38 minute read
OPS
Using Data to Foster Trusted Partnerships
Aaron Pierce of LexisNexis talks about the many benefits of legal management solutions like CounselLink, from tracking legal spend to improving communication with outside vendors and creating stronger relationships.
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CCBJ: Let’s talk about CounselLink’s role in supporting law departments.
Aaron Pierce: CounselLink is a cloud-based enterprise legal management solution for corporate legal departments. I like to think of it, basically, as a platform that enables insights and efficiencies within the legal department. It provides work management capabilities for handling the legal work that in-house counsel does. It also handles legal spend management capabilities for all of the various law firm and vendor invoices that flow through the legal department. And most recently, we’ve also been growing its set of vendor management capabilities, which allow for legal operations to better track and understand all of the work that their outside vendors are providing for them. Vendor and legal service provider management is a widely discussed pain point for law department executives and legal operations professionals, and the question they want answered is, “How can law departments gain insights that help them better evaluate their existing vendors and legal service providers?” The key to improving any system is, first, being able to measure it. If you’re not collecting data, both objective data points and subjective data, you can’t even begin to properly rate or compare or identify trends. It doesn’t have to be a huge program. It doesn’t have to be a big corporate initiative. You can start with just one or two data points, then collect more data based on your needs as you go along. Maybe you just want to look at how well firms are complying with your guidelines, or maybe you want to see how often you’re engaging in detailed hourly billing arrangements versus alternative billing arrangements. In CounselLink, for example, we have a vendor scorecard tool that you can use to track some of those data points directly. Once you plot your vendors and put them on a chart, you can start to watch the trends
over time – and you can also use that ability as a tool for helping to manage those relationships.
Matching up legal service providers like law firms, consultants, e-discovery providers and others on a matter-by-matter basis is often seen as a challenge. How can law departments and legal operations executives ensure that they are selecting the best solution for a particular matter?
It all comes back to the data. If you’re dealing with a single firm for all matters of a certain type, you can track the firm’s performance. You can keep an eye on their work over time and make sure that it is improving
based on your data and criteria. But if you’re taking that approach of trying to find the right firm for the right matter, as you said, you’re going to need to have a collection of the critical data points from those kinds of matters that will help point to the right firm or service provider. For instance: How big is the matter? What’s my anticipated exposure? Is this a critical betthe-firm matter, or is it more of a transactional, lowerimportance piece of work? You want to collect those data points to help point you to the right place to go. I recommended starting with one or two data points, and as you start to mature and expand the data you’re collecting, you can begin
to drill down and use the different criteria to come up with the best firm for a given set of end points. You should be able to generate some simple and repeatable reports that pull this data and help you drive that process of selection, based upon the different inputs to those matters.
How can law departments better communicate and collaborate with their legal service providers and vendors?
Using a tool like CounselLink to help facilitate that communication means you’re going to have all of your information in one place. You won’t lose information to the email box of a particular attorney who doesn’t happen to share that he got an email from an outside counsel, for instance. Instead, you’ll be able to see the ongoing collaboration and data all in one place, alongside all of the other details about the matter that your organization is collecting. In CounselLink in particular, vendors and clients share a common user interface. They log into the same tool. They’re not just submitting bills to a black box, they’re being given a place to communicate and view data about the matters they’re working Aaron Pierce is the vice president and general manager of the CounselLink business. With over 20 years of technology leadership experience, and over 10 years in the legal software space, Aaron is passionate about helping legal professionals achieve greater outcomes through data-driven decisions.
on, as well as a place to collaborate on those matters. You can’t always be in the same room, you can’t always be face to face, you won’t always be looking at the data at the same time. But with the right tools you’ll know that you are looking at the same data, and that you’re making decisions based on having access to the same information, both as an in-house legal professional or as an outside law firm or vendor that’s supporting those legal departments.
What else should our readers know about optimizing their relationships with their vendors and legal service providers to stay on budget and secure the best outcomes?
It’s all about ongoing communication and feedback. The more open and transparent you can be about your goals and needs, and the more open and transparent your firms or partners can be about their goals and needs, the more likely it is that you’re going to be able to drive successful outcomes. Having that open and transparent communication about performance, just like you would as part of your regular employee engagement, is tremendously beneficial. It means sharing the data you’re collecting with your partners, with your outside counsel and your vendors, but also sharing how you’re interpreting the data and how you’re using it to drive your decisions. Trusted partners that you can rely on to be an extension of your in-house operations, and that you let in to understand your goals and motivations, will provide higher value. The more that they understand not just the data or the details but also the motivations and strategy behind them, and the better you are able to share that information, the more likely you are to have a successful outcome.
As ELM Platforms Mature, Law Departments Gain Ground On Business Goals
Jonah Paransky, executive vice president of Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, discusses the ways that the role of general counsel has evolved in recent years to accommodate the growing emphasis on legal ops, and how new technology can help legal departments maximize their impact while minimizing costs.
CCBJ: What are some of the important high-level changes you’ve seen in legal departments over the last several years?
Jonah Paransky: General counsel, under pressure from their organizations to maximize value and minimize spend, have shifted to a much stronger focus on business strategy. They are still expected to deliver the best legal advice to the companies they serve, but that now comes alongside an expectation of expertise in running the legal department efficiently and with business goals in mind.
In recent years, it has become more common for general counsel to have a legal operations director reporting directly to them. Legal ops is an area where general counsel have placed much of the emphasis for their drive to improve performance and value. The 2019 Altman Weil Chief Legal Officer Survey found that adding personnel to the law department operations function is seen by general counsel as the best way to improve the efficiency of legal services delivery. Given the impact of the legal ops function, it’s not surprising that legal ops is now a much more accepted part of the typical corporate legal department. Back in 2008, the Blickstein Annual Law Department Operations Survey found that 37 percent of legal ops directors viewed “gaining attorney respect” as their primary challenge at work. Ten years later, zero percent of respondents cited that as a challenge. It’s safe to say, legal ops is well established and here to stay.
How are law departments responding to the current corporate legal landscape and expectations?
They’re utilizing an increasing number of solutions targeted at helping them meet their strategic and business goals. The foundation of these solutions are the enterprise legal management (ELM) platforms that lay the groundwork for better operations by streamlining workflows and capturing data about legal matters and spend. We’ve moved into a more mature era of ELM, in which technology is quite advanced and is being leveraged for more of the tasks that law departments need to accomplish. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a great example of technological improvement. More than 57 percent of respondents to the 2019 Blickstein Law Department Operations Survey said that they expect most law departments to use AI for legal work in the next three years. We’ve seen e-discovery solutions, for example, introduce AI-driven technology-assisted review to improve efficiency and results in identifying relevant information. Lawyers are also using AI in their research, increasing their efficiency by letting machine intelligence find the specific citations they need in a fraction of the time it would take an attorney. Our company, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, leverages AI to help inhouse legal staff with a number of workflows: LegalVIEW® BillAnalyzer is an AI-enabled bill review service that helps companies save up to 10 percent on legal spend and increase billing guideline compliance up to 20 percent. LegalVIEW Predictive Insights helps improve outside counsel selections and support important deJonah Paransky is executive vice president and general manager of ELM Solutions. In this role, he is responsible for leading the overall performance and growth strategy of the business unit globally. Reach him at Jonah.Paransky@ wolterskluwer.com.
cisions about matters with predictive budget and cycle time information. Ten years ago, solutions like these would have sounded like science fiction to most corporate lawyers, but today general counsel and legal ops professionals understand the value of AI. At ELM Solutions, we are also expanding into new areas like contract lifecycle management, which has been a major pain point for many corporate law departments. In May of 2019, we acquired CLM Matrix so that our portfolio could support this growing legal function need. We knew it was the right choice for us because Forrester ranked CLM Matrix the No. 2 contract lifecycle management offering in the market, and it already had customer satisfaction scores that were through the roof. It’s an excellent fit for our strategy of integrating products seamlessly so that busy legal professionals don’t need to log into separate systems to get their work done.
What advice would you give to a corporate law department, regardless of industry or company size, to help them improve the business value they bring to their organization?
Use all of the data you have available. That means your own internal data, as well as data from external sources to benchmark your performance against. Data is an incredibly valuable tool, and law departments that don’t leverage it to control spend and improve their decision-making are leaving money on the table. This is becoming clear to legal leaders who are more and more often seeking solutions that can provide them with clear, relevant analytics. EY’s 2019 Reimagining the Legal Function Report found that 87 percent of law departments experienced a large or moderate increase in demand for analytics in the last five years. This is an area where vendors like ELM Solutions not only have the technology but also the experience and expertise to help law departments build an effective metrics program. Because data is such an important part of value capture for legal teams, it is a major focus for ELM Solutions. Our LegalVIEW database is the largest repository of legal spend data in the world, with more than $130 billion in detailed legal invoice data. Well over a decade ago, we created our data contributor program, which allows our clients to securely share their data for benchmarking research and product development purposes, and by now the program has grown to include more than 100 clients. That data is anonymized, cleaned, enhanced with information from outside sources, standardized, categorized, and used to generate insights, including those contained in the Real Rate Report, which has become the gold standard for hourly rate benchmarking.
What are you and the ELM Solutions team doing to help law departments improve their strategic value?
We have a keen focus on the customer experience, and we constantly work with law departments to understand exactly how we can help them meet their goals. Our Total Spend Management approach emerged out of those relationships. We have innovated around e-billing and brought it to the next level with advanced technology and experts that generate savings and improve visibility into legal spend and the management of it. We are careful to not only offer solutions to client challenges but also to implement them in ways that make it easy for clients to take full advantage of them. For example, when we introduced a rate benchmarking feature that allows users to compare proposed rates to market rates, we placed it directly in the workflow where users view law firm rate proposals. Similarly, our Predictive Insights Module presents law firm rankings directly on the screen where users make decisions about outside counsel assignments. Making the data available isn’t enough – we make sure to deliver it right where users actually need it. These principles inform all of the new features and solutions we conceive of, now and in the future, and we’re excited to share our next round of innovations with law departments.
Colin McCarthy, founder of Legal Operators, talks about recent developments in the world of legal operations, how to think big to solve current legal ops problems, and what to expect in the future of this exciting field.
CCBJ: How did you arrive at your current role in legal operations?
Colin McCarthy: I took a nontraditional path. When I graduated from law school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, so I took the first job I could find. I was working in Kansas City, as a document review attorney for a law firm called Shook, Hardy & Bacon. Although the experience was good, I knew it wasn’t for me. I moved to California, where I worked for several small law firms over a short period of time, which each gave me a different perspective. I also worked at the district attorney’s office as an attorney intern and got great experience there. However, I still hadn’t found my calling. Eventually, I got a job at Sonos, a home audio company in Santa Barbara, working with a small legal team. The company was undergoing hyper growth at the time, which gave me the chance to experience many different opportunities. I learned from the general counsel there to always ask “Where can I add value?” – this was his mantra every day, and it has become mine. At Sonos, I got to learn about contract management systems. We had one that was not working for the company, so I learned to unwind it and map out and build another system. I was the first beta tester for a company called SecureDocs – who later, after building our system at Sonos, launched a new company called ContractWorks. I’m still a big fan, and I champion their success whenever I can. After Sonos, I made a move to the Bay Area to work for a semiconductor company called GlobalFoundries.
There, once again, I did a little of everything – intellectual property work, mergers and acquisitions, contracts, etc. I had a big focus on two particular systems – a contract lifecycle management system and an e-billing tool – and was spearheading both projects, from a legal standpoint, for a global team of 20,000-plus people. I credit a lot of my growth to these opportunities. With that experience, I moved to Rubrik, an amazing startup in Palo Alto. I had free rein to lay down new systems. The company was, and still is, in a hyper growth stage, so I had an opportunity to make a huge impact in a small timeframe. From there, I was hired by Twitter as their sole legal operations person. There was a huge amount of alignment at Twitter with what I’d already learned and accomplished, which allowed me to make an effective impact there as well. Most recently, I launched an organization/movement called Legal Operators. I have brought 600 thought leaders in our community together on a Slack channel to solve gaps in the legal ecosystem. We do this by identifying the issues, talking out loud about them, and putting brainpower together to figure solutions out. The focus of this group is to provide the best content, collaboration, community and culture to move the needle forward. We solve legal operations problems by looking at them through four lenses: process improvement, legal technology, legal spend management, and industry metrics and data analytics. It takes the whole ecosystem to solve these issues.
What are some of the most significant developments you’ve seen in the industry in the last year?
so hot. Companies like, Akorda, IronClad, Parley Pro, Malbek and Concord are all out-innovating themselves. These are exciting times for selecting tools that are not enterprise, like Apttus, Conga, SpringCm and Icertis. If I’m considering any of these tools, I know I will have to reevaluate soon, as the technology is improving year after year, with an emphasis on customer success and easy user interface. There is an apparent skills gap in legal operations. The industry to this point has reacted by putting finance people, legal people, senior people, junior people and project managers into these rolls. This has absolutely bridged the gap, but it takes a whole ecosystem to solve the issues presented to companies – such as change management, project management, tool extractions, tool implementations, tool selections, etc. It was a year of progress and moving forward.
What’s your forecast for 2020?
Colin McCarthy is the CEO and co-founder of Legal Operators. With legal and accounting backgrounds and experience in the tech industry, he has managed systems including SharePoint, Apttus and Contractlogix. Reach him at colin@legaloperators.com.
Expectations are growing across the board. There’s a big transformation happening. You’re going to have a lot more work, but there’s only so much bandwidth and budget in a law department. Add in all these new privacy implications across the whole company, and there’s a lot more strain on legal. We’re going to see much more of Axiom and/ or Legal.io hiring to solve the privacy problem and the shortage of talent in the market. More remote
work too. And legal operations has to grow. Technology can bridge the gap between manual processes and automation, but general counsel will have a lot of new challenges, and they should be receptive to bigger ops teams to support the growth of the department over the next year or two.
Tell us about Legal Operators and what you hope to achieve with this organization.
I co-founded Legal Operators last May. I’d been going the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium for a couple of years, and I’d seen the amazing things they were doing for the industry. However, I felt that they had some blind spots and were missing out on some things that, frankly, seemed obvious to me. I felt that given my connections and abilities, and my understanding of the industry, I was the person to put a plan into action to fill the gaps in the market. Hence, Legal Operators was born! We started with sponsored happy hours with a UK law firm called Penningtons Manches Cooper, with Legal.io as core sponsors and champions of our group. Our mission is to bring people together from the legal operations community, but I also wanted to include the rest of the legal ecosystem, because everybody lends a different voice. We want to bring the collective power of the legal community together and connect these collaborators, inventors and disrupters who are defining the future of the profession. That’s our mission statement. It’s bold. We started with the happy hour in San
We solve legal operations problems by looking at them through four lenses: process, technology, spend and analytics.
Francisco and then did the same thing in Los Angeles. Each happy hour is infused with education, with two to three 15-minute TED-style talks. Our Chicago chapter launched in February, and more than 80 people attended. The audience was fully engaged, with a great lineup of speakers. Once the sessions were done, we brought the participants back to the Slack channel for further discussion. The New York launch is on March 19 at the Bloomberg Law headquarters, and it is quickly filling up. Other areas where we will launch domestically soon are Atlanta, Austin, D.C., Seattle, Philly – and maybe in your neighborhood, if there is demand. Internationally, London, Toronto, Sydney and Melbourne. We have teams on the ground in these areas that are just as enthused about Legal Operators as I am.
What’s your advice to people looking to advance their careers in legal operations?
Join the community. Try to learn. To quote Sheryl Sandberg: “Lean in.” If you want to advance your career, you’ve got to tackle the hard things, and you’ve got to get the right knowledge from people. Don’t be frightened by that. You’ve got to look at it through a process lens. What are the existing processes? Learn them – and how to put new processes down. You’ve got to figure out, from a process standpoint, where the frustrations are, where the blips are, how can you get information to and from people, how to share information with the various
teams, because you’re working with them collectively. There should be knowledge transfers across the whole department. Then look at it through a legal technology lens. Make a technology road map of your whole company first, and then do the legal department. Identify what systems your company is using. What systems can you leverage that other departments may be using? Can you get different licenses and bring them in? That’s one way to save money, be efficient, and get the best technology without paying for it. As you make the technology road map, ask, “Is this working for the team?” Interview everybody and get as much information flow as you can. The third lens to look through is spending. You’ve got to know your spend inside and out. You’ve got to have that relationship with finance, that relationship with the general counsel or manager, and you’ve got to own that process. You have to know what your law firms are expecting. You’ve got to understand the relationships. You’re building processes for that as well, and understanding that spend. Finally, there’s analytics. This is a big trend. If you’re not measuring what you’re doing, you’re missing the boat, because you need to quantify where the company is and where the company is going. To summarize, look at it through the lenses of process, technology, spend and analytics. I’m sure there are more layers to it, but if you want to advance your career and build a legal operations function, this is a great place to start. Expect the best from your team, and give them an opportunity to grow. And never stop asking yourself, “How can I add value now?” Keep a positive attitude, and don’t take yourself too seriously. It should be fun!
FUTURE SEATS AT THE TABLE RESERVED FOR BUSINESS SAVVY GCS WITH SOFT SKILLS
An inside look at FTI Technology and Ari Kaplan Advisors’ recent survey of chief legal officers about the future of the legal industry. T he legal industry is at a crossroads in 2020. Advanced analytics and machine learning are growing more commonplace within legal work. New privacy regulations are causing organizations to rethink their approach to enterprise data and customer relationships. Certain legal functions are growing more commoditized. And law school admissions, while up slightly in 2019, remain historically low. Against this backdrop, FTI Technology and Relativity partnered with Ari Kaplan Advisors to survey chief legal officers about the future of the legal industry and the skills and expertise needed for the next generation of lawyers. To understand their perspectives, Ari Kaplan personally interviewed 32 general counsel from corporations of all sizes. The results indicate an industry in transition across four key areas: the evolving role of in-house counsel, risk factors and how the modern legal department is addressing them, technology and innovation in law, and advice that general counsel have for law firms and future lawyers.
1. The Evolving Role of In-House Counsel From the inherent dangers of a bring-your-own-device mobile workforce to the frequent headlines about data breaches, risk is ubiquitous in today’s business environment. According to 97 percent of respondents, the role of today’s general counsel is to help companies navigate these daily calculations about risk and business strategy – a dramatic shift and expansion of their responsibilities. As the general counsel’s role has evolved, law departments have become much less binary, with respondents emphasizing that they are less likely to summarily reject a request or idea than they used to be. No longer is legal “The Department of No.” The expectation now is that legal is an innovative unit that helps the company creatively solve problems and achieve objectives.
2. Risk Factors and How the Modern Legal Department Is Addressing Them As risk has grown, compliance has become increasingly important, and this is a key area where legal can show quantifiable business value. Regulatory penalties are costly, and reputational damage can have dire long-term consequences. Fortunately, demonstrating compliance – especially around data privacy – can earn customer loyalty. More than half of respondents reported that data privacy regulations and compliance pose the greatest enterprise risks today, and two-thirds reported changing their data privacy policies to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation. For many, their organizations had an “important wakeup call” in the form of an internal or external breach, leading to formal, substantive plans and additional investments in privacy compliance.
3. Technology and Innovation in Law Like other business departments, legal is embracing cloud-based apps, with 75 percent of respondents reporting the use of service-asa-software tools for
Ari Kaplan, founder Ari Kaplan Advisors, is a leading industry analyst and the principal researcher for a variety of widely distributed benchmarking reports. He often speaks with students and professionals on how they can leverage technology and distinguish themselves in the downturn.
legal work. From contracts and e-discovery to case management, general counsel view best-of-breed applications as a cost-effective means of remaining agile. Growing data volumes impact many legal functions beyond e-discovery, which may be why 44 percent of respondents reported that they are using or planning to leverage artificial intelligence for other functions as well, such as reviewing and managing contracts.
4. Advice From General Counsel to Law Firms and Future Lawyers From technical skills to thoughts on the value that working at a large law firm can provide, respondents shared a lot of practical advice for current law students. For some, the legal profession is “a calling,” albeit a highly competitive one at which some do not succeed. Most advised law students to gain a broad set of technical and soft skills, develop an appreciation for how businesses work, and research all of the career options available to them after law school, from large and small law firms to corporate and government work.
When it comes to working with outside law firms, general counsel report that their legal departments want practical advice, better communication and lower fees – but most of all, they want these law firms to know what they and their companies value most, and to focus on delivering exactly that.
What Lies Ahead This is a period of transition for the legal industry and especially for the role of general counsel. As the position grows in stature, so do expectations, which includes broadening responsibilities to encompass more of a business-strategist role, adopting emerging technology and innovation to combat growing external threats, and running a legal team with a service-oriented approach. Successful general counsel of the future will need a wide array of practical business experience and soft skills in order to keep a seat at the table and help companies navigate an increasingly complex global environment. Read the entire General Counsel Report https://bit.ly/2WuBXyj.
Bill Piwonka, chief marketing officer at Exterro, discusses key ways that legal departments have evolved in the last decade, including operational and process changes, technological advancements, and the new role of the general counsel.
CCBJ: The role of the general counsel has changed dramatically in the last 10 years. What’s been the driving force behind these changes?
Bill Piwonka: The general counsel or chief legal officer used to simply be responsible for providing legal advice and managing litigation and other legal operationsfor the organization. In the last 10 to 15 years, the role has evolved and grown so that different parts of the organization are now actually reporting up to the GC or CLO – I use those terms interchangeably. These days, you’ll see privacy reporting to that person; you’ll see compliance and ethics reporting to that person. Over the last six or seven years, we’ve seen legal operations taking on a much broader and more important role. I think it’s in response to the C-suite focusing more on legal and saying, OK, how do we continue to provide the best legal representation and legal advice to the organization, while controlling costs at the same time? And consequently you’re seeing a lot more functions that previously had been outsourced being brought in-house. We’re seeing more projectmanagement-certified individuals come in and really treat legal as a business process. So you’re seeing a much broader scope for the GC or CLO – and I’d say that what’s driving it has a lot to do with what’s happening in society itself. Privacy has become a very big focus, really coming into play with the implementation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and then this year in the U.S. with the California Consumer Privacy Act. There are 13 or 14 other states that have privacy legislation winding through their legislatures as well. Clearly consumers and governments are focused on privacy. So organizations need to make sure that they’re compliant with all these various privacy regulations. Cyberattacks and hacking are a constant threat. You’ve got to focus on compliance in terms of regulatory mandates. If you think about a company that’s in pharmaceuticals, or finance, or utilities, for instance, these industries are heavily regulated, and you absolutely have to make sure that you’re compliant. So having somebody who understands the various implications from a legal perspective overseeing different groups or departments makes a tremendous amount of sense.
What are some of the changes in organizational structure that you’ve observed?
Previously, you might have had some of these different groups and departments within a company being more independent. Now they are reporting up to the GC or CLO. So there’s more of a need for collaboration and communication than ever before. I’ll give you a couple of examples. The GDPR and CCPA give individual consumers the right to ask companies what data they have stored on them, what they’re doing with that data, and which third parties have access to that data. They can request to see the data, and in some cases, they can request to have that data deleted. At the surface level, you might look at that and think, OK, that’s the responsibility of the privacy group, right? These are privacy regulations, so privacy should handle that. But if you think about the process, you realize that a consumer comes in via the Web or an online portal, or even over the phone, and requests this information, right, that’s going to kick off some workflow that makes sure the request goes to the right person. If it’s an employee
making the request, you probably want to send it to somebody in human resources to get the information, as opposed to somebody in the privacy group or IT – which may be very different than if it was a consumer making the request. After somebody is tasked with finding the information, you have to collect it, and you have to review it. Often you’ll have to redact certain information, because it may not pertain to that specific requester, and then you have to produce it back. When you think of it that way, it’s e-discovery, right? So a lot of these companies have e-discovery technologies in their legal group, but the privacy people may not even be aware of it. Soif you’re trying to operationalize and become more efficient, you want to have privacy and the legal ops or e-discovery professionals working together on these data subject access requests. And it gets even more complicated if the request is to delete the information. Because on the surface you say, OK, the law says we have to delete it if we’re requested to do so – but before you do that, you have to have an understanding of whether that data is under a legal hold or is subject to retention regulations from some other piece of legislation. So now you start thinking, well, the compliance group needs to be able to say, OK, we have to be compliant with this regulatory obligation. Legal has to be involved to say we can’t delete something that’s part of a legal hold. So now you’re seeing how multiple departments, which are all Bill Piwonka oversees all marketing functions for Exterro. His background is rooted in businessto-business marketing operations. During the past 20 years, he has led marketing teams and initiatives spanning strategy, product marketing, product management demand generation and more. Reach him at bill.piwonka@exterro.com.
reporting up to the GC or CLO, need to work together and harmonize their efforts to ensure that everything is being done appropriately. From an organizational perspective, what we’re seeing is a blurring of the lines between these formerly distinct departments, which used to be more siloed in their day-to-day activities.
Could you talk a bit about legal governance, risk and compliance (GRC) and why it’s important?
First, it’s important to point out that GRC is a term that’s been around for a while, right? And it has different focus areas. There’s information technology GRC, there’s finance GRC, there’s human resources GRC. But in terms of legal GRC, say you’re the person responsible for legal compliance, and you also have strong ties to privacy and security from the perspective of what your legal obligations are in a breach response. If an unfortunate cyber event happens, if you get hacked, there are legal requirements about when and how and to whom you have to communicate the breach information. If you’re the person at the top of the organization, you need to have a way to consolidate these different activities and tasks and leverage the information and technology you have in your organization. So ideally you’ll want one platform that has commonalities that can be used across all of these different departments to help people do their jobs. I would argue that you need to start with a robust, modern enterprise-class data inventory system, where you know where your data is and who owns it, the data-retention regulations that govern that data, of course, as well as what third parties have access to it. That will allow you to effectively analyze the data and respond to various requests for it. But on top of that, you also need to have the ability to connect to those data sources, so that you can verify what’s in your data inventory, go find the information you’re looking for,
and find information that’s potentially stored inappropriately or in the wrong place. Legal GRC is an approach – from a technological perspective – to becoming more efficient and productive and operationalizing all of those different tasks and activities across the various departments that report to the GC.
How are general counsel, legal ops professionals and others in the industry increasing their technical competency?
Partially, it’s just a natural demographic evolution. As the workforce changes and gets younger, there’s a growing percentage of digital natives who are already very comfortable with technology. As the part of the workforce that is less comfortable with technology reaches the end of their careers, they’re gradually being replaced by that younger generation. But also, purely from a process standpoint, if you go back to what I was saying about legal operations business-process optimization or business-process reengineering, those ideas have been around for 30 years already. The discipline of applying technology and process management and process optimization has been applied to all kinds of things: how we close out our financial books every month, how wemanage our supply chains, how we develop applications, how we run our manufacturinglines. Over the last 30 years, organizations have used strategies like Six Sigma and other process methodologies to become more productive and effective, to do things at alower cost but with higher quality. And over the last five to seven years, we’re finally seeing legal get process optimization and process management applied to it. As the C-suite is taking a sharper eye to the cost of the legal organization, they’re saying OK, we can do things more effectively. We can utilize technology to better manage our internal operations from a legal perspective. So I don’t think it’s necessarily that the industry is going out and taking computer classes or something like that to increase its technical competency. It’s just a natural evolution of understanding that technology can be appliedto the legal department’s day-to-day activities, to make everyone’s jobs easier while reducing costs and increasing efficiency.
members to specialize in upgrading our delivery infrastructure, we’ve also rolled out a competency framework that formally requires every LPM to measurably contribute to improvement initiatives. Pick the low hanging fruit. But then move on to other low hanging fruit (there’s plenty if you can avoid a fixation on past successes). Ultimately, however, you will need to pursue nonlinear innovation (recall “eliminating it entirely”). There are many small steps on the way to true transformation. But eventually you need to take some big steps, too. OK, one more silly math problem. I had the good fortune of sitting in on a presentation from Dr. Larry Richards—he of “lawyer brain” fame. If you are unfamiliar with Dr. Richards’ research, I commend it to you. In this presentation, Dr. Richards focused on strength-based teaching. Specifically, he cited a seminal study in which 6,000 Nebraska school children were taught to speed read. Where “normal” students improved their reading speed from 90 to 150 words per minute (+60 wpm, +67%), “gifted” students improved their reading speed from 350 to 2900 words per minute (+2550 wpm, +729%). The moral of the story is leaders should leverage their team’s strengths — i.e., identify and foster the diverse talents of individual contributors. The literature on team performance and work satisfaction supports this conclusion. But what if we looked at it another way? What if, instead, the problem we were trying to solve was saving time on a finite task? What if we wanted the school children to get through their prescribed reading so they had time for other activities (music, sports, reading for fun)? Which group is actually saving more time? Let’s assume they need to read 10,000 words per night (i.e., ~20 pages). The obvious answer is not always the right one, especially when the question changes. Casey Flaherty is Director of Legal Project Management at Baker McKenzie. A t the recent, excellent Law 2030, Vijay Govindarajan observed, “There is only so much Six Sigma you can do.” Despite my affinities, I concur. Low baselines can have an outsized impact on the efficacy of interventions— but then baselines stop being low. Consider buying a car with an eye towards better gas mileage. Which technological leap saves more gas? Improving a car’s miles per gallon (i) from 10 mpg to 20 mpg or (ii) from 20 mpg to 100 mpg? Put another way, from the perspective of gallons saved, what is the ‘bigger improvement’ (i) +10 mpg/2x or (ii) +80 mpg/5x? Since I’m asking the question, you already surmised the answer is counter intuitive: One simple takeaway is that once you cut something in half, there is nothing you can do, save eliminating it entirely that will ever again deliver the same raw level of improvement.
In the legal context, for example, we have good reason to accelerate contract review. Start with a standard review that averages 20 minutes and reduce it by 60% through basic interventions (harmonized templates, checklists, playbooks, deviation matrices, etc.). You save 12 minutes per contract. Next, throw on some razzle dazzle AI that reduces average review time by another 60%. You save less than 5 additional minutes. That’s not nothing, especially with large volumes. But it comes at a cost, including the opportunity cost of addressing other chokepoints, constraints, and rate-limiting factors. With that framing, the point seems obvious. Then again, everything is obvious oncve you know the answer. Diminishing returns are not usually so obvious. What “feels” obvious is: if some is good, more is better. Thus, we regularly encounter organizations doubling down on what already worked and being disappointed when their returns don’t double accordingly. I love low-hanging fruit. I’m such a fan of incremental improvement we’ve not only segregated LPM team The Limits of Incremental Improvements Speed Normal Readers Gifted Readers Before 90wpm 350 wpm 150 wpm 2,900 wpm 2,550 wpm 60 wpm 44.4 min66.7 min 3.4 min 25.1 min 28.6 min 111.1 min10,000 BeforeAfter After Time Time Savings A Words Miles per Gallon Before 10 mpg 20 mpg 20 mpg 100 mpg 80 mpg 10 mpg 500 gal500 gal 100 gal 400 gal 500 gal 1000 gal 10,000 miles BeforeAfter After Fuel Consumption Fuel SavingsA Distance
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HON. ROBERT C. BONNER (RET.) United States District Court Judge, Central District of California
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