#34 - Flex Talent For The Win! With Trista Engel & Jessica Markowitz, executive leaders at Paragon Legal

Hello everyone and welcome to Pearls on Gloves Off. I'm your host, Mario Carroll and today on the show I have the two co leaders of Paragon Legal, Trista Engel, their CEO, and Jessica Markowitz, who is president and coo. The two of them met when they were getting their MBAs at the university of Chicago Booth Business School and then later together co founded an entrepreneurial investment firm called Calex Capital Partners. And that was just before they joined Paragon. As Paragon's CEO, Trista focuses on client and attorney development and strategic growth initiatives. As Paragon's president and coo, Jessica, on the other hand, is focused on recruiting, finance and operations and human resources. I wanted to have Trista and Jessica on the show because as you may know, I am a strong believer in what is known as flex talent. And I think it is one of the least understood levers in the legal optimization arsenal. My perspective has always been that the three biggest force multipliers and investments you should make as a legal department are, number one, hiring a legal ops professional, number two, investing in tech and tools, and then three, investing in flexible talent. I've often said that legal operations ultimately boils down to right sourcing. And I say this a lot because it's not just a one and done exercise. It is a constant review of the current state of your department and, and how it can be optimized. Looking at the legal demand that is coming in, how can that work be disaggregated? Which resource should that go to? Is it high end outside counsel? Is it regional counsel? Is it inside counsel? Is it a junior attorney or a contracts manager? Should you leverage technology and automation, et cetera? Well, now there's a new lever that has kind of become in vogue lately and technically it's not new, but I do think it is growing in its impact, its quality and its prevalence. And that is, of course, flexible talent. I actually came in with a lot of my own questions and I learned a lot because as always, customers and community members are where all the innovation and discoveries happen. And Trista and Jessica do a generous job of sharing quite a bit about what their own clients are doing, seeing and learning in this space. So with that, onto the talk. All right, welcome, Trista and Jessica. So nice to have you guys here on the show.

Thank you, Mary.

Thanks for inviting us.

Well, I have been excited to chat with you and to have you on this because I'm a strong believer in flex talent and I think it is one area that is really not well understood by legal departments in house. Teams, legal operations. And it is a really important weapon that you can have in your arsenal for optimization. So I always say, you know, first hire a legalized person, make sure you invest in technology. But then Flex Talent is this other sort of secret weapon that you can have to help. Right. Source and optimize. And that's kind of what you guys do. How would you describe to someone, you know, what is flextalent for Dummies?

I totally agree with everything you've said that it's really a great tool to have in your toolkit, but a lot of people don't really understand how to use it. So the way that I would describe flextalent, it's a way to build your ideal legal team and get the skill sets that you need and the expertise that you need when you need it, and not have to worry about the cost, the management of those people and those skill sets when you don't need it. So it is a really great way to build that perfect legal team, but without all the commitment that comes with having everybody on staff full time.

Right. And I'll add to that right now there's kind of a couple prongs to get the work done. You have the in house team, that's your core team and you have law firms and law firms are great at specific use cases. And I would make the case, you know, the bet, the farm work and then there's this in between because we all know legal work doesn't come at an even pace throughout the year. So having this, you want someone that can when it's really busy. So sit in front of your sales team and be an extension of yourselves. And Flex Talent offers that. That's just one example. Or you're launching a new product and you don't know if it's a forever thing. And you want very experienced product counsel to be able to work with your engineering and your privacy and your compliance to make sure and marketing and all of those things to make sure that goes well. But it's not a forever need.

So it's kind of like fancy temp agency for lawyers or other legal professionals.

In some ways there are dynamics that are similar and I think for where we play and where our competitors play and where I think about the Flex talent market, it's really at. You know, I think there's a misnomer where you think temp and you, you think non committal.

Yep.

Not highly skilled.

Right.

And for our folks and for the folks that do this across any of our competitors, it's that really highly Experienced skillset. And so that's the big differentiator. These are people that can hop in and add value on day one.

One of the things we hear the most from clients is that they need a plug and play solution. When you need that type of extra help, you want someone who's as talented as your outside counselor, as talented as your in house counsel. You need someone who's experienced, who gets it, who can do the work, who can just jump in, doesn't need a lot of handholding. So that's where we try to sort of separate ourselves a little bit from the staffing or temp agency dynamics, is that these are really highly skilled professionals who have chosen to practice law in a different way than the traditional path going in house or the traditional path going through a law firm. But they're really highly qualified and they can jump in and help your team from day one. And that's huge.

So I've experienced using Flex Talent in my past life at Google. It was a huge resource for us and in fact it was like a very large percentage of what we would call our overall team. And we thought of outside counsel and Flex Talent as an extension of our team. So exactly as you're saying, like they get our company, our product, our culture, how we want work delivered and can hit the ground running. But there is sort of this again, misconception that if you want someone who's qualified in short order, you should just go to the law firm.

Right.

And so how, what kind of people are these that are so highly qualified and skilled, that are making themselves available? And is this kind of like just the modern new way of working and having flexibility in your life?

Yeah, it's. I think you bring up two really good points. One is that Flex Talent is a really important piece of the puzzle in your different options for staffing your legal team. So as Jess mentioned, you've got your outside counsel, you've got your in house counsel and the piece that's missing in places is the Flex Talent. There are reasons why you would go to your outside counsel, there are reasons why you would hire in house, and we can talk in depth about that further. But Flex Talent sort of plugs a hole in there where there are things you'd go to your outside counsel for because you didn't know there was another option. So one of the ways we like to talk about what we do is things that you would normally bring in house or you'd prefer to do in that you either don't have the bandwidth for, you don't have the budget for an additional headcount. It may not be something that is ongoing long term, year round. So you throw it out to your outside counsel because there isn't another way, but there actually is another way. And that's where the flex talent piece comes in. And to your second question around who are these people? It is a misconception that these are people who can't get another job or they're. They. There's a reason why they're not at a law firm or have. There are reasons, but they're reasons of their own choosing. Paragon vets really heavily and a lot of our competitors do as well. We accept fewer than 5% of the applicants who come our way. These are really talented professionals who have chosen to practice law this way because they want flexibility. They have aging parents, they have young children. They have outside interests that they want to spend their time on. A documentary filmmaker. On our staff. We've got a children's book author. We've got someone who does ballroom dancing. So they've got all these varied interests and ways that they want to spend their time that, you know, working in a flex talent model allows.

Yeah. And I'll add just a. So mo for us in particular, nearly everyone has a former in house experience. And that really differentiates. When you think about going to your law firm and you're trying to solve a problem, the law firm experience or the law firm requirements are that you dig deep and you do, you come back with the perfect answer.

Right. Very different.

And those folks who haven't worked in house and realize the speed at which that needs to happen. And you don't need the perfect memo that's nine pages long. You need something that's good enough to keep the business moving. And that's a different skillset. And so having folks with that in house experience that know this pace of businesses is. It's not interchangeable.

Yeah.

But a lot of people think that it is.

So a different skillset and it's a learned skill set.

Yeah. So I'm going to keep digging into this whole quality thing. Right. Because I remember getting a lot of pushback of, you know, should we try someone from Paragon or some sort of other Flexible Talent Co. Vs. The Law Firm? And it was always this, well, at the law firm, you know, you know, they're really, you know, they're going to be really good. Can you still make as much money if you're, you know, I guess. What is it contracting through Paragon? Is that the right lingo?

So I will Say if you are looking to maximize and become partner and make a million plus dollars as that's going to be difficult.

Yeah.

Through a paragon. Or even really.

Or even in house.

Right.

I mean that's also the argument where people think, oh, you're going in house, are you not as not good enough to make partner? And that's absolutely not the case.

So we compare our comp for our employees and our attorneys relative to the in house role. But these are for, you know, I think they're make people are making trade offs. They're making trade offs when they're leaving the law firm life to go in house and they're making trade offs when they come to us. So a lot of our people value flexibility and don't want to work 60, 80, 90 hours a day. A week. Sorry. Or a day. Or a day. Yeah. I mean, so from a comp perspective, these are highly compensated attorneys and legal professionals that are doing highly complex work, but they're not billing 2,000 hours a year and they're not working 60, 80 hours a week.

But on the flip side, it's a huge cost savings for legal departments to opt for, let's say flexible talent versus a law firm as a.

As.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean that's the big selling point, right?

Yeah. I saw an article this morning that said the blended rate for the Amla 100 is over $950 an hour.

The blended rate, I know, I remember when partners hit a thousand and then they hit 2000. I don't even know where the ceilings are now.

But no, it doesn't. The limit does not exist.

There doesn't seem to be a ceiling right now and the rates just keep going up. And that's a big thing people have been talking about, but they've been talking about it for years and there hasn't been any change. The rates just keep accelerating. So when you think about flex talent versus a law firm, it's a no brainer. And we get a lot of people who are law firm trained and who came from the AmLaw100 and they've just chosen to live their lives and advance their career in a different way. So you're getting the same level of talent but at a fraction of the cost. Yeah.

And there I want to just push back a little. There is a reason to go to your law firm. And if you are betting the farm, if you are, let's say a social media company that got bought by one person and you're not sure if the sale's gonna go through Go to your law firm, you know the, where they don't come to us or don't come to our competitors. There's a bet the farm work where you want that law firm partner to tuck you in at night, read you a lullaby and it's worth every penny. But there's a lot of work that's day to day, that's keeping the business running. That in its individual capacity is not high risk, it's low, lower to medium risk. But together it's a big chunk of work.

Okay, so I know like maternity leave backfill is kind of the classic example and the early.

Probably first step that people take in trying this out, but I think that's even a minority of the type of work that goes to flexible talent companies these days. What are the type of use cases who's. When does. I guess you've just laid out why it makes sense to go to a law firm. When does it make sense to consider other options?

Yeah. So I. So when it makes sense and what we've hear, what our clients do and what we think it makes a lot of sense is for those things that are relatively high in volume, in it's in and of itself, each decision is low risk. We're a great alternative. Let's take an example. We have a, a newer client this year that wanted, that was exclusively using outside counseling and she came to us and had never heard of flex talent and said I want to build my own mini law firm within my, I don't have headcount but I want to build a little mini law firm. And if I get 20 hours for a privacy person and 20 hours for a commercial person and 20 hours for a product person that a week. And though that's my, that's kind of what I'm using my law firm for, then I'm going to save tons of money. But not even just that. I'm going to be way more efficient because I'm not going to be the gatekeeper to all of those, you know, the things that come from the law firm. These people can now go talk to the business units themselves. And so not only is it saving me money, but it's helping address the business needs faster and more efficiently.

Because they're often sitting with you and part of, part of your team, they have an email, you know that that reflects your own company. So from the client's perspective, from the internal perspective, they look and feel just like a member of the in house team, right?

Yes. That's one of the biggest values is they operate as an embedded member of the in house team. So when you're thinking about what you want to give to outside counsel versus what you want to keep in house, it's all the stuff you would normally choose to keep in house, but you can't. That's where Flex Talent can plug in.

Yeah.

A few of the major use cases that we're seeing lately and that we really talk to clients a lot about are the sort of overflow or staff augmentation work, which I think about as managing the ebbs and pros of the legal work. Some of that work is predictable, you know, when it's going to ebb and flow, like quarter end, year end. Some of it is event driven, like CPRA or other regulatory changes, some of it is just business driven and you don't always know when things are going to ebb and flow. The model of staffing your in house team somewhere in the middle of those peaks and troughs and then using Flex Talent to manage when peaks come is a huge use case we're seeing right now. Especially when budgets are tight, you can't get headcount, so when things get busy, you're just stretching your existing team. Right. So that sort of workflow management is the first use case. The second big one we're seeing we've touched on a lot, which is cost shifting from outside counsel. The stuff you want to bring in house, you can't, or for whatever reason it doesn't make sense to, but you can get it done at a fraction of the cost. And with scrutiny on budgets and scrutiny on the legal budgets and the legal team, that cost shifting can be a huge value driver and cost savings for the legal team. And then the third is what you mentioned, which is discrete leaves of absence, maternity leaves, paternity leaves, sabbaticals, things like that, where you know you've got a finite period of time that you're going to need extra support for. Flex Talent is the right plug and play solution there.

And I would almost argue there are peaks and troughs to any business. And you mentioned kind of staffing permanent talent, you know, somewhere in the middle. I would always staff at the trough because, you know, now with downturns and stuff, the last thing you want to do is have to have people sitting idle and lay them off. Think about your in house team as your trough and using the combination of outside counsel as well as Flex Talent. Flex Talent should be also less expensive than a full time in house person because you're not paying for all their overhead benefits full time sort of Salary, Right?

Yeah. And you can turn it on and off. It's hard to hire someone permanent and say I want to be. I want you to be 25 hours this week and the next quarter I want you to be 40. Following quarter I'd like you to be 30.

You're. And I'm only going to pay you for that.

Yeah. And I'm only going to pay you for that money.

Right.

I think also the big thing that's a theme of 2022, 2023 is finances is involved now finance is a part of this and things that they appreciate are variable costs. Something that I talk about that got lost in the last 10 years is a huge productivity metric is revenue per employee. That proves to investors in capital allocators in finance you can manage to the ebbs and flows of the business and it's relative to peers and relative to histor to historicals Legal, you know, we talk about legal as a business. These are key things you should be incorporating in the framework of how you make decisions.

Yeah.

And this is where we love talking to legal ops people because legal ops people are putting that business lens on the legal function which really has only started happening and is in the last, you know, five years and is still in its nascency in a lot of areas. These metrics and productivity and thinking about how to run the legal function as a business is what the legal ops focus is and should be.

We had this huge team when I was at Google of of overflow work talent and they sat with us because back then we were all in office together. So there was this huge part of the floor that was kind of all these flexible talent workers and our teams loved it because they were sort of commercial overflow. So doing a lot of contract work that was routine, like you said, low risk but high volume and just kind of mind numbingly churning through high volumes of stuff for our senior attorneys who were very well qualified and we were hiring the smartest people. You didn't want them working on that kind of stuff. And so a couple questions about that. I would get to know these folks, they were part of our team and you'd see like George every day by the coffee bar and then him working away and ten years later George is still there and I'm like, whoa, how is that possible? Isn't there like a co employment issue or how does that work?

Yeah, we. It's funny you say that because we have our longest running engagement, same attorney, same client is over 13 years.

Yeah.

Wow. So yeah, it's not 10 yeah.

So you really can have like continuity when you say they're a part of your team and they get it. I mean, they really are.

Yeah. And one thing that can be really cool about that, and that's happened at this client and it's happened at a couple of our other clients as well, is that you've got one person. So we have an attorney who's been on the same client for the last five years.

Yeah.

And she's been moved around to different parts of the legal team. Oh, that's great for her because she's got the requisite knowledge. She knows the systems, she knows the people, she knows the business. But as the needs of the individual team has shifted, they've been able to move her around and that's a little bit harder when you're really hiring a specialist in a specific role. And they've also been able to flex up and down her hours. So sometimes she's 10 hours a week, she's been 20, she's been 25, she's been 30. And they've really been able to move her to different parts of the team as the business need. So there's, you know, even if the same need isn't ongoing, the same person can really provide a lot of value in a different way than a full time employee.

We have a client who has been with us for over a decade and half of their team is flex talent for this client. It's many of the same people since from the beginning. But to Trista's point, they move. They, the business has grown, the needs have changed and they're able to kind of jump in and parachute in on different issues and different teams and support in different ways. That's a little bit different than what you were talking about with the same person doing very similar work. But I think as you think about the alternatives would hiring for that full time person and getting them for 40 hours a week, it doesn't sound like it's what the Google and what legal apps and what the legal team, the senior legal leaders want their core team working on.

I mean, you're exactly right. The response is that's not what we want to hire our full time people to be working on. And the beauty of why our full time people actually love the program was because this was the work, like I said that I mean, I hate to say nobody wants to do, but it's not going to progress your career in some ways. And so not having to manage folks who say, ugh, I've been working on this for a month. You know, manager, can I start working on more meaningful work? But this work still needs to get done day in and day out, and someone's gotta do it.

And it's funny you say that. Cause when we were diligencing Paragon years ago, before we. We joined the company, we talked to one of the attorneys, said, I do this because I don't ever want to do a performance review. I don't ever want to talk about my goals. I want to go in, I want to get my work done, and I want to go home. And there are people that just want that, and then there are people that, you know, want that. Really, this is my path. This is how I'm going to get there. And there's work that just needs to be done regardless. You just need people to do it.

Totally.

Yeah. And we talk about this, even internally for our corporate team at Paragon is that we need to make room for the people who want to progress their career, and we need to make room for the people who want to be individual contributors. And corporate America has long really thought of this pyramid. And if you're not rising, it's sort of an up or out situation. And that's not the most efficient or optimal way to run your career, to run your business. And it's similar for these folks.

It's so true.

But I will add, there are folks that want that, that come to us and want that. And the cool thing is they can. If they want it, they can get experience at different types of companies, figure out what works for them. Our clients really value that, too, because they don't even. They can talk to their peers a million times. But to actually have someone who's been in that other legal department and has some best practices that they can bring from five other legal departments and then bring it to yours, I mean, that's huge value.

So I totally actually remember that when attorneys would come in and say, well, I actually did a couple stints at PayPal, Facebook, Apple, you name it. And they think about things totally different. You guys are really unique. And we're like, what? Tell us more. We don't want to be, you know, the one who's not doing things with standard operating procedures. And so we would learn a lot. Like, nothing about trade secrets, but just about process and templates and how are you doing this kind of routine work.

Yeah, it's a huge value to have that outside perspective. And we just heard from an attorney that is no longer with Paragon, but I love this story. She came to us as a contracts manager With a jd but she'd been in contracts management role, came to Paragon, did a contracts management role and told us I want to progress, I want to get a counsel role, I want to be an attorney and want to get a practicing role. And so we helped her progress her career through the contracts management role, through to an attorney role. She ended up converting to one of our clients. So to your point about, are these the types of people we want to hire full time? Yes, they are. Many of our clients do hire these people full time. But she ended up converting to our client and now she's running a team there. And this is in the span of four years, let's say. It's such a great story where, you know, she came to us with a goal, we helped her achieve that goal and her career is off and running. It's so awesome.

Yeah, we get the sort of overflow type work, the routine work, the people who stick around do the same work for, you know, over a decade. But there's also, this is what I learned from you guys. There's. There's also a huge area for specialty work. So you know, again, traditional stuff that you would send to an outside council because you're launching a new product, you're going into a new international area, you have new privacy regulations, all the things AI is here. We gotta learn how to implement our terms, how do we regulate this within our own company. And you guys are seeing a lot of placements on that kind of thing too. Tell me, how does that work?

We are especially, you know, new regulations. I joke or I don't even know if it's a joke. Every company has become a regulated company.

I agree.

I run entirely which go legal. Regulated companies spend more illegal.

I'll have jobs.

Yeah.

But a really big trend over the last, I would say 18 months is this specialized niche experience. And I think because folks are realizing it's not. It's a one time need, but one time can mean a while, for a long time. Yeah. And one thing we did see during kind of the go go of 2021, 2022, whenever that kind of crazy started, there was a lot of hiring of specialists, full time hiring of specialists. We saw a lot of generalist work come to us now we're seeing the, we're still seeing the generalist work, the commercial work, the straight down the fairway, what we call it. But we are seeing so much more niche where the legal teams are just rethinking because a little bit, I don't know if it's fear or just changing of kind of strategic priorities of how do you get the work done. Those teams that are really progressive in their legal ops function and really progressive in how they leverage this are really thinking through like how long is that a real full time need?

Right.

And sometimes it's two years, but that's still a difficult decision. If you say, yes, we need someone to set up our new compliance pro or you know, privacy program and make sure our product is in compliance. And that's going to be a two year thing.

Yeah.

But then say knowing hiring someone, going into it, knowing that's going to person's going to be transitioning out, that's tough.

It always makes me laugh because when we joined Paragon in 2018, the next 12 months after GDPR, we would get requests for people with five years of GDPR.

Which unfortunately we could not, we couldn't always find. But to the point about the specialty, we recently had a client who came in with a request for an attorney with retail pharmacy experience who had also been a practicing pharmacist. Okay. That is a tall order. Yes. So talk about specialized requests. And actually we were able to find that person and we fulfilled that request. So kudos to our amazing recruiting team. But the. That is really niche work that you would think, gosh, where else can I get that from my law firm. But people are out there and they don't all work at law offer. Right. And Flex Talent can help you find that.

How often do people then say this person really is great and is working out and now I'm going to convert them to full time. Does that happen much?

Yeah, there is a path of this work where you kind of. And I, I don't love this term but I'm going to use it kind of the Try before you buy.

Yeah.

And I will say 15 to 20%.

Of they get converted.

Convert. There's also. And I don't know if potential clients will love this because people come here for a reason and a season. There are people that get asked to convert and and choose to stay at Paragon.

Sure. Is it sometimes even an intentional try before you buy? I want to hire a full time person but I've had a streak of bad luck or I don't know. I'm not familiar with this type of role. Do you have anyone? And if it works out.

Yes, there are. It's happening more and more. Especially when there are fewer and fewer new headcount. People need to get it right. Hiring is extremely hard.

Yeah.

And there's the aspects of both substantive Fit and cultural fit well.

And let's be honest, it's really hard to let people go these days. Depending on your organization.

Yeah. And it's expensive.

Yeah, it is. And you know, headcount is constrained and sometimes you want to hoard your headcount and not let them go just for the sake of having the headcount. So there's a lot of things that go into that hiring decision, but it.

Gives people optionality or it gives clients optionality to see is this the right person, Especially when you're making a big hire and you have limited seats to do so.

Yeah.

One of the things that we also sort of advise clients on and we talk about is this can help you scope that role. Not only is hiring really hard, hiring the right person is hard. But first you have to really know what the role is. And that can almost be the hardest part. Yeah, it's just really figuring out what exactly do you need so that you can go out and find the right person.

Right.

So even at the sort of quote unquote try before you buy may not just be about your flex talent person, it might be about the flex talent role that you scoped out and trying out that role.

Yeah, that's a great point.

You know, pivoting it if there are things that do or don't work.

Yep.

And then making the case for headcount once you've determined.

Right. And that's a good way to go. Also from like the I know I need someone for halftime or 20 hours a week and then maybe it blossoms as you learn more and you grow and then becomes a full time role because you've scoped, you've learned how to scope it.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

We've had many clients where they've used us as a way to help build their team. So now there's a publicly traded company that started with a small legal department. I would say Paragon at one point was converted half of the their half their team was Paragon or former Paragon. And they leveraged us to kind of do exactly that. There was, you know, this was at the beginning when they were a smaller legal team. So they had maybe four or five people and they would bring someone on and say 20 hours. We think it's this role. Oh, no, it's not. And it's full time in this group. And you know, one by one just kind of built their team over time, help using us as resources to kind of bounce ideas off of and figure out what does the team actually want. Like, and it helped them find Amazing talent. But also skip the missteps of getting it wrong.

Does this model work in all sizes and stages of companies too? I mean I imagine at a large company obviously you have a lot of managers and oversight. If you're a startup and let's just say you don't even have a legal department, you know, fractional GCS I've heard of. You're nodding. So I'm assuming that is something you guys place as well. But even startup that needs a contracts manager to get things going. Do you see that? Is that not a best practice? Is that something.

No, we do see it and I think as the model has evolved, as the Flextone model has evolved and the awareness of it has evolved, so has the client base. It used to be the case that for Paragon it was primarily Fortune 500 companies, huge legal team that had a ton of turnover. Over the last few years we have seen an inflow of interest and demand and need from smaller companies. So it could be the like, hey, I'm a one person shop.

Yeah.

And I don't want, I can't send everything to my outside counsel.

Right.

It could be, you know what Jess described earlier where I think I need 10 hours of an employment person, 10 hours of a privacy person, 10 hours of a commercial person. You can't always get that expertise in one human. So we'll give you three part times that you can make one full time out of. So it absolutely is a great use case for smaller legal teams to help build those teams out and bring those capabilities in house as you grow.

Yeah, but I think also, I mean the enterprise client, the large fortune, what you know, 5, 500, 1,000, the use case. So we have a large client, a large enterprise client and for their, one of their commercial teams, they no longer use outside counsel except for rare occasions. So they've take, you know, their two sources of getting the work done full time hires, flex talent. And they've made that decision consciously to help reduce the overall outside counsel spend. I mean even if it is, you know, 50% of a one and a half percent, if you have billion dollars of revenue, you're still talking real dollars. And so we've seen the cost management and also the efficiency. Again, if you are a team of 20 and you need to direct five different business groups and 20 different business contacts, you want someone in the business that can do that. You don't want to gatekeeper. We, we've heard and we believe and we've seen gatekeeping and being the middleman is a job and so as much as you can get out of that and let your people run and do the work and be the right elevation point, we've seen that at large enterprises as well.

One thing we haven't really touched on, and I'm sure you see this Mary, from talking to attorneys all the time is right now attorneys are so stretched, intel legal teams are so stretched. So I'm sure even with ironclad, when you're talking to them about, you know, implementations and thinking about tech and all that stuff, a lot of them are just like, I don't have time. Where am I going to find the time to do this? They're already so stretched.

Yeah.

And it's the same for us. And that's one of the biggest use cases right now is just help us help you. Yeah, the pressure valve. Yeah, it's the pressure valve. Yeah, it's this. And it's the same with tech. It's there may be an initial upfront investment in time. It's going to save you time in the long run. And even for Flex talent, our value prop is being able to plug and play and save you time very, very quickly. And there is so much built up pressure that needs that pressure release in house right now.

That's such a great point. It reminds me of the story we had a client very recently that like couldn't even get on the phone with us to talk. We placed someone to to help her and couldn't get on the phone with us. Just didn't have enough time. But she just sent an email and just said I was drowning, I was drowning. Thank goodness you guys came on and we used Flex Talent. I'll catch up when I catch my breath more. But just the idea that it can very quickly release that pressure valve. Cause if she was busy with having someone full time support her for a couple months, I mean I can't even imagine she was doing that all herself as well.

Well, and it's right sourcing, you know, that's like my favorite word. But thinking about what the right work is that should be done. Everyone's always busy. And my GC used to say, well, are they busy doing the right things? Like I know everyone's busy, everyone asked me for headcount. How do I know they're working on the right things? And it's the job of the legal ops professional to say you are busy, but all this stuff is not at your level or shouldn't be on your plate or can be automated or can be outsourced or done differently. And so you're alleviating the pressure and the volume, but also allowing those full time people to work on the right things and that helps with job satisfaction and stress and that like that relief is just ah, thank you. Now I can actually think and do the right stuff.

Yeah, that's huge. And one of the things that it really helps with is that professional development of your own team. So you were saying earlier, what is your existing team working on? And one of the conversations that we have a lot with our clients is how do you think about right sourcing and where to send the work? And once you've decided that you need flex talent, how do you decide what that role is? So where are the professional development opportunities for your existing team? Where do you want them focused? Where do you want, where are they best utilized? Whether that's because they can already do the work or they want to learn how to do the work? So how do you optimize for your existing team so that you can develop and grow those people? And oh, by the way, job satisfaction and retention and lack of burnout, those things are all really important and they're.

Expensive and really expensive.

So I think you touched on a lot of it already. So you can tell me that you've already answered the question, but I know that you guys speak a lot to either new GCs or GCs of legal departments that are overstretched or just that have never sort of dipped their toe in the water when it comes to this different staffing model. And you counsel them, you kind of help evaluate the current state and what are some of the questions you ask or what are you looking for when you want to make a recommendation for how they might be able to think about their staffing profile differently?

Yeah, the, one of the first things that we talk about is what is what are the main areas of work that need to get done and bucketing those by where, what's highest priority, what's highest risk, what is day to day, what is sort of spiky versus ongoing. And using some data, if you have matter management systems and you can see, or you can see tickets, you can see the ebbs and flows of work, you can analyze the types of work that are getting funneled to your legal team. Starting to think about bucketing, what should go to inside, sorry, what should go to outside counsel and where do I really need my internal team focused? And then thinking about based on that, where do you have gaps today? Where do you have skillset gaps? Where do you have capability gaps? Are those gaps.

Ongoing needs? Are they full Time, do you want them embedded in house and using some of these filters to say, okay, based on your answers to these questions, this work should probably go to outside counsel because it requires an on call nature. It doesn't happen that often. It's hugely high risk. Yes. Send that to your outside counsel. This stuff is high priority day to day. Keep the company running, get the deals done work, do that in house. Then there may be some other things that are spike, ebb and flow. They may be part time, you may not be sure what they look like. You may need it, but you don't have it on your team yet. Those are the things that flex talent can come in and help you with and help you figure out how to grow.

Yeah, the, the other thing that I think I talk to people about and is a little bit scary to do, but I think it's a good practice is figure out what your team is spending the time on. Kind of do a workload time audit. Because sometimes you don't even, you know, you're managing a team, everyone's busy, you don't know how people are spending their time. And it can be as simple as say, hey, you know, Julie, keep a notepad and just jot down kind of what the next three weeks look like and where do you spend the bulk of your time? And then you can kind of as a manager or leader or legal ops say, oh, this is so evident where we can take this, you know, X project off your plate but without doing that, you know, simple time audit, which I think people can be really cagey about because it feels scary.

Yes.

And so how you communicate that and how educate the team on the purposes of it. I think it's really important because it's hard just to look at, you know, matter management. It's hard just to look at your E billing and your contracts management to see kind of what's where. You need to understand really well what is going on with your team.

What's so hard is with all the right sourcing, so many of these departments don't have that data. They don't have systems. They have no idea. You know, going back to my gc, he's like, everyone just says they're busy and I don't know what they're working on. So you know, sometimes it is just kind of asking questions and trying to figure out, you know, where the time is being spent.

Do that with our corporate team and it's, you know, we, then we can answer, okay, what's the real capacity? Are they working on the right Things when do we need to hire someone or you know, bring some outside support on. Yeah. And without that visibility, we're just blind. Blind, right.

I did it for myself over the last three weeks just to say how am I spending my time? Am I spending my time in the right places? And how do you measure that versus how I want to be spending my time?

Yeah. Is there stuff that is taking up time that isn't highly valuable and is if you could have the gift of another body who's very capable, what work would you give to that person? Trista, I wanted to go back just quickly. You said something about, you know, looking at what's high risk, what's about the company. I'm curious your thoughts. When I first started benchmarking in my role as legal ops and understanding how other legal departments were managed, you know, I'll share that we would take all of our super high risk bet the company stuff that would go to our super expensive outside counsel, that that was our matrix of work allocation. And I talked to one of my peers at another tech company and he's well, if it's high risk, really important stuff, we make sure we do that in house. I was like, wow, that's totally the opposite. So do you guys see that and does that also change the way you talk to them about what makes sense to stay in and out?

Yeah, a lot of that depends on the risk tolerance and the priorities of the company. Companies handle things so differently. So a lot of it is GC or CEO preference.

Yeah.

And we've seen both. We've seen both. Where companies will do will send all their really high risk stuff to outside counsel. You still want that to be heavily managed?

Of course. Yes, yes.

But we've also seen the opposite where companies take keep all their really high risk stuff in house. When that high risk stuff is choppy, then you are sucking up more of your internal team's bandwidth on those really big high risk items. Which maybe you know, is a choice for a lot of companies, but it has downstream effects for how the rest of your team is spending their time. So you've just gotta be mindful of how you are managing the workload of your internal team. But yeah, we've definitely seen both. And I don't think there's a right way to do it.

Agree, agree.

And also just making sure you have the right skill set on the team. You know, if you're doing a major M and A, you want to know someone who's seen it a lot and some people have those people on because they're very acquisitive. And other people, you know, they're going to do one M&A, you know, big M and A every five years. You're probably not going to have that person on staff. So it just depends on the business strategy and the skillset.

And related to what you were saying before about you get these folks from Flex Talent who've seen different things things, you get that perspective of what was it like to do all the high risk and that there's a ton of value from getting those different perspectives and seeing different ways of doing things.

How do you guys also think about cultural fit? Because I know that's another big part of why hiring and staffing is so hard. Like, you just, you need the skill set, that's one thing. But you could also come from that exact background and let's say direct competitor who has the exact same job that you need. But my God, it does not work here yet. Right.

Well, to bridge the gap from this question to what we were just talking about is that different companies have such different risk tolerances that too different ways of managing that risk. And that's one of the things that we really try to train our team members on and make sure that they are adaptable to or make sure that we're making the right decision match on the level of risk tolerance. Because company cultures are so different. One of the great values of having a flex talent person is that they're able to come in and learn the risk tolerance, learn the business people, learn the new systems really quickly because they've done that over and over again. Learning new ways of operating, but making sure that we match our talent and their sort of risk tolerances and their speed of working and their, you know, their dial with the company's risk tolerance, speed, style, expectations is almost as important and maybe even more important than the actual substantive skill set. Oftentimes that's when things don't work out. If there's a big mismatch on culture.

Speed, risk tolerance, it's rarely that someone's not a substantive fit. It's more culture. And culture is amorphous. But I think the things that if you are careful in the things that matter to someone who's bringing on flex talent independent, they don't need to have their handheld. They can go and run in whatever direction you point them in coachable, because every company's different. So you want someone to be able to come in and learn your ways and be open to feedback. It's different from where they've been responsive I can't. Whatever you think responsive is, multiply it by 10 and be more responsive.

When I ask attorneys, how do they know that they're getting good quality from their law firms? They're responsive. That's the sign of quality.

It's so important. Even if you're running out to lunch, just let people know, hey, I'm running out to lunch. And it's, it's so simple. Simple things like, I'll get that back, you know, just, I don't have time to do it for do whatever now, but I can do it in an hour.

Yeah.

And it's almost to your point, Mary. It's sort of, it's almost a sign of quality as opposed to quality itself signal more than.

We still don't know how to measure quality in this world.

But I think if you can, if you are someone that has those traits, that in most instances you can solve for the culture. And so we spend a lot of time on the soft skill because it is very easy to look at a resume and say, I see this substantive fit. The soft piece is very difficult. But that's what makes or breaks a little bit.

And that is where having a flex talent partner can be really valuable. Whether it's in sort of a temp to perm situation because you don't want to do the full time hiring yourself or, you know, just finding the right fit. We talk to hundreds and hundreds of people, we place hundreds of people. We, we match up company cultures and soft skills with our talent all the time, every day. That's our job. We wade through all that stuff and the biggest value add that we can give our clients is to make it easy. Yeah, make it hard because it's hiring again is really hard. And finding the really hard. We try to make it easy. Yeah.

Final thing I want to touch on that I realized we didn't talk about, but it's pretty important. And you said the word train. So we, you said we train them. X, Y, Z. What is the role there? Or let's just say I decide that I'm going to be a flexible talent attorney and I come to you to get placed. Am I an employee of Paragon? Where do I get my benefits from? You know, and you place me at the new company. Am I an employee of that company? Like, how does that work?

Yeah, good question. You are a full time employee of Paragon and we do all of the back office, you know, taxes, payroll, everything. And we also provide a full comprehensive suite of benefits to our attorneys. So you are a full time Employee of Paragon, you do not become an employee of the client company. And not only are you an employee of Paragon and you get our benefits, but we also are, you know, building a community at Paragon. You are a part of our team. Something that's unique about Paragon is that we have a function we call attorney development, where every attorney on our team has a point person in our attorney development team who is responsible for their success at Paragon. This is your point person who's going to help you onboard to your client, help you find your next client, provide you feedback when you need it, you know, problem solve with you. If there are things that are coming up with your client, help you think about what's the right next role for me, if I want to go, if I want to switch industries or if I want to build my privacy chops, how can I transition from commercial to privacy? So we have a team that is fully dedicated to making sure our attorneys are successful because they are members of our team. They're employees of Paragon, they're representatives of Paragon, and we want to do right by them.

Yeah, that's. That's nice because you actually then have two homes and two communities. You have like your own community within the Paragon, but then you're embedded in this other team with the client and you're hopefully feeling like part of that team as well. So that's pretty neat. Well, thank you guys so much. This was really educational for me and I think for hopefully a lot of people, people out there about how this all works and what the best practices are. So thank you for your time and a lot of fun.