
• Can you assign a buddy for the intern, someone that is “safe” for their questions?
• Does your organization have a general internship program at the corporate level? Can you tap into that resource and combine your efforts with theirs?
• Will your intern fit into your company culture? Keep in mind there are likely to be age differences between your interns and the general internship pool. Lots of corporate intern programs are focused on college interns and your law students might feel differentiated and out of place.
• Consider your brand. Can you afford to bring on interns without hiring them at the end of the internship?
• Will the work they are assigned to be challenging and insightful, rather than just repetitive busy work? Interns are willing to step out of their comfort zone and learn practical concepts that they haven’t experienced or learned about. Give them an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities.

When should you start?

Find out your own organization’s H.R. hiring schedule. H.R. schedules are typically not in sync with law schools.

It’s important to know key dates for campus recruitment. Schools are usually soliciting participation at on campus interviews (OCIs) in late spring and in early summer. Top law students are getting recruited by law firms in early fall. Create a plan for recruiting and set appropriate expectations internally, as well as with your intern.

Since campus interview season starts in August, you may miss some great talent if you start interviewing in January or February. If you’re targeting certain schools, reach out to the career development center at those schools to understand the time table for their OCIs.

Keep in mind that 1L students cannot be recruited until December 1st, as opposed to the typical August timeframe with 2Ls. There is less expectation for a 1L to receive a returning offer since they aren’t in as high a demand as 2L candidates, so this may be an option if you miss the key recruiting window or don’t anticipate hiring as a FTE. By considering a 1L for your internship, you can still get top talent well into the beginning of the year to help source your internship program for that summer.

Design Your Program

Develop the Structure.

A comprehensive and robust internship program should include information on learning objectives and goals, daily responsibilities, short and long-term projects, supervisor assignments, evaluation procedures, policies and expectations, orientation and off-boarding processes, just to name the basics. What will the intern do and what are they expected to accomplish? Will they have daily tasks, or will they be working on special projects? What is the reporting structure?

Secure budget and establish compensation.

Ensure that you have enough budget and whether it’s going to cover relocation or housing while your intern is on-site at your location. You’ll also need to determine compensation for the individual during the timeframe that you will have them on board.

Develop a job description, open a job requisition and get ready to post the position.

Make sure your job descriptions are all in order well before you post your internships. Open a job requisition, if that’s something that your company requires. Also, determine whether you’ll have recruiting support from your H.R team.

There are a number of recruiting platforms that many schools are tied into, so don’t lose hope if you don’t have support from your H.R. organization. You can still post intern job openings directly with school career development organizations.

You don’t have to be a large corporation with lots of bodies and resources to have a great program. You can recruit on your own through phone screening, or by leveraging job boards directly at law schools.

Plan your projects in advance.

Make sure that you have a sufficient amount of work for the intern to do. Sitting idly with nothing to do is a horrible experience. It’s critical to make sure that your interns always have enough to do, but are not completely overwhelmed. You don’t want them to feel like they have to put in a 60-hour work week, but at the same time, you want to make sure that they have enough interesting work to do.

Pay attention to the projects and the work that you have scoped out for your interns. You do not want your interns to go through an experience where they do not have enough to do. You also need to recognize that sometimes interns might be a little reluctant to put their hand up and say that they’re not busy enough because they don’t want to draw attention to themselves. It’s up to you, or the person who is overseeing your intern program, to make sure that you’ve got consistent touch points and that you know that your intern is busy to the appropriate level.

Onboarding, Orientation and Evaluation

1. Assign a mentorAssigning a buddy is a great way to allow the intern to have a connection with your department that is beyond just the manager. It also gives them a “safe” way to ask questions and get training.
   1. Identify people across your legal and organization that want to mentor and enlist their support. You may also need their support in interviewing or in assisting the intern throughout the summer.
   2. There are many ways for people across your organization to get involved. It’s up to you to make sure that you have lined up those resources in advance and that they understand their role. This will help ensure that your intern has a valuable summer and becomes part of the team.
2. Set the tone for the intern on arrival.You may need to do things differently for your intern than you do for your usual FTE’s. For some of them, this may be their first exposure to a “corporate” position.
   1. Welcome the intern and introduce them to the team in which they will reside and to the organization. This will help integrate them more quickly and help them adjust to the social and performance aspects of their projects and their internship so that they can be successful.
   2. Take your intern to lunch, walk them around your department, send out an email communication about their arrival to your department.
   3. Make the intern feel included in all things. This is the theme that you will need to continue throughout the summer to ensure that your intern has an amazing experience.
3. Schedule meet and greets.Scheduling meet and greets between your intern and your key leadership team allows your interns to get a better understanding of what happens across the entire legal department at the beginning of their internship. This gives them the confidence to reach out to their managers to provide input about certain areas, tasks or kinds of work that may be of interest to them. It will also help them determine if they are a good fit for a full time role, if offered.
4. Plan a team building and networking event.It’s important for your intern to realize how valuable this experience is and to gather information about what the practice of law is really like, and to meet the people who work in the industry.
   1. Early team building events will integrate the intern quickly into the organization. This can be just a fun activity that takes place during the summer, or if you want to partner with other people at different companies, you can pull all of your interns together and have a broader and more inclusive experience.
   2. Using defined touch points, interns will better understand how to leverage their time with your organization to “fine tune” the remainder of their law school education. They will also better understand what they want to do in the future and how to map out their career.
5. Set up frequent check-ins.Ensure that you meet with the intern on a regular basis and have formal midpoint and endpoint evaluations. Discuss how the intern is contributing, strengths and areas that need growth, and any other feedback for the intern. Invite the intern to report on project statuses and ask questions to better understand their role, project and your organization.
6. Don’t spread the interns out too thinly.Co-located interns are much easier to oversee and you will be able to create a more inclusive experience for those interns. Remember, if you do not have co-located interns, team building becomes even more critical. You will need to work harder to integrate those interns who are not co-located. Team building outings, or exercises, will help to connect your interns not only to the teams with whom they are embedded, but also to other interns.
7. Send out an after internship survey.Gather feedback about what worked and what you can do differently from the interns. Integrate that feedback into the program design for the following year.
8. Prepare to hire outstanding candidates.Make sure you have budget allocated and the paperwork underway so that your internal processed doesn’t delay your ability to make an offer. If you want to extend an offer at the end of summer, prepare early so that your interns are not left hanging wondering whether they’re going to get a job offer. Early planning ensures that you won’t miss out on hiring top talent that you have invested in.

Key Takeaways

• Just Start. Don’t make this a tools problem. Go through the exercises and develop a strong foundation.
• Prepare. Start with process definition. Determine what matters to your organization and drive toward measurable results.
• Make it a Amazing for Your Intern, Your Team and Yourself. Keep in mind that these students are all looking for an experience that will build their career and help them refine their focus. Make sure at every turn you have created an outstanding experience for them during their summer. Whether it’s filled with cool transactional work,interesting meetings with different individuals across your organization, or even informational interviews, take the time and effort to exceed expectations.
• Stand Out From the Crowd Think about all of the little nuances that will allow your intern program to stand out and be something different from all the other intern programs out there. This will ensure that your program will be a success.

The above information is based on a podcast that is accessible to members only. Listen to the Podcast. For detailed documentation on intern programs, including sample generic job descriptions, and more details on key dates, access the Internship Initiative on CLOC.org.

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!

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

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

People:

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

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

2. Find fearless team members

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

3. The doers are better than the dreamers

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

Process:

1. Document a process

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

2. Break down the process

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

3. Not a one-time task

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

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