Meet Mary O’Carroll The Number One Legal Ops Guru in a unique Webinar of the ACCI Legal Ops Forum!

So, hi everyone, and thanks for joining us today in our Legal Operations Forum webinar. Really happy to see all your faces. Now, some of you may be wondering how I got to know Mary or Carl and how I convinced her to do this webinar with us. And the answer is actually very simple. I connected with Mary on LinkedIn and she immediately replied and said that I should let her know if she could ever be helpful. So, without much hesitation and thinking it was actually a real long shot, I told her about our forum and asked if she would be willing to do this webinar with us. And to my surprise, she immediately replied, absolutely, I'd love it. Sound familiar? Mary? And the reason I'm telling you this is because I think it says a lot about Mary. First of all, how humble she is and also how efficient and how simple it is to work with her. And I think that most of all, it shows how great her desire is to contribute to the legal ops professionals around the world. So, my name is Siga Meghedrouzen and I'm the CEO of Cyberbit and I head the ACCI Legal Ops Forum. And today we'll speak about a lot of important issues that can help you implement legal operations in your department, the role of legal operations, trends in legal operations, and how to start implementing legal operations in your departments. We'll also speak about KPIs and SLAs, which is an issue that has been discussed a lot in our various forums and we have not reached, I think, any real conclusion about it. Also how to implement new technologies, how to strategize, and so on. Hoping we'll have enough time to discuss all of these topics. And all of this is intended to provide you with tools to implement legal operations in your departments and to make your work more efficient. Now, you're very welcome to ask questions using the chat, and we'll try to answer them as we go along.

So let's start. So, Mary, I'd like to, first of all, ask you how you started your legal ops career and why did you choose to follow that path at all, and did it turn out as you expected?

So, yes, thank you so much for having me here. First, let me say I always like to say yes to invitations to speak to new audiences. I think that the biggest challenge we have in our industry is actually education, so the more that we can get out and share what's happening across the world, I always say yes. So thank you so much, first of all, for reaching out and for having me here. So as an introduction, yes, I'm Mario Carroll. I'm currently the chief community officer at a company called Ironclad, which is a leading contracts lifecycle management company. Or you might have heard that that bucket of companies called CLM Contracts Lifecycle Management. Prior to joining Ironclad last year, I actually spent 13 years building and leading the legal operations function at GOOG Google on the side. During that time I also helped to build and lead an organization called clock, which is the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. It's the largest and fastest growing association or organization and community for legal ops professionals around the world. And I'll talk a little bit about that today as well. So I'm not a lawyer. I actually got into this world by accident, as many of us do. My background is actually in business. And so people often ask me, you know, how did this whole industry become your life's work? And I think it started for me. I was in investment banking and consulting. And that is an area that trains you just to be very aware of looking for problems and finding solutions for it. So I started in the legal industry when I joined a law firm, an international law firm called Oric. And I started asking questions about the budget and how we were getting away with raising our rates every year on our clients without any explanation. And so.

Fast forward a few years. I started with Google. Google called me to do legal operations in house. I thought it would be very much the same. It was very different than being at a law firm. And I remember getting there and asking all of our leadership team how they were tracking their matters, how they were tracking their budgets. And I was told we don't have matter budgets. This is Google. We track things on post its. And this is a true story. So there was no systems, no tools, and I thought, my God, what have I gotten myself into? So that is absolutely a true story. And my general counsel started asking me questions like are we getting good value out of the money we're spending with outside counsel? And if we're not tracking time, how do we measure our productivity of our lawyers? And how do I know where I should be adding headcount and where should I put in technology? And the list of questions kind of went on and on. And with each of these questions I said, I have no idea, I don't know the answer to any of these. And so sort of began the journey. And so what I thought I would do today, as I mentioned, is I've put together a very short 10 minute presentation kind of on the background of legal ops, how it worked at Google and the Rise of that. So if you guys don't mind, is it okay to kind of go into that now?

Sure, sure.

Okay, let me get that up and running. See.

And anyone who has just joined, you're also very welcome to use the chat and ask us questions.

Yes, please do. Questions would be great. Either during, throughout, or at the end. Fine. Okay, so let's see. You can see that. Okay. Yeah, great. So I think if you look across every single modern corporation, I find that function after function, every single area has been completely transformed from the inside and out, redefined by technology, innovation, data, the need to move at an unprecedented scale and speed. Right? You see, finance, hr, marketing, every group has completely transformed. But legal, of course, as we know, is the last holdout. And I think that we've started to finally feel that pressure in our roles. And for the first time we are seeing real disruption, real opportunity in our space to do things differently. And I personally find it extremely exciting to watch that transformation slowly unfold and to be a part of it. So why is this group here today? Why are we all part of this industry? Because it's. Because I think that the industry is changing in powerful ways that I think are already impacting each of our jobs and is going to continue to impact our jobs in the future. Now it's always been my view that it is the in house legal departments who have played the biggest role in driving that change. It's not the law firms, it's not the law schools. The role of the general counsel has really changed over the years. So in the past the GCs were focused on fighting fires, keeping people out of jail, making sure they were the best lawyer in the room. But I think that has changed. They're now having to ask really different questions, new questions, and they're being now forced to sort of staff up their departments in new ways, take on new challenges, manage new functions that go beyond traditional GC decision making. And so that GC of today is responsible for all these new functions like strategic planning, budgeting, professional development, tooling, resource allocation, training, data analytics, et cetera, et cetera. And now, as you all know, these are not things that most lawyers are trained on in law school or at the law firms. And nor are they in many cases, topics that any of the lawyers or GCs have interest in. And so with that came a very natural evolution that drove the rise of what we now know as legal operations, where GC started to bring in business professionals, people to work as kind of their right hands in the department. Have a seat at the Table run the rest of the show. And when many of us, like myself, we just said, you know, had first started in these roles, there were no real job descriptions. We were just kind of told to come in and solve problems. And, you know, actually a few of us were. Where I started in Silicon Valley, we found each other. We started to meet regularly to share our ideas, our findings, to ask each other, what are you doing? What are you seeing? What are your best practices? And that really was the birth of an organization I mentioned earlier, now known as clock. And in the early days, it was mostly people at large companies and departments with over 100 people. And that little group, that group grew and grew over time until, honestly, none of us could fit into each other's conference rooms at our offices. And we formally created Clock then as a global organization at the beginning of 2016. Now, when clock emerged, it had a big, big effect on accelerating the pace of change in the legal departments because you finally had people with a collective voice today, as I mentioned, it's the largest organization of legal ops professionals around the world. And it's really built on the foundation of sharing, of collaboration, and the idea that we can do things better and faster if we do it together, if we're talking to each other than we could in our own silos and working individually. So since we started in 2016, that group has really grown as we've seen the role explode again around the world. There are roughly 5,000 members across the globe in every industry and departments of every size. So, yes, even in small departments, we now are seeing it, and mostly recommending that it is hired. The legal ops role is hired into a function if you are a team of three to five people. So really early on, the role has not just grown in prevalence, but it is also grown in stature and in scope. So we're seeing the scope of the role increase to what we've described on the right side as the core 12 things that could fall into the scope of the role, but that is even growing time over time, and also in stature, meaning that we're seeing many people in the legal ops role now at the VP level, very commonly at the director level. We've even seen it at the.

Senior Vice President level at some Fortune 100 companies. So it's continuing to grow and expand and change day by day.

I thought I'd give you. People are always asking, that makes sense in theory, but what does a team actually do? So I thought I'd give you just a quick snapshot of what my team at Google looked Like when I left last year, I had the privilege of growing that team from just myself to over 60 people by the time I left, serving a department of nearly 1500. So I'm sure very different from the size and scope of all of your departments. Very large, but definitely, arguably one of the larger and more mature legal ops functions in the world. Just to give you an idea of what we did specifically, we operated in a few areas. The first was what I considered outside counsel and vendor management. That's everything where we spent money outside of the company. That included budgeting, financial management, vendors, rate increases, so on, so forth. The second bucket was tech enablement, very simply, systems tools, workflow optimizations, contracts management systems, patent systems, litigation systems, kind of everything else we needed to put in place to scale our business. The third area which came about was data and analytics. Very important to make sort of any decision with data in your company. This included business intelligence, data provisioning, management, dashboards, visualizations, metrics, advanced analytics. We also had a team called Education and Knowledge Management. This was the team that really managed trainings, professional development. We also had them create all of our centralized knowledge hubs, help centers where we documented our policies, our processes, how do you get stuff done? And they also did certifications for the legal department. And then finally we had a group called Program Management. I know I'm jumping around a little bit, but this is the order in which they emerged. Program Management was the group that did strategic initiatives. So they partnered with our leadership team on the really high impact sort of cross functional projects, new regulatory changes, things that we had to comply with, or the key objectives or goals of the department. So we did process improvement, project management, strategic planning, all the execution of special projects. So that's kind of what my team did day to day.

And so what's the effect of all this? With more and more companies, with more departments doing this kind of work around the world, what has this done? Well, we know that it's created a lot of pressure on the industry. It's created demand for more options for us, demand for more technology. And we're seeing that change every day. So it's forced us to work in new ways to deliver those legal services. And it's created a heightened focus on what I would call right sourcing. You'll hear me use that term a lot. And what right sourcing means is looking across the entire all the department's demand for legal work and disaggregating that work, matching each piece of the work with the right resource. That means insourcing, outsourcing deciding what goes to a law firm, what goes to a law company or alternative service provider, as they're called, what needs to be done with a lawyer, what doesn't, what can be automated. Answering all those questions and with more and more players involved, we'd require more collaboration. And we're seeing an exponentially increasing amount of data, certainly in the world, but also within the legal department. And so the importance of capturing all that data, making sense of it, being able to make sense of large volumes of data quickly has become critical and in many ways also a competitive advantage for your department. And so finally, we're also seeing a change in the skill sets, the roles that we think are going to be critical for delivering legal services in the future. It is not just about lawyers and paralegals now. You're going to see a lot more options for lawyers and legal professionals of tomorrow. And I think it's very exciting to see all that unfold. So what sort of happens next? I think we continue to see progress and change. It's going to accelerate, it's going to happen faster. These recent years of COVID are a great example where I think that operational excellence and stronger prioritization was really critical now, really more than ever to every organization. And I want to continue to see the role of Legal Ops growing. Before you all jumped on, Seagal and I were talking about how we're seeing it in Brazil and in Africa and Japan, so definitely all over for the world. Personally, I want to continue to educate people and make sure that this role is a mainstay in legal departments around the world, big and small, across all the industries. And so I think that we have the opportunity to influence the future, to drive positive change in the industry where we can get better outcomes for everyone that is involved. And of course the way to do that is by really leveraging the power of community. So we saw that certainly with the explosion of clock around the world. I know that ACC Israel is incredibly helpful group, that you can rely on each other. I know that there have been some informal groups and passionate people here in Israel. Some of you may know, I think Edo Bargil is on this call. He had invited me to speak at what I understand was recently the first Legal Ops conference in July in Israel. So that's kind of a big deal. It seems like interest is growing here as well. So like I told Seagal, if I can ever be helpful, I'm always happy to chat and answer any questions. So with that I will sort of stop talking, but certainly here to answer questions. And happy to have a conversation with all of you.

Mary, we actually do have a first question.

About legal ops helping the risk function of legal managing. Maybe managing is from Philippe Dragotta, managing the legal risk. How legal Ops can assist with that. Maybe want to relate to that?

Yeah, Well, I think that, you know, the entire department of legal is really focused on risk. The legal ops function traditionally, we like to say, optimizes the balance of speed, quality and cost. And quality, to me, is a big part of risk. There's the control that you want to have around how things are done and there's consistency as well. And if you think about a legal department, in a lot of times we find, you know, if three people, five people, 10 people are doing the same type of work, they're often doing it alone and doing it in different ways. And so is the advice that you're giving, is the work that you're producing controlled? Is it consistent? Do you know, let's say, how your sales team is executing contracts? Are they making changes? What's getting signed? Where are those documents stored? What happens after that? If you're going to be in complete compliance with certain things, are you able to see what's happening across the entire department? And again, how every lawyer is performing their work? That is a big function of the legal operations team. And in addition to helping to control the risk, by putting in structure and process to make sure there's consistency and standards in the way that advice is given and the work is done, you're actually able to hopefully measure it as well. So an example I'll give you from a really interesting conversation I had with another legal department in the US and they're very focused on data analytics. And so they put in a ironclad contracts management system essentially to create their contracts to control the language that's in it. And essentially the control piece there is if you want to allow self service, if you want your procurement or your sales team to be able to execute contracts on their own, the legal team is, you know, can create those controls and pre approve the language that they can go and execute on their own without coming to see you or put in the control, such that if they want to change the language, if they want to change one of the clauses, it kicks back automatically to someone in the legal department to review before it can get approved. So those are some of the risk factors that they were able to look at. Something like their limitation of liability over time for each contract. And they actually had a chart, a dashboard essentially, that they could show how they're as they're, you know, a startup, they're giving away a lot of things and concessions and that goes up and as it goes, the company matures, you see that drop off that limitation of liability. Multiple goes down over time. And so you're able to sort of show your leadership team how your company or how your department is managing risk better over time. So I thought that was actually a very interesting way to display sort of the results.

Right. And I think we can touch that also when we speak about KPIs, which is an issue we'll touch on like in a few minutes and that can be very interesting. We had a long conversation about that and we'll share it. But perhaps before then, Mary, you can relate to legal departments in Israel which are, you know, much smaller than the typical department in the US And I know that many departments really want to take their first step in implementing legal operation. And since, you know, there is no like formal education or any anything formal that you can follow or formal steps and no one has time and not every department has a dedicated legal operations function, it can be very struggling even for those who want to start. And maybe you have some insights or tips from your experience on how people should start implementing legal operations.

Yes. So where to start? I mean if you are going to just kind of roll up your sleeves and play that role or have someone on your department play that role before dedicating a full time head, you certainly can dive in and experiment and see if that works for your department. I think frankly there's so many places to start that it's overwhelming. I think the hardest part is prioritizing. So what I often recommend to people is look across the department and figure out where the biggest impact can be. That's easy to say, harder to do because everywhere you look is going to be a problem and every problem is sort of worth fixing because as we know there's a lot of opportunity to do things better in our industries.

It's not obvious that obvious. It's not always that obvious where to start. So I like to say let's look at where the people or the resources in your department are going. And that could be your financial resources, where you're spending a lot of money and outside counsel, your headcount resources. Where are you spending a lot of time as a department where the people, your small team feeling a lot of pain, where they're spending a lot of time working. And even if you have some technology, where is that being spent? And then where can you have the biggest impact on where those resources are going. And if your team is very focused on, let's say, ip, maybe that's where you want to start. If you're. Your department is very focused on contracting, which is what we see from probably 80% of teams, that is a good place to start, so on and so forth. If it's outside council, where most of your money is going, maybe E billing or getting a sense of, if you're getting good value for your dollar, that is a good place to go. So really looking again at the bigger things, it's often easy to start at the periphery. You know, a little project here, a little project there, which is also good. And that helps you gain kind of the trust of the rest of the department that you're here to, to help them. And sometimes there's fear of what a legal ops function can do. I know when I started, it was 2008, it was the recession. Everyone thought I was here to do bureaucracy and to make life more difficult. And it was about building those relationships and gaining the trust of the whole team to let them know that you're here to make their lives better. I mentioned, right, sourcing. I think ultimately, right, sourcing is a big key, maybe the most critical part of what we do in legal operations, and that is again, figuring out matching your resource with the right value of work. If you're looking at technology, what kind of work should be automated? What kind of work can you use technology for? What kind of work should we just stop doing altogether? What kind of work can go to outside counsel versus inside council? What resources? Again, moving those resources around to try and get the most value out of it. And then finally, also mentioned the community, the people on this call use each other, you know, read, listen to podcasts, learn from what others are doing, because we're all having the same struggle. And by now there's others who have gone ahead of you and have dealt with some of those challenges. When I started, we were all kind of doing it for the first time and making it up. But now there are those who have learned lessons who can give you some guidance about what to do, what not to do, what to look out for. So hopefully you can find people to help you in your community.

Great, Mary. And we have actually, I think, two questions on the chat, which I would like you to answer about hiring for the legal operations function you mentioned, and you told us about your background. And the question is, you know, what are your insights on hiring for this position? Should it be someone who is a lawyer or more experienced, less Experienced and what kind of background should they have?

Yeah, so I personally don't think having a background in legal is required. That said, it can be helpful, but again, I don't think it's required. To me the most important skill set to have is really a business minded background or skill set or, and you can be a lawyer, you can be a paralegal and have a business background or a business mind. So to me that's more critical. I feel like you can learn the legal function quickly, other backgrounds and other ways to look for someone, someone in this role. Because again, as we all know, there's no education, there's no sort of training ground to hire them from. And the good news is I've seen people be successful in legal operations who were, who were attorneys, who were paralegals, who were project managers, who were in other parts of a company doing operations. So did they come from finance operations, marketing operations, tech operations, Former consultants? Consultants were a big area that I hired from before process improvement consultants because I found that they were very good again at coming in, identifying problems, putting together a plan to execute on it and seeing that through people with finance backgrounds, people with tech backgrounds, all really good places to start. And in the beginning you're sort of looking for a generalist. As you grow over time, you'll start needing specialists. So by the time I had a huge team, I needed someone who was a specific data analyst and a specific financial analyst and a specific systems and tool developer. But in the beginning you kind of just want somebody who is hungry, who is really naturally curious and wants to get into a lot of things because someone ideally understands finance, understands project management, understands or has an interest in technology and can do a little bit of everything. So you kind of want the jack of all trades in some way. I know that's hard to find, but they're actually, they're out there and there's so many people out there looking to get into this now. So honestly, if you put out a post and you are going to hire a dedicated role, I think you will be surprised about how many applications you get. Someone in the US just told me they put out a role and didn't know if anyone was going to apply because who knows what legal operations is. And within one week he got 800 applicants.

Wow, that's amazing. I think the thing is that here it's even less, it's much less developed.

It is much less. So we'll have to do some convincing.

It will change.

Yeah, yeah. So you have to take someone, as you said, who is not experienced already and then like do on the job training and someone that has the basic capabilities.

Right, right.

Which you think are important for this job.

And, and frankly I would try to hire someone you don't have to train someone who's just good enough to look around and find problems and start to solve them for you. Ideally you have someone who you don't have to tell them, this is what I want you to work on. You know, that person who can come in and tell you what needs to be fixed is really helpful.

Yes, yes. If you can reach that, that's perfect place to be, I think.

Okay, so we'll go back. We have additional questions, but when we'll go back to them in a minute. But Mary, I really want to ask you about KPIs. So KPIs key performance indicators. And this is an issue that has been discussed so many times in various ACC forums. And I must say I personally don't feel I've cracked it. And I don't think the other participants, I think they share the same feeling. And you know, we see all of the departments around us having KPIs. We also want KPIs also to show, to measure ourselves and to show what we're doing, to show the value that we're bringing, to have them as a tool that empowers us. But I'm not sure there is a perfect solution in KPIs for our kind of a job. And I'd really like to hear your insights and tips about that.

So I would agree completely. I mean, I think KPIs are super important and metrics are something that we should strive for because data is how we need to be making decisions as a department. But I don't think that there is a magical group of regular GC dashboard that that applies to everyone. And every department is completely different. And what is important to you and what's important to your leadership team is going to be different. I would say don't go crazy. There's a lot of companies that put together so many reports and so many KPIs. And if you have data, and kudos to you, getting data is hard enough if you have so much data that you're able to produce so many reports and KPIs. The downside can also be that you're putting out so many reports, taking a lot of time to do that. But ask yourself the so what question, you know, what decisions are you making from these reports? How is this helping you? If it's just reporting the Weather, you know, then is it worth the effort? I think there's the question we always ask ourselves, is the level of effort versus the impact? And if you're spending a lot of time creating reports, nobody's looking at them, and you just become this reporting function, it sort of loses its value. If you put out a few, you know, not too many, a few very important reports that people can use to make decisions. I would, I would rather have a few really good ones. I also think that.

They don't reports and KPIs don't always answer every question for you. A lot of times they're there to raise these questions. And what I mean by that is we always had a little bit of fear of metrics in my experience and in my departments, because why are you trying to measure me? I left the law firm. I don't want you to track my hours. You know, what, what kind of things are you looking for? Are you trying to judge my work and you know, to tell people it's not about that. We're not trying to find who's not doing their work or, you know, you're doing less than the other person or you're complaining.

Comp.

Your work is less complicated. It's really about looking at trends over time and identifying places that you're asking questions. So sometimes the report, let's say, shows a pattern. I want to show the leadership team to say, does this make sense to you when you're looking at this? Are you just nodding? This is obvious to me that that's how things are going, or do you go, wait, whoa, what's this spike here? Why is this person an outlier? And if it's doing that, that's also serving the purpose of the KPIs for someone to go, oh, what is happening there? Oh, that's because this person works on partnerships and that person works on NDA. So of course their volume is going to be very different. Okay, so raising questions, again, not necessarily answering them, because you're going to see two people and you can't compare them. But are you able to sort of understand. Yes, I expect to see that. That confirms what I expect. That is also helpful, useful KPIs that I think are useful. Your turnaround time, that one is sort of an obvious one, you know, that's again one that you could show. Are we getting better over time? So it's Another thing that KPIs should help you with your leadership team. And managing up is always showing the value of the legal department. How do you know that you're getting better? How do you know that you're improving your cost, your quality, your speed over time? And if you're able to measure that, fantastic. There's always a grain of salt with that, right? Because there's complexity involved. And as Sigal and I spoke, when she goes, well, what about the complexity? Can you measure complexity? I think that that is also challenging. And there's different ways of going about that, measuring the complexity of risk or complexity of the work. There's certainly the companies that choose to self report that, you know, have the attorney put in on some scale, whether it's complex or risky. And what do you think happens when we ask attorneys to rate the complexity? Everything is a 10. Everything is super complicated.

So the best advice I actually heard on rating complexity is to use a scale of 10, not to use a 3, not to use a 5 and a 10. What happens when you have 10 is, is that everyone is sort of going to go two or three points from what's actually happening. But at least you have a directional notion. No one's going to put an eight if it's actually a three. No one's going to put a two if it's actually a six. Right? But you'll get, that's between, you know, one or two. At least you'll directionally know if it's medium high or low.

But then, Mary, just a small follow up question and then you would have like, and this is on a bit of a discussion on sla and then you would have like a different turnaround time for a more complex contract or I mean, how does that fit in the complexity or it's just measuring the work? Was it complex or not?

Well, I think you probably ideally want to look at turnaround time as it relates to the level of complexity. I will admit we were never successful in cracking that nut. So, you know, all of this sounds ideal and these are all the things that we should strive for. But getting the data in a clean and manageable place such that you can report on it on an automated regular basis is way easier said than done. So I just want to make you all feel better that like nobody's practiced.

The reassuring message, we're not alone.

That's where we want to go though, right? Because I think that is where you start to make decisions on things. And what we're seeing from, well, we could talk about contracts just for a second because that's what I know really well right now is that if you're seeing your turnaround time for a certain type of contract certain level of complexity that you want to continue to speed up. You can then get in and analyze which clauses are being negotiated most often. Where are things getting hung up in your department? Is it with your side? Is it with the other, your counterparty? And then you're able to tweak the process and measure it again over time. But you have to put figure out what questions you're trying to answer. That's actually step one. Then putting in the process to capture that data that answers the questions, then putting in the systems to capture it automatically and then to have the report. So it takes time, but that is eventually where you want to get for sure.

Yeah.

And we did discuss the issue of tracking liability caps as a way of showing that we're actually reducing the company risks. Or I know I can say that I track, for example, how many out of the contracts are that we sign with customers, we use our templates on how many do we negotiate. And you know, I want to see, see a trend on that as well. So I don't know if there are any other ideas because I think people also need you know, to have like the ideas of, of what they're breaking their head, what they can actually measure. And as you say, it's, it's, you know, it's a per department issue. But I don't know if there are any like additional ideas. I think, I think we also discussed, and you mentioned this now that it can help you track like improve your template. So if you see that some specific negotiation is taking a lot of time on a certain template, then you analyze that and you see, okay, maybe I need to change this clause and then I can make the turnaround time shorter.

Exactly right. And the example you gave is great. Right. How much of your negotiation or how much of your contracts are executed on your paper versus the third party and what is the speed lead to execution on both of those and can you then change the balance based on that? That's a great one.

Okay, so we'll go back in a minute and speak more thoroughly about SLAs, but we do have another question. And I don't know if Mary, you have anything that pops into your mind about sharing a few Africa moments that you've had in your career in increasing the department productivity. So any anything that comes to mind with respect to that.

I don't know if they are Eureka moments, but certainly areas where.

I think increasing the productivity is critical. Self service has been a place for me that I think we can all do more on and that's all goes back to, right? Sourcing is figuring out what kind of work work is coming in frequently or what can we empower our clients, our internal clients to do themselves. And in my experience, there's certainly the frequently asked questions of your department that you can turn into self service, right? They're, they're asking questions that are sometimes not even legal. Legal advice, you know, that you get all the time. Sometimes it is, but it's the same question over and over. Sometimes it's requesting work, but it's work that they can execute themselves. When we talked about contracts, measuring standard contracts versus negotiated contracts is another important one. And that goes to something like this. If you have standard contracts that are not negotiated, how much of it can you push to your third party? Or can you push to your internal client to self service and execute on their own again within legal controls. But the more you can push out of the legal department actually ends up speeding, not just legal up, but the entire business. You're getting sales done faster, you're getting procurement done faster, you're getting hiring done faster. So those are things for me, I think self service and empowering the rest of the company to get work done faster makes it's a eureka moment because it didn't just help legal, it helped the whole company. And then what usually happens is the whole company comes back and says, who put this in place? This is so amazing. Thank you. You're amazing. You get promoted. You know, all those good things sort of happened afterwards.

Yes, good. That, that sounds definitely like a great moment.

Now let's go back and discuss a little bit about SLAs. Okay. And we, you touched that when we talked about KPIs, but I know a lot of folks are trying to implement specifically SLAs and it is.

A complex issue. Okay. It is challenging. So like, what are your very pragmatic tips for someone who wants to build an SLA program?

So I think that SLAs are important even for a small legal department because it sets some level of expectation for your client and it gives them them a sense of what is happening. And you know, frankly, the SLA is helpful because there's lack of transparency. There's probably, you know, you want to eliminate the frustration from your internal client going, hey, I submitted this three days ago, four days ago. Where is it? Why aren't you done? Why aren't you done? So if you can give transparency into where things are through some system, some tools, some self service, I think that alleviates a lot of the need and SLAs can be difficult again for a small department because you don't know what else is coming in. Right. And you sometimes you can't help the fact that there's a lot and complex things coming in at the same time. So this is another one where I think it's setting an expectation. It is making up for lack of transparency. But more importantly, there should be open lines of communication. So if you're going to miss, there should be an understanding of why. But you do want to hold yourself to some level of accountability.

There are different ways to do SLAs, and depending on how your department is structured or what kind of work is being done, there are portions that you can break out. Oftentimes it's the time to assign. Is that something we can do better and faster? That one I think is certainly under our control. Who is the point of contact that the client should be bugging about the work? That one we can do quickly. The time to respond. How many turns does it take to get to a resolution? Is it the resolution time? That's the sla. So again, defining it and setting those expectations are important. But I think most importantly, you want to just be responsive and allow your client to know where things are in the process. I mean, I actually would love to open it up and hear how you guys are thinking about it and what the challenges are. Is it that just making sure that there's a line of communication and that folks know where things are or are people feeling is the purpose of it? Because your clients are unhappy with how long things are taking? And if that's the reason, then we should ask ourselves, is it taking too long? Is this a resourcing issue? Is it it that we should be leveraging technology? Is it that we should do more self service?

Yeah, I think actually, you know, you asked the questions and gave possible answers. And I think that generally, you know, the way I feel it, I feel is that business is constantly looking for results. Meaning you talked about time to assign and time to respond and that well and good, but I think they want it resolved.

So that is the parameter they're looking for. And that is the parameter I think is the most problematic to commit to.

And because of complexity, because we don't have control on the work coming in and we have limited resources. So obviously we can outsource some of the work work, but maybe we're limited in that as well. So at the end of the day, the amount of resources is sort of fixed unless we kind of strategically grow the resources and Our counterparts want their issues resolved and taken care of. They want the business in the company. So I think again, I'm speaking for myself, I'd love to hear other opinions. I see that idol related to this here on the chat. I know he's a great believer in SLAs and he thinks that really departments of every size should. Right. You know, I'm, I think I'm representing you correctly. Should have SLAs, but I, I think again, as you said, it's more of what is the purpose in, in behind it. What are you trying to really achieve and how are you going to do it through the sla? So again, in my opinion, it's a bit, a bit more complex.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think there is, there should be an expectation of, from the client of when that they're going to get a response and when things get resolved. But if you've built a really good relationship with your client as well, there should be an open line of communication and understanding of what's reasonable. And sometimes there are some unreasonable clients as well. But I, I kind of go back to that question. If they're pushing for LSLAs, if they're pushing for more and you don't have the ability to do that, then I think there's another question for the legal department to question. And is this just a moment in time or is this sort of ongoing that we have a challenge in meeting those SLAs? If that's the expectation and we cannot meet them, what do we need to be doing differently and how can we change the way we deliver our work?

Right, right. I think for that purpose SLAs are definitely a great tool. And I think there is another question that's a bit relevant to this from Donna. What are the things you think that the legal departments should stop doing and then maybe find more time to actually lawyer and do lawyers work?

Yep. Again, goes to. Right. Sourcing. So we look at all the work that's coming in and we figure out where is their low value work work. Oftentimes there, there is low value work. Sometimes there is low value, high volume work that you can figure out that's a good bucket that you can automate or outsource. So again, maybe that's not stopping, that's pushing to other ways of getting the work done. There are those sometimes things that you should stop doing. And I'll tell you, like we talked about metrics earlier, we have often found a lot of people spending a lot of time putting together Monthly dashboards and monthly metrics. And then you look at who's logging in, who's looking at those reports. Nobody, nobody cares if you stop doing it for two months. Does anyone ask about it? Well, no one asked stop doing it. We have an intranet site. We keep updating it with all of our stuff and our documents. Does anyone log in and look for those documents? No. Stop doing it. There are things like that you can analyze and maybe not related to legal work, but you'll often find it does take up people's time and it's not a good use of people's time.

Yeah, yeah, definitely agreed. And I think that's a great point. I'd like to ask you, Mary, on a different topic. Okay. When we want to introduce new technologies or new processes and deal with change management.

Which is not necessarily something that's welcome with the stakeholders and surroundings.

But it can also have struggles within the legal department itself. So do you have any tips on dealing with change management?

Yes, a lot. This is something I'm very passionate about and I think the key to success in legal tech is making sure that you have a focus on adoption. Everything is going to be about the adoption you can focus on. Look, legal tech is scary. It's intimidating because there's so much, much change management involved and people keep bringing up, you know, how will you get people to use it? Because if you put in something that's really good and invest a lot of time, if they don't use it, you've spent a lot of money and time for nothing. Right? And so what I like to say is the best change management is no change management. As I'm saying, I say a lot. And what that means is find a way to get people to adopt the new way.

And then you don't need to spend time convincing them. So think about this. If you spend less time focusing on all the new features, all the dozens of integrations you need to have, and really focus on like the usability, what is the experience for the end user? Is it instantly better for them? Is it walk up usable, meaning it doesn't require training for them, that's going to be really critical for success. People have nowadays something like a seven second attention span, right? And so they have one chance for you to hook them in. And if you send them to log into a new tool, can they instantly figure out how to use it? Can they instantly see the value in it that makes their life better? If so, then they won't go back to the old way. Right? That's how we, our life is with our phones and all the new apps. If someone tells you to try this new app in your personal life, no one trains you, no one needs to work on a change management program. You just, just kind of do it because it's so much better than the old way. So I think that we have lowered our expectations for technology in the B2B world and what we expect from work, we expect it to be clunky, we expect it to have a few extra clicks, but I don't think that that is fair. I mean, that's part of the reason why I wanted to join a software company, because I think the software has a responsibility too, to be easy, to be helpful. And change management in the past for Legal Ops has been such a big part of our job because it is slightly a less good experience. But it helps us to get data, it helps us to have everything in one place, it helps us to have control. And so we think about change management as going around and convincing people, please log in, please use this system. Even though you've been using your email and your desktop your whole life, like, if you just do this and it takes two more seconds, it'll really help the department. Well, everyone is very selfish and not in a bad way. We just think you're slowing me down. I'm trying to get my work done. Now I have to click, click, click to three extra places. I'm just going to use my email and my desktop and you've lost them, they just won't come back. So you really do need to look for adoption. And usability is kind of the number one thing because again, if it gets all the data and it can do all the integrations for you, doesn't matter if no one's going to use it. So I really think there's a lot of focus on that. I have a lot of other tips about, about software as well. You know, we don't. There's an emergence of much more modern software and I don't need to tell all of you that because you are in a tech hub of the world, but certainly the old tech requires a lot of coding and developers and resources from IT or.

Services from the vendor to get anything done or to make any changes. So especially for small and nimble departments like yours, you want to find stuff that is no code that you can administer on your own, that you can get things, make changes in real time. I think that makes a big difference in being able to manage your costs, manage your technology and just the speed of business that needs to get stuff done. Is that helpful?

Yeah, I think it's very helpful. And I think as technology evolves and becomes easier to adopt, it makes our lives easier, I think, in this respect. And I also think you need to show each stakeholder what's in it for them.

Yes.

And to create a motivation for them to adopt. And I think together with an easy.

Tool to operate.

You paved your way to success.

Yeah. And another tip I'll give, which I think is really important, as you have a lot of stakeholders and you want to go out and convince them that you want to use some technology.

What not to do is do not go around and ask everyone what are the features you want? What are your must have requirements? And when you do that, you're going to get a different set of requirements and features from everyone you talk to and they're all going to think that you wrote that down and that's going to be in the new system or tool. You're never going to find something that pleases everybody. So instead of asking the question that way and disappointing everyone right off the bat, ask the question of, you know, what's working really well in your current process. Do you think there could be a better way to do things? What are some of the things, what are some of the results or ways that you would like to see things be better? And ask it in much more of a general term so that you get the stakeholders aligned, not necessarily on how everything should be done at the end of the day, but aligned on the open mindset of, yes, there is a better way of doing this. Let's collectively find a better way than it currently is. And I think that that should be the goal, that it is slightly better for every organization and every stakeholder. Is it going to meet all their feature requests and all the things that they want? In a perfect world, absolutely not. So starting there is just going to get to disappointment. So just kind of open their mind to could it be better? And hopefully you do make it slightly better for them.

Okay, sounds great. I think we have time for like one more question and I think this is a good place to end the webinar about strategy. Okay. And should legal departments have strategy for legal ops and how should they build it?

The strategy for legal ops for a smaller group is if, you know, ideally, if you have the resource to invest in a single dedicated person, I think that is where you'll get the most value out of it. If you have someone who can focus on the role. What we often see for smaller departments is you have the hybrid or someone kind of playing the part of legal ops as a side of their job, and they're dabbling in it. They're putting in processes, they're putting in technology on the side, which is an okay place to experiment and start. But eventually what ends up happening is all the investment in your future goes into the background because as we know, everyone's super busy and the legal work does not stop coming. And so that is always the priority. Your client work is going to be the priority. So unless you're really able to dedicate some portion of someone's time, or really, ideally a whole person who can focus on building for the future, putting in the processes, maintaining the systems.

That is where you're going to get the biggest impact. And then as I mentioned earlier, you know, finding someone with the skill set and the experience to help you, guide you as a leader, see where to go. As we talked about, as I did my presentation earlier, a lot of GCs are hiring this because they want someone who can come in and bring the skill set and the experience that they don't have, have to do professional development, to do systems, to do some of the financial metrics and data analytics. And if you're bringing someone else in with those skills, let them have a seat at the table, let them run free to figure out what can be done better and let them come back to you with the strategy of here's our current state, but here's where I think we could go and here are the steps that I think we need to get there. That is the ideal person. Rather than having you all hire someone and say, okay, today I think you should work on this and tomorrow I think here's a problem I'd like you to fix. I want someone to come in who actually helps bring value to you as well.

Yeah, that sounds like a great tip. So, Mary, I think there are many, many more additional issues that we could cover, but time is ending. So I really want to thank you for being with us, for sharing all these tips and insights with us. I think it was very helpful and useful. And of course I want to thank ACC Israel for supporting this forum and giving us the space to collaborate and to meet and to exchange ideas. Because I think as you said throughout this webinar, in this area, this is highly important for the community and sharing of ideas is very important. And we discussed today many, many topics. I think it was very useful, especially KPI SLAs, the change management, the hiring of legal operations staff, and many, many more. And I have no doubt that if everyone implements these tips and insight, they will be able to to generate more value to the company, which is our goal actually, and to create more visibility to our work. And I invite all the participants that are not in our WhatsApp group to join and I hope to see you all in our next webinar. And Mary, if you want some closing comments, I would be happy for you to say something.

No, just thank you for having me and just reach out to each other, use each other and feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. I will always respond and happy to meet one on one with anyone as well. Thank you so much.

Okay, thanks a lot Mary. Thank you. Bye bye.