Live Q&A: Demystifying Digital Transformation for Legal Teams

Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today on our webinar. This webinar's topic is Demystifying Digital Transformation for Legal Teams. My name is Mary o'. Carroll. I'm the Chief Community Officer here at Ironclad, and I will be your moderator today. A little bit about me. I've been with Ironclad for a couple of years now. Prior to that, I spent most of my career at Google, building and leading the legal operations and technology function there. On the side, I also helped to build and lead a organization called clock, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. And at the core, I believe that I am an advocate for legal operations and digital transformation. So this topic is right up my alley. I am so happy to be joined today by some incredible speakers. Lindsey, Director of Legal Ops at the New York Times. Iris, an old friend who's a VP in DGC at Airbnb, and Ramsey, the VP and international legal leader at Florida Pfizer. Incredible companies. What I'll do is actually just ask them to introduce themselves briefly and then we'll. We'll get into it. So let's start with you, Lindsay.

Hi. Thanks so much for having me. Lindsay Kane, Director of Legal Legal Operations at the New York Times, and super excited for the conversation today.

Looks like we lost Iris, but we always have some technical difficulties. We'd go right into Ramsey.

Hi. Hi, everyone, and thanks for having me with you today. I currently lead the Emerging Market Legal team, which covers Latin America, apac, China and Middle east and Russia region, and I'm based in New York. Thank you.

Thank you.

And I think we all know what Pfizer does, so. Iris.

Yeah, sorry, my. Everyone froze and my connection was lost. So this is what happens when you rely on technology and you work from home. Hi, everyone. I'm Iris Chen. As Mary said, I'm a VP and Deputy General Counsel here at Airbnb. I oversee the functions in legal that support much of our product and engineering teams, as well as marketing, brand enforcement, copyright, trademark trust and safety, and also commercial and partnerships, as well as airbnb.org which is our nonprofit.

That's a lot of stuff. All right, well, I intentionally curated these three superstar individuals from these companies because I think that it really covers kind of all the bases that we want to look at with Iris. We just heard she's at, you know, Airbnb, a tech first company. We actually worked together at Google, so we spent most of our.

Both of our.

Both of us spent most of our careers there. And we both know that just because you work at a modern tech company doesn't mean that your legal team is any easier to transform. On the other end of the spectrum, we've got Lindsay at the New York Times, a company that was founded nearly 200 years ago, which, you know, underwent quite an evolution, transitioning to, you know, from a print traditional newspaper to a digital first subscription first business. And internally, their legal department had to tackle their own digital transformation with that. And then finally with Ramsey at Pfizer, which is a behemoth of a company, I think there's something like 83,000 employees. Imagine the change management at that size and scale. But we also remember that in 2020, Pfizer had to learn how to move with lightning speed to pivot the entire company to get ready with a vaccine during the pandemic in record time. So, you know, if they can do that, then isn't anything really possible for the legal department? We will learn more today. We are super excited to have you all here. For everyone in attendance, thank you so much for submitting great questions. During the registration, we've received a ton. We're going to be using them to help guide the conversation today. And then before we get started, just a little bit of housekeeping. I think the questions that we have will take us through the majority of the session, but we will try to save time for some live Q and A at the end. You can enter them on the side in the chat or the Q and A. And we've also got some moderators in the chat who are going to help answer questions live as well. So with that, let's get right into it. All right, guys, I would love to know kind of where all of you are in this digital transformation journey. What was the catalyst? Why is it such a big topic for you and your organization and, and kind of where you are in that path. So maybe I'll start with Ramsey, who I met recently and was just really fascinated by the story that you told me.

Yes, thank you. Thank you, Mary. So, you know, I think we are like many other companies trying to figure out, you know, the.

Next step and when we want to invest and what technologies we want to adopt. But if we take just a step back, Pfizer has been going itself.

On a journey of transformation. So from a, from a company that basically had nutrition, animal health product, pharma of patent, innovative patent to more of a, of a company over time that separated these businesses to focus.

Primarily on breakthrough that really we say change patients lives. So we're not talking anymore about, you know, any, just some, some Some improvement, but really therapies that and medicine that really change people's life and focusing on oncology, immunology and and other disease areas that are absolutely critical and touches the lives of many, many patients around the world. Vaccine being one. And you listed. We're very proud of the accomplishment we've had during the COVID and what we were able to bring at the light speed to the world when faced with a pandemic. So that's the Pfizer that you know on the business. If you look around us, you know the industry is a very dynamic industry.

In the healthcare industry and the biopharmac. And the reason why it's also very.

Going through that important change is because the technologies are allowing now are having an impact on how you discover develop medicine. So you really need to understand and see where you can utilize these technologies to deliver on your mission now. And this is where the legal division comes into play. We've had a legal division that's been, you know, certain designed for I would say the older Pfizer. Okay. And now with the change etc. We as a legal team thinking, trying to figure out how can we reposition, restructure our operations. The legal team in a way that's going to be able to serve that transformation going forward. So this is really where we are. And I don't. I think we're just starting the journey and we are talking to many colleagues. You've been very helpful, Mary, and your colleagues to us just to understand more of a landscape, what's out there and how we want to start executing on that change.

So you're feeling it from the top then too. Right. Because the whole company is transforming. Legal's feeling the pressure. You're feeling it from your CEO, your gc.

Absolutely. And you know, the area that we're in, Mary, is very interesting because we as a legal team trying to figure it out as we move. You know, like there's so many unknown. I give you like the way, you know, algorithm and formulas are being utilized on clinical trials, et cetera. So and the legislation are obviously catching up around the world. So we're learning as we go and trying to anticipate which is important for us.

Absolutely. And we hear it all the time like everyone in the whole company is transforming Legal can't stand still. Iris and Lindsay, I imagine you're feeling that as well. Has there been sort of pressure from the top or what's kind of driven your transformations?

Yeah, I don't know, Lindsey, if you go ahead, if I jump in just because my Internet is so unstable, I'm taking advantage of the fact that it's working now. You know, obviously Airbnb is a tech company and so this idea of digital transformation is probably not as relevant in the traditional sense. But I think, remember that Airbnb is a technology platform, but it's also an offline business. We're in the hospitality space. You're talking about people traveling and staying in Airbnb listings. So there's a lot of our business that is not about technology. It's about people in the real world. Right. And so, you know, it's kind of interesting to see how our functions like trust and safety, have to use technology to, you know, hopefully prevent bad things from happening in Airbnb listings, preventing fraud on the platform, et cetera, so that people can have those really good live in person experiences right in Airbnb listings. So that's been kind of interesting being in a company where, yes, there's definitely adoption of technology, but they're also in a space and a sector that is not necessarily technology.

In terms of.

Adopting tools that can help the business from a digital perspective. I almost see when I came here there are just so many tools that we use and different teams along the way have decided they like a certain.

Certain tools. So like, I'll take the example of, you know, we have Jira, we have airtable, we have all these.

Tools that different functions have adopted. It's almost led to too much and there's some inefficiencies that come into play when you have all of these different tools that maybe don't speak to each other, aren't integrated. So I think what we actually should be doing is probably cleaning that up a little bit.

Right.

And being more selective about which tools the company as a whole is using, using, because that can lead to a lot of inefficiency when you have that kind of sprawl.

Yeah, yeah, I can relate to that as well. I think oftentimes when there is a need for something, and it's kind of the flip side of trying to push a tool when people really need it. They'll find the tool that fits their needs. And what you end up with is like a lot of dispersion. I can share a little bit about our journey, our digital transformation journey. And Mary touched on it a little bit in the opening about just the times, this shift from traditional print to a digital first subscription first based business. And the same time, you know, our internal departments, legal.

Going on our own digital transformation. And so when I Joined the legal department one of the times for almost 10 years, spent some time in a former role and joined the legal department almost six years ago. And immediately one of my first initiatives was a digital transformation of our records management process, which had been run somewhat in the same way for a couple of decades. And so we had electronic repositories in place, but they were.

Like built to replicate paper based, a paper based environment. And so really rethinking how we approach our records and transforming that entire body of work just kind of naturally led to CLM as the next step in that evolution. And so it has been a journey since.

So I love something that you just said there, Lindsey. I wrote down, you don't want to replicate the paper based environment. And that is so much of sort of one way of thinking when you think about digital transformation. People say, okay, well this is how it currently works. Let's just throw some technology on top of it, let's just speed it up, let's just automate it. But true, you know, the word transformation, we're not just digitizing, we're actually trying to rethink how we work, how the future of providing legal services should work. And that's part of what makes this a little bit hard. And Iris, you know, sort of alluded to the explosion of tools. Everyone sees a problem and they go after like, I can fix it this way, I can fix it that way. But we know that you kind of have to step back, you kind of have to think through strategically, like, what is the roadmap? What is the goal? How are these things going to talk to each other? What needs to go first? What are the right tools to have in place? How, you know, it's, it's totally, it's an important thing. We all know it's obvious, but who owns it in your organization? And when we're all so busy doing our day jobs, like, how do you have the time to step back, back and think about, gosh, this is kind of the chaos that's currently happening. And what do we need to do to put all this in place so that we are set up for the future?

I can, I can go. For us, it's Ops owns it. And so, and that was really what my role was born out of is, is exactly that, Mary. Needing that sort of centralized.

Centralized function to think through the technology roadmap, the process improvement roadmap, all of that. And so me and my team own that. And in consultation with others in the department who use or have, currently use a tool or have a need for a tool or a need for a process. And it might not always be getting a new tool. Right. It might be using something that we already have in a different way, it might be a different process. It might be leveraging an enterprise tool that the company already pays for. So it's not always going to be net new legal specific tools. But really thinking about the landscape of what are the problems we're trying to solve, what tools and resources do we have at our disposal, how should we use those, what's in budget, how can we get the best bang for our buck? And really prioritizing the roadmap that way has been what we've done and have been successful at.

Yeah, I think definitely having an ops team to own that is hugely important. You know, when I joined Airbnb, you know, three plus years ago, you know, they had just, just experienced a RIF and a reduction in their workforce. And a large part of the legal department's ops team was part of that rif. And so coming into a situation where there was no single owner within legal for a lot of these matters was really kind of jarring because I came from Google, where we had Mary leading the helm of our ops team within legal. You had a corporate engineering team that was there to build tools for us in, in whatever we needed to. Pretty much the opposite. And I do think we had to. When I got here, even the commercial function was fragmented. Like it wasn't didn't roll up to one dgc. And so over time, I eventually brought some of our sort of inbound commercial work and our partnerships and other commercial type functions together and then had that team kind of own being the kind of point of contact for the business when it came to evaluating things like a CLM tool or deciding what we might need to help make our commercial function more efficient with tooling. So I do think assigning a single owner really helps because that's their priority and that's their focus. But if you have too many constituents or stakeholders to manage, it can be really hard to get any traction on these things.

Ramsey, I know you had a similar experience. Yeah, yes.

I mean, we continue to have today that issue and we're fully aware and we determined to fix it. But there's no single ownership today. There's part of it with the operation. Part of it is the digital, the enterprise, and then you have markets that also come up with their own tools on their own, et cetera. And you know, Iris mentioned this earlier. You know, we have an abundance of tool to the extent that is so confusing, you know, and it makes it hard. Obviously, there are tools that are, you know, designed to make it simpler to interact with your client, et cetera. And then there are tools that you need within your teams. And how do you have. At least I work with a global team. How do I make sure that we know we're all having a tool that allows us to communicate at the right time, consistently, et cetera. So that's the other challenge, but definitely one we are going. I can tell you from my vantage point, I'll do everything as part of my role in legal to make sure that we address it in 2024.

And on that, you've just said something really important, which is that I want to do everything that I can to address this. There's a mindset shift that I think is really important that needs to take place right across organizations, legal departments, when you're thinking about transformation. Because it's very easy again, to be very busy, to stick with the status quo. This is how we're doing it. Everything's fine. Or we don't have time to take a step back, to rip everything out, to rethink about it. But it really often takes someone with the just conviction that this is really important, not necessarily to own it, but to drive it and try and be the voice for change in the organization. Sometimes that comes from the top, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes we're actually trying to convince leadership to do things differently. What's your experience with kind of the group mindset? Are people in the organization excited? Do you get pushback? I mean, I imagine we all have a little bit of change management involved in this. Right?

Yeah. No, thank you. It's been an interesting.

Journey so far working with the rest of the organization because we obviously have colleagues who look at all spectrums. You have more of the. We love it the way we are. We have all our doubts, everything is going to fall apart if you start using them, etc. And then you have people who are a little bit. I think that's the majority that fall a little bit in between. There are curious, but not, you know, but they still want to see more before. And then you have maybe I would say the disruptor that really feel that this is time to, you know, transition and go fast, etc. So. But I would say, Mary, that.

There'S still. When. Whenever we talk about change and management and changing and adopting new tools, etc. At least for our experience, there's been some bitter taste when. Because colleagues have really struggled every time they're told this is a new tool, it's going to make it easier, etc. Turned out to be like, okay then. So complicated. Two, three years later, okay, now we discovered this was not really the most easy one. We're going to roll out another one. So I think this is one thing we really need to work through. And if you want to do make that journey, we have to gain their confidence and have some credibility.

Getting them there.

Yeah, yeah.

I think if I can add two things to that, I think that's spot on. There's two things that come to mind as I hear Ramsey speak about that is picking the right people for your focus group. Right. So your project team, your focus group, the other stakeholders you're going to bring in, be really thoughtful about who you include, how you include, and engage them. And. And then the second is really thoughtful about the roadmap. Right. So the roadmap takes into account, in my perspective, what are the most, the highest needs, the highest priorities, the biggest bang for your buck. And also some small wins. Like to build that credibility. You have to start out the gate, you know, low hanging fruit, small wins, showing the value, and then can tackle some of the more complex projects. So I think all of that have been really thoughtful. Roadmap and being really thoughtful about who you include in individual projects and whose input you seek and how is two. Two pillars to success on the change management side of things.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Like, be willing to experiment. Right. And by that kind of echoing Lindsay's point, choosing like discrete areas where you can really demonstrate the value of what you're proposing so that you actually have data to show and you can say, this is actually the impact that we thought it would have and that can get you more traction with the wider organization.

I think the other thing that we're experiencing right now at Airbnb is just with all the AI and machine learning kind of excitement that's really helped.

Across the entire organization get everybody excited about how we can better use technology to make work easier. So, like within Legal, we even have like a small working group that is testing out certain AI machine learning products that we can use in Legal. But again, they're experimenting, they've got like a focus group. Right. We're trying to see if this actually has impact before we go off and say, everybody's got to adopt this. And I think that's been a really smart way that we've thought about, like, okay, how are we going to start integrating some of this really cool technology into our Daily practice.

Yeah, I love what AI has done to the conversation and that mindset shift because certainly there's a ton, ton of fear out there, but at least it's gotten people curious about and especially with legal, there's so much talk about AI and legal, like what does that mean for our profession and what does it mean in the way that we're going to work day to day in legal departments? And even if we aren't adopting that day one, it gets people starting to think about technology and automation more generally. Are you guys feeling that as well? And are you guys hearing the we need to be using AI, where should we be using AI from other parts of the organization?

Yeah, yeah, no, it's definitely, you know, it's a top down thing for us. And even our chief legal officer from the very beginning was like, you know, he, he's actually retiring. So you know, you, you could say, oh, like why would anyone even care if you're kind of not going to be in this field anymore? But he's been super excited about the possibilities and encouraging us to experiment and has been participating in these focus groups and using the technology and asking good questions about kind of the implications of this. And I think that's the other piece of this that where legal can play a really good role is it's not about saying like, oh, we shouldn't use this because it's scary or we don't understand it, but at least knowing its limitations and guiding the business on kind of how to think about the risks that some of these tools can introduce and this technology can introduce so that at least you're being thoughtful and you're kind of not going into it completely blind and not understanding the consequences of it. I think having legal be adopters and helping the business evaluate these tools is actually a really good thing for sure.

Great. Okay. And then we touched on this a little bit. But just to get more tactical, like where do you start in this journey? You're looking across your department. There's, there's chaos, there's a mess. There's a million things as we all know that can be transformed and change. I often like to tell folks, look at where certainly low hanging fruit is a good way to get people bought into, you know, why you're there. But also where, where are you going to have the biggest impact? Where is the bang for the buck? Where can you put more of your resources and intention behind to actually change the way the broader organization works, not just legal. And I know for each of you commercial legal teams and Or CLM has been a key place for people to start thinking about why is it so obvious or why does that make sense for your organizations?

Iris?

All right. I think commercial is like the easiest place to start within legal, at least because it's one of the few areas in legal where you can actually find metrics that are useful and you have high volume, usually you've got.

Turnaround times. I'm not saying it's something where you can measure SLAs necessarily, but there's usually a way to measure whether you're getting better or not. I think.

This is where at least I've been focused is what can we do to improve both the intake of requests that we get somehow measure or monitor how long it's taking to the extent we can, and also just demonstrate like, you know, when we create other things, like maybe more self service kind of resources for the business team, you know, how is that potentially impacting the turnaround time? So I think you want to start somewhere where it's easy to get data and it's measurable. Right. And seeing how.

Kind of tooling can really. And technology can really help you get those, those measurements and get more precise about that rather than just sort of, I think it takes this long. So that, that's where we, we kind of have tried to focus.

But you know, again, like going back to AI machine learning, like, you know, one of the tools that we've been experimenting with is about helping the litigation team write initial briefs, like drafts of briefs. Like, that's going to be amazing if that actually can reduce the turnaround time that it takes for the litigation team to produce, you know, memos or briefs. So it's just, I'm really excited about the potential, but I do think you start usually where there's something measurable, for sure.

Yeah, yeah. And I think it also is a natural fit because it touches so many areas of the business and you have that pressure from internal clients who want to get to contract faster, who want an easier way to do it, who aren't necessarily jazzed about doing contracts over email. And so there is that natural momentum. I think that that helps make CLM good first choice for us. It was the natural first choice just because I had, from where I had come from, I started in strategic sourcing, dealt with contracts a lot, moved into a records management role and tried to, you know, transform that. And so it was just like the next natural step, something that I was confident that we could excel at. So it was kind of practicality in my sense. But I do think that exactly what you're talking about, Iris, that it makes a lot of sense for various reasons. And I think the pressures from internal clients is, is one of those.

Did we lose Mary?

Yeah.

Oh, no.

Coming back, I think gradually.

Can you hear us, Mary?

Yeah. Did I freeze or did I. I could hear you guys fine. Maybe I had a weird face, but I could hear you guys fine.

Yeah.

And for us it's been like. Like what? What Iris and Lindsay said similarly for. In terms of.

Areas, we also prioritize, driven by the commercial needs and the R and D, because we do support as well in R and D and manufacturing and the other functions.

And as one of the most highly regulated industries in the world, you know, our legal team spend a lot of time on the commercial side reviewing promotion material, medical material, etc. Etc. And we found that there's one area that could benefit from the use of digital tools is really that review to try to simplify it. All these hundreds of pieces that come for review to try to simplify that review and accelerate it as much as we can so they can release them. The other area obviously is the IP and you know, everything related to the filing of patents, etc. So that's another big area that we're certainly prioritizing. I wish we had more the luxury of time to try to absorb and think, etc. But, you know. But that's what we have to work with.

Yeah. Well, that kind of goes to our earlier part of our conversation about who, who can take the step back to start thinking about it. When I think all of you said you need to dedicate a bit of someone's role or have an ops team that can focus on it because everyone is moving so quickly and has a million things to juggle. And if you don't free up somebody's time to think about it, this inertia just continues on and no change happens. And you have to be really deliberate about, I think digital transformation and it's, it's, it's a pretty big undertaking. What do you guys think it's going to do to the role of. In House Counsel and how does it shape the future of the profession? You know, some of the things that we're seeing happening, whether it's AI, but even more basically, you know, some of the just transformation that, that changes the way that we work day to day or, or doesn't it?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's hopefully going to help us deal with a lot of the things that probably don't require A lot of creative thinking or problem solving. Right. And get rid of the redundant work. You know, I think the example of reviewing marketing materials that Ramsey mentioned, like we had this, I will always remember this at Google because I thought it was just so cool. You know, we had this legal assistant who happened to know how to code and created a way to review marketing materials and catch kind of the commonly asked questions or issues. And it would like, you know, look for the wording or phrasing or whatever and then would pop up like an answer for the marketing person saying like, hey, maybe think about phrasing it this way. Right. And like, that was amazing. And it kind of reduced the amount of time we had to spend going over the same question over and over again with, with our business partners. So it's things like that that I hope technology can help us reduce or get rid of. Right. But I definitely see it as a supplement to our practice as lawyers and legal professionals versus kind of replacing us. And it hopefully will have the effect of allowing us to focus on the things that really do require, like I said, creative creativity and experience and judgment, which I think all of us would rather be doing more of that. Right. Than the kind of rote stuff.

That is just par for the course because we're not fully transformed digitally.

Yeah, I agree with all of that. I think the high volume, low impact.

Work.

And also thinking about kind of what you said, Iris, about kind of co piloting with an internal client.

Right.

Like we've already, we've already established this guideline. Rather than someone in the legal department telling this person over and over again or even documenting it in a playbook, you have something more automated that can bubble that up in real time. And I think that that will obviously just reduce redundancy and help with efficiencies across the board.

Yeah. So definitely efficiencies is there. I would also think for a global company like us, you know, all the capabilities that come through translation, you know, helping, you know, whenever you have a global meeting, you know, helping the colleagues whose English is not the first language, for example, to be more comfortable, to feel more integrated.

And think for the colleagues who are also in the US or from the US also have the ability to.

Overcome sometimes some of the challenges or language barrier whenever we are interacting with the global teams there. So I personally have been also trying to utilize and see, you know, how I can, the existing tools that we have today, how it could help me be more efficient. I'll give you a recent example. We have. We have our version of Internal. Like many companies, it's a safe, safe one that we license called Vox. So I was drafting, I drafted an email. I knew that the colleagues, the senior colleague I'm sending to really is very particular about how long the message should be to be read it. So I drafted it and I was like, how can I reduce it even more? So I said like, let me try this out. So I said, I entered it in the prompt and actually it really revised it in a way. I had minimum edits to do and I thought, wow, this would have taken me like a few maybe 15, 20 minutes. Now I had like 30 seconds and just look at it for 30 seconds. So I think even today we shouldn't be afraid to start experimenting how that, you know, impacts us every day and not wait for the perfect system for everything to be figured out before we think it's time to try them.

Yeah, I mean I think for efficiency is part of it. Aries mentioned the professional satisfaction and just job satisfaction in your work and just feeling challenged and working at the right level is really important. As you think about is there enough work to go around? I mean we could all keep everyone busy if you doubled the size of your team. But we're at the point now where adding headcount just to keep up with demand is not an option anymore. And there's so many ways to be smarter about that. I mean process improvement is one of those transformation and technology is certainly, certainly one of those. But it also creates a better client experience. You guys have all kind of mentioned some of the self service things that you've been able to create when your client can get things done on their own, bypassing legal, not having to, you know, deal with legal, that gets stuff off your plate that you're answering the same questions over and over or giving them, you know, a contract that doesn't need legal review. So that makes them happy because they get their jobs done faster. But I imagine that makes lawyers happy too because that's like sort of the mind numbing stuff that they're doing over and over that they just get that off my plate. So I can actually get to the thinking. Right. The real part of the role that I want to focus on.

Are you guys feeling that way that you know, when you think about how you are able to scale and grow your, what your teams are able to do that there is pressure to not just hire and think about other levers and you know, is there, is there willingness to invest in that?

Yeah, I mean I think for you know, headcount is Definitely not free flowing these days. So anything I can do to free up one person's time, even if it's a fraction of their overall time to do something else, where, you know, I'm not going to have the headcount to do it, of course, like I'm going to try and do that. And I do think commercial is one of those areas where if you can use other, other software or tools to free up that time, of course I'm going to do that. You know, luckily I have a team that thinks about these things. Right. And they try to create those self service tools, et cetera, in order to free up time to focus on other things. But you know, I going back to what you were saying, Mary, like, I think the mark of a really good kind of commercial function is that you set the clients up, you know, you create the templates, you create the processes that are streamlined and you make it as self service as possible and then you just get out of the way. Yeah, because when legal becomes part of the process or a touch point, it does create drag on time to close that deal. Right. And that's really important, especially for a lot of enterprise businesses. It's, you know, so anything you can do to, to minimize legal's involvement is, is key. But yeah, I do think like it's the first area, you know, I will go to, to say, say hey, can we free up somebody's time to do this other thing if we apply some technology here or maybe outsource this to another team or another function where it's better suited? Right, right.

Well, and the technology piece of the self service, I always say that should be the easy part. I mean as, as all of us know, it's getting people to come up with a uniform language template process. You know, what are the guidelines that we want to give our clients? How are you guys able to, or how have you struggled with trying to get your teams, the legal teams, to come together to collaborate and to kind of agree on a path forward?

I think it goes back to being really thoughtful about who you engage and how and when and to what level. And so having the right people involved, if you're going to example is say you're going to harmonize your templates, right. And you've got a dozen versions of the MSA and you want to get down to one or two, right. Bringing in the right folks at the right time. If you have everyone involved.

All the commercial team involved, it's going to drag. Right. So picking out and for me the recipe has always been like someone who knows it really well, someone who has a differing opinion on how we should approach it.

A paralegal who's expert at.

Implementing all of this in the clm. And so bringing in the right folks at the right time has been necessary throughout. And I think typically, you know, solves that issue. It's been what we have done.

Yeah, I don't have the answer yet on this one. It's an important one. I think we, hopefully we will figure it out. But what I can say, and Mary, you and I have talked about this earlier. I think going forward.

The culture and the mindset are going to be really, really important. So typically we used to hire and look for colleagues, certain qualification, etc. Yeah, that is degree, this and this. And some of this will continue to be very important. Like let's say if you're working in an IP prosecution, you need somebody with a PhD, you know, in chemistry, et cetera. On screen.

The.

So you need this. But I think more and more, the mindset, the colleagues who are. And we're talking about legal professionals who are willing to be uncomfortable with uncertainty, trying new things, jumping in, learning constantly, wanting this intellectual curiosity, these are the ones who are going to drive us forward.

And I think that's where we need to, as leaders when we lead this team to create that ecosystem and that and you know, and that space for them to be able to accomplish that and that excitement. So I think it's really, we're going to focus a lot on culture and beyond the efficiency. Also the other message is about the quality of the experience you have on the job. That's for me, is very important. You know, with time, I think legal professionals also, the demand has been very high on the volume. It's sometimes very challenging, very tough. So really need to be on just the efficiency to start going to a place where people get to enjoy their experience, to grow to, you know, that's, I think, the other beauty of what I think the new technologies could bring.

Yeah, I absolutely love that you've made it a point to try to hire people with the right mindset and to think about a growth mindset as you come into the work. And that's going to create more of a culture of it. But it's also, I've said this oftentimes that it's going to become a competitive advantage for you as a legal department to be able to hire, attract, retain talent. Because if you have come from an organization that is digitally transformed and has tools and people are focused on the right things and Then you go look for a new job. No one's going to go, want to go back to working the old way. I mean, very quickly we get used to technology. It's sometimes scary, sometimes the adoption is, is difficult, but once you're there, it's very hard to go back. And so as I talk to so many legal departments now and they're thinking, yes, I need to do this, maybe next year I'll kick the can, I'll kick the can down the road. But, but that is where the urgency is, right? There's pressure from above, there's pressure from within. There's just the need to keep up with the business and in order to attract and retain talent. I mean, all these are reasons why this is urgent. And I've honestly never talked to anyone who said, I wish I waited longer to put tech platforms in. Except. And then let's go to this for a moment. Maybe all of us have kind of experienced that failed implementation, that failed transformation project, and sort of the, the PTSD that, you know, sets in from that. And three years later, you've been trying to get it up and running, it's still not running. And then you tell everyone, okay, we're going to start over, we're going to find a new platform for this. I have strong feelings that we're in a much better place in terms of technology and usability that we were years ago. And so hopefully some of that will has gone away. But how do I know, Ramsey, you mentioned it for your organization. Like, how do you get people to sort of trust you? Like, this time we're going to get it right. I know it's been really painful, but trust me on this time.

I think we'll go back to. Maybe it was Iris who mentioned, or maybe Lindsay, you said this, like, focus, starting to focus on small wins, where I could start saying, okay, you have every right to be skeptical because of our history.

Maybe not so successful over the years with this system we've used, but we're going to try on that system again more on a pilot and show the success. And I think you build ambassadors who are going to start to, you know, help with bringing that excitement, et cetera. But you have to be really, really thoughtful about where, which one you want to, you want to, you know, invest time in, because you really need that credibility. And I think we don't have too much time to make sure that we start bringing colleagues to trust that this is new chapter, new era starting for us. It will be hopefully more successful.

I'm a huge proponent of the phased rollout both in functionality and in user groups. So I think the biggest way to avoid that. Oh, we've had this tool that's been plaguing us for years is that you don't roll it out big bang to everyone. You test it with a small pilot group. You then grow and grow and grow and you are able to identify very quickly if something's not working and if it's not working for your pilot group and it's not working for the first two departments that you rolled it out to that are going to be your kind of easiest wins, then you pull the plug early and you don't force, don't force it. So I've, I've. That's been my approach and helps to avoid that, that credibility issue of we rolled something out to everybody and now everyone hates it for years. And so it's that, that phase rollout and then again focusing on.

Your focus group and on your project team to kind of before you even implemented, fully implemented and rolled out, making sure that for us, ease of use and user experience is always top of mind in any tool that we implement. Even more so than functionality in some ways and robust. Like I would take an easy to use tool over Rob reporting any day of the week because if people aren't using it, if it's complicated, your reporting is going to show it because it's going to affect your adoption. So.

Yeah.

Great.

Okay, so we have about 15 minutes left or so. I want to move to the live questions and we've got one that has the most votes. How do your companies document the technology already being used and spread the word so that other teams can optimize on that technology. And you guys are all with large organizations, so I'm sure you have lots of tech and tools, some that work well, some that probably could be used by other teams. Yeah. Do you have a good way of documenting and spreading that?

Yeah, I don't know that we do. There is a team at Airbnb, our biztech team team that at least recently I've seen them more on the scene. Just, you know, when, when there was this initiative to see how Airbnb could better utilize AI machine learning. Like they were the ones who kind of owned auditing and documenting how different teams maybe were using the technology and where were the opportunities going to be.

So, you know, it's owned by kind of the engine business teams, but I don't know if they use, I mean we, we use Google Docs a lot, Google Sheets for a lot of things. I don't know if it's all in one like Google sheet somewhere. It wouldn't surprise me if it is. But yeah, at least we have one team that owns it. How they do it, I'm not sure.

Yeah, we have a team. So if you're. If the question is about kind of enterprise level tools. Right. That could be used by anybody in the company, we do have a team for that. It's not a legal team, it's within technology. It's our enterprise productivity team and I think they do a really great job at this. So they're embedded in certain areas and I don't want to speak for that team because I'm not on that team but this has been my experience is, you know, in our self service portal you can see all the enterprise tools available and request a license to those you can search by your need. They're also embedded into our vendor onboarding and contracting processes. So if someone's trying to onboard a software.

Vendor then it'll trigger an approval from that team to like make sure we don't already have a tool that could be utilized. So I'm sure they do more but that's my experience of how they operate and seems to work well.

Yeah, I can, I can speak a little bit to how we did it at Google. We had so many so like over 100 technologies that were being used by our department at some point and we worked, our legal ops team worked hand in hand with like legal IT which who were aware of kind of all the enterprise tools. We found it was difficult to use a lot of the enterprise tools because of the.

Privacy, the restrictions, the view rights that we wanted to lock down for sensitive legal data. So that's why we had to go on our own quite a bit. And then we created a legal steer code that eventually.

Everything that if you're going to buy any technology you had to go the steer code just so that we didn't have a proliferation of tools. And then our steel code would prioritize the requests. And also think about when you're coming up with your business requirements, you know, can we get to 80% of the requirements with something that can be leveraged for more than one team? It's easy to say you need every single thing and end up with like a bespoke tool for everything. But in my experience I'll share. I think E billing, clm, E discovery need best of breed and you probably can get away with like something for everything else. That's a gross generalization but I think that those are the areas that you can kind of think about leveraging technologies for more than one thing.

Next question that we have from the audience is as a transformation agency, we focus on priority process mapping as the North Star before innovating and prioritizing. Do you map process and who does that in your organization?

Maybe some of you haven't gotten to this step in the journey yet too, because I know that you're developing some of the strategies behind the transformation.

Let's see. Oh, was someone else going to go? I didn't want to. I would say we do. And it's largely housed in legal operations. And so anytime we're thinking about a process that, and that could be any process from like how.

How legal engages with our finance department on the budget setting process. That could be how.

How we onboard vendors, how even our onboarding of new hires.

Right.

We think about processes that we in the department do and document them. And as we document them, then you're able to really see in Google Docs where something's like, why do we do it that way? And for me visually it's so much easier to see when you're putting on paper and you say we're going to do this process every time and we're going to answer all the questions and document all of it. You can really see where you've got inefficiencies or where you've got gaps in that process. And I'm a huge fan of documenting our processes. My team knows I have a process document for everything that, everything that we do. And I think it also helps us with knowledge transfer as well so that anyone can, can pick that up and pretty quickly understand how to go about it and how to seek out resources. So that's, I think the first step is document your processes so that you know what you need to solve for if you're thinking about innovating.

Yeah, for us within, within legal, I would say like about 70% is also owned by Legal Ops and There's the other 30 where you have each department doing their own thing and then you discover it later. So our ambition is that eventually you get it 100% under one one roof. But that's obviously within Legal and then each of the other functions, procurement, ET they have their own.

You know, processes and mapping. But for legal it's also work in progress. You see how much work we have, Mary?

Yes, a lot. That's why we all must appreciate our Legal Ops teams. And at Google, I'll just add my two cents as well, is that we Our legal ops team did the process mapping. I'm a big believer in process mapping your current state, as Lindsay mentioned, to show kind of where the opportunities are and then map out where you think the future stated and is. And then, you know, just a helpful tip as you map out your current process. Every step of every decision and every changing of hands, I would ask why? So, okay, first step, this person requests it through this channel. Why? Why is it that channel? Does it have to be that? Is there any other way? Okay, then we route it to this team.

Why?

Why does it go to that team? Is there a good reason? And so sort of like whether it's new, new hire onboarding, as Lindsay said, or you know, your contracts, routing or whatever it is, make sure in every step you ask yourself why it is that way. Otherwise you get again into this danger of automating the current process, which oftentimes is not optimized and is just the way it's always been done. Last question as we wrap up. As you, as you work on your digital transformation, what cross functional departments do you work with, if any? Are there other parts of the company that you work hand in hand with.

Say really close with technology, obviously. So that enterprise productivity team I mentioned has been a great partner throughout.

Finance, obviously. I would say on some, particularly if I'm thinking CLM procurement is a big partner. So those are probably the top three for us. Yeah, Information security, obviously.

Yeah, it's the same on our end. I think we have a procurement team that we have to partner with. Especially when you, when you start exploring CLM solutions, obviously. But you know, the other aspect of my job is we, you know, we are kind of like the frontline legal support for a lot of the business. So we are, they're always kind of a stakeholder if we're going to roll out a new process or think about, you know, changing how we do things. So we always have to involve them and make sure it's a seamless experience for them because they're ultimately the ones who kind of are our users.

When you're kind of interfacing with them directly. Right. So I would say depending on the use case, like it could be any one of our business partners too.

Very similar to. Yes, I mean very similar to both Lindsay and Iris. And I would just reinforce what Iris said that to the extent that it's going to be impacting a commercial or a client, we really want to make sure that we work with them ahead of time before we make any of these changes.

Amazing. Well, thank you three so much for these valuable insights and takeaways. Lindsey Iris Ramsey, been a complete pleasure and appreciate your time. While I still have everyone else on the call, please keep an eye out for our next virtual event, which will be taking place on January 11th, where we'll be showcasing the best of Ironclad's winter product releases with live demos. And of course, be sure to join the Ironclad community to stay abreast of all of our events. We'll send out today's recording within the next 24 hours. And thanks so much for joining us today. See you next time.

Thank you.