#26 - Hosting Ironclad Live with La'Resa Young, Sunil Jamal, Charles Hurr

Foreign.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mary o'. Carroll. Today on the podcast, we're going to try something a little different. Just a few days ago, I was actually in Dallas recording something called Ironclad Live, kind of like a talk show which I hosted, playing David Letterman, if you will. And instead of celebrity guests, we brought three of our own celebrities from the Ironclad community, including rock stars like Larisa Young, director of legal operations at St. Jude Hospital, and AGC's Sunil Jamal from the Houston Texans, and our old friend Charles Herr from l'. Oreal. In this podcast, we're going to replay some of the stuff that we did on stage at Ironclad Live, and that included some really fun interviews with these three individuals. Now, just like any talk show, there were points where we had some videos, some things that we threw onto the stage, which you won't be able to see, but I think you'll still be able to follow along. So I hope you enjoy this. It's something new, but it was a lot of fun. And here we go.

Please join me in welcoming to the stage larisa Young from St. Jude Hospital. Hi, Larissa.

Welcome. Welcome.

Thanks so much. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you.

How's life and things doing these days?

We're not busy at all.

Twiddling your thumbs. You've been there how long now?

16 years?

Like a lifetime.

Don't drink the Kool Aid if you.

And you must love it if you stay there that long. It's a company with, like, what an incredible mission. Heart, Soul, like, is that in everything and everything that they do every day?

Yes. Our founder, Danny Thomas, he put that mission into place. No child should die in the dawn of light. And we have taken that mission very seriously. See it in the work that we do, the way that our kids act. You know, our kids cry because they're leaving, not because they're there, because we make it so much fun for them to be there. So.

Well, it is so meaningful. And I know that the culture is really strong. And you guys, because there's children, you have to keep it fun and light hearted at all times.

Yes.

What are some of the big holidays that you guys celebrate there?

You would think it would be Christmas, but it is not. It is Halloween. Halloween is two hours of mass chaos there where kids dress up. Our teams, you know, departments dress up. We've had Disney, we've had Star wars, we've had Pixar, we've done it all. If you can think of it. We've done it.

And I think we've got a quick picture. Can we take a look at what life looks like at St. Jude? Kids and staff dressing up. It's awesome.

And while you have a lot of fun, I also understand. Well, first of all, you're a huge organization, like 5,000 people at the company and, and an older company been around a long time, just a little bit. And now you guys are undergoing an entire organizational digital transformation, which is so exciting. We're seeing that everywhere.

Yes. And we've done it in the compass of two years. So we've changed medical records, our electronic medical record to epic. We've changed the policy system that we use. We've just gone live with workday and. And then we went live with a new contract management system.

Cause why not?

Was there any thought of like, wow, there's so much change happening. Do we want to throw yet another system at people? And how did you approach that?

Yeah, we did a lot of thought behind. We worked with our communications team because change can be hard. And one of the things that we did is we over communicated. We had banners.

We have a yammer page for all things Ironclad. We made announcements, we got people excited about it. We started putting out the Ironclad Academy. Shout out to the Ironclad Academy. It is amazing. We showed them that five minute video, just giving them a snippet of what Ironclad could do just to get them excited and anticipating. We kind of acknowledged that change could be hard. And so, you know, with that we were extending a little bit of grace. A lot of times when we were like, hey, we're going live. And they're like, yeah, yeah, another system.

So yeah, but you guys, I believe, had a really short time frame, right?

Yes. Yeah, we were very ambitious. We went live, I think we started with the implementation team around January and we went live in May. So we had a very short time. If not St. Jude, then who?

That's a great honor, by the way. And that just shows like you guys always want to go first and lead the way.

It's very ambitious. We have an ambitious strategic plan, so why not have an ambitious implementation?

How did you choose Ironclad and then how did it go?

Yeah, so St. Jude has a lot of values and we stand really, we stand on those values. And one of them is working collaboratively to push our mission forward. And when we did our rfp, Ironclad stood out in that way for us. So that was one of the things that we told Our sales rep. Like, this is one of the reasons we're picking you is because we think you can be a great partner in this effort.

I mean, you had what, 10 plus years of legacy documents that you had to get in for the launch. So not only did you like need to build workflows, communicate to everyone, but then you had to get all the old stuff in.

Yes. So we had over 10 years of data that we put in there, and our first goal was to only put in contracts that were going to expire because we were so ambitious about going live so quickly. But in less than 24 hours, we implemented, we imported over 100,000 contract files into our system. Yeah. If not St. Jude.

If not St. Jude, then him. Yeah.

I'm glad it wasn't me doing the import, but we had an amazing import team. Michael Jones led that effort and we couldn't be more excited about it. And even the metadata piece.

We contracted with a third party to help us make sure our data was clean. And they did about 3,000 contracts and was like, look, there's only eight files that we found in 3,000 contracts that were either missing or didn't have all the data. And so that spoke well to our import and that spoke well to the ironclad system. So we really appreciated that.

We all know that humans probably would have made more errors.

Right, right.

And so what did you think of Kai just now? Not the person. Kai's great, but Kai both.

Kai the person.

The new assistant. Yeah, the new assistant. You guys are a little bit unique in that. I know you told me earlier that you've got 5,000 employees. You actually give everyone in the company access to the repository.

Yes.

So they can get in there and search for stuff themselves.

Correct.

And then that kind of means that they would have access to Kai to start asking things of the repository.

Yes.

I'm kind of picturing Saint Jude like Gray's, an anatomy hospital where you've got like Derek Shepard on his tablet, like looking for stuff. What do you like? Are they using tablets? Are they using it like during the day as they're running around the hospital? And what are they going to be asking?

We don't have a big dreamy or a mixtimie, but we do have faculty that our clinical operations team, they do have access to the repository. We give anyone access that wants it across the organization. We have over 5,000 employees. And so, you know, they are in there looking to make sure contracts are still active with some of our physician groups that we contract with. Equipment is being ordered for certain surgeries for our kids. And so that means a lot to us when they can go in there and access it on the phone. I travel with my iPad, so I'm looking at it on my iPad. I'm excited that people are actually leveraging and using the system, and so I'm excited about Kai. I've already emailed my sales rep.

While he was making the intro, so I'm excited to see what Kai can do.

Just out of curiosity, what would that have looked like before you had technology in a system, you know, in real time, as they need to find stuff, what do they do?

We would have had to go in and look at it for them, because before we did ironclad, our old system, everything was sort of isolated and siloed, so we'd have to go in on the back end, the system administrators to look and see, you know, if contracts were active and all that. Now with the repository, they can go in and do that. And then now with Kai, I'm already saying I'm a beta user. Now with Kai, they'll be able to say, like, show us all of our physicians contracting shows when they end. So that'd be great for us.

So that must be saving a ton of time for your team. And, like, they would have had to wait for you guys to look through paperwork to try and figure out the answer.

Yes.

Wow.

Yeah. So I'm excited about it.

And do you think that your end users are nervous? You know, they not sure about it, or are they kind of excited about, you know, having access to stuff themselves? Right.

I think before they were kind of hesitant. Like, I don't want to see everybody's stuff. I just want to see my stuff. But now that, you know, we've explained it, like, hey, you can leverage finding a contract that's already been negotiated. It cuts down on your negotiation and turnaround time for your contract. So I think people like it more. That's great.

What are people gonna do with all their extra time now?

Help us run the hospital, go find.

A new Halloween costume. What are you gonna get for Halloween this year, do you know?

I don't know. I've always wanted to do Maleficent, but I don't know if I was scared of the kids, but some kids come in and I'm like, some of them like the scare, some of them like being scared. So I've always liked Maleficent, so I think the mermaid is going to be pretty popular this year, so we'll see a lot of that. So I'm excited to see what it looks like.

Awesome. Larisa, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you.

Give her a big hand.

Well, I hope you enjoyed act one with Larisa Young of St. Jude Hospital. Up next, we've got a fabulous conversation with the AGC of the Houston Texans, Sunil Jamal. While you can't see it from the podcast, you he comes up to stage with a pretty cool gift for me and the rest of Ironclad. And you'll hear about that starting now.

Okay, now, next, please welcome to the stage AGC of the Houston Texans, Sunil Jamal.

Before we get started, I know we're in Dallas and Cowboys country. I wanted to make sure that we got a good gift for you in Ironclad.

That's amazing.

Oh, that's so cool. Look at this. So cool. Thank you.

Wow.

I want to make sure you wrap the battle red over here, not the blue and sleeve.

We will have to get this framed and put this in our offices for all to see.

Thank you for that.

That's huge. Is this the old jersey? The new jersey?

That's right. That's going to be a limited edition jersey in a couple of, in a couple of months here. So we're doing a jersey rejuvenation process, working with the NFL on kind of getting an entire new slate of kits for us. We're working through that process. I mean, it's been a pretty locked down process. I haven't even seen a proof of the jerseys. Only a few people know of it, so it should be a good deal.

All right, well, it's a lot more complicated than I thought, so if we can do a quick video, we give an overview of what that looks like. A new face of the franchise is not the only change that is coming to the Texans. And who would know this? ABC13's Adam Winkler. He is here in the studio with more. Adam, what is going on?

So, Myra, Chauncey. In late December, the Texans confirmed the franchise is in the process of exploring possible uniform changes. Since taking the field for the first time back in 2002, the Texans have exclusively worn some combination of deep steel blue, battle red and liberty white. Now, look, we get it. Fans care more about winning games than cool uniforms. But y' all can't control the players or coaches. You can give feedback about the rebrand. The team is currently listening to and reading feedback from you, the fans about potential changes to jerseys, colors and helmet design. Now, it's important to note the new uniforms and helmets will not be rolled out until at least the 2020.

Not only are the Texans plotting their strategy for a rebrand, there's also a lengthy process mandated by the NFL through which the Texans must go before making any major uniform changes. But Chauncey, Myra, get the right coach, then pick the right color. You'll see a lot of smiles here in H town.

Yeah. So we've been dealing with a lot of focus groups. That was the initial process. We used ironclad for that. We got the process started. Obviously a lot of them had to sign confidentiality agreements and release some waivers. And we used a process where we can get 50, 75, 100 people in using a QR code which they would quickly fill out on their smartphone, get an NDA through ironclad. And it worked out really well.

So like when they show up at.

The door, right at the door, they'd be in takes 20 seconds and they'd be inside. And so there's a handful of people who have committed to providing their feedback, trying to get us to the right colors, the right jerseys. So we have a fan oriented process so that everyone feels good about the jerseys.

Yeah. And this is not easy to do. So it doesn't happen that often.

Oh no, this happens, I don't know, once every 10, 15, 20 years. As you noted in the video, it hasn't happened since 2002. So it's a new thing for us.

Yeah, very cool. And what sort of role you mentioned kind of the NDAs, what role does legal play in this whole long process?

Yeah, so I think we're more of a sounding board. So if there's agreements that need to be made, vendors design agreements. So we help with that, kind of coordinating the NFL process, working with them, working with the management council and kind of facilitating that.

So everyone always gets really interested when we have a sports team because everybody wants to know what's it like to work for these contestants or for an NFL team. We are also close with the GC of the Jets, Jill Kelly, and she mentioned to me there's only like two of them in our legal division department. Are you similarly sized?

Yeah, that's right. So our legal department was three people and then one of our director of legal ops ended up going to another place last year. So now it's down to two. It is a slim legal team and we have a lot of departments to kind of look after. So it's important that we have a right kind of service and software to help us out with that.

The person who left, she was kind of the manager of CLM product, getting the bids, implementing the process, the workflows. And so after she left there was a hole. But thankfully with the right training from her and then the right help from Ironclad, it's been easy to kind of fill that void a little bit.

Yeah, that's good to hear. I always kind of worry about like having the single point of failure with that one person who's just really good, you know, and they know how to work the system, but then they disappear and everyone's like, well, now what do we do?

That's what I tell my boss is I want to become so important that you can't really do anything to me.

And when she left, I mean, do you have technical background or how did you pick it up?

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I didn't have technical. Thankfully it's not too hard to use. And so that was the easy part of it. And then with the right help from Ironclad and our account managers, it's been an easy process. One of the things we realized is while deciding whether or not to kind of hire a new person or when to hire a new person is we looked at when, when are we busy in the legal department. So we determine that June, July, August, right before the season is our busy time. And then once the season starts and people start rolling in, the contract flow kind of gets lower and lower. So we hired a summer associate for the first time from a law school to kind of come in, help us out in June, July and August. She kind of handled the ironclad flow. She got the hang of it by the end of it, but it kind of introduced her to contracts and contract life cycle and it helped us out, obviously.

And what did you think of the KAI announcement today? Was that interesting to you guys as a small team?

Yeah, no, it's definitely interesting. Anytime AI can help us, trying to make us efficient so we can focus on some of the bigger projects, it really helps us out and it'll probably answer a lot of questions for our different departments that ask us.

Yeah, great. So Sunil, you know, being at the NFL is a very coveted role and I would imagine that whoever was hiring you did a little background check. That's right, Google search. So I did a little Google search on Sunil of my own and I happened to come across a photo on the interwebs. Let's see that photo. Is that you, Sunil?

That's me with a lot more hair.

So we're in Texas. You're a poker player and by the looks of it, not just an amateur.

So that's A couple of years ago. That's at a casino in New Orleans. I played in the World Series of Poker circuit event over there.

The World Series of Poker?

Yeah. It was a big hobby of mine until I got married and had two kids. So it's kind of weaned down a little bit.

So my brother in law is a litigator and he's also on the circuit or used to be before the kids. As a really good poker player, I feel like lawyers who either negotiate a lot or litigate. Can't trust them. Are really good at poker because they've got the poker face.

Yeah, yeah.

Lawyers. I've noticed in my playing time that lawyers and accountants are some of the best poker faces. Poker players.

Accountants too. Yeah. Why do we think that is?

I have a feeling that they just, they're always managing other people's money. So when they get to manage their own, they know how to kind of take advantage of it.

And so do you think the skills translate to make you a good poker player and a good lawyer?

It definitely helps with negotiating. Even when just knowing kind of play the player is what they say, not the cards. So just when you're negotiating with another person, it just helps with kind of just the EQ of it and the situation and what they care about and what we care about. So it just helps with that.

You gotta know when to hold them.

Yeah. Know when to fold them, basically. That's right. That's right.

What's next for you in CLM and Ironclad and the next journey of the Houston Texans.

Yeah, the next for us is kind of extrapolating as much as we can for our departments. Whether it's corporate development or marketing or digital media, they always want more from us. So it is how we can give them answers in a quick manner, efficient manner. Whether it's our corporate development team who's asking, hey, how many of our contracts are have an opt out this year or when are they terminating? Right before the season. They'll ask just so they can get on their sales process and their renewal process. So instead of me looking through hundreds of contracts, now it's more of how can I use AI to kind of make it easy for me.

Yeah.

And so different than Larisa who was just telling us they give access to like all their end stakeholders. Everyone's got to go through you so making your life a lot easier now that you don't have to answer everyone's questions.

Yeah, that's right. Every organization is different for us. If they ever need any questions Answered they have to go through us. And that's just for confidentiality reasons and a lot of NFO rules and regulations.

Yeah. So what was that like again before you had a system?

Oh, no, it was definitely me going through every single document, making an Excel spreadsheet, figuring out the term, figuring out opt outs, opt ins, and then updating that on a periodic level. But hopefully this makes it easier.

Yeah. Well, hopefully now you have a lot more time to play poker.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

All right, thank you. Let's give a big round of applause to Sunil.

Well, as you just heard, I had.

A lot of fun chatting with Sunil and poking just a little bit of fun at him as well. Up next, we speak to our old friend Charles Herr AGC of l'. Oreal. Just like Sunil, he comes to the stage with another very cool gift for me. And you'll hear about that up next.

All right, now let's welcome my good friend AGC of l'. Oreal. Charles.

So I brought you some of our La Roche Posay sunscreen. And it's relevant right now. We are the official sunscreen of the U.S. open. So for those of you who are the tennis fans that have been watching, as I've been watching on television, that's where the official sunscreen is.

And La Roche Posay is like all the rage right now with my teenager and her friends and my dermatologist friends, I didn't even know that was part of l'.

Oreal.

So l' Oreal actually has a ton of. Of brands.

We do. We do. We have probably about 40 brands. So in addition to La Roche Posay, we have Skinceuticals, which is also a dermatologist brand. And we have big mass brands like Maybelline, Lancome, Kiehl's and a bunch of others.

So skincare, hair care and everything else.

Exactly.

Okay, so you guys or La Roche Posay was sponsoring the. The U.S. open recently. I think we have a video that covers a little bit of what that actually looked like there. So let's take a look. A day with Low Roach Posse at the US Open.

At the MX Lounge.

So that's. I think that's from TikTok.

Yeah. So I think the reason this stuff is so popular amongst my teen is because she follows all these skincare people on TikTok. And what I told her, by the way, was all these influencers on TikTok are signing up to be L' Oreal influencers using ironclad Clickbank, thereby Bypassing sales.

We do.

We do. I work on hundreds of influencer agreements a year. So when we actually have two influencers we've signed up for, from the US Open, two tennis players to be brand ambassadors for La Roche Posay. But yeah, we. And we sign up people for TikTok and it's amazing what TikTok has done for us.

And are you a big tennis fan yourself?

I like tennis. I enjoy watching tennis. My real passion, though, that I discovered during the pandemic is pickleball. So you met everybody I know.

No, it's fun, it's easy, it's age appropriate for me, all those things.

Although they say, like, the biggest reason people show up in the ER these.

Days is because from pickleball injuries.

As.

They die for the net.

And you discovered this during COVID I did, yes, actually.

So I spent a lot of my Covid time out in Arizona. I'm based in New York City, which basically shut down pretty early on. And so when everything closed, I finally said, I'm just, it's time to go, there's nothing here, and went to Arizona. And that's where I learned pickleball. And actually when we, we set up a court in front of the house because all of the. There are actually pickleball courts in Phoenix, Scottsdale, but they were all padlocked. And so we, we made our own way and had our paddles and played with the family and we had a.

Photo of your makeshift pickleball car.

And if that's not like Covid in a nutshell, I don't know what it is.

Yeah, the net we had wasn't quite wide enough. And so we had some extra netting that we put on the sides that was. That is pickleball dedication propped up with the chairs. We made the lines with chalk and there were a few little hazards, some cracks in the pavement, but yeah, and.

We go way back. Because you've been an ironclad customer since the very beginning. I mean, a very long time customer. Your journey has been great. And you guys are always early adopters. What do you think of Kai?

Of Kai, yeah. So speaking of going way back, I was actually thinking about when we first signed our agreement, which I think was back in either late 2016 or 2017. I remember having a conversation with my general counsel and we were like, well, should we sign a five year agreement? We actually, we ended up signing a five year agreement. And I said to him, I said, you know, neither of us knows where things are going to be in five years. And I remember Thinking I said to him, in five years, we may just be talking to our computers. Right. And so, you know, watching Alex and his assistant, it's like, I think we're there almost. It's exciting. We. One of the things that I think Kai will be really useful for, for our team is throughout the audit process. So internal audit. And for those of you who work in big companies, I'm sure that just instills this sense of fear and anxiety. It certainly has historically for us. When I first came to l', Oreal, I was like, these people are going crazy. What's going on here? And so we have audits throughout the year where the audit teams will come in. And in our case, they're mostly coming from France and wanting to find contracts and where are these? And it was always a mad scramble to find things and then put them in a folder somewhere so the auditors could look at them. And we had an audit back in January that we had now that we've been using Ironclad for five, almost six years. Just gave the auditors access to the contracts they wanted to see. And it was the easiest thing. It was amazing to be able to do that.

Yeah. So we used to go through that at Google as well. And I remember the times that they showed up and we actually finally had processes and things in place and we were able to just kind of like show them what we had. And the best thing you can do for auditors is to be like, nothing to see here.

Exactly.

Produce things and be the shining star to the rest of the gna. That's great.

Yeah, no, it's really exciting.

And you guys are pretty big into AI responsibility. Just kind of tacking on to John's talk. Right.

We are, we are. Like many big companies, we now have an AI task force and AI evaluation committees looking at all the different products. We've been using AI Assist and AI Playbooks from Ironclad now since they were first released, or even as a beta customer and love both of those. So looking at this evolution and being able to use Kai, I'm really excited about the prospects and being able to run these audits or find these contracts for these auditors with one query.

It's amazing. You and I were talking during the break about the article that Jason Baymack, our CEO, had just put out about where AI is these days and how it looks to a little bit about like the Napster time.

Exactly, that's what he said. So this is a piece, I think it was in Forbes that Jason wrote talking about we're sort of in the Napster era now of AI and it makes a lot of sense. It really rings true. I mean, for us as, I mean we are a beauty company, but we are also a content company. Brands are our lifeblood, our IP is our lifeblood. So being able to.

Use the AI in that way will be amazing. One of the things we are concerned about is copyright and using what goes into the AI. And like in the Napster scenario, it was all the copyrighted content that was being shared. And I think eventually, and a couple of people talked about this, the, the wild west that we're talking about of AI, we'll see the evolution as there are lawsuits and other ways of responsible working that will start to take hold. And we'll see those models, we'll see the regulation, EU has a proposed regulation.

And then we'll start to see those guardrails around AI. But yeah, I think we're definitely in the Napster era still.

We are living in certainly very interesting times. Join me in thanking Charles.

Very welcome.

And don't go anywhere because we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're gonna be playing the world's favorite game show about contracts, Whose Clause is It Anyway? And you're gonna be part of that, so stay tuned.

Well, that's a wrap.

I loved these conversations. There was a lot more that took.

Place at this event.

We revealed a whole slew of really cool CLM products and AI advancements to Ironclad. So if you want to check it out or see more of these interviews, you can watch all those on our website or on our YouTube channel. I hope that you will take a look. And until next time, thanks for listening. So we'd love for you to check out the whole show, which you can do on our website or on our YouTube channel. Maybe one day you can actually attend one of these live and in person. There'll be more in the future and they are a lot of fun, I promise you that. So I hope you'll check it out online. And until next time, thanks for listening.