Intro:
Welcome to the Contract Lens podcast brought to you by Malbek. In this podcast we have conversations with contract management thought leaders and practitioners about everything contracts and its ecosystem. Today's episode focuses on legal operations, and we are joined by legal operations expert, Stephanie Corey, co-founder at UpLevel Ops. In her career she 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. So now it's time to relax, grab a glass of wine, and let's talk contracts.
Becky:
Hi, Stephanie. We're so glad you could join us today on the Contract Lens podcast. Thanks for being here.
Steph:
Thanks Becky for having me. I appreciate it.
Becky:
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 obviously a founding member of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, CLOC, which many of our listeners will be familiar with. So I thought that the way we could kick off this conversation is, could you start by defining what legal operations is, and why it's needed within organizations?
Steph:
Yeah, you bet. It's funny I've been having this conversation a lot this year, talking to new GCs, and GCs at startup companies who don't yet have big teams and they're looking, they know what legal ops is, and they've been reading about it. And so, but they want to know more, they want to know if they're ready for it. Does their team need a legal ops manager? And so I've been having a lot of these conversations, but really at its core, what it is, is it's the business management of the legal department. And it's 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.
Steph:
And legal is now treated exactly the same as the other businesses. They've basically got a P&L to manage too, and they have to talk to their spend, and they also have to communicate their value. What is legal as a cost center in most companies, and the company's paying big bucks for this department because most of the people working in it are very, very senior executives or, are not executives, that's a wrong word, but professionals who are highly trained and highly skilled. And so it's not a cheap department to run.
Steph:
And so general councils are expected to provide information on, Hey, what value did you give to the company this year? And so that's what legal operations is. It's really the 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. You can show the types of work that's being done in the department. You can show what outside council is working on, what your other service providers are working on, what the internal team is working on. It's really that infrastructure around all of that, how the work is getting done.
Steph:
And so really, I look at legal departments as having two pillars. You've got the general counsel and the GC's managing all of the substantive legal work that's happening. And then the general council is also over the business side as well, but you've got the legal ops manager who's then managing the budgeting, the finance, the workflows, how the work is coming in the department, how outside counsel management is happening. And then there's a whole separate reporting in and of itself there. And that flows up to the GC, and then the GC has, hopefully, a clear vision of all of the work that's happening in the department.
Becky:
So how long has 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 been that evolution?
Steph:
Oh, that's a great question, Becky. 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 actually, 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. And so 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 all of a sudden, I think it was a confluence of the CFO all of a sudden looking at legal spend and saying, Hey, this is getting crazy. We got to do something about this, all the way to going from zero technology to startup after startup, after startup.
Steph:
And so the last time I looked, and it's probably grown tenfold since then, I swear, but it was something like 1500 new legal tech startups in one year. And so there's just, you could literally count on one hand when I started with the legal tech providers who were out there. And so that's just completely exploded. And the tech is getting better, right? It's easier to implement. Malbek being the perfect example of this. It's a solution that can be implemented in a couple of months versus three years, $3 million that people just don't have the budget and the bandwidth to implement. And so the tech has gotten better. It's cheaper, it's easier to implement, and it really genuinely solves problems versus like, Oh, I guess we just have to do this and hold our noses while we use this clunky tool. The tech is a lot better.
Becky:
Yeah. Yeah
Steph:
And so you've got good technology at an affordable price, and you've got this financial pressure on departments that they did not experience 10, 15 years ago. And so legal departments GCs knew they had to become more efficient. And then internally, I think they saw with their teams, lawyers don'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 or not they want it done the way an ops manager would want it done. And so 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 of how the work gets done. And I think a good ops manager can really influence the team there.
Steph:
And so maybe the attorneys should change the way they do their work a little bit to meet current workflows and technologies and all of that. But that being set aside, I think attorneys they are definitely getting there. They are becoming more open to change from an operational perspective. And GCs recognize that this just has to happen because their feet are being held to the fire, and the solutions are there. And so 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.
Steph:
And then 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 definitely see the value, and then therefore resource it properly by giving them the budget they need to do whatever they need to do because they see the value so quickly.
Becky:
That's actually a perfect segue into what I wanted to ask you next. So you mentioned that legal operations really was an outcropping of pressure from CFOs and financial pressure. So I was curious, is there a tension that exists between GCs and legal operations, or once the legal operations person is there, is it really viewed that person is really viewed as an ally for the GC and not as some task master?
Steph:
Yeah. In a healthy organization, this is the right hand to the GC. And so 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. And so this is literally the person that does the follow-up, that just pushes, that does the reporting, the dashboarding, and just the GC is really the vision for the department. This is what I want to get done. And the legal ops manager is the person who operationalizes that vision. And so I, unless it's a very unhealthy situation, you don't usually see a relationship where there's conflict, there has to be good chemistry between the GC and the legal ops manager, because that's the GC's right hand person.
Steph:
And then further to that, what I experienced in-house, which was just such a helpful thing for me, was the deputy general counsels, they were able to use me as a sounding board before they went to the GC. So, Hey, I have this idea, it's half-baked so let you know what can I do to help you bake this out a little bit further? How do you think the GC will respond to this? All of that. So I was a sounding board to the deputies because they never saw me as, and not to put a negative spin on this, but they never saw me as a threat. Right? I wasn't in the market to be a deputy general counsel. I don't have a law degrees. So I was zero competition to them.
Steph:
They saw me as an advocate, a partner, sometimes a therapist. I always had somebody in my department complaining about something. And so I think legal ops is really that role. You are the, I used to say the glue that holds the department together, and that's certainly true, but also the fluid that runs between everything that just pieces everything together, because you so often are playing, you're wearing so many different hats, technology, finance, administration, marketing, communications, you're doing all of these things. And if you're influential and you work really well with the team, they see you as such an asset. And you could really, I think, just be so influential in the department in that particular instance.
Becky:
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. I think the difference is, when you're a big company, you usually have a larger ops team supporting that larger department and, but so often I get calls and I would say 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, 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 be practicing law and not filling out spreadsheets. And so they don't have the bodies to throw at the work.
Steph:
And so just because of that, they have to be ruthlessly efficient. And so because of that, they have a greater need for legal operations in many ways. And that was a surprise to me, I had never really thought about it like that, but I see it every day. And so what we do for those smaller departments is often 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 get done? And then we supplement all that with our experience and expertise. And then we build out roadmaps for them.
Steph:
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, Becky, because I didn't know if there would be a market for that. 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 head count, or if they do get a head count, they want to bring in a lawyer. And so we've actually been running legal operations for a bunch of smaller legal departments. Some of them, 20, 30 people legal departments, some of them all the way down to teeny tiny. I think with the smaller teams, it really is an extra set of hands to do the work.
Steph:
It's nothing, really at the end of the day, we give them good ideas. I'm sure there are things that they wouldn't have thought of, but at the end of the day, it's not rocket science, it's literally implementing e-signature, automating some of the workflows, 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 using us as that set of hands to do it. So they're not taking valuable legal resources to do that.
Becky:
Because on top of everything else that they're doing, setting up e-signature, or automation, or data tracking, probably feels like a big ask. So to be able to offload that.
Steph:
You got it.
Becky:
... Really frees them up.
Steph:
Yeah. They don't have five extra mid-level attorneys who can dedicate half of their time to do this.
Becky:
Yeah, absolutely. And we will definitely be sharing your contact information. Your firm is obviously called Uplevel Ops, you've mentioned that, but we'll be providing all contact details for those who are listening, who are really interested in those services given where their company is right now. So you mentioned smaller legal departments. How do you know when it's time to actually 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, or process work. And so when they're, if we had to stick a number to it, if they're spending 20% of their time either filling out some requirement from finance, or HR, or what have you, or they're really struggling, contracting is a great example of a process that every legal department has to deal with. And I think no matter how good you are, there are opportunities to streamline.
Steph:
And so when you find out that your attorneys are spending time just looking for contracts, or trying to figure out what their obligations are, or answering to every client, where are they in the queue? What's the update, what's the update? And they're having to look, okay, who has that? Where is that? And so they're doing work that's not legal, that's not strategic at all. It's literally looking for things. And so 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.
Becky:
Yeah. It's the frog in the pot of water that's slowly coming up to boil. Yeah.
Steph:
I just, yes, I just used that example with somebody yesterday I think it was, exactly right. And so, you know what? And well, it ends up I have a client in Europe and I love what she said. I use this phrase all the time, I stole it from her. It's you really have to pay attention to your team's work joy. And 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. And so I had one GC say to me, look, when the next attorney I hire, I want him or her to hit the ground running. And 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.
Becky:
That concept can definitely be applied to so many different areas of business. So 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. You can do it by, based on what I just said. If you can get the attorneys to explain what they're doing, and let's say, and don't ever bring up, this is to all my legal ops peeps, don't ever bring up time-tracking because they will come after you with pitchforks believe me. But if you say, estimate for me what you're spending on these types of things, searching for documents, looking for contracts for whatever obligations and meta tag, telling clients what the status of things are, if you could make a list of those things that you know 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.
Steph:
So you can actually attribute a real savings to that. So 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. So if you say, if outside council's really growing, managing outside counsel without a system in place becomes very difficult. You can't really, 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 it, et cetera. And so if you need, it's time for you to let's say, implement a new billing system, then those systems each have their own ROI. So any vendor will be able to come up with an ROI for you. And I used to use my vendors for that because you did have to build a business case in order to purchase a system.
Steph:
So I would leverage our vendors for those individual cases. But I think it's really critical that legal ops managers do that in order... And it's harder, right? Contracting is a great example of you have 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.
Becky:
I'm starting to get a sense of what this person is like. They obviously have a finance background. They're obviously very organized, maybe a therapist too, as you mentioned, but what experience does.
Steph:
Exactly.
Becky:
... does this person, as you're looking to maybe hire a legal ops for the first time, what does this person need to be able to do in order to run the team efficiently?
Steph:
Legal ops managers come from all backgrounds like you just suggested, Becky. I came from the finance world like a lot of my peers. Sometimes they come from HR, sometimes from IT. Sometimes they were chiefs of staff in totally other completely different fields. So they really come from everywhere. I would say that the common link is this idea of process improvement. And so 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 mindset, that change mindset, is incredibly important for this role. But the other thing is, if any GCs are listening to this podcast and 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.
Steph:
This is really the GC's right-hand. And so having good chemistry with that person is incredibly important, but also this person does need to have the right skillset because in a skillset it needs, is that influencing, getting along with people, and I heard Kim Rivera 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, or you can't be a good effective leader anyway. Yeah. It's so important in the legal department, because you're really, at the end of the day, you're getting a bunch of attorneys to do things they don't really want to do. They would rather just do the work the way they were doing it and all of that. So, anyway, I think being an influencer, but in a really good way, like getting people on board, championing things, you do have to be a cheerleader in that way. So finding somebody with that right soft touch, I think is so critical.
Becky:
Yeah. I like what you're saying there about soft skills. I think they can be definitely undervalued, and this functions really sets as a hub between many different groups. So as you said, getting along with people is going to be an incredibly important component of the skill set. Maybe doesn't even necessarily come out on the CV as your, but may come out more in the interview process. For a new legal ops person who is coming in, where can they begin in order to achieve some quick wins for their GC and the legal team?
Steph:
I think the most important thing to do is to do, and I call it a mini assessment, where you sit down with everybody you can and spend some time talking to them and just ask them, what do you think is working well, and what's not? Where do you struggle most? Where does your teams struggle most? And the GC will have his, or her, ideas of what needs to be done in the department. And that exercise alone will give you a couple of things. It'll flesh out what priorities the team has, because you will definitely hear common themes. And then it'll also allow you to see whether, or not the GC's priorities are aligned with what the team is saying are the issues. And that's a really critical thing to know.
Steph:
And it also gives you good visibility. So all of a sudden these people they'll meet you, they'll understand why you're there, especially if you're the first legal ops manager in that department. And they don't have experience with legal ops and don't know what you do, right? Why is this person harassing me all of a sudden. Well, if you sit down with them and interview them, they'll get why you're there. And so I think that it's like the first 90 days type thing. I think you need to sit down and talk to as many people as you can, explain to them why you are there, try to understand their priorities. And then from there, build out your priority list, your roadmap, whatever you want to call it. And then you meet with the GC, get sign off there, and then meet with the team and express what you're going to be doing over the next year or so. And then you have an actual strategic plan that you can work towards, and you've got buy-in from everybody. But I think sitting down and having those initial conversations is incredibly critical.
Becky:
Yeah. So I have to bring it back to contract management, obviously, Malbek, that's our bread and butter. So 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. And so 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, 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. And so they haven't done a readiness work to get cleaned up before they actually implement their system. And if you haven't done that and then done the needs assessment, right? Okay, what are the things that are most critical? Then 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. And so you really want to understand what it is you're trying to solve for before you go out and select a tool.
Becky:
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.
Becky:
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. And so it's going to be unique from company to company. You're going to, as a GC, right? I would want to know how many open matters have I got? What the major types of agreements are? If you can break them down by business unit, that would be great. And 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, right? Like what's the time to close? What's the overall cycle time? And why, I think that's so critical, is because so often legal gets blamed for things that they don't really deserve in many cases, right?
Steph:
Like, Oh, it's sitting with legal, but if you can automate the workflow, then you can figure out whether or not that's true. I remember when we did this at HP, what we found out was, well, no, actually, we sent it back to you with some questions and haven't heard, it's been sitting with you for three weeks. And so a lot of times just being able to show where it is, especially if the clients can log in to the system themselves and see where the contract is, then I think that's incredibly helpful.
Steph:
So the other things that you might want to track are the key dates, key provisions, cancellation clauses. You also want to talk to the finance team because they're probably going to have revenue things that they want to track as well, to the extent that you can set up your system to capture these things for you, you're just going to have an easier go of it because then it's obviously something that you don't have to manually do, or manually input to get it into the system. 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.
Becky:
Stephanie, thank you so much for sharing your experiences and your insight, and we will be sharing your contact information for anyone who's interested in getting in touch with you about legal ops as a service.
Steph:
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, Becky. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.
