LEGAL
While there has been a lot of press lately on the "new" profession of legal operations, many attendees of the first-ever ACC Legal Operations Conference, held in early June, were quick to point out that there have been people in this role for 20+ years. So, it is by no means a "new" profession. A better explanation is that it is a profession that just hit the limelight due to the many cost-cutting efforts of businesses in response to the economic meltdown of 2008. As legal departments were forced to hit a bottom line for one of the first times ever, legal operations came to the forefront, and many more companies started hiring business professionals into their law departments to manage to a budget and create efficiencies.
So don't call it new – call it reinvigorated. There was even a headline calling it sexy. But regardless of age, it is (as the people who practice it are) definitely deserving of the attention it received at this conference and going forward. Here are just of the insights this new-to-this-old legal-ops professional walked away with:
A major trend now is "right-sizing," which can sound very much like empty, corporate speak. But the concept is solid – making sure the people with the appropriate amount of experience are doing the appropriate work. Senior attorneys should not be doing the work that a paralegal should be doing – frankly it is wasteful of their talent and likely boring for them. Instead they should be working on complex and challenging matters that can help develop them in their career. By giving the correct level of work to the correct level of employee, the department can also save a lot of money. For example, basic contract review or work along those line can be done by paralegals with lawyer oversight. Or even automated, like NetApp's use of electronic signatures along with their NDA. Give your senior staff the chance to shine.
Back to the line of "more with more" – creative staffing by utilizing paralegals and other legal staffing will allow a department to hire more people – but for less money. More work gets done with the increased head count. Hard to argue with getting more work done!
It seemed that at least every third question asked was answered by either "data" or "metrics." Thank goodness ops folks don't have the math phobia our counsel counterparts experience! But an even bigger caveat was brought up repeatedly as well: If you don't have a plan for the data – if you aren't measuring for a good reason – don't even bother with it. Don't do data for data's sake. (Another important and repeated caveat – junk in, junk out. You can't get good analytics with bad data, which requires proper training and careful quality management.)
Data does prove incredibly useful, however. If you need to show you decreased legal spend, track those numbers and use that data. If you want to move high-cost work inside or to paralegals, your best bet is starting with data. If you want to build a business case, data is your very best friend and belongs as an integral part of that case. If you want to prove your value as a legal ops person, you guessed it, data. Make a plan for your data, find a good way to collect it, figure out how to analyze it, and use it.
Goodness only knows! With 130 attendees in the room, a good guess would be there were about 100 or so different titles. The panel talking on this alone ranged from Director of Legal Ops to Chief of Staff & Senior Director, Legal Operations to Global Director of Operations – Law, Compliance & Government Relations. Good luck fitting that on a business card.
Making it even more difficult, Cam Findlay of Archer Daniels Midland Company and Mike Dillonn of Adobe Systems, Inc. elaborated on the expectations of a legal ops person, adding just a few more titles. A legal operations person must be able to do the work of a CFO, a COO, and a brand ambassador for the legal department (CMO). Another title came up over and over: Secretary of State. I'm not quite sure what title I like best – frankly they all seem a little intimidating!
ACC and its members are undertaking the task to normalize some of the expectations around legal operations. They are working on a shared definition of what legal operations should be, making it easier for those looking to establish or prove the importance of a department to a new GC to communicate just what it is we do. Creating these definitions now is important to ensure the direction of the profession and provide a united front when communicating to the C-Suite and law firms.
There were several automotive metaphors used throughout the conference, so it would behoove me to do the same. These metaphors came up namely in the legal operations professional versus Chief of Staff discussion – wherein it was decided, I believe, that while legal ops may lay the tracks, the Chief of Staff is the engineer of the train.
However, while we are busy laying those tracks for the department, we are the engines of change. Those tracks are going to be more efficient and better thought out (with strong data to back it up) than they've ever been. Legal ops is not only charged with creating change within the department, but also are generally in charge of change management. Not only does the legal ops professional get to decide what crazy thing needs to get instituted, we have to make others try it, buy in, and become ambassadors themselves (the feeling of "no small task" was a recurring one throughout the conference).
Armed with numbers and knowledgeable about business and the legal department's needs, legal operations professionals also have the opportunity to make impactful change with their outside counsel. We are in a position to demand rates – we heard the examples where it worked! We can ask that projects are better managed or that the right work goes to the right people. We can review their work in quarterly business reviews that show the law firms we know what they're doing, and ask them to improve alongside us.
Part of the meeting was also involved in creating interest groups that are designated to tackle many issues that legal ops professionals face, from external resources to selecting technology and tools. There was much promise, and results should be seen in the coming months.
If ACC and its new legal ops members can deliver on what was discussed, the work and new relationships have the potential to jumpstart this area of the legal profession and make quick, meaningful strides forward. I'm excited to see what the second annual conference brings!
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