If your organization is spending seven figures each year with external legal service providers, chances are you sometimes struggle to spot legal billing violations.

This is understandable given the volume of invoices to be reviewed, the density of information on each invoice, and the lack of time in-house teams can devote to the task. But these violations can easily add up to 10% or more of the total invoice amount — even if you’re using a traditional e-billing system or invoice review vendor to manage compliance.

To get a better sense of where your next cost savings opportunity could be hiding, here are five legal billing violations that we frequently see eluding even the most diligent legal departments.

Work in excess of 8 hours per day

The Brightflag team’s all-time favorite legal billing violation is a customer being invoiced for 26 hours of work by a single timekeeper — in a single day. (Must have been a great multi-tasker!) Most organizations now impose a limit of eight to 10 hours of work per day per timekeeper, both to ensure that quality of work remains high and to avoid incentivizing a culture where billable hours are maximized at all costs within their partner firms.

Enforcing this simple guideline can be deceptively complex. Invoice line items may not be presented in chronological order, requiring the reviewer to turn back and forth to count the number of hours per day. There are also likely multiple timekeepers on each invoice. Then, some law firms may insist on submitting narrative descriptions that span multiple days of work.

All these factors contribute to a tendency for reviewers to settle on a number that’s “close enough.” On larger invoices, though, that latitude may translate to thousands of dollars in unnecessary expense.

Modern e-billing systems can now address this issue by automatically comparing each timekeeper’s hours per day to your organization’s agreed limits, identifying violations you can act on. Ideally, these tools enable you to approve the invoice with reductions, or reject the invoice to be corrected, without any human intervention. As a result, you genuinely can maximize legal billing compliance while minimizing administrative work.

Ratio of partner to non-partner time

Corporate legal teams invest considerable time and effort into conducting panel reviews. One common area of focus is agreeing on appropriate hourly rates for each timekeeper. Far less attention, however, is given to the ratio of partner time to non-partner time on any particular matter. So while an organization may have negotiated hourly rates with a particular blended rate in mind, this target can be difficult to match in practice.

As with the previous example, spotting this legal billing violation manually would require a significant amount of data entry (and creative maneuvering) in Microsoft Excel. Many legal teams end up ignoring the problem, as a result, except in extreme circumstances. This is another missed opportunity to better manage costs. But just as important, the lack of visibility into who is doing the work now will make it tougher to make informed resourcing decisions in the future.

Most invoice review systems summarize work performed by timekeeper seniority, with the best tools tracking trends over time and alerting you to invoices on which the ratio of partner time to non-partner time is unreasonable. From there you can start to benchmark law firm performance by blended hourly rate.

Excessive internal communication

It’s understood that law firms need to communicate internally in order to deliver quality results for their clients. At the same time, some law firms seem to be far more efficient in their collaboration than others. For this reason, most organizations cap billable internal communication at 10% of each invoice to incentivize the right behaviors.

But while “internal conference with R.G. and C.T.” is easy enough to spot on an invoice, calculating the percentage of fees that this represents and comparing it to your billing guidelines is cumbersome at best. The problem only compounds when law firms find — shall we say — creative ways to describe internal communication. At this point, even traditional e-billing systems have a hard time keeping up.

A.I.-based approaches are starting to find more success in identifying and correcting this common legal billing violation. Machine learning can identify obvious examples of internal communication (think keyword searches for “internal”) as well as less obvious examples that otherwise would be missed. The result is significant cost savings through stronger enforcement of the intended rule.

Multiple participants in meetings

One benefit of outsourcing matters to law firms is gaining their expertise and experience in a very particular practice area. As a condition of the higher associated hourly rates, clients have a reasonable expectation that the lawyer assigned to the matter will be largely self-sufficient. So their billing guidelines tend to permit only one participant in each meeting or call to bill for his or her time (usually the most junior timekeeper).

In cases where law firms have multiple participants in meetings, the corresponding narrative descriptions rarely follow one another on the invoice. This means that reviewers have to keep track of the descriptions they’ve read, referring back to earlier line items and pages to cross-reference. And if each timekeeper happens to use different wording to describe the same meeting, even a diligent reviewer can miss the duplication.

Once again, A.I.-based invoice review solutions offer new hope. Because machine learning doesn’t depend on matching exact words or phrases, it’s far more likely to correctly identify meetings with multiple participants. These systems can then apply an organization’s guidelines to invoices automatically by, for example, removing fees associated with all but the most junior timekeeper’s line item for the meeting.

Incorrect tax applied

Legal services are subject to taxation in most every business territory. Naturally, organizations will want to pay not too little, as this would be a risk to the business, and not too much, as this would be an unnecessary expense. Most reinforce this desire with billing guidelines that require their law firms to submit invoices with taxes correctly calculated prior to their being paid.

This process is a steep challenge for legal teams operating in multiple jurisdictions. It’s all too easy for a law firm to apply an incorrect tax rate, or for an invoice to be reduced without the tax being recalculated.

These simple errors can introduce significant friction into the relationship between the legal and finance teams. And in this scenario, your software may not come running as readily to your rescue.

Most e-billing implementations are centered in the United States — a country in which legal services aren’t subject to taxation. As a result, many tools on the market still lack basic functionality for managing global tax compliance. Those with a more worldly perspective, on the other hand, are now able to synchronize tax rates with finance systems of record, check legal invoices automatically for compliance with these rules, and return non-compliant invoices for correction.

Short-term advice

Now that you know the ins and outs of each type of violation, here are five actions you can take to stop errors from slipping through your system:

1. Organize your invoice review workflow so the people most familiar with the work performed are given an opportunity to spot discrepancies. Think beyond seniority level.
2. Discuss variations in accounts payable practices with your finance team. For example, some regions may require corrected invoices versus short-paying invoices.
3. Set clear expectations with your law firms regarding billing enforcement and dispute resolution processes. Structure will help sanity prevail.
4. Use an e-billing system that’s customized to your organization’s own legal billing guidelines — ideally one that goes deeper than basic keyword matching.
5. Monitor billing behavior by generating regular reports on invoice compliance and discuss the results with your law firms. They may appreciate the data more than you think.

Long-term perspective

Controlling spend is one of the clearest indicators of operational efficiency within corporate legal departments. It’s also a continuous fight that won’t be won with a single tactic. By focusing first on stronger billing compliance, though, you’ll position yourself for faster progress.

Whether spotted violations spare you $100 or $1 million next month, any cost savings are a positive result your colleagues can recognize. At the same time, law firm partners will value the predictability that comes from precise rules and consistent responses.

From GC and CFO to in-house attorneys and outside counsel, you’ll start creating powerful advocates for legal ops innovation.

About Brightflag
Brightflag’s solution for better billing starts with A.I. trained to interpret the true nature, cost, and value of work described in legal invoice narratives. The results are then automatically compared against your billing guidelines to reveal potential cost saving opportunities. Over time, this creates a collection of data-backed insights you can use to inform everything from pricing negotiations to quality of service evaluations.

If we had a dollar for each time we read or heard the words ‘legal services transformation’ or ‘change management’ recently, the Elevate team would be travelling to the CLOC 2019 Sydney Institute first class all the way!

Today’s legal ecosystem is engaged in breathless pursuit of innovation; captivated by enticing opportunities to transform service delivery by combinations of technologies, novel service models and an array of management methodologies; ranging from Lean, to Design Thinking and Legal Project Management (to name just a few!). In the in-house environment, Legal Ops is at the epicentre, supporting and enabling legal teams to achieve the optimal blend of value, quality and cost efficiency.

At this year’s CLOC Sydney Institute, we will hear about exciting legal department change journeys and opportunities to deploy new technology and ideas. All change in legal services environments requires significant investment in planning and management. It is no accident that change capability forms part of “Strategic Planning” in the CLOC 12 Core Competencies Model, and that legal departments performing at the “Mature” level plan to manage change.

But what exactly are legal services transformation and change management? In this post, we will demystify these terms and consider the role of Legal Ops in the successful execution of change.

Change Transformation

Simply put, change is discontinuing something old for something new. For legal departments, change impacts important building blocks such as vision or strategy; governance, rules and policy; business processes and technology systems; performance management, org design, people and culture, or a combination of the above. Change involves modification in how legal departments perform their work, the work environment, or how clients consume the output of their efforts. Change initiatives intend to produce benefits in efficiency, effectiveness or quality. Given the proliferation of LegalTech, many change projects are prompted by new technology.

Change falls on a spectrum: on the left, incremental evolution of one (or more) of the legal department building blocks described above. On the right, transformative change involves a fundamental and structural disruption to the status quo. Needless to say, not all change is truly transformative and approaches should be calibrated accordingly.

Digital transformation for legal departments is the technology-enabled realignment of vision, processes, service delivery models and client experiences to achieve digitisation of services and defined business goals. It is occurring in concert with business and societal shifts of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, catalysed by ‘always-on’ connectivity, advanced data analytics and breakthrough developments in AI, triggering revamping of processes, workforce skillsets, technology and data environments, and strategies to respond to the opportunities and challenges of digital commerce.

Regardless of whether change is incremental or transformative, it is always much harder to do than describe. However, all legal departments must hone their change skills to get fit for the future of legal service delivery.

Sometimes… things change and they are never the same again. This looks like one of those times. That’s life! Life moves on. And so should we.– Spencer Johnson, 1990 “Who Moved My Cheese”

Lawyers Hate Change!

Lawyers score highly (certainly higher than the population average) on traits such as scepticism, cynicism, impatience and introversion, and typically score lower on collaboration and trust in others.[1] Some speculate that training in precedent and jurisprudence predisposes lawyers to instinctively prefer what has gone before. Despite this, there is no definitive evidence to show that lawyers dislike change more than anyone else.

Humans are pre-configured to operate subconsciously through powerful, trained patterns resulting from ingrained habits and behaviours, values and belief systems, individual experience, comfort, references and routines. We also place more value in the things we already have or know, and have an innate bias for the status quo. In other words, we incline towards what we know rather than embracing alternatives, even when rationally and logically presented.

Worse still, people typically react to change with counter-productive emotional responses, including shock and denial, frustration and unhappiness. These reactions, if not carefully managed, can provoke complex change resistance behaviours, the most toxic of which are passive subversion of the change project, withdrawal of cooperation or disengagement.

Against that backdrop, it is unsurprising that up to 70% of work-related change projects fail to realise promised outcomes.[2] Invariably, the causes are people factors and resistance to change. The technical aspects of deploying technology or revised business processes are straightforward by comparison with the human wildcard.

Legal departments are organised systems of people, so these forces are multiplied and compounded. Busy legal professionals scarcely have enough time to work in the business, let alone manage change. This is where Legal Ops can provide tremendous value.

The Good News

Legal departments are resourced by intelligent, motivated and analytical professionals who are receptive to change when presented in a structured, digestible way which clearly and consistently articulates why change is needed.There’s more good news. While the legal sector is facing the challenges of disruption later than many of our business and professional colleagues, we can benefit from the research, theory and methodologies long since established in other domains, and employ it to our advantage. Most important is adoption of the discipline of change management.

Change Management and the Role of Legal Ops

The Change Management Body of Knowledge (CMBoK) published by the Change Management Institute defines change management as a structured approach to transitioning individuals, teams and organisations from current state to a desired future state. It offers a management methodology for planning change activity, and a human-centred way of managing people factors, drawing on expertise from diverse fields including organisational psychology, sociology, project management, design theory, process improvement, systems theory and management consulting.

The use of structured change management is vital for successful change for legal departments, which is why change management forms part of the CLOC Core Competency ‘Strategic Planning.’ Legal Ops can deliver tremendous value by ‘owning’ the space, leveraging change management tools, techniques and internal/external professionals, and ensuring suitable planning and delivery governance.

Change Management in Practice

There are multiple competing Change Management theories, from Kotter’s 8 Steps, to Lewin’s Change Model, to McKinsey’s 7-S and ADKAR. Each has relative pros and cons (though this blog is not the place to weigh them). Each is intended to help prepare the organisation and its people for structured, well-planned change, involving well-defined goals, support and consistent communication. Arguably, for legal departments, it is less important which model is preferred than to select just one, and use it effectively. With its multi-disciplinary expertise, understanding of process and technology, and horizontal view of the entire legal department, Legal Ops should provide pivotal support in the design and performance of high-quality change management.

Conclusion

The future of legal service delivery will require legal departments to be more agile in how they adopt new tools, methods, service models and ideas, and this requires significant investment in ‘operationalising’ change processes. Legal Ops professionals are perfectly positioned to play an instrumental role in this space.

In the coming weeks, we will be publishing more tips on executing successful change on our blog. You may visit our booth at the CLOC Sydney Institute 2019 and to speak with Steven Walker, James Odell or Jon Kenton about Elevate’s unique Elevated Transformation approach for successful legal department change.

About Elevate

Elevate is a global law company, providing consulting, technology and services to law departments and law firms. The company’s team of lawyers, engineers, consultants and business experts extend and enable the resources and capabilities of customers worldwide. Elevate is the most-used law company according to the 2017 State of the Industry Survey published by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) and has been ranked as a top global legal services provider by Chambers & Partners for four years in a row. More at elevateservices.com

[1] Herding Cats: the Lawyer Personality Revealed (2002) Richard, Dr. L available at https://www.lawyerbrain.com/sites/default/files/caliper_herding_cats.pdf and Alvey, J., (2010) More on the Lawyer Personality https://leavinglaw.wordpress.com/2010/12/01/more-on-the-lawyer-personality/

[2] Nohria, M., & Beer,M (2000) https://hbr.org/2000/05/cracking-the-code-of-change

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

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

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

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

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

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

To recap, a modern CLM solution should include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The future of software robotics

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

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

What are potential areas for robotics to benefit legal operations?

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

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

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

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

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

The unique potential of robotics in legal operations

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

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

The new normal for legal operations

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

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

As both a law student and a Project Manager with CLOC, I’ve gained a unique perspective on law school and the rise of legal operations. I’ve been a Project Manager with CLOC for three years, where I’ve helped grow our organization from 40 members to over 2,300 members and have participated in some groundbreaking changes in legal operations. While with CLOC, I’ve also been a law student at Stanford where I’ll be graduating this June.

The last three years have been incredibly valuable not only for introducing me to leaders in the legal industry, but also teaching me about the intersection between legal education and the evolving legal practice. When I reflect on what I’ve learned in law school, I think law schools are great at teaching students black letter law (e.g. contracts, torts, and civil procedure). Increasingly, law schools provide students meaningful clinical and pro bono opportunities and some sense of what it’s like to have real clients. Law school also provides an important sense of community within the legal profession and pushes students outside of their comfort zone, which is critical to our long-term success.

However, it won’t come as a surprise to anyone reading this, that at their core, law schools don’t teach students about the business of law or about our legal ecosystem – what we represent in the CLOC community. We aren’t taught about the synergies between law firms and legal technology providers, or the rise of alternative legal service providers and the evolving role of in house counsel. Classes in people management, business management, or the business of running a law firm aren’t required or even sometimes provided (and many students don’t take advantage of the limited offerings).

The truth is, law school can feel detached from the reality of practicing law. What I’ve discovered during my time with CLOC, is the way that lawyers work, the legal services that are available to clients, and how clients pay for those legal services, are all changing. That’s today’s reality. And, I think that our law school curriculum, at its core, should reflect those changes.

Certainly, some of this comes from experience, but I also think that it’s on the legal ops change-makers, practitioners of the law, and students of the law to challenge our conventional understanding of how the law is taught and how our legal education is provided. Naturally, law schools and business schools should be partners in this endeavor, which is why CLOC is so important. At CLOC we’re all about bringing everyone into the conversation – from academia to the AM Law 100.

For the last four years, CLOC has supported law students and the focus on legal ops training through its scholarship program. Much like CLOC itself, the scholarship program keeps expanding. In May 2019, ten (10) scholarship recipients from a variety of backgrounds across the United States were selected to receive CLOC’s 2019/2020 scholarship. From my experience with CLOC and involvement in the Scholarship Program, I know that those of us who are prepared with the necessary training in the technological and operational side of legal practice are in a much better position to meet and exceed our client’s expectations. Understanding how to practice is just as important as understanding the law itself.

The legal industry has been slow to adopt technology, but that’s changing quickly and CLOC is a testament to that change. Every day, new technology is altering the way that attorneys handle day-to-day operations and anymore, technology and operations skills are not just a “nice to have,” they’re critical for law school graduates to learn and exercise in practice. I’m excited to be a part of the changes that the legal industry is experiencing and I can’t wait to see what comes next!

About the CLOC Scholarship Program

Scholarship recipients from the 2019/2020 year were invited to attend the 2019 Vegas Institute in May 2019. View the impressive selection committee and equally impressive winners of the CLOC 2019 Scholarships. Learn more and apply for a CLOC Scholarship today.

Many teams in organizations face challenges where resilience is needed in order to maintain high-performance and well-being. This is especially true for teams working on high-stakes matters, under time pressure, and in intense environments, much like the work your team is doing in the legal profession. Additionally, research suggests that the personality traits of high need for achievement professionals can make team formation, decision-making and leadership considerably more challenging within performance-driven professional organizations.

Resilience is the capacity for stress-related growth, and it exists at the individual and group level. Complex, changing, fast-paced work environments require that teams quickly adapt to missteps, failure, slow results, and challenges generally.

Resilient teams (1) resolve challenges as effectively as possible; (2) maintain team health and resources; (3) recover quickly; and (4) display the ability to handle future challenges together). Here are some common team challenges that require resilience:

• Difficult and/or high-stakes assignments
• High consequence work
• Unclear team roles
• Innovating – the process itself is full of missteps and setback
• Angry/upset/skeptical clients
• Poor results
• Ambiguous direction/goals

The study of what it means to build resilience at work has thrived in the past decade, and as more organizations continue to orient their work in teams, there has been an increased interest in what it means to create a resilient work team.

Here is what we know about what resilient teams do differently:

They recognize and actively mitigate against the producer-manager dilemma. Harvard Law School’s leadership programs for law firm and law department leaders always begin with cases that illustrate how the “producer-manager dilemma” significantly impedes effective leadership and team building within our profession. The dilemma occurs and worsens as professionals gain seniority and continue to need to “produce” client/technical work, as well as take on an increasingly long list of leadership, business development and organizational responsibilities. Moving from being individual contributors to team participants and leaders requires professionals to invest more time, focus and thoughtful energy into the healthy functioning of teams. Unfortunately, the urgent crowds out the important and without a strong cultural and organizational commitment, professional teams are often dramatically under-led and less likely to achieve the full benefits that a collaborative, diverse and inclusive team effort can provide. Resilient teams are more likely to be found in organizations that provide training, tools and incentives to help professionals identify and mitigate against the effects of the producer-manager dilemma. Team leaders create resilient teams through application of more formal team processes and tools and growth mindset frameworks; personally evaluating and optimizing what, how and to whom they delegate; building and using their internal and external networks to help their teams; and establishing and supporting team norms such as those described below.

They stay motivated. Professionals choosing to work in an intense environment most often exhibit the personality traits associated with a high need for achievement. Some of these traits, such as a high need for autonomy and a fierce competitiveness, can disrupt the formation of resilient teams. Team members may resist collaboration and view team members more as rivals or roadblocks than sources of new information, ideas, talents and support.

Resilient teams stay motivated and counteract those tendencies by accessing the power of intrinsic motivation, i.e., motivation from within the work itself and how it gets done. Indeed, research shows that focusing on intrinsic goals leads to higher performance, well-being, and motivation for teams. Team members become more intrinsically motivated when they have choice or a say in how their work unfolds, feel like they belong on the team and have developed high-quality relationships with their colleagues, and feel confident in their ability to learn more challenging skills The challenge is for leaders to create a team environment that supports those valuable outcomes.

They build psychological safety & belonging. A critical foundation of resilient teams is psychological safety – a climate in which people feel comfortable expressing and being themselves. In order for teams to appropriately manage adversity, people need to feel comfortable sharing their knowledge, which means sharing concerns, questions, mistakes, and partially-formed ideas. Research has found that teams that employ more positive emotions and focus on solidifying the connectedness of the people within their teams experience more of this type of openness, and thus higher levels of team resilience. In addition, teams that are able to openly and clearly discuss both positive and negative experiences are better able to work through adversity, have higher levels of trust, and higher levels of resilience.

They take an appreciative approach. While it’s important for teams to identify areas of where they are struggling, it is also important for teams to identify, organize, and elevate their strengths on an ongoing basis in order to maintain their energy and reach their full potential. For example, teams can apply an appreciative inquiry approach by asking team members to share and openly discuss what matters most to the team, what they want the team to look like or grow into, what obstacles stand in the way, and what changes they are willing to make to achieve this vision.

They prioritize well-being. Resilient teams openly talk about stress and burnout. Burnout is a chronic process of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy caused by a disconnect or an imbalance between key job demands and job resources, and it is highly correlated with lower levels of morale, turnover and disengagement. Interestingly, structured team debriefs or after action reviews have been linked to lower levels of team member vulnerability to burnout. Why? Debriefing facilitates information exchange and elaboration (so there is less ambiguity, a known burnout accelerant), enables team member support, and increases self-reflection and self-efficacy.

Professionals – especially lawyers in top firms and legal departments – operate in an incredibly stressful, dynamic environment. Research relating to resilience has shown that it is a trait that correlates strongly with thriving in such a demanding environment. Many legal organizations are now providing training and resources relating to the building of their lawyers’ and allied professionals’ resilience. The next frontier is for legal organizations to invest significantly more resources and attention to the building of resilient teams. Here is the big picture: the markets for talent and clients have never been more global or transparent, resulting in dramatically increased competition. As technology like AI increasingly disrupts and replaces traditional service delivery, professionals will need to distinguish themselves by providing interdisciplinary and integrated legal and business solutions. The only way to do that in a dynamic, complex environment is in a team, and it had better be a resilient one.

In April 2018, as I closed out the Vegas Institute, I was simply blown away by the energy, the passion and the power of that event. I remember thinking at the time, “It just doesn’t get any better than this.” Well, I was wrong. Our 4th Annual CLOC Institute in Las Vegas last week was, as so many attendees pointed out, filled with an energy level and positivity that was off the charts. I returned home more energized and inspired than ever before!

In the past, I have written and posted my closing remarks from the CLOC Institutes, but this time, I will simply direct you to the video of my opening (too lazy to type it all up!). As you’ll see, we kicked things off with an inspiring welcome video featuring testimonials by GCs from some of the world’s leading companies. Each spoke on the positive impact of legal operations and of CLOC. And to think, just a few years ago, people didn’t even know what the term “legal ops” meant.

I’ve had a week to reflect upon the Institute and wanted to share some additional thoughts. First, I am so humbled to represent the CLOC community and this movement as your president. This year’s Institute, with over 2200 attendees, was the ultimate evidence of how far our once-small community has grown. Nowhere else will you find this many experts, drawn from all backgrounds, all perspectives, and all parts of the legal ecosystem, sharing their best ideas and practices, and collaborating on results.

So what’s next? As I mentioned in my opening, we’re more committed than ever to taking this community and movement forward. This year, we’re purpose driven by two major principles: 1. Focusing on the community and 2. Engaging across the ecosystem.

Focusing on the Community

First, we are returning the focus to what we believe makes this organization great — the community. The whole idea behind starting CLOC was to help Legal Ops professionals do their jobs better and to create and share best practices. We want to ensure we’re doing that by making it easier for you to interact, participate, and learn from each other. To support this principle, we’re launching a new member community platform that will allow us to create more subcommunities and topical discussions, to create more webinars and trainings, and work across the ecosystem to generate more relevant and useful content.

Engaging Across the Ecosystem (with a focus on Law Firms)

While there is more interest and belief than ever about legal operations from all the players in the ecosystem, there continues to be a significant divide in our perspectives and approaches. We believe that CLOC has a huge role to play in bridging these divides and driving real change in the industry. As such, we’re starting by actively focusing on getting law firms more involved with CLOC this year. In a couple of months, we will pilot a new membership type for law firm legal operations professionals. This will be separate from our existing in-house CLOC community, but will allow these law firm participants to network, share ideas, and actively communicate across the divide with each other and with in-house members. We foresee creating topical discussion forums like pricing, diversity and inclusion, knowledge management, and more, where individuals from both law firms and in house teams can collaborate and help each other. We believe that including the voice of the firms in our discussions is critical to better alignment and movement in our industry.

One of the concerns I expressed from the stage during my kick off at the Institute is whether or not law firms can “embrace the CLOC culture” which requires us to be courageous enough to be imperfect, to share openly, and to admit when we have no idea what we’re doing. We were afraid that we would launch this thing and no one would be willing to ask questions or contribute their experiences, learnings, or struggles. After all, law firms are used to being the expert on all things to their clients and have indicated to me in the past that they are uncomfortable admitting that they don’t have it all figured out yet. By the end of the three days, however, I feel very hopeful about what’s to come. I had so many meaningful conversations with law firm attendees who expressed excitement, initiative, and positivity about what we’ll be able to accomplish together. I feel like we’ve moved past the point of uncomfortable conversations to a new phase where we are ready to embrace the change, energy, and passion and where happily we find ourselves sharing the driver’s seat on this new adventure!

As I have said many times before, everything about legal operations is hard — every step of the way. We’ve come so far, but there is still far, far to go. This community we’ve created is full of passion and perseverance and when we have passion and perseverance, anything is possible. Just remember the quote I closed with: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, everyone would do it. The hard… is what makes it great.”

Thank you for making the 2019 Institute a success and for being such an integral part of this movement. I can’t wait to see where this rocketship goes next. See you next year!

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

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

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

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

Uniting a complex ecosystem

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

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

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

Making it work in the real world

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building a use cases cloud

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

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

Prepping for Legal 3.0

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

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

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

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

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

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

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

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

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.

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

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

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

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

See You in Vegas for the 2019 CLOC Institute

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

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

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

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

Questions? Email info@cloc.org.