#25 - Empowering Legal Ops Leadership with Alex Kelly at Brightflag

What does it take to run a high performing business? Strategy, finesse and a lot of advice from people who've been there, done that before. I'm Mario Carroll. Join me on my Pearls on Gloves off podcast to hear from the leaders building some of the most innovative companies today. We'll take a high value, no holds barred approach to find out what works. See you there.

Hey Alex, thanks for being here.

Hey Mary, great to chat with you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. So I noticed you don't have your podcast equipment, but it is off screen because you are a avid podcaster yourself. Host.

Yes. I think you were one of my first guests on In House Outliers. We've had over a hundred legal ops legal leaders on now, but we were very fortunate to have you on as one of the first guests. So have become familiar with all things running a podcast like yourself.

Yeah, it's. Well, you went way ahead of me. I know when I started I reached out to you and I'm like, I'm starting a podcast. How does this work? What am I doing? And then over my head. I still don't know if I have any business having a podcast, but it's been really fun. I don't know how much are you enjoying it?

Still loving it. I have to say it is slightly unnerving being the one who is being asked the questions rather than asking the questions.

Oh, that's so interesting. So I actually much prefer being the interviewee because then you don't really have to like think or prepare. I just feel like you just with the conversation, whereas if you're the host, you actually have to like, hopefully make it interesting.

Yeah. It's crazy. But to your question, I've loved it. It's been hugely educational for me. I think a great way to kind of have a much deeper conversation with somebody about their journey, lessons they've learned along the way and the diversity of backgrounds and perspectives that exist within the kind of legal ops community is just incredible. And I've definitely made a lot of great friends through which has been really a nice benefit.

Yeah, yeah. That's what I love about it and why I think it's so important because I have these conversations with folks all the time that aren't like a recorded conversation. And I just feel like I learned so much and then when we actually do it sort of on the air and share it with the world, I'm glad because like, I learned a lot from every conversation I've had and I feel like others could too. So yours is focused on legal you've got GCs, you've got in house folks, you've got legal ops professionals. How do you find your guests? Where do you source them from?

Yeah, it's a great question. I think primarily through our customer base and our community. By way of background, I'm one of the two co founders of Bright Flag. We're modern E billing and matter management solution. At this stage we have got hundreds of customers, a lot of the kind of trailblazers in the legal app space. So many of those have been kind enough to take time out of their busy schedules to join me and then other people in the community. In the broader ecosystem. Thought leaders like yourself have been very. And Jen McLaren have been very generous with their time as well. And I think it's so beneficial for that next generation that's starting to emerge and come through now to kind of hear that maybe people didn't have it all figured out when they left college or took their first legal ops job or took on their first CLM implementation or E billing system implementation, made mistakes along the way and still got to where they are. And I think that's kind of been a recurring theme for people I've spoken to, maybe at an earlier stage in their career who've come up to me at the clock Global Institute or other events. That's one of the things they find hugely beneficial and encouraging. From hearing, as you say, those conversations that were probably happening off air within this incredible community you've helped build before that point.

Yeah. And do you think there's one particular conversation that has been either the most interesting or the most downloaded or talked about that you've had so far? Maybe not.

Yeah, that's a tough question. There's been so many on a kind of such a diverse range of topics, I think I'd really struggle to pull out one. The conversation I had with you in those early days definitely stands out for me because I've said this to you a number of times before, but when we started Bright Flag, we had, I think, a very limited understanding of the broader legal apps movement. This was back in 2014. We started the company here out of Ireland originally. And it was very fortuitous that a former colleague of mine from my law firm days, Neil Culkin, who worked with you and Google and the legal team, introduced me to you. And I can safely say we wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for the conversation Ian, our CEO, my co founder and myself had with you back in. I think it might have been 2015 when we had this idea for using AI machine learning to bring insights to spend management and the relationship between law firms and corporate legal teams to provide more visibility, more cost control, more automation. And you were such a huge champion and encouraged us to come and sponsor the first CLOCK Institute in San Francisco. And really we took off from there and got exposure to that incredible community. A huge amount of support, a huge amount of customer and product feedback and as I said, genuinely wouldn't be here if it wasn't for that. And so I know it's spoken at length about the impact you've had in this wider ecosystem in establishing Clock, but maybe not so much from the vendor perspective, from the kind of founder perspective. And I have to say, yourself and the other members of the CLOCK leadership group were just so supportive, so encouraging, so welcoming. And I think that has driven a lot of innovation and facilitated next generation technologies like Ironclad to emerge because they've had that support of the community and been welcomed into us and I think maybe for that reason. Mary, I'm not just saying this, that definitely was my favorite episode.

Well, I remember that time, 2014, 2015, 2016. And I look back, I recall of course the first time I met you and your co founder and we talked about what ideas that you had for legal tech, but also so many others that came through during that time and definitely Ironclad. I remember meeting the founders of Ironclad, they just had an idea at that time as well. And I mean I don't want to rattle off all the others that I met during that time but. And just how funny the journey, you never know where life takes you that you know, now I'm actually working for the founders that I had met as they were starting and telling them about this world. But you know, we were all so excited because we had worked for a decade without any tools, without anyone addressing our needs. And certainly there was like the old guard, the old technology that existed, some of which was really meant for law firms that we were trying to repurpose in house and nobody was really addressing our needs. So I do think that was part of the reason we came together to create Clock. But Clock wouldn't be what it is. Legal ops as a profession wouldn't be what it is today if it wasn't for the vendors, the software providers like you actually making us able to do our jobs because it was frustrating then. So of course we were super encouraged by any startup and wanted to see you all be successful. So really has been fun watching you guys blossom. And I think back on that first you guys weren't even called Bright Flag. You guys came and you had like, oh, what was your name?

Yeah, so we were originally called Legal Shine. And as we were entering the US market and we entered the US market within a year of starting the business, our second ever customer was a US corporate. So very quickly we had a kind of US centric focus because obviously the legal ops movement was born in the us started by the likes of yourself. And we had an early advisor who was very senior in house Lawyer Johnson. And Johnson for years, as you just said, was one of those kind of forward thinking legal leaders who was crying out for better technology and just loved what we were doing. And he's, he's an extremely polite, nice person, but he very gently said to myself in the end of those early days, you know, moonshine in the US has a certain connotation, there might be a little bit of confusion with the name Legal Shine. So yeah, we quickly changed a Bright Flag in those early days.

Oh, how interesting. I did not know that that was the reason why. And that's funny, I just thought there were so many companies called Legal something legal something that it was confusing. But. So I like your new name. It's great. Not so new anymore. So can you just tell me briefly, how would you describe what Bright Flag is? Because I'm familiar, but for everyone who's listening, sure.

So we are a modern E billing and matter management platform for corporate legal teams. Our essential purpose is to help legal teams and their finance partners operate like a business. And we kind of back that modern technology, that AI powered platform up with a real focus on acting as a trusted guy and being the best customer service provider for our customers. So we are the E billing and matter management platform for companies like Clorox, Shopify, Volvo, other legal teams that are using Bright Flag to create and protect business value by controlling their budgets, managing their invoice review and approval processes, automating their forecasting, their financial reconciliation, their vendor and panel management using our AI powered platform. So from those earliest days, we've had a laser focus on that essential purpose of enabling legal operations professionals and their finance partners operate like a business and facilitating that through both this AI powered technology and our customer success team working in collaboration with them.

Yeah, and we're a customer too, so I know that we've been really happy with our platform and have been successful with it. So since I have you and one of the topics that kind of makes me crazy, so let's gloves off here and talk about it, is Matter management. And I always get really heated when people say, oh, I'm dying to get a matter management system. Because what is it? You know, that's kind of like the knowledge management term where if you ask 10 people, they're going to say it's 10 different things. And we have an E billing system. We have Right. Flag. I've had an E billing system in my past life. Now they're often synonymous with E billing. Slash matter management. And what do you think the slash matter management piece is when you think about it in relationship to an E billing system?

Sure. So I think fundamentally the kind of key components of matter management. And you're right, it's one of those terms that is thrown around in the industry and can mean so many different things and you really have to drill down and kind of unearth what the underlying business objectives are, pain points, priorities, to understand what actually is required by the legal team.

Yeah.

For us, matter management in the context of Bright Flag is eliminating the need for tracking matters in spreadsheets for people who are adopting for the first time, capturing all of the relevant data that you need in a very easy to do way. For the legal team and outside counsel where they are involved, ultimately acting as that system of record and being able to get at that data, manage matters very easily and report on that data very easily as well. There's obviously other aspects that come into focus which are more tangential from our perspective. Integrating with other systems like email document management, which is part of our platform as well. But we're not competing directly with the likes of Imanager. Net documents. Those are things that I think to your earlier question maybe sometimes get thrown under the hood of matter management, but maybe shouldn't.

Yeah. So everyone throws this term saying, you know, matter management is one of my key priorities. I have to have a matter management system and I think I define it the way you do and that's how I've used E billing slash matter management in the past. It is really the system of record, it is the metadata, it is capturing the practice group, the cost center, the lead attorney, the outside counsel, you're working with, the costs and budget related, you name it, the product that is in question. But I'm finding more people are using it to describe something that they actually want lawyers to work in day to day, like update your matter to say who's got the pen? Where is it to do intake to have the documents in there? And I mean, I'll just cut to like my view, which is, I don't know that There is a master matter management system that is going to address someone's needs in this way. Because in my view that's what CLM is. That's what contracts lifecycle management is for the contracts piece, right? You have intake, you have negotiation, you assignment, you have the repository. And then for IP you have your IP system where you're intaking your patent ideas and then going through the process and then managing that whole thing in there. And that's where your lawyers related to those functions are working. When you have litigation, you have E discovery. So then I ask what is matter management to you then? Like do you want a system where every lawyer is doing all those things in the same system and tracking their progress? And I don't know what's your perspective and are you hearing that is how people describe it?

Yeah, it's a great question, Mary. I think you and I met in London at an event a few months ago and we're, we're chatting about this briefly. My perspective is very similar to yours in that you want to make it as easy as possible for the lawyers to get their work done in the system that is going to add the most value for them. So for a lawyer involved in managing the contract workflow, that's going to be ironclad and for somebody in the IP team that might be their a IP management system. So from my perspective, you need to have that clarity of purpose in terms of what is the core job that needs to be done, what is the actual priority, what is the best system to support those requirements. And Bright Flag is not the best system for somebody who's looking to kind of automate a contracting workflow or to support the team with that process. And that best sits within ironclad. And I'm an, we are an ironclad user as well and it's one of the systems I use, we use most frequently on a daily basis as the ultimate approver for many things on our team. And it has that ease of use, that intuitiveness that makes it very easy to take those core actions. And I think it can be a mistake for a legal operations leader, for a general counsel to fall into that trap of just trying to find one system to solve a variety of different problems because you can fall between different stools and solve none of them. Well, some of this probably comes back to the work you did with the team at clock in the early days around the 12 core competencies like. And maybe I am a little bit prejudiced in this view, but my perspective is that financial management and contract Management are two of the core pillars that almost every legal department needs to build and needs to get right and before moving on to kind of other priorities. But I think starting with that kind of clarity as to what are your biggest pain points, what systems best support those, rather than trying to find something broad that isn't going to solve any of your key problems. Well, would certainly be my philosophy.

Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think I've said often you want best in class for E billing contracts and probably your E discovery. If that litigation is a big part of what you do, then maybe you can find a system that can service the needs of the long tail of everything else and then everyone kind of gets stuck on this. But I want a centralized matter management system and maybe they mean for legal intake, which is another kind of buzzword theme that I'm hearing a lot about. They want one system to intake all the matters, you know, and I do see a need and the benefit for having that data, but there's different ways to slice it. And I think you and I are aligned in there's probably no magic matter management system where you have all your lawyers working in it day to day, tracking their status, updating things.

I actually I was listening to one of your podcasts, Mary, I think with Kai, one of the Ironclad founders, talking about obviously AI is the buzzword at the moment, generative AI and its application in the wider legal ecosystem. And I think one of the benefits you get with a kind of a best in breed CLM solution like Ironclad for instance is you have a dedicated data science team focused on how you can be applying and I know you have been for a long time applying AI to the specific areas that it can add the most value. We're doing the same in the spend management space and E billing and matter management space and have been from our earliest days. And I think if you try to solve for with a broader solution, you probably lose that benefit in terms of what you're getting in a technology partner as well.

Yeah. And that's kind of the difference between I guess what's called enterprise elm, enterprise lifecycle management, which is the one system that can do it all. And maybe if you're a department that doesn't have set processes and you can still kind of force your attorneys to do what you want them to do, which is pretty rare, but it could work in those cases. Yeah.

And I think I know something I see with your customers as well and speaking to many of I know we have a lot of overlapping customers is the ease of implementation and adoption of ironclad because of how the technology has been designed, the fact that it is next generation and your approach to customer success, I think that's probably a distinction as well for many legal teams that is getting up and running quicker and getting to value quicker shouldn't be underestimated, I would say.

Right. And the same for you. And so for the record then, you guys don't have any sort of lofty goals to expand beyond financial management and the outside counsel management and E Billing piece of it?

No, certainly for the foreseeable future. We have just seen such exponential growth in an emerging cohort of legal departments in the US who are getting to a point of scale where they're firstly obviously investing in legal operations. And I think I shared the same view as you. That is the starting point. You need to invest, invest in people first and build the function. And that being a catalyst for the adoption of E billing and matter management with a much broader cohort of companies that maybe were considered to be in the addressable market where it was more the kind of Google scale organizations where E billing and matter management had penetrated 10 years ago. So that combined with EMEA, APAC, those markets really starting to adopt technology, modernize their operations, invest in legal operations as well as. And we're just laser focused on supporting our customers in those areas where we see ourselves adding the most value in terms of financial management, cost control, budgeting, matter management.

Yeah, the market, I mean, it's so huge and it's changing so fast. You and I have been in this space a long time. You're calling in from Dublin, right? And that's where your office is today?

Yes, our office is in the city center. We're actually, we're in a modern bit. We share a building with Squarespace, but we're right beside Dublin Castle. So we're actually looking out at a part of Dublin Castle there behind me.

That's so fun. I have yet to go there and I'm dying to get over there. But it's funny, you're one of those people that I see several times a year all around the world. And yet we've probably never met in our own towns because we're on the road all the time. How often are you traveling these days?

Quite a bit. So when I rewind back to the kind of the start of the Bright Flag journey back in 2014, 2015, I actually relocated to New York for a few years when we were getting established in the US to begin with, then Kevin joined US Kevin Cohn, our chief customer officer know, joined us. I relocated back to Dublin but have been spending a lot of my time on the road. I think there's probably two real focuses. Firstly, time with the community in these kind of really important events. And there's obviously just been an explosion in the ecosystem. Clock is still still the main show in town in many ways in terms of CGI and the regional events and looking forward to London coming up now shortly. But then all of the kind of newer communities that have emerged, like legal operators, Lync, acc, legal operations, there are so many so spending a lot of time at those sort of community events or our own events that we run. And then secondly, we have a kind of globally distributed team. A lot of our team are in the us, a lot of our engineering data science team here in Europe, in Ireland, and we place a really important emphasis on bringing that team together regularly. We do work remotely, we facilitate hybrid work. But I think post Covid, we're just seeing the importance of getting that alignment, getting the team together, both in terms of collaboration, engagement, development for individuals and our team. So those two reasons have me on the road quite a bit. But I know I don't think I'm coming close to you, Mary.

No, I think you're going to more events than me. That's where we usually see each other, at conferences and events globally. And you've been at it much longer than myself. I mean, when I was at Google I went to clock and clock around the world and that was the kind of the one thing that I went to. But now that I'm at Ironclad, I've been to a lot more which events, you know, how do they differ, what communities are good? Let's see if you have some perspective to share with all the folks who are kind of new and saying, I'm overwhelmed. There's so many communities, there's so many events. I mean you could literally spend the whole year traveling the world just going to Legal Ops events now.

Yeah, 100%. Like I think there is four, somebody who is new to legal operations. I think there is huge value in the cgi, the Clock Global Institute and the Clock Institutes. When you're at that early stage of the journey, I think that the content as well as the relationships and the community aspect I think are really valuable. And I think there are these other groups that have developed some maybe have slightly more focus on people who are at a kind of further stage of maturity in their Legal Ops journey and are smaller and maybe that facilitates kind of more intimate conversations and deeper work on specific topics. And then there is that regional aspect I think as well, where I know you and I have spent time in Australia, in EMEA and these areas where there was an existing community of people focused on innovation. They may have had slightly different titles, but there was great things already happening. And you're kind of layering on top of that some of the best practices emerging from things like clock. And those communities maybe have a little bit more of a local flavor in Australia or the UK and at the CLOCK EMEA Institute where you're taking both perspectives and bringing them together to kind of give that audience what they need for their markets, which might have slight differences to them. So as you say, there are so many different groups emerging. What I'd say to anybody who's new to the space is over across all of them. It is an incredibly welcoming group of people that want to help and are very open to share, which isn't the case in my experience in other areas of business, but certainly in legal ops that that attitude seems to exist across all of those groups.

Yeah, it is. It's interesting how the culture of the legal ops and legal innovation space has developed into just a very, very open and transparent and sharing culture, which is great. So as you're going around the world and you mentioned Australia, emea, we see each other across the us. The US to me is obviously the most mature market when it comes to the explosion of, let's say legal operations professionals and how it's just the sheer volume that we have of DED roles as well as I think the adoption of legal technology. Would you agree? And how are you seeing the UK and EMEA in Australia, other parts of the world that you are traveling to?

Yeah, I can certainly speak to it from the bright flag perspective, what we see with our customers. So we have a lot of very large enterprise customers in EMEA, the likes of NatWest, Santander, Ericsson, Philips, Total Energy and these are very, very large organizations and I think they have a real focus on innovation from legal leadership and have people in dedicated roles driving that innovation and have buy in for what they're trying to achieve. I think they are probably not necessarily outliers in emea, but they are further along that maturity journey than the kind of maybe mid size organizations in the us, if that makes sense. Where in the US there's a wider adoption, there's wider acceptance of legal ops adding real value for GCs at a much earlier stage in much smaller legal teams in Europe. I think it may Be that investment comes slightly later and can look slightly different. It can often be an in house legal leader and assistant GC moving into the legal ops role. The background that people are coming to it from is slightly different. Now from the bright flag perspective. Some of that is I think because maybe the US is just a little bit more litigious and legal spend specifically scales more quickly for a US headquartered organization when compared to a one based in emea. But those are some of the differences. But I think it is. I even see it with my former colleagues from law firms who've moved in house. There is way more understanding and awareness of legal ops. I think there is a next generation of general counsels emerging who intrinsically understand the value it can bring to them and it forms part of their strategy much, much more readily.

That's in the U.S. or you mean globally?

No, I'm seeing that globally. I think that is happening now, but I think us is ahead in the context of uc, gcs investing and legal departments investing in the legal ops hire in legal teams as I don't know what you see, but certainly as small as three or four in house lawyers. I think maybe that's more like 10.

Yeah, yeah, no, definitely seeing it. I used to say it should be within your dedicated legal ops hire should be within your first five, you know, when you get to a department of five, but now we're seeing it more commonly within a department by the time you get to three, which is cool. I think everyone's kind of believing in the impact of it. And you mentioned something that I also observed which is in emea, the background of the profiles of the people that are in legal ops or legal innovation roles are much more sort of attorneys like agcs or someone who is practicing and or splitting their role and I think just on a different path than what we're seeing in the US Is that something that you can confirm that you're seeing as well? And why do you think that is?

Yeah, 100%. When I, even when I look at our customer base, that would be reasonably common. I've interviewed many of these people both in the US and EMEA on in house outliers and I don't know, is it that the general counsel in EMEA currently perceive that putting somebody coming from a legal background into the role they're going to carry more credibility and get more in more readily from the legal team? Now as you and I both know, there are a kind of a multitude of competencies and soft skills that are required to be successful as a Legal ops leader. And while somebody coming from a legal background has that advantage that they have subject matter expertise and context and maybe existing relationships, they what is new to them very often is change management driving technology roadmap, understanding the language of the broader business from a finance perspective or from a process perspective. So I don't think there's any silver bullet. Right answer in terms of the ideal background for somebody coming to a legal ops role. But I don't know if that's part of why in Europe they tend to come more from a legal background.

So my hypothesis and what I'm seeing in the US at least, is I know when I started and a few of us were early days in the legal ops role, it was probably 50, 50 attorneys and maybe even a little bit heavier on the attorney side. Whereas now, and I'm curious if you're seeing this as well, in the US at least, there's a much broader range of backgrounds and probably a much smaller sliver of those who are either splitting the role as attorneys. We do see splitting as contracts managers or paralegal shots. Something el less splitting the role as attorneys and or less folks who are practicing attorneys who are transitioning into this role. So my hypothesis is that outside counsel management and financial management was the first kind of big catalyst for why you needed legal ops in your legal department. But now that things have gotten much more mature and digital transformation has been the buzzword over the last, I don't know, three years or so, that has become now the biggest catalyst for if you don't have a legal ops person, you need them because you need to go through a digital transformation which may or may not include E billing and financial management. But because of that, you need someone maybe has a broader project management technology background and skill set that is on the business side, less so substantive legal.

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think as legal operations matures, there's probably two things happening, right. Like it is more well understood and consequently probably more attractive as a career path to a broader mix of people. And the US is just further down the track on that. Yeah, I think one of the really interesting things that's happening as well is there's just more things falling in within the kind of the legal wheelhouse as new regulations emerge, privacy law, AI regulations, ESG initiatives. And I think that's really exciting as well. And that just again, broadens the scope of what a legal ops role can entail. And that's something that's come out of my conversations on the podcast is it can look very different in different organizations in terms of what's part of the remit, as you say, it might be financial management because there's a strong focus on outside council spend. It could be predominantly contract management because you're in hypergrowth and it's supporting the scaling of the sales Org, or it could be compliance. And that's, I think, what's so exciting about it. And one of the really nice things over the last nine years at Bright Flag is we've had a whole bunch of people now move from spending time with us in roles within our team into legal ops roles. And to your point, maybe coming at it from more of a technology background, change management background, somebody comes to mind is Sean Houston at Heineken. That profile. Yeah.

And if we just talk about Sean for one second. I've met Sean, I know Sean. So he leads legal operations at Heineken and came from the customer success team at Pride Flag. And in my interactions with him, he is so well qualified to do his role and comes with such a skill set that is, I think, unique in many of the Legal Ops people that I've worked with because he understands what it takes to get the technology to be successful and he knows that all the things that you have to do to do that, the stakeholders that need to be aligned, the partnership that you need to have with your technology provider. And from the outside, he's doing fantastic in his role and I think having that background brings something different. And that's why I encourage more people to look outside of the traditional hiring paths 100%.

And fun fact about Sean, he was a baseball broadcaster in a previous life, which probably helped him develop his great communication skills, which obviously don't hurt in legal Options ops as well in a large global company like Heineken.

Yeah, so true. Maybe he'll end up having a podcast one day.

Yeah, I'm watching my back, Mary.

Yeah. So the other thing I wanted to ask you was. So we talked about the maturity of the Legal ops role and how it's broadened and how the skill set and backgrounds have changed. The other thing that I'm noticing, even in maybe an explosion in the last year and a half, has been the plethora of other types of companies in our ecosystem. Legal tech has been around for a long time and we've had consultants and we've had managed services providers, but now there's what's called flexible talent, where you can. It's like a contractor, but sometimes even a longer term contractor and all these other roles that I'm curious to hear from your perspective. Also at Bright Flag, we're seeing this at Ironclad, where folks are like, I know I want the technology, I'm going to buy it, I've got the budget, I want to make it a priority and I want it to be successful. I know it needs dedicated resources to I either have or don't have a legal ops team. If I do have a legal ops team, I don't want them spending a hundred percent of their time working on E billing or administering a contract system all day. But we all know you can't just set it and forget it, Right? Like, you need someone to own that system for a while and now you have the option of, yes, sure, you could hire someone full time to do that and that's maybe still best practice, but you can actually outsource a lot of that as well. Whether it's to the vendor themselves or to some of these flexible talent or managed services providers or even systems administration support providers. There's just so much more available. Are you seeing that? Are people using that for their E Billing systems? What have you seen?

Yeah, certainly there's a few things that come to mind on that, Mary. Like, I think the first thing from our perspective is a focus on ease of use of the product itself so that it's very easy to implement and adopt and use for the team. But as you said, there is not table stakes. Exactly. And that's what you should just expect from your technology partner in any space. And then combining that with great customer support and customer success and trying to be proactive in ensuring our customers are going on a maturity journey and how they're using the platform to automate basic tasks like invoicing, budgeting, accruals and elevate their usage of the platform and the time that they're spending from those kind of basic tasks, many of which can be automated by the platform leveraging the AI so that instead where they're spending the time is on strategic analysis and insight and not the mundane routine work and not having their team's time consumed with that work. Certainly we would see some customers where they may have somebody on their team doing some of that work, our team can support them on some of the more routine work, or they can use, as you say, one of these emerging third parties on a very flexible basis that can provide that support. But I think, think our vision, I think aligns very closely with yours in what we're trying to do for the legal team, legal operations leadership is elevate where they're spending their time so that it is on strategic analysis, looking at the data to inform resourcing decisions, which firms they're working with, what pricing models they're putting in place, ensuring being the CFO of the legal function and giving really accurate forecasting to their FBA team and not down in the weeds of getting invoices approved or dealing with timekeeper rates or things of that nature. So I think that is a combination of automation and as you say, potentially leveraging services either from your vendor or from one of the new kind of entrants in the ecosystem that can add a huge amount of value. And it's obviously something close to our heart. And the type of insight clients are getting in their overall outside council management programs through Bright Flag is assessing do I have the right resource doing the right type of work? Should I be using firm for this type of work? Should it be an in house resource, an alternative service provider or can it be fully automated? And those are the sorts of I think conversations Legal Ops could can be having with their legal leadership group with finance when they've got the data and to your point, have the time.

Yeah, so let's unpack that a little because that's exactly right. And you're referring to something that I like to call right sourcing. Right. Which is I think is a big part of what Legal Ops function is, which is to use these systems and do the strategic thinking, thinking about where the resources should be spent internally. Do I need to hire someone, do I need a new law firm? And then similarly on the contract side, what should we automate, where should we send stuff? Inside, outside. So that is where I think the Legal Ops internal leaders should be spending their time with the software. Then there is the legal stakeholders. Right. So you've got the attorneys who've got to review their bills and their budgets and their invoices. You want to automate that, you want to make that as seamless as possible so they have the information that they need to go in and be as quick, quick and on their way to do their day job. There are ways and we at Google did outsource some of that in voice review as well or like a first past review where you still do new to human trying to make that life better for the lawyer. So the option to actually do the sort of the review as well. Then there's the piece that is the actual administration of the system. And that's where I think often falls to Legal Ops. But is a not the best use of time for your Legal Ops Professionals necessarily. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on where you are in your life cycle. But if you have have one person and you want them to do the analysis, but they're doing the oh, we have a new cost center I gotta add. Oh, there's a new currency I need to add to my system. I've got to integrate this new entity. We've got to onboard a new law firm. That stuff doesn't go away. You can't just move on from. I fought bright flag, I never have to administer the system again. Are you seeing folks outsource that piece of the work? Do you guys have services that help people do that? Do people do that? Mostly in house. I'm seeing a bit of an evolution of that. So that's my question, the administration of the system. Yeah.

I think firstly Mary, it probably comes back to your original point, like it depends on where the legal department is in terms of its scale and what their requirements are. If you're spending hundreds of millions, billions of on legal spend, you're going to need a legal ops resource dedicated to E billing and matter management, likely on your team, maybe with third party providing support. And I think in a kind of a modern legal ops function, you don't want your strategic legal ops leadership doing that work. Obviously you would hope to have the scale to have somebody doing it on the team for smaller legal teams and we have many clients that fit that profile. I think what we're seeing is that our technology is substantively automating more of that work and lifting that burden from the kind of one person legal ops team. Our customer success team is providing a huge amount of proactive support to ensure that they've got the reporting that they need, that the system is set up in the correct way. They're getting the data that they require to inform those strategic decisions. And there's maybe some middle ground between that really large legal department and that smaller team where you're on that journey and you're not quite ready to make an internal hire. And maybe that's where as you say that kind of using a managed service, using a third party to supplement your team, but not a kind of a full time resource. We've seen that be. Be successful.

Yeah. I think there's also for the smaller legal departments, even if it is self managing for the most part, there's that succession plan or that continuity that if that person leaves and there's only one person, at least if you've had some sort of flexible talent or managed service, there's some continuity that can continue Alex, it's been really fun chatting with you. It always is. Where am I seeing you in the world next? Is it going to be Clock London? Probably next?

Yes. Yeah. I was at a planning meeting for Clock London earlier today. I'm getting excited for it. We've had a deluge of rain in northern Europe for the last month, so I'm hoping, like Clock London weather will have improved. So, yeah, really excited, Mary, to catch up again there. It's always a great event.

Thanks for being here. We will see you in London then.

Thanks, Mary.

Thanks everyone for listening.

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