It’s 2021, and AI is ready. Are you using it?

The last two years have been a doozy with an unprecedented curveball, within a tornado, within a hurricane for businesses. Survival depended on adapting to the new norms COVID presented, supply chain disruptions, regulatory changes (and then invalidations), and customers’ changing expectations. 

What’s in store for 2022? 2023? 2030? I have no idea, but as a co-founder and EVP of Evisort I’m going to prepare my business and team to be as agile and streamlined as possible, so we have the best chance of tackling any challenge that comes our way.  

Intelligence and adaptability are critical. Businesses will either be left behind by digital transformation or embrace it to keep their competitive advantage.

Business intelligence is critical to adaptability. Unfortunately, many businesses have a massive intelligence blind spot – their existing contracts. Existing contracts are the most important intelligence source in a business – contracts are data and data is the lifeline of a business.

The blind spot is getting bigger and feeding a long-term problem: when companies digitize their Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) processes for generating new contracts they replicate their existing workflows without fundamentally improving them. This means sub-standard terms, pricing, and other trends get replicated in every single new contract. Pouring salt in the wound, businesses waste time and money negotiating the same clauses over and over because they didn’t analyze their historical contracts and learn from past negotiations. 

Change is here and it’s due time that Legal, Legal Ops, and any team that works with contracts demand more from contract management technology.

Contracts are data. And because it’s 2021, your company has either started or has already transformed most of the business to be digital and data-driven. 

Except. For. Contracts. 

In-house legal departments have historically been viewed as a cost center and legal and contract management tech have lagged behind software for profit centers like sales or product. 

Not. Any. More.

Legal and Legal Ops should expect to survive and thrive on the data buried in their contracts – instead of resorting to one-off anecdotes. Contracting teams should have access to analytics and insights in real-time. It should be as simple as uploading contracts to the cloud and using out-of-the-box dashboards that instantly break down your contract components and allow you to filter and drill down into vital information business leaders need, such as: what percentage of our contracts have a termination for convenience and when do they renew? Which of our contracts have non-standard negotiated language we should be aware of? Can we put their logo on our website?

Even more importantly you should be able to easily show the value added by teams drafting and reviewing contracts by automatically measuring and reporting on backlog trends, aging contract drafts, and transaction cycle times.

We need a new standard. That standard is Contract Intelligence.

For too long, AI has been a buzzword in legal tech – or any tech company for that matter. You’d be fired from marketing at a contract management software company if it wasn’t on your website. Vendors are vague and oversell clients who buy platforms only to find that they had to train AI algorithms themselves with frustratingly low levels of success.

AI has not been well defined in this industry for a decade, so let me be very clear.

In 2021 you should be able to upload any document to your contract management system and automatically track clauses, dates, fields, and metadata that can be easily searched and visualized in seconds – without lifting a finger. Furthermore, you should be able to access and analyze all your contracts and data – be it third-party paper or terms unique to your business allowing you to optimize future negotiations for efficient execution – learning and improving from the data-point derived wisdom in your historical documents.

We all need to start demanding Contract Intelligence from our legal tech vendors. It has three critical capabilities:

• Intelligent Contract Lifecycle Management – streamlined, data-driven deal-making tools and workflow processes that make contract request, generation, redlining, and approval workflows transparent, efficient, and optimized for execution    
• AI-based Contract Analytics – answers to your most important contract questions and ability to visualize and report on vital contract info and key performance metrics without manual data entry, data migration, or IT involvement    
• Central and Secure Contract Repository – a single source of truth for all contracts that works with your existing systems, without migration or IT involvement

Contract Intelligence enables businesses to learn from the past to improve the future. Legal, Legal Ops, Sales, Procurement, Finance, and IT teams can now instantly turn contracts into searchable data, answer any question about existing contracts, and optimize new agreements for negotiation and execution so you can make better, faster, less risky deals.

This isn’t pie in the sky thinking.      

Businesses are transforming their contracting with AI today. When COVID-19 hit, NetApp, a provider of data management and solutions for the cloud, was challenged with hardware and supply bottlenecks. To respond to these unforeseen challenges, NetApp quickly needed to understand which customers would accept partial shipments and what recourse it had with key suppliers across most of its product and service lines across the globe. Agreements weren’t historically tagged with “partial delivery” terms and there were tens of thousands of contracts. Fortunately, NetApp transformed their contracting processes with AI and was able to search across all agreements to quickly locate specific provisions, enabling      them to invoice for partial shipments while maintaining customer satisfaction. Within a week, NetApp was able to run a search on partial shipments across their entire contract repository—cutting 24,000 contracts down to 600, with 90 different variations of partial shipment provisions.    

Okay, but what about creating and optimizing new contracts?       

McKinsey estimates that AI technologies could potentially deliver up to $1 trillion of additional value      annually for banks.^[1] Bank of New York Mellon, the bank of banks, uses AI to review new custodial agreements based on their internal rules, guidelines, and processes. They then use AI technology to automatically create customized initial contracts and digitally coordinate with the necessary internal stakeholders for approval of special terms. BNY Mellon then takes it to another level and uses AI to automatically flag non-standard language and alert the necessary legal team members to automate the decision-making process, allowing attorneys to focus on more strategic tasks. 

Now is the time to transform and gain a competitive advantage

Law is changing, capabilities are available today that no one could fathom even five years ago. Today it’s exciting to use these tools, but tomorrow, it will be negligent not to. You need to go beyond digitizing your contracts and processes, you need to datatize them.

^[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/ai-bank-of-the-future-can-banks-meet-the-ai-challenge#

May I ask, what have you actually built and what did you learn that might help us?

Thinking of innovation as only big tech-driven initiatives misses a critical element of the realities and effort required to produce innovative outcomes – controlled experimentation. Firms that can de-risk their innovation efforts while accelerating their progress gain a competitive advantage regardless of the ultimate commercial success.

Summary

This case study shares the story of Koenig, Oelsner, Taylor, Schoenfeld & Gaddis, PC (“KO”) and its efforts to test and build a new contract management service that would complement its legal work.  Their effort earned recognition from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium in 2020 when the firm was recognized for their Legal Innovation in Operations (LIO) submission. 

KO’s experience in prototyping and building contract management as a service offering holds instructive value for legal operations professionals as well as law firms. For in-house teams, the KO story offers insight into how to empower outside counsel to direct innovation efforts toward initiatives that matter most to their legal function’s business customers. For law firms, this story provides a case study on the steps that can be taken to position a firm’s innovation efforts for the maximum chances of commercial success. 

Dialogue questions

To spark business ideas and create meaningful yet de-risked progress towards innovation, in-house teams can use the following questions to guide a dialogue with their law firms on how to collaborate on and instigate experimentation:

1. What can we, as one of your many clients, do to help de-risk your attempts to build something new in terms of a service, product, or business?
2. Recognizing that “failure” is not commonly sought after or celebrated within the legal profession, what can we do together to begin shaping the narrative that experimentation is okay and should not just be tolerated, but actively sought?
3. How can we help you build something that serves many clients, not just us?
4. How are decisions made in the firm in terms of shifting from talking about doing something to actually doing something that could lead to innovation? Would you say this is an effective an efficient process? Why?
5. Would you be willing to partner with one or more of our other providers to build and test a new offering?

Narrative

KO’s contract management service was developed in response to insights formed in relation to KO’s two primary practice areas: corporate transactions and commercial transactions.

“Oftentimes on the commercial side, we never actually see the final version of the contract,” explained KO partner Ben Oelsner. “Additionally, we do a lot of M&A work on the sales side, so we help our clients get organized for the sale of their company. Buyers conduct due diligence on those companies, reviewing all their contracts, and we assist in that work. Frequently, the client is scrambling to get its contracts organized for the other side to review. We help clients with this task but we also try to help them get organized before they are involved in an M&A transaction.”

Oelsner had worked with a number of companies that employed in-house contract managers and understood their value to the contracting process. He saw the opportunity for the firm to offer contract management as a complimentary service to complete the scope of their offerings to clients. 

Development

Oelsner teamed up with industry advisor Bill Mooz, as well as Andrea Policky, a veteran in-house contract manager who KO hired to help lead this initiative. The three had discussions about what would be required for KO to actually offer a contract management service. Their discussions quickly led to planning, and before long, they started approaching KO’s existing clientele about their nascent contract management capabilities.

They spoke with clients about KO’s ability to come in, assess where the client was in their contracting process, help them figure out what they needed to do to improve that process either from a technology perspective or from the perspective of staffing, training, or process design.

The approach that KO took to developing this service is one that emphasized action over discussion and prototyping over planning.  In short, they experimented to learn rather than build first and hope things worked out. To do this, Policky went full time with KO, and Oelsner and Policky collaborated to develop proposals for clients on an ad-hoc basis. The thinking was “this is interesting to us. We think it will help our clients. We have the capability and a client that has requested our help. Let’s just go for it,” said Oelsner.  

Oelsner’s view of the initiative was that it was low risk. “The thing for me was, you can talk about this for a long time, but you have to start doing something. That’s really what I did – talk to the partners and say we’re going to do this. What’s the worst thing that happens if it doesn’t work? It fades away. We’re in a pretty good position to try this. There’s not a lot of downside if it doesn’t end up working.”

Their focus was simply creating and testing out a prototype – not going into full bore development and implementation. Because of this approach, the contract management prototype did not require a fundamental permanent change to the operating model of the firm, nor did it require a significant investment of cash. 

Learnings from Commercialization

Once they had a prototype, KO began stress testing it with eight clients. They were learning and refining while generating actual revenue. In the process of doing this, KO developed several key learnings about their service.

1. The sales cycle was long

The sales cycle for getting people to commit to a contract management service provided by a law firm was long. “There were several clients that thought it was an amazing idea but getting them to actually commit to hiring me to do those services for them, it was a little bit more of a challenge,” explained Policky, “so the sales cycle was just longer than we had anticipated it was going to be.”

2. The positioning of their offering within the market was suboptimal

KO defined a profile for their target customer. “We felt like startups weren’t going to be the right type of clients for this initially because they’re not ready yet,” explained Oelsner. “You could tell them about this service, but they’re not going to need somebody for that work because they don’t really have a lot of contracts or deal flow. The companies who had gone through a round or two of financing, depending on where they were in selling their products, were likely a better target for our service because they would have started to feel the pain from a lack of contracts management.”

Targeting later stage companies came with several consequences. First, later stage companies are more likely to get acquired, which runs the risk of disrupting the type of long-term business relationships that KO was hoping to establish. Second, later stage companies have the resources to hire in-house contract talent, which placed a greater need for KO to articulate why their offering would be superior to hiring someone in-house.

3. The pricing was a sticking point

KO provided clients with an initial assessment on a fixed fee basis. After the assessment, everything was done on an hourly basis, as is conventional for law firms. “It was harder for companies to find the funds to support an undefined amount” explained Policky. “If it wasn’t on an hourly billable rate and instead on a fixed fee basis, I think that would have been easier for clients to swallow”

In general, the monthly price came out to around $5,000. “The key for the service,” Oelsner explained, “was making sure that they understood exactly what we were going to do for that amount because that fee did not include the legal services such as the creation or negotiation of the contract.”

The benefit of prototyping and experimenting is that it gave KO a way to measure the upside and downside of continuing the development of this solution. Ultimately and based mostly on the reasons above, KO chose not to mature the contract management service beyond the prototyping phase. Policky and KO parted on excellent terms, and Policky returned to doing legal operations in-house. However, Policky feels that her time spent working inside a law firm has enriched her perspective and capabilities as an in-house legal operations professional. “Being part of building something like that at KO was incredible. I learned so much. And now, I have that much more depth to my experience because I now have an appreciation and understanding for both sides of the coin.”

Most of KO’s investment in prototyping the contract management service was recuperated by the revenue that it generated. In other words, it was truly low risk. The main benefit of the experience is that it generated many insights and lessons learned that will pay forward for other services the firm may decide to prototype and test. As Oelsner predicted, the downside risk was very limited, and he is happy to have gained this valuable experience.  

Future Options

Oelsner still believes that there is a market for an outside contract management service, but that “it has to be a separate business. It really shouldn’t be the province of a law firm to do this because of the nature of what businesses do.” 

In other words, KO designed a service but stopped short of actually designing a business around that service. If they had taken those next steps, here’s what it might have looked like.

• They might have developed a B2B marketing competency to educate earlier stage companies about the value of contract management to expand the top of their funnel pipeline.
• They might have achieved greater standardization in the scope of their service, enabling them to design fixed and transparent pricing.
• They might have established a sales team to help usher prospective clients across the finish line in terms of committing to their service.

Each of these initiatives would consist of a series of experiments, and each of those experiments would require time and attention. KO implicitly recognized that these types of experiments would be beyond its operational comfort zone.  

CONCLUSION

The lesson in this case study for firms is that there is a virtue in courageous experimentation. Even experiments that do not commercially succeed still generate valuable learnings, and the risk of downside, if planned well and vetted appropriately, can be minimized. For in-house teams, this is important to consider and discuss with your current law firms. Failing is likely viewed as a risk to the firm and perhaps their relationship with their client. By recognizing the merits and positive outcomes of experimentation, in-house teams can prompt more action and behaviors that drive towards innovative outcomes.

May I ask, would you call your firm a ‘learning organization’?

What a law firm actively seeks to learn as an organization and culture, beyond legal knowledge and expertise, is a signal to in-house teams of its true ability to help their client solve real human challenges – whether legal, business, or administrative.

Summary

This LIO case study shares the story of Kelley Drye and its commitment to learn and apply new thinking and execution methods geared towards addressing unmet needs of their clients.  The firm is building a methodical innovation capability that is informed by client conversations that are unconventional for law firms.  This effort earned recognition from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium in 2020 when Kelley Drye was recognized for their Legal Innovation in Operations (LIO) submission. 

In 2020, Kelley Drye launched a business solution for one of its clients.  The story of how Kelley Drye developed this offering and where it will take them holds instructive value for law firms seeking to create a culture of innovation as well as for corporate counsel trying to promote value-driven innovation in their outside counsel relationships. Their story provides insights into meaningful innovation efforts that directly benefit the client and can be markers for in-house counsel to seek out when analyzing their legal service provider’s value-generating capabilities.

 These include assessing whether their law firm:

1. has designed a structure and culture of problem solving into their compensation model (e.g., innovation hours’ credit)
2. makes cash investments to produce bespoke innovations for their clients
3. directly involves the client in defining, creating and integrating client business solutions
4. has developed and socialized a framework to evaluate, prioritize and execute client solutions

Encouraging your law firm to make similar investments and change their perspective on how firms and clients should interact requires the in-house team to not just sit back and wait for the firm to act. Clients have a distinct role to play. It begins with having a different type of conversation than perhaps the legal team is used to.

Dialogue questions

To prompt a helpful dialogue on the topic of being a learning organization, these model questions are recommended for raising the topic in a polite and non-threatening manner:

1. How does your firm utilize not just legal talent, but its business talent as well, to learn about us and find ways to generate new types of measurable value?
2. What type of professional development – formal or informal – is your firm driving that helps your people become more business aware and empathetic to their clients?
3. What would you suggest is the most effective way for your clients to engage you in a conversation about their business and professional challenges and goals?
4. Do your partners actively and openly embrace having business talent from the firm directly engage with your clients? If so, what have you learned from this that might be valuable to us? If not, how can we help you start doing this?
5. What does the concept of “innovation” mean for the firm and what do you consider its most critical ingredients?

Narrative

More and more corporate law departments look to their service providers to do more than provide expert legal advice. Clients expect their investments in these partnerships to add measurable value to solving their business problems, not just legal problems. For the traditional law firm model, this can be challenging and their efforts to meet this client desire can result in titles, committees and efforts cloaked under the “innovation” moniker.

Kelley Drye has taken a similar yet fundamentally more meaningful path. They didn’t want to just say they were innovative; they wanted to demonstrate it through client outcomes and a clear commitment inside the firm to learning how to increase the likelihood of generating innovative outcomes. They built a methodical innovation capability that is informed by client conversations that are non-traditional for law firms

Background

In 2018 Kelley Drye established KD Skunkworks, an internal working group focused on innovation.  Based on its exposure to the concept of design thinking, in June 2019 KD Skunkworks conducted empathy interviews with five different clients seeking to identify unmet human needs of the actual individuals within the in-house team. The goal of each interview was to identify opportunities to potentially create client value in ways not just inclusive of legal outcomes.  Those conversations generated five innovation ideas that were “pitched” in a firm Shark Tank-style competition. The winning pitch was to be funded by the firm and led to an organized effort to execute on it.

One of those ideas related to the firm client, META Advisors, whose Chief Compliance Officer Dana Kane participated in an empathy interview.  META specializes in post-confirmation administration of bankruptcy estates under plans of liquidation, plans of reorganization and out-of-court workouts. Large commercial bankruptcies can involve claims from untold numbers of creditors.  For each claim, various data points must be updated and cross-referenced, including the overall status, amount, priority level and documentation of the claim. META must also communicate information (including personally identifiable information) to and from creditors, outside counsel, financial advisors, and others.

The key insight that emerged from Dana’s interview was the sense of personal frustration she felt from hours spent reconciling data from different spreadsheets. This was not legal work; it was administrative and costly. A team from Kelley Drye collaborated with Dana to generate ideas on how automation might improve META’s workflow and create some operating efficiency.  This opportunity was chosen as the winning pitch to be executed and funded by the firm.  

Kelley Drye engaged a project manager and technology developer to bring this idea to reality.  After analyzing the existing process, Kelley Drye was able to automate key components of the workflow to reduce error rates, decrease cycle time, and minimize drudgery in the process and in Kane’s daily life. Now, META’s claimants and creditors are able to track the status of claims in real-time.  META is in their second year of using the solution, and recently, other bankruptcy trustees have begun to approach Kelley Drye about adopting the same solution.

Committing to Learn

When KD Skunkworks was started in 2018, Judi Flournoy, Kelley Drye’s Chief Information Officer, approached the firm’s managing partner to ask if the firm would support the idea of giving attorneys billing credit to spend time thinking about solving problems using technology.  He said yes, and that decision has provided Kelley Drye’s lawyers with a meaningful incentive to participate in the innovation-seeking process, all without necessitating any change to accounting systems or the fundamental operating model of the firm.

Since then, KD Skunkworks has matured into a more formal structure within the firm, and in the process taken on a different character.  Initially, KD Skunkworks was an informal working group consisting of technology enthusiasts.  Today it has evolved into the Client Services and Innovation Committee (CSIC).  This is an important milestone on Kelley Drye’s strategy roadmap because it defined a formal protocol for advancing learning and experimentation throughout the firm.  “I really do see a big difference because we have this very nice formal partner engagement with the CSIC at the highest levels of the firm,” explained Guy Wiggins, Kelley Drye’s director of practice management. Kelley Drye’s lawyers and professional staff now have a forum in which they can communicate their ideas and insights for how to make the firm more innovative and competitive, and the firm has a mechanism for evaluating, prioritizing, and executing such ideas.

The other significant change that has taken place is that the CSIC is not limited to technology enthusiasts.  “I don’t have any math or science background,” explained CSIC Chairman Bob LeHane. “In fact, I went to law school so I wouldn’t have to take statistics.” Jokes aside, LeHane takes the responsibility seriously, acknowledging that he faced a significant learning curve in his new role.  But the fact that the committee dedicated to innovation is led by someone that does not have a background in STEM is emblematic of a broader and very positive trend at Kelley Drye, which is that innovation is no longer the exclusive province of technologists.  Innovation is derived from an exploration about problem-solving, and diverse voices need to be present in that conversation from clients to legal practitioners and business professionals.

“Kelley Drye has been around for a very, very long time,” Flournoy explained. “It’s an old New York firm. I would go so far as to characterize all of the innovation-related efforts up to probably the last five years being purely driven by someone like me,” referring to her background in information technology. “Now, what’s happening and what needs to continue to happen is, those changes are being driven by others, which is really important to not only the culture of the firm but its survivability in a very competitive market.”

Focusing on Humans

An area that Kelley Drye has steadily been exploring is design thinking.  Design thinking encourages organizations to focus on the actual people for whom they’re providing services or products.  When you sit down to create a solution for a client’s business challenge, the first question should always be: what’s the human need behind the business challenge?

“What we’ve heard from clients over the last few years,” explained Flournoy, ”is that they don’t care about what we’re doing with innovation, what they care about is its impact to them personally, and how we can make things easier for them, more cost-effective, help them solve a business problem. That’s what they care about.”

Design thinking is a set of principles and processes that facilitates Kelley Drye in identifying, understanding, prioritizing, and ultimately fulfilling the needs of their clients.  “The design thinking methodology for us was instrumental in helping us get to what we wanted to focus on and then how to go about it,” said Flournoy. “The empathy interview component of design thinking was really important, particularly around META. It asks questions like ‘what frustrates you, and how might we eliminate that?’”

While design thinking is ultimately about identifying potential solutions, special emphasis is given to properly defining problems and their human roots.  To this end, the design process requires developing a human-centric understanding of stakeholders, which often necessitates asking questions about emotions, contexts, and processes.  Some lawyers might feel uncomfortable asking questions like these because:

• they are outside the scope of traditional legal conversations, or

• they perceive that it would violate some norm of privacy, or

• they are reluctant to ask questions they think could be perceived by the client as not knowing how to do their job or understanding the client’s needs.

Part of what makes Kelley Drye distinctive is that they are comfortable with and even excited about engaging in conversations like these with clients.  

CONCLUSION

Kelley Drye is evolving the scope of their services, and it’s not an accident.  They have become a “learning organization” that seeks to complement its legal expertise and brand with a distinctive problem-finding and solving capability. This is the logical consequence of specific decisions that were undertaken to unlock the potential of everyone at the firm, namely:

1. Creating a forum for submitting, evaluating, and executing innovation ideas

2. Providing a financial incentive for lawyers to participate in innovation projects

3. Intentionally pursuing ‘out of the box’ conversations with clients

Law firms that want to promote a culture of innovation can learn a valuable lesson from Kelley Drye.  The mere fact that an idea is approved by a committee does not mean that it will be successful in practice.  Some ideas will succeed, and some will fail.  But by establishing a protocol for experimenting with new ideas, a set of principles for first deciding which experiments should be run, and an organizational memory for studying the outcome of each experiment, Kelley Drye is maximizing their chances of discovering commercially successful innovations.

May I ask, how you incentivize your law firm workforce?

Thinking of pricing as only a financial exercise grossly undervalues the power it has to fundamentally shift the behavior of people of a legal team – both in-house and law firms.

Summary

This LIO case study shares the story of Husch Blackwell and its commitment to reengineer its compensation and incentive model. Over the last several years Husch Blackwell completed an overhaul of the incentive structure in their compensation plan. The novelty of this new incentive structure went on to earn recognition from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium in 2020 when Husch Blackwell was recognized for their Legal Innovation in Operations submission.

Husch’s new incentive structure enables them to price engagements in ways that most firms simply cannot match – not just in terms of the financial components but more so on their approach to drive behaviors directly linked to the client’s personal and business objectives. This has made Husch Blackwell more competitive in the market. Their story offers a valuable lesson for in-house teams as it demonstrates the potential impact that incentive design can have on the success of engagements with outside counsel.

Dialogue questions

To help promote healthy communications around incentives, these model questions are recommended for raising the topic in a polite and non-threatening manner:

1. How does your firm motivate lawyers to work efficiently, identify and work to solve client business problems, and achieve desired legal outcomes?
2. What do you need from us, your client, to help you start, manage, or improve your ability to align the personal incentives of your legal workforce with our business objectives?
3. How are members of your client teams measured on discrete client engagements? Are all matters and engagements treated equally?
4. What levers or options does your firm use to create incentives for all members of a legal matter?
5. Are there incentives you believe would improve our relationship and motivate your people to help us achieve business objectives and legal outcomes?

Narrative

“Our national coordinating counsel team, the Innovāt Alliance, is built around a business model designed to fully align incentives and purpose with our clients. Once we determine the business outcomes our client is trying to achieve, what our role might be in driving those, we then configure the service model and fee arrangement around those desired outcomes,” J.Y Miller, Husch Blackwell Partner.

If you work in the legal department, chances are you don’t have many conversations with outside counsel about how they incentivize their workforce. But perhaps you should.

There can be a sense of taboo around discussing incentives between a client and firm. Clients can make the mistake of thinking that asking about their firms’ incentive structure will offend some norm of privacy. Firm lawyers can make the mistake of thinking that clients would find their firm’s incentive structures to be boring or irrelevant. As a result, the topic is most often left unaddressed, leaving critical and measurable value untapped.

Discussing incentives can be very illuminating. In the worst-case scenario, the firm and client will learn where incentives are not aligned. In the best-case scenario, they’ll discover opportunities to better align incentives, and that is the foundation of a strong business partnership.

A great example of how Husch’s new incentive structure makes them more competitive in the market is their work for SPX Corporation. SPX has exposure to asbestos related litigation. In 2019, SPX appointed Husch as its National Coordinating Counsel (NCC) to drive one of its major portfolios of asbestos litigation. Husch works almost daily with Brenda Godfrey, Assistant General Counsel, Litigation & Claims, of SPX to develop strategic plans, evaluate risk, and manage a number of local counsel across the United States who handle the day-to-day litigation in individual cases. 

A core feature of the engagement is that Husch was contracted to reduce SPX’s defense spend by at least 20% relative to the 12-month period before the engagement through the use of a creative fixed fee arrangement. That commitment is counterbalanced by a set of incentives offered by SPX for Husch to achieve targets within the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter to SPX, namely, reductions in open claim inventory and indemnity spend. If Husch achieves the target KPIs, then there are paid bonuses.

What makes this model appealing for the client is that it shifts the risk of poor performance from the client to the firm. For most firms, they would consider this risk too great. But Husch was able to accept the risk – in large part due to their incentive structure and the confidence they had in their award-winning business model.

Client KPIs, like those embraced by SPX such as reduction of open claim inventory and indemnity spend, are quantitative measurements. Husch has essentially incorporated these measurements into the incentive structure of their compensation plan. In short, Husch can confidently undertake engagements on terms that are very client friendly because Husch’s attorneys aren’t incentivized based on the number of hours they bill but rather based on their contributions to achieving a client’s desired outcomes, among other factors. Similarly, clients like SPX can be confident that their counsel are focused on outcomes.  As Brenda Godfrey explained, “With Husch, I can direct my attention to the goals we’re trying to accomplish without having to require case budgets or enforce cost controls.”

Husch has now completed its second year as NCC for SPX for this particular portfolio, and the results of the engagement speak to the effectiveness of the model as the performance is judged against the benchmark period.

Long-term Investments

The process of winning this relationship with SPX took 11 months from beginning to end, but the story of how Husch came to this position started much earlier. The foundational work that positioned Husch to win this relationship was five or six years in the making.

In 2015, Husch started another major NCC engagement for a different company, and the magnitude of that task drove them to look for new solutions. “We started discussing the approach to managing these large portfolios and what technologies we had in place,” explained J.Y. Miller. “We got our operations team involved in a number of ways, including looking at our processes and trying to clean them up, trying to be more businesslike. We brought in our IT professionals and outside technology partners who worked with us to design technology solutions that would underpin and drive those efficiencies.”

A great illustration of this drive toward efficiency is the process of checking conflicts. The first time Husch brought on a major portfolio, the conflicts check took them 4 months. The second time took them 4 days due to the incorporation of Robotic Process Automation designed by Husch IT professionals.

“We know some of our innovation efforts are going to require investment beyond a 12-month or 24-month time horizon,” explained Kevin Bielawski, Director of Legal Operations for Husch Blackwell. “Those investments are worth it in the long run. They’re going to make our client service and client experience better, plus put us in a position of competitive advantage so that our partners like J.Y. can go out and tout our capabilities in a very easy way.”

Thoughtfully Designed Incentives

Husch’s previous CEO, Greg Smith, pushed the partners to look long term and challenge themselves to break free from the status quo. “We convened a large, diverse working group to analyze the most successful teams in our firm and really study what drove their success. Working with consultants, we also evaluated lessons from successful teams in other industries. We brought all this information together, and, as a result, we completely revised our partner evaluation and compensation system to focus on incentivizing the positive behaviors that lead to client success. This model now also includes our associates,” Bielawski explained.

He further stated, “We spent a lot of time developing metrics around positive behaviors because we know and recognize that if we drive those positive behaviors, we will drive success long-term for our clients and firm.”

Husch made several key changes to their incentive structure.

• They no longer offer bonuses for simply hitting billable hour targets. They have expectations and targets, but they don’t want attorneys to focus on billing hours. Rather, they want them to focus on contributions that lead to client success (such as the KPIs measured in Husch’s NCC relationship with SPX) so they remade their entire system around that principle.

• They eliminated origination credit. “Origination can create a lot of negative behavior,” Miller explained, “and it was behavior that we didn’t think served our clients or served our people, so we eliminated that from our model.”

• They now incentivize teamwork and collaboration, which is measured in part by proliferation or true collaboration among firm lawyers. “One of the goals that we have is to earn trust so we can bring in other partners to the client relationship and expand it,” said Miller.

• They also incentivize client service, innovation, and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

“A true commitment to core values requires you to incentivize those values in your compensation system. If it is truly important to you, you must make it the centerpiece of how you reward your people. That’s what we’ve done at Husch,” Miller declared with an earned measure of pride.

Challenges

Change is always hard, and this was no exception. Key challenges in adopting the new incentive structure included designing, communicating, and integrating the new metrics into the firm’s operating model and culture. For the SPX engagement, it also required refining relationships and expectations of engaging local counsel.

“It took a little time for folks to get their arms around some of the newer metrics,” Bielawski remarked. “It was new, and so that newness took some adjustments and getting used to.”

“There’s always some level of resistance to every change,” Miller said, “especially in a law firm. One thing that we’ve learned in our firm is that if we take the time to really do our due diligence and communicate effectively, then our partners are willing to take those leaps of faith. We do our research, present it to our partners, give them time to think and respond, iterate based on their feedback and then come back at it again in a revised version. By earning our partners’ trust, we are permitted to vault our firm forward in new ways.”

CONCLUSION

Husch Blackwell made robust changes to the core operating model of their firm. They took a studied approach, hired outside experts, and adopted a long-term mentality. They developed a consensus among their partnership to make a bold change that came with real risks. The result is that they are now reaping real rewards in the form of enhanced competitive advantage in the market, increased matter flow, and stronger client relationships.

Advice on building an organization that can adapt to new challenges

Two popular sayings in the legal world are 1) people, process, technology, and data are what make a firm unique, and 2) change is constant. So how do those two elements work together? How can you ensure that you have the right people, processes, technology, and data for today’s constantly changing world?

Shearman & Sterling, a 150-year-old law firm, recently asked themselves this question as they undertook a massive data analytics project, as shared in a recent Ask the Experts session for CLOC. The firm had one billion documents, only 4% of which were in their document management system (DMS), that they needed to quickly get into ship shape to meet new compliance standards. By the end of the 18-month project, not only were all documents in an easily searchable cloud repository, but the firm was also able to roll out features that are beneficial to the client like partner dashboards, more accurate forecasting, and revenue models for value-based pricing.

Here’s a look at their pillars of people, process, technology, and data, that empowered their success as a data-driven firm.

People

“The people aspect cannot be underestimated,” said Meredith Williams-Range, Chief Knowledge and Client Value Officer at Shearman & Sterling. “You have to bring your people along in your [change] journey. Your processes won’t matter. People are your culture and culture will trump your strategy any day of the week.” In the Shearman & Sterling’s case, that meant truly making the initiative firm-wide, as opposed to the responsibility of a certain team, with top-down support from the C-level executives.

Part of the success of the people aspect can be attributed to hiring and involving the right people. Lawrence Baxter, Shearman & Sterling’s Chief Technology Officer, touts the strategy of balancing IQ, EQ, and AQ — that is, intelligence, emotional intelligence, and adaptability — in new hires. (A former marketing executive, he has seen his share of companies go under because they are unable to adapt). He also likes to create teams with equal proportions of, 1) veterans with strong institutional knowledge, 2) tenured employees who are willing to learn new skills, and 3) newer employees, especially those from other industries, who can bring in fresh new ideas.

The success of the project also depended on a fundamental understanding that this effort was not about replacing people with machines. As Williams-Range explained, “It’s simply about adapting the processes that we have and enhancing those processes because the amount of information and the amount of data coming at us as lawyers is growing each day. The technology holds the hand of the lawyer.”

Process

In terms of process, Williams-Range believes there’s no one right place to start — the important thing is to simply start. For Shearman & Sterling, the beginning point was understanding clients and regulations at a global scale. Baxter also recommended asking clients what’s working and what isn’t, and using those answers to drive internal change, since what the client wants carries weight. Of course, unforeseen circumstances can also drive change — Baxter said he has seen years of innovation in the past few months.

The team agreed there are no shortcuts when it comes to process improvement. As Glenn LaForce, Global Director of Knowledge & Research at Shearman & Sterling put it, “You can’t shortchange the pre-work that goes into getting to what we call the sexy stuff, all the cool analytics projects. You have to go through, you have to look at your data and be sure it’s clean and in order, make sure you have the right governance behind it and make sure you have the right policies behind it, and that takes time.”

A whole-firm initiative also meant involving the whole firm. The company created a multidisciplinary data steering committee to get an understanding of how each part of the organization was using data and the downstream effects of making any changes. How will a change to a process in HR affect the DMS in eDiscovery? How should workflows be adjusted for the unique needs of finance and the research team? How do you ensure there’s an audit trail?

For Jeff Saper, Global Director, Enterprise Architecture & Delivery Services at Shearman & Sterling, a lot of the process work comes down to reducing complexity. “We create complex environments and at the end of the day, they need to be simplified,” he said. However, this process of simplifying and streamlining cannot compromise compliance, regulatory processes, or confidence in your work.

Saper and LaForce also stressed that failure is an important part of the process and should not be viewed as a negative — if it happens within a development environment. Finding processes that do not deliver value is just as important as finding ones that do. The important thing, they agree, is learning how to adapt and move forward.

Technology and Data

Again, when evaluating which technology to use, the question ultimately comes back to what benefit will the client receive. For example, Shearman & Sterling decided to move their DMS to the cloud. However, as Saper pointed out, “It’s not about cloud. It’s the agility of what we can do to make things work faster or leaner and hopefully have a better return for our firm.” People wanted to be able to access data anywhere, on any device — a desire that was certainly fast-tracked by the COVID-19 pandemic — and the cloud enabled that.

Similarly, the firm found success in using established technology in new and different ways. For example, the firm used DISCO eDiscovery to sort through and classify emails. Using the platform’s artificial intelligence capabilities, the team was able to classify some 30 million emails in 12 days.

The team developed a clear strategy around who they would partner with to find the right technology. “We’re never going to be a firm that builds technology,” said Williams-Range. “We have talented lawyers and that’s our sweet spot, but we need to provide the right technology and the right system to our people to be as efficient as possible to deliver the best value to our clients. What we do is we look for those partnerships that are going to really work with us.” 

As someone who spent 16 years on the technology vendor side and has seen a lot of finger-pointing, LaForce emphasized the importance of looking for partners as invested in the success of the project as the internal team is, who have governance procedures and skin in the game. “Otherwise, they’re just selling us a product,” he said.

Baxter also noted that the legal landscape has become complicated. A service provider you are in a joint partnership with on one proposal could be a competitor pitching against you in another matter. Cultivating a friendly relationship throughout these complicated dynamics is an art form that will serve law firms well.

Parting Words of Advice

Ultimately, the work of digital transformation is never done, but with the right people, processes, technology, and data in place, the Shearman & Sterling team feel confident they can tackle new challenges that come their way. Their advice to others looking to make the leap? “Just start somewhere,” said Williams-Range. “It can be overwhelming, but just start.”

“Change is not the devil,” added Saper. “It’s ok to continue on a journey as long as you do it safely and securely within compliance. We’re in a different world and law firms have to adjust to it.”

The legal field’s talent shortage is expected to intensify as law firms and legal departments pivot from adjusting to challenges brought on by the pandemic and changing the way they operate and deliver legal services to planning for long-term growth, including team expansion. 

With hiring returning to or even exceeding pre-pandemic levels, it’s important that legal leaders re-examine their recruiting and retention strategies, including benefits and compensation packages and remote work arrangements, to remain competitive. According to recent Robert Half research:

• 34% of employees currently working remotely said they won’t stay with companies that don’t allow remote work
• 75% of workers want to work remotely at least part of the time
• 66% of companies will offer flexible scheduling after pandemic restrictions are universally lifted
• 78% of hiring managers said they are open to recruiting outside their geographical area

What other factors should managers take into consideration when planning to hire? Here are several key insights into current trends:  

Pandemic realities boost demand for practice area, legal operations expertise

One of the greatest challenges is the lack of available talent as law firms and legal departments directly compete for skilled legal professionals. Midlevel lawyers and paralegals with three-plus years’ experience are especially in strong demand. 

As companies adopt measures to minimize risk and ensure business continuity, they seek advice from in-house legal teams regarding contractual agreements, corporate transactions, mergers and acquisitions, and compliance. The need for legal services is increasing in labor and employment law, insurance defense, healthcare, eDiscovery, and data privacy and security.

The pandemic spurred a critical and expanded partnership between general counsel and legal operations managers. Tasked with optimizing legal resources to increase productivity and revenues while mitigating risks and lowering costs, legal operations professionals play an important role in helping in-house legal teams strategically focus on the business of law. Legal operations managers, typically non-lawyers, with specialized knowledge (e.g., expertise with project management, information governance and financial management practices) are sought by hiring managers and the need for skilled legal professionals should remain acute in the months ahead.

Competitive salaries and perks: Essential to attracting top talent

In today’s candidate-driven market, it’s not surprising that salaries continue to rise for most positions. Job seekers with sought-after skill sets and practice area expertise know what salaries they can command – and aren’t afraid to ask or negotiate for them. Many are receiving signing bonuses and counteroffers. Hiring managers can ensure they are offering competitive compensation by consulting industry resources.

Here are average starting salaries at the national level for several in-house roles. The salaries are from the 2022 Salary Guide from Robert Half, which contains average starting salaries for nearly 50 positions in the legal field.

The salaries are listed by percentile: 50^th percentile for candidates with average experience and most of the necessary skills; 75^th percentile for candidates with above-average experience and all the needed skills. Bonuses, benefits and other forms of compensation as well as practice area expertise, special skills and certifications are not taken into account. Hiring managers can use the Robert Half 2022 Salary Calculator to benchmark average salaries locally.   

In addition to competitive salaries, job seekers evaluate the perks an organization offers as a way of gauging company culture. Increasingly, benefits such as flextime, remote work, health insurance, retirement savings plans, paid parental leave, and wellness programs can significantly impact a company’s ability to attract and retain top talent.

Other important trends to know in today’s hiring environment

1. Digital skills are essential

The pandemic transformed the legal landscape, with depositions and hearings continuing to be held virtually. However, the need for legal professionals to be tech savvy long predates the pandemic, and job candidates should demonstrate proficiency in the latest digital tools and industry software, such as litigation and practice management. The most sought-after legal professionals will also have ideas on how to leverage technology to improve client services.

Digital expertise is a priority as legal leaders focus on freeing up lawyers to concentrate on legal work. Strategic deployment of tech solutions is a fundamental and integral factor in effective legal operations practices. 

2. Legal teams expand in-house skills with contract professionals 

To meet rising workloads, legal departments may need to hire on a contract basis – legal professionals who can fill gaps and make immediate contributions and specialists who can offer expertise unavailable in-house. 

3. Tech savvy legal support staff in demand

Midlevel paralegals and legal assistants who can conduct case research, manage online calendars, draft legal documents and assist multiple attorneys are highly marketable. These professionals also are needed to assist with video meetings and virtual depositions and court hearings.

4. Growing emphasis on strong interpersonal competencies

Beyond legal experience and knowledge, interpersonal skills are more important than ever. Legal hiring managers are seeking candidates who possess critical capabilities, including:

Increasingly, a key attribute for professionals in any legal role is adaptability. The legal field has gone through profound changes over the past two years, and 2022 could be just as unpredictable. Prepare for hiring by understanding the trends that will significantly impact the legal job market. Doing so now will allow you to fortify your in-house teams and ensure the success of your organization.

Jamy Sullivan is executive director of the legal practice at Robert Half, a premier provider of talent and consulting solutions for a wide range of initiatives in the legal field, including compliance, contract management, data privacy, litigation support and more. Visit RobertHalf.com.

The pandemic has shifted the ground under our feet. It has disrupted not just our industry, but all industries. And it is not just the pandemic; other tectonic shifts have left our world fundamentally changed.

There has been a global reckoning on racial and social justice which can no longer be ignored. The acceleration of climate change effects has seen Environmental, Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) rise to a top investor and corporate priority. And privacy and cybersecurity have become the new imperatives to inspiring trust with customers and employees.

The picture is clear: We are living through a time of unprecedented change. And it is only human nature to be anxious when things change that much, that fast.  But remember: Legal operations has always been about change. As a community, we embrace disruption and turn it into opportunity. We do not need to fear this moment. We need to embrace it, to realize its incredible potential for positive transformation.

We are already living through some amazing shifts in our industry, our culture, our world. Suddenly, nothing seems out of reach. For so long, our industry clung to the past. This wave of disruption has swept away much of that resistance. And we meet this moment with more power and influence than ever. As a legal operations community, we have never had more of a voice. We have gone from playing at the margins of the industry to being true stakeholders.

We stand at a crossroads. For years, the way forward was blocked. Now, at long last, the road ahead is open. So where do we go now? As a legal operations community, what is the future we want for our industry?

For me, there are a few big areas where I want to see us focus. I can sum these up in three words: Ecosystem, Technology, and Humanity.

Ecosystem: We need to break down the silos that separate us

I believe it is time to get serious about connecting our fractured legal landscape.

Think about how far we have come in legal operations. In just a few years, we have made huge strides in modernizing and updating our mindset, approach, and practices. We are smarter and more effective in so, so many ways. And legal operations teams are not the only ones who have improved. Law firms, law schools, new types of service providers, have all invested heavily to add capabilities and new skills.

But here is the problem: Everyone is working on their own backyard, their own organization.

We have really strengthened and improved the nodes. No one is really working to connect all those nodes into a coherent, rational system. We are not thinking holistically or trying to solve problems collectively. Even the term “ecosystem” is misleading. The reality is that our industry often does not feel or behave like a real ecosystem. We are more defined by our disconnection than by our connection.

To bring in the next big wave of innovation and growth in Legal, we need to step out of our backyards and engage with the entire landscape. This means bridging huge gaps of culture, understanding, and practice with law firms, technology providers, and all the other parts of our industry.

This will not be easy! But it will be worth our time and investment. By forging stronger and more rational connections across the ecosystem, I believe we can bring new speed and value to our industry.

Technology: We need more connected and usable solutions

We need a fundamental shift in how we consider, adopt, and leverage technology. Not that long ago, we lacked basic technology capabilities and solutions. No more. Now, there are too many. And they rarely seem to work together.

The result? When it comes to legal tech these days, anything is possible… but nothing is easy. The capabilities are all there, but what is the actual experience of the human beings at the center of it all? Are they adopting it, are they using it? Do they have a unified view of the data?

We need platform solutions that give us new insight and operationalize our manual and lower-value tasks. Most critically of all, we need standardization, simplification, and seamless integration.

We have a big role to play here! We need to partner with technology providers and integrators to understand our needs, and to think holistically to create more user-centered, intuitive, solutions that drive business outcomes. And we need to provide clear common standards and expectations that focus on ease of use and unification.

If we fail to address this, the problem will only become even more daunting. It is time to push for and demand more elevated and holistic technology.

Humanity: We need to get better at supporting and serving our people

Finally: I want to talk about how we bring more humanity, inclusiveness, and purpose to our industry.

As a community, we have always seen, and addressed, some things clearly. We are operations people; we all understand the value of process, organization, technology, use of data and so on. And we are really good at taking on these things and finding ways to make them work better.

But what have we not addressed? We have innovated a lot of creative, smart things to help employees be more productive. What have we done to make sure they are satisfied, in balance, and aligned to the values of the organization? Far less.

Today, employees have different expectations and demands. They want to work for an organization that feels purpose-driven. To feel that their employer is committed to things that they believe in, to feel supported and heard. Employees are rising up to apply positive pressure to an industry that has let them down in some vital areas. From our dismal mental health record to slow progress on diversity and inclusion, they are no longer satisfied with empty promises.

We need to stop looking at our employees through a “manage and control” lens and embrace a new relationship. We need to listen and engage, understand and empower. This is new territory for many of us so you can be sure there will be some mistakes along the way. There are many pieces to this, but to me, it is ultimately about culture. We have to invest in defining and strengthening the culture within our teams and organizations.

This is not easy or obvious. But if we in CLOC bring the same level of creativity and focus to this new challenge as we have to the other parts of our mission, we can make a real difference in people’s lives.

Conclusion: The future is now

 For all the pain and hardship it has introduced, the pandemic has left us all with something priceless. It has reminded us that the most important things in our lives are the ties we share. Family, friends… and this community. Without you, our passionate and engaged members, this organization would be nothing.

You know, we used to talk about the future as if it were this abstract concept over a far horizon. No more. The future is now. It is happening all around us. We see it in the huge shifts across our industry and our world today.

And we have the voice, the power, and the determination as a community to influence that future for the better. That is the thrilling mission that we face now… together. I look forward to taking that journey with all of you!

In legal operations, we have an orientation towards constant improvement. That restless spirit, the perpetual desire to do better, is the beating heart of our movement. It is what makes this community great.

We have made huge strides in how we organize and align our teams, bring technology to bear, connect and share information across our community. But no one stops going. We do not sit back, celebrate our accomplishments, and stop trying to push into new areas.

Our vision and mission as an organization reflect that ambition, that drive. “We seek to redefine the business of law.” It is not only about doing it better; it is about doing it right. That spirit is more important now than ever. Because for all the progress we have made, we still see elements of our industry that remain far behind.

This is no time to stop moving forward

This is a strange but exciting moment. Many things that we considered out of reach or outright impossible are now coming to pass. But even as we race forward in some areas, we remain stuck in others. The future is now, but it is not evenly distributed.

The in-house community has improved rapidly over the past decade within our teams and organizations. But we still have a vast frontier of opportunity in expanding that community, in our connections, in how we link up and engage with other players across the ecosystem. We see signs of progress there, but no real change yet. When it comes to another critical area – diversity and inclusion – we still are nowhere near where we need to be. We see promising ideas, an increased level of interest and commitment, but have yet to realize a substantial return on all those efforts. The actual pace of change remains painfully slow.

As we confront these important and impactful elements of our industry that stubbornly resist progress, we have a choice to make. Do we simply accept it? Do we go back to the conventional wisdom of a couple of years ago, and say, “Well it’s just too soon, it’s just too hard”?

I think too highly of our industry and the CLOC global community to accept that. It’s just not good enough. We will not tolerate mediocrity and stasis.

We are entering a new stage

Far from resting on our accomplishments, I see us entering a critical new stage of our journey. When we began years ago, CLOC was about “standing up.” We were establishing the basics of the field and spreading the word. We defined and shared the core principles and started building our community.

Then, we went into the “growing up” stage. That is the path we have been on for the last few years, as we spread in importance and influence within and outside our organizations. We have added depth, sophistication and scale.

Now it is time for a new stage. I call it “showing up.” This is the phase we are just beginning, and I believe it will be defined by how we use our strong foundation and base of influence to make our industry a better, more connected, more inclusive space.

I want you to join me in raising our sights, in redefining what is possible. Yes, these are hard challenges; but the only way we will ever make real advances is if we collectively demand change. It all starts with that intent, that determination, that mindset.

We have worked hard to earn our place in the legal industry. Those of you who have been in legal operations for a while know what an uphill journey it has been to win this level of belief, credibility, and acceptance. Now it is time to start doing something with it. We used to worry about proving how we fit in. Now, it’s time to push the industry towards our vision of a more equitable, representative, connected, dynamic legal sector.

Reaching across the ecosystem

We need to explore how we can make our industry work better in every dimension. It’s not enough to simply focus on our own backyard; we need identify, strengthen and leverage the connections.

We have so much work to do to bring our industry together. That is the next big frontier, the next big wave. And that will only be possible if we step out of our own teams, and in many cases our comfort zones, to engage in real conversations with our partners, vendors, law schools, and others. It means pulling in experts and voices very different from our own.

This is one of the clearest lessons we need to take from the pandemic: That we solve problems much better together than we do separately. When we have big, complex challenges, we need to bring different skills, perspectives, and capabilities to bear. This will not be easy – but it is the best way, in fact the only way, to take our industry to the next level.

Making our industry more inclusive, diverse, and equitable

That brings me to the other area that I want to stretch into: Diversity and inclusion. It’s important that we be clear in calling out the lack of progress and impact here. We need to unify in moving from words to actions.

I love that companies are starting to use their market power for good in this area, for example by demanding that law firms become more diverse. That is hugely important and we need to see more of it, but that alone is not enough. Simply realigning incentives and market pressures is not enough.

We must look at access to our industry. How do people, particularly young people, find their way into the field? Some of these paths are too restrictive and need to be expanded to be more inclusive of others from different backgrounds. How can we reach, educate, and engage a whole new generation of more diverse talented legal professionals?

They need us… but we need them more. We need new thinking, new perspectives, new backgrounds in Legal. We need to reflect the world around us if we are to be effective in serving that world.

Our organization should have an important role in the fight to make our industry more representative. We are uniquely equipped to serve as a forum for big ideas and practices that span across the industry. That type of information and idea exchange is at the very heart of our mission and historical focus. I want us to be the place where the best ideas and promising new approaches in D&I are innovated, discussed, shared, and put into practice.

We win when we work together

I want to close with a reminder that this community is defined by innovation, collaboration, and above all, persistence. That tireless spirit, that voice that keeps telling us: We can do it better. That is what has made us great in the past. It is what will fuel this next wave of legal operations progress.

This community is not about me, or those on the board, it is entirely about you. You are the members, the volunteers, the innovators, the fighters who make CLOC what it is. Our greatness, our power, lives in all of you. I want to challenge each of you to be an active part of shaping our collective future. We all have a role in making our industry better, fairer, and more connected. We all have an opportunity to be on the right side of history.

I know that, if we work together, there is no limit to how much we can achieve.

In CLOC’s quest to facilitate collaboration among legal operations professionals and other industry players, we are pleased to support industry organizations and initiatives that support the transformation of the business of law. The below post was a follow-up press release from TechLaw.Fest 2021 co-organized by the Singapore Academy of Law, Singapore’s Ministry of Law and MP Singapore.

Singapore lawyers discussed what is truly owned by a buyer of non-fungible tokens at the closing session of TechLaw.Fest 2021.

Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) sales have surged to US$2.5 billion in the first half of 2021, up from just US$13.7 million in the first half of last year1. But what are the buyers truly getting for the money they have spent? There are also growing concerns over the rights and protections afforded to NFTs, as well as their associated risks. These issues took centrestage at the closing session of TechLaw.Fest 2021, moderated by SAL member Dr Stanley Lai, Partner at Allen & Gledhill and Chairman of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore’s Board of Directors.

The session also featured: SAL member Mr Benjamin Gaw, Director at Drew & Napier; Mr Chia Hock Lai, Co-Chairman of the Blockchain Association of Singapore; and Professor Dinusha Mendis from Bournemouth University. To illustrate the purchase of NFTs, audience members were treated to a simulated NFT auction organized in partnership with the Blockchain Association of Singapore.

The day’s discussion was framed by Dr Lai, who noted the intellectual property issues that NFTs raised. “NFT exchanges have to be studied carefully, and attendant risks of cryptocurrency exchanges and wallets are still ever-present. The proliferation of copies of works that are transacted by NFTs will also lead to a dilution of value. But NFTs are not a myth, and may even be a plausible reality, provided that the attendant risks are noted and mitigated.”

1 NFT sales volume surges to $2.5 bln in 2021 first half

Panellist Mr Benjamin Gaw, a Director at Drew & Napier, agreed, advising that the public exercise due diligence before purchasing NFTs. “Buyers of an NFT typically have ownership rights over the token, but usually only have a license to the underlying digital art for personal, non-commercial use, amongst others. This problem is exacerbated as many NFTs do not have clear contractual terms on the exact scope and rights of the NFT owner in relation to the underlying artwork. Purchasers of NFTs must therefore do their due diligence and be fully aware of what rights they are acquiring when purchasing an NFT.”

“Owners of NFTs need to understand their ownership rights as these assets move to the mainstream. Legal professionals also need to be well-versed in the rights and protections afforded by NFTs as well as the risks and mitigation strategies available to better advise their clients. TechLaw.Fest continues to provide a platform for discussion and debate of these cutting-edge legal issues among practitioners, regulators and enthusiasts,” said Mr Rama Tiwari, Chief Executive of the Singapore Academy of Law (“SAL”), which is a co-organizer of TechLaw.Fest.

Beyond NFTs, TechLaw.Fest 2021 also addressed legal technology cybersecurity. Said Mr Bill Deckelman, EVP and General Counsel of Marquee Sponsor DXC Technology, “The rise in frequency of cyberattacks, combined with the acceleration in digitization of everything, has dramatically changed the risk landscape. An effective eco-system supporting legal tech is the need of the hour. As the Digital Transformation Partner of TechLaw.Fest 2021, we are proud to be a part of the event that has helped to shape meaningful discussions for legal and tech communities – practitioners, academics and students, seeking in-depth learning in technology and legal matters.”

Added SAL member Mr Robson Lee, Partner from Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP, “Legal technology has always been integral to our global operations. It has enabled us to provide seamless services to our clients across our 20 offices in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, South America and the United States. The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the pace of our

digital transformation. The firm continually invests in the latest technological solutions to enhance our capabilities as an integrated international law firm, so as to effectively serve our clients’ needs and the global community from whichever location, which is the new norm.”

The fourth edition of TechLaw.Fest ran from 22 to 24 September 2021 and attracted more than 4,000 global registrants from 100 jurisdictions. The annual conference is organized by SAL, MP International and Singapore’s Ministry of Law.

For more information on TechLaw.Fest visit www.techlawfest.com

TechLaw.Fest is a signature Law & Technology event hosted annually in Singapore. TechLaw.Fest brings together the international community to debate, deliberate, act and innovate in both the law of technology (policies, regulations, legislation, case law and governance) and the technology of law (infrastructure, business transformation and people development). It is co-organized by the Singapore Academy of Law, Singapore’s Ministry of Law and MP Singapore. More information can be found at www.techlawfest.com.

About the Singapore Academy of Law

The Singapore Academy of Law (SAL)’s vision is to make Singapore the legal hub of Asia. SAL works with our stakeholders to set new precedents of excellence in Singapore law through developing thought leadership, world-class infrastructure and legal solutions. More information can be found at www.sal.org.sg.

About MP Singapore

Trusted since 1987, MPI embodies more than a quarter-century of event building, marketing and management experience in both Eastern and Western cultures, practices, and business philosophies. We bring world-class talent, industry expertise, and incredible enthusiasm into the design and management of extraordinary online-to-offline experiences for your organisation. MPI is part of Pico Group, a global group of agencies specialising in engaging people, creating experiences and activating brands for businesses, institutions and governments. As part of the Pico group, MPI has unlimited access to a wide network of industry contacts and resources. Pico Far East Holdings has been listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange since 1992. For more information, visit www.mpinetwork.com.

About Ministry of Law, Singapore The Ministry of Law is a ministry of the Government of Singapore responsible for ensuring that Singapore’s legal infrastructure is clear, efficacious and transparent. It is currently led by Minister for Law K Shanmugam. The Ministry of Law formulates and reviews legal, intellectual property, land, insolvency, public trustee, moneylending, pawnbroking, legal aid and community mediation policies, as well as legislation and strategies under MinLaw’s purview; provides legal and policy input for other Ministries’ proposed Bills and programs; develops the legal services, alternative dispute resolution and intellectual property sectors; and regulates and licenses all law practice entities and registers foreign-qualified lawyers in Singapore, amongst other its other functions. More information can be found on www.mlaw.gov.