Stephanie Corey is the Co-Founder at UpLevel Ops and has served as the Chief of Staff and Senior Director of Legal Operations at Flex, the second-largest manufacturing company in the world, and spent the better part of her career providing value-added services to legal departments. Stephanie also founded and is a former executive member of the leading legal operations trade organization, CLOC, Corporate Legal Operations Consortium.
Let's talk contracts...
Lizzy:
Hi, Stephanie. We're so glad you could join us. Thanks for being here.
Steph:
Thanks, Lizzy for having me. I appreciate it.
Lizzy:
Absolutely. It's great to talk with you again, you've been a great partner of Malbek's, and have such a wealth of information to share as it relates to legal operations. You're a founding member of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, CLOC, which many of our listeners will be familiar with. I thought that the way we could kick off this conversation is, you start by defining what legal operations is and why it's needed within organizations.
Steph:
Legal Operations is the business management of the legal department. So different from working in a law firm! Once you go in-house and you're running a legal department, it's no different than the other executives who are running businesses within that corporation.
Legal is now treated the same as the other business units. They've got a P&L to manage, they must talk to Finance about their spending, and they need to communicate their value. What is legal as a cost center in most companies? Companies are paying big bucks for this department because most of the people working in it are very, very senior executives or professionals, who are highly trained and highly skilled. It’s not a cheap department to run.
Legal Operations is business management. It's the measuring, the tracking, the automating, the getting infrastructure in place so that you can see what's happening in the department. You can get data out of these systems, and you can show value. It's really that infrastructure around all of that, how the work is getting done.
I look at legal departments as having two pillars. You've got the GCs managing all the substantive legal work and the legal ops manager who's managing the budgeting, finance, workflows, how the work comes in the department, and how outside counsel management is happening.
Lizzy:
So how long have legal apps as a function been around? It's a newer area, but what caused it to be recognized as a need, and what has that evolution been like?
Steph:
Oh, that's a great question, Lizzy. And it's something that I think I'm sure that smarter people than me saw happening probably a lot earlier than I did. When I started, it was way back in 1999, I got hired at HP as their Legal Ops Manager, and then at that point there wasn't legal tech, it just didn't exist anything close to what it looks like today. It was really focused on outside counsel management span, and just making the daily lives of the attorneys easier and finding ways, there weren't automated workflows or anything, but just streamlining as much as you possibly could. Then everything shifted suddenly! I think it was a confluence of the CFO looking at legal spend and saying, “Hey, this is getting crazy. We must do something about this, all the way to going from zero technology to startup after startup, after startup”.
It’s grown tenfold since then, I swear, but it was something like 1,500 new legal tech startups in one year. You could count on one hand when I started with the legal tech providers who were out there. It's completely exploded, and the tech is getting better every day. It's easier to implement. Malbek is the perfect example of this. It's a solution that can be implemented in a couple of months over three years and it’s cost effective for organizations with the bandwidth to implement. So, the tech has gotten better, it's cheaper, it's easier to implement, and it genuinely solves problems.
So you have good technology at an affordable price, and you've got this financial pressure on departments that they did not experience 10-15 years ago. Legal departments and GCs knew they had to become more efficient, and they didn’t want to be filling out spreadsheets. They don't want to be dealing with the budget. They don't want to have to be printing stuff out, and signing, and scanning back in, and all of that. They want this stuff streamlined and automated. Now query whether they want it done the way an ops manager would want it done. There's always that internal struggle of, “I know this is how you redline docs, but what if we did it this way”? There's always that internal dialogue about how the work gets done. And I think a good ops manager can influence the team there.
I would argue that some attorneys should change the way they do their work a little bit to meet current workflows and technologies. But that being set aside, I think attorneys are getting there. They are becoming more open to change from an operational perspective. And GCs recognize that this must happen because their feet are being held to the fire, and the solutions are there. And I think because of all of that, we've really seen this shift, and then you need somebody to manage that, and you need somebody senior to manage it, and you need somebody driven, self-driven, who can look at this stuff, who knows what needs to get done, because the attorneys just don't have the time, even often the GC just doesn't have the time to be directing this person every step of the way, but they need to have this business acumen, this organizational skillset, this is a person who needs to look at something and say, you know what? This can be done better.
Once you have that person on board, things just run so smoothly. I've never seen a legal department get an ops manager in place, and then say, you know what? I don't really need this tool. The team usually starts growing, or they see the value, and then, therefore, resource it properly by giving them the budget to do whatever they need to do because they see the value so quickly.
Lizzy:
That's a perfect segue into what I wanted to ask you next. You mentioned that legal operations were an outcropping of pressure from CFOs and financial pressure. I was curious, is there a tension that exists between GCs and legal operations, or once the legal operations person is there, is it that person who is viewed as an ally for the GC and not as some taskmaster?
Steph:
In a healthy organization, this is the right hand of the GC. And I know when I was in-house and Chief of Staff, I would leave every single meeting with a list of about 20 things I needed to do, but my GC would say to me, I sleep better at night because I know you're here driving these things. This is the person that does the follow-up, that does the reporting, the dashboarding, and just the GC is really the vision for the department. The legal ops manager is the person who operationalizes that vision. You don't typically see a relationship where there's conflict, there must be good chemistry between the GC and the Legal Ops Manager because that's the GC's right-hand person.
From what I experienced in-house; the deputy general counsels were able to use me as a sounding board before they went to the GC. I wasn't in the market to be a deputy general counsel. I don't have a law degree. So, I was zero competition to them.
They saw me as an advocate, a partner, and sometimes a therapist. You are the glue that holds the department together but also the fluid that runs between everything that just pieces everything together, because you wear so many hats- technology, finance, administration, marketing, communications. If you're influential and you work well with the team, they see you as an asset.
Lizzy:
What about small legal departments that don't have someone in legal ops? What are some of the things that they can do without the presence of a legal ops professional and staff?
Steph:
I also work with a lot of small legal departments. When you're a big company, you usually have a larger supporting department, so they make up a big portion of our client base. It's the solo general counsel, or the GC with three or four people on his, or her team. I think what's interesting is when I first started UpLevel Ops, I didn't think those small departments would be that interested in legal ops frankly. I thought it would be the midsize companies who are hiring us more frequently, but in fact, it's the smaller companies who do need that infrastructure, and they need their lawyers to practice law and not fill out spreadsheets.
Smaller teams must be ruthlessly efficient and have a greater need for legal operations. What we do for those smaller departments is go in and talk to them and do a quick high-level analysis of what they should be doing rather than the six-month assessment that we might do for a big legal department where we go out and talk to a hundred people. We don't do that for small departments obviously, it's more like, okay, talk to me, what are your priorities? What do you think needs to be done? And then we supplement all that with our experience and expertise. And then we build out roadmaps for them.
This year, because so many smaller companies have been reaching out to us, we've actually started to perform legal operations as a service for them, where we're running their legal operations, which is really interesting to me.
I always thought people would just want this role purely in-house. But what we're seeing is that they either can't get the headcount or if they do get a head count, they want to bring in a lawyer. I think with the smaller teams, it really is an extra set of hands to do the work.
It's not rocket science, it's literally implementing e-signature, automating some of the workflows, and getting some tracking in place so that the GC has some data. It's not these big, heavy systems that they don't need, that would be overkill for them. It's just some light, simple stuff that these GCs and their smaller teams can use that will streamline how they do the work, and then use us as that set of hands to do it so that they're not taking valuable legal resources to do that.
Lizzy:
Because on top of everything else that they're doing, setting up e-signature, automation, or data tracking, probably feels like a big ask so to be able to offload that is appreciated. It really frees up their time.
Steph:
You got it. They don't have five extra mid-level attorneys who can dedicate half of their time to do this.
Lizzy:
How do you know when it's time to bring a legal ops person on board in-house?
Steph:
I get asked this question all the time, and there's not one cookie-cutter answer because each department operates so differently. But I would say what you need to look at is when your attorneys are getting bogged down with administrative and process work. If they're spending 20% of their time either filling out some requirement from finance, HR, or what have you, or they're really struggling, contracting is a great example of a process that every legal department must deal with. No matter how good you are, there are opportunities to streamline.
When you find out that your attorneys are spending time just looking for contracts, trying to figure out what their obligations are, or answering every client's questions about the status of a contract, that's not legal, that's not strategic at all. It's literally looking for things. And when they're starting to creep up, that's when it's time, okay, we need operations. And I would say, it probably happens a lot earlier than we recognize, just like everything else, right? Like with everything else in your life, it was probably by the time you recognize it's happening, it's probably been going on.
Lizzy:
Yeah. It's the frog in the pot of water that's slowly coming up to boil.
Steph:
I have a client in Europe, and I love what she said recently, “you really must pay attention to your team's work joy.” When they're filling out spreadsheets, and by the way, they're not in finance, these are lawyers, they didn't go to school for this. And they're spending six hours a week, which is, it is a studied average of what lawyers spend looking for documents, when they're doing that kind of non-essential work, their work joy is really diminished. I had one GC say to me, look, when the next attorney I hire, I want him or her to hit the ground running. I don't want them dealing with this nonsense, but it's stuff that lawyers don't need to be doing. So, once you start to see their time being eaten up by non-essential legal work, then it's really time to bring somebody in to look at that.
Lizzy:
That concept can be applied to so many different areas of business. I'm going to probably steal that as well. So how do you build the case that legal ops is needed and where are you likely to get pushback as you are building that case?
Steph:
There are different ways to do it. If you can get the attorneys to make a list of those things that are administrative and that can be automated and ask the attorneys to estimate what percentage of their time, they're spending on that and let's call it 30%, then you've got a real number. And if you could just say, okay, so we have five attorneys. They're each spending 30% of their time doing this stuff. If we could cut that in half, we save X.
So, you can attribute real savings to that. You can do it at a high level that way, which is probably the easiest way to do it. You can also do it on a system-by-system basis. If outside counsel is growing, managing outside counsel without a system in place becomes very difficult. It's much harder to do panels and convergence programs and RFPs when you don't have the data of what you're currently spending, what matters they're working on, etc. So, if you need it, it's time for you to let's say, implement a new billing system, then those systems each have their own ROI. Any vendor will be able to come up with an ROI for you. I used to use my vendors for that because you did have to build a business case to purchase a system.
So I would leverage our vendors for those individual cases. But I think legal ops managers must do that. Contracting is a great example of you having to make some big assumptions when you're building out this ROI for how much time it's going to save and all of that, but to the extent that you can do it, you make a much stronger case than just, “Hey, we think we need this”.
Lizzy:
I'm starting to get a sense of what this person is like. They have a finance background. They're very organized, maybe a therapist too, but what experience, as you're looking to maybe hire a legal op for the first time, does this person need to be able to run the team efficiently?
Steph:
Legal ops managers come from all backgrounds. I came from the finance world like a lot of my peers. Sometimes they come from HR and sometimes from IT. Sometimes they were chiefs of staff in totally other completely different fields. They come from everywhere. I would say that the common link is this idea of process improvement. The idea that I said earlier, when you look at something knowing this can be done better, this is frustrating the team, this is wasting their time. The clients aren't getting the information they need, we can make this better. I think just having that change mindset is incredibly important for this role. But the other thing is, if any GCs are reading this, they're curious about what they should hire, what skills they should hire, I think the most important thing is really that the GC needs to have good chemistry with the person, I can't underestimate how important that is.
This is really the GC's right hand. So having good chemistry with that person is incredibly important, but this person does need to have the right skillset of influencing and getting along with people. I heard Kim Rivera, who is the GC at HP, and she was talking about how sometimes we talk about soft skills like they're a bad thing, and we need to get away from that because you can't be a leader without having good soft skills. It's so important in the legal department because at the end of the day, you're getting a bunch of attorneys to do things they don't really want to do. I think being an influencer and championing things is so critical.
Lizzy:
Yeah. I like what you're saying there about soft skills. I think they can be undervalued, and this function sets as a hub between many different groups. As you said, getting along with people is going to be an incredibly important component of the skill set. For a new legal ops person who is coming in, where can they begin to achieve some quick wins for their GC and the legal team?
Steph:
I think the most important thing to do is a mini-assessment, where you sit down with everybody you can and spend time talking to them and just ask, what is working well and what's not. Where do you struggle most? Where do your teams struggle most? The GC will have his, or her, ideas of what needs to be done in the department. That exercise alone will give you a couple of things. It'll flesh out what priorities the team has because you will hear common themes. It'll also allow you to see whether the GC's priorities are aligned with what the team is saying are the issues. That's a critical thing to know!
It also gives you good visibility. These people will meet you; they'll understand why you're there, especially if you're the first legal ops manager in that department. You’ll talk to as many people as you can, explain to them why you are there, and try to understand their priorities. From there, build out your priority list. Meet with the GC, sign off there, and then meet with the team and express what you're going to be doing over the next year or so. You’ll have an actual strategic plan that you can work towards, and you've got buy-in from everybody. Sitting down and having those initial conversations is incredibly critical.
Lizzy:
I must bring it back to contract lifecycle management, obviously, Malbek, that's our bread and butter. For Legal ops, what's the one thing you wish that every legal ops professional knew about contract management?
Steph:
It's that process is more important than technology. You've got to do the work upfront because so often we'll go in and we'll see they signed, they bought a contracting system, but they're sitting on it for six months, and they haven't implemented it because they haven't harmonized templates. They don't have playbooks. They haven't figured out what contract type they want to hit first. They haven't done readiness work to get cleaned up before they implement their system. The chances of you selecting the right tool are slim because you just haven't done that upfront work to make sure that you're buying the right system that's going to automate what you need it to automate because contracting is incredibly complex and varies from company to company. And because of that, these systems all do different things. You really want to understand what it is you're trying to solve before you go out and select a tool.
Lizzy:
Plus it doesn't matter how good that tool is if you haven't really assessed and don't really understand your processes, and how things should be ideally functioning, that tool isn't going to help you at all.
Steph:
Exactly. That's exactly right.
Lizzy:
What are some metrics to focus on that can indicate that legal ops is having a positive impact on the business?
Steph:
I think there are some basic things that you'd want to track but know that every department is different. It is going to be unique from company to company. You're going to, as a GC, want to know how many open matters you have. What are the major types of agreements you have? If you can break them down by business unit, that would be great. Further, if you could break them down by complexity level, that would be incredibly helpful. But some other things that you want to track are the life cycle management of a contract. What's the time to close? What's the overall cycle time? I think that’s critical because so often legal get blamed for things that they don't deserve in many cases.
Other things you want to track are the key dates, key provisions, and cancellation clauses. You also want to talk to the finance team because they're probably going to have revenue items that they want to track as well, to the extent that you can set up your system to capture these things, you're going to have an easier time. But I think just looking for very basic things, I think cycle time, breaking it out by business unit, contract type, and then the key provisions are probably the most critical things to start with.
Lizzy:
Stephanie, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your insight, we will be sharing your contact information for anyone interested in getting in touch with you about legal ops as a service.
Steph: Thank you so much. I appreciate it, Lizzy. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
