Legal operations with the expert – 5 questions with Aine Lyons

As the world grows more and more interested in the concept of legal operations, not all people can define exactly what it is, or how it’s shaping the future of legal departments. LegalWorks met with Aine Lyons, founder and Europe lead of CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium), to get her input on the matter in hand and the future trends and prospects of it.

1. How would you describe CLOC?

A: It’s a community of change agents that are transforming the legal industry through their collective drive, experiences and IQ.

CLOC is the world leader in helping in-house legal teams on their journey to operational excellence. Our vision is a seamless legal ecosystem that delivers peak efficiency to the businesses and clients we serve. CLOC helps legal operations professionals and other core corporate legal industry players (e.g. tech providers, law firms, LPO’s, law schools, etc.) optimize the legal service delivery model. We do this by supporting legal ops and COS professional development; offering best practices support in areas including legal department tools, technology, templates and knowledge bases; and working with key legal service providers to drive efficient & effective solutions for corporate legal customers

2. How would you describe legal operations?

A: Legal operations is a multi-disciplinary function within a legal department that optimizes services delivery to a business or government entity focusing on CLOC’s 12 core competencies. See links to the competencies here.

3. What trends do you see in the legal operations industry?

A: Mainly three points:

• Moving work to self-service apps, using AI in a real way supporting by HI (human intervention) from legal service providers.
• Consolidation of legal tech vendors, as there has been a huge proliferation on the market in the last number of years with individual tools having some of the functality we need, but not all of it. It will benefit us all if we push vendors to partner more closely together to deliver end to end solutions.
• Clamp down on external vendors numbers due to GDPR and COIs asking legal teams to adapt internal tools instead of buing externally.

In a digital world, we need to think about more self-service apps that people can access – anytime, anywhere, on any device. This is how some of our self-service portals and apps appear on employees’ mobile phones and iPads. We mirror how employees like to operate in their personal lives which is giving them the ability to have access on their mobile phones and iPads and to sign anytime, anywhere.  I’m really focused on building more self-service apps and portals that legal team members and clients can use on their phones, laptops and other devices. We recently launched an NDA app, a Conflicts of Interest App and a Business Courtsies app, with about another 10 in development. This automates the work and the requests from employees and clients and gets them engaged in being responsible for compliance. 

We are also applying AI for non-standard or customer paper NDAs. These run through the AI tool managed by our LPO. The tool “machine reads” the NDA against our standard template, so it’s a more efficient analysis of the gaps between our paper and the customer paper. It results in a faster review and, in some cases, no review at all. 

I’d like to share a few things we’ve learned:

• There isn’t one technology that fit all our needs, after looking at 7 different vendors, so it’s important to be thoughtful about which tool you use for which problem you are trying to solve.
• There is a lot of human interaction (HI) required to train the tools – our team doesn’t have the bandwidth, so partnering with our LPO has been a great solution for us because they are familiar with our contracts. 
• We need to get started on our AI journey so that we are conversant and understand the different technologies as they develop. 

This is a pilot for us, starting with our NDAs, but we intend to roll out AI for other non-standard contract reviews and redlining efforts.

4. What advice do you have for legal operations teams trying to influence the legal department?

A: Make your projects enterprise ones aligned to business priorities;  you’ll get executive sponsorship if you do so. That get everyone’s attention. Build a change management comms plan; it’s really critical. For tech project:  Listen to the users – you’ll get better engagement if they know you are trying to solve their problems.  Engage them in tool design and testing. Include champions and naysayers on the project; naysayers will help identify issues to solve before the roll out. Invest the time in streamlining and reengineer your processes, templates and playbooks. Avoid too much customization or hard coding – it will impact upgrades down the road. Celebrate small wins along the way to gets people on your side – first impressions count, so you need to ensure they are positive ones. Measure the impact of what you roll out; define your success metrics upfront and establish baseline data to measure movement and trends. Promote the results via our GC and other business leaders.

5. Why do you think legal operations is suddenly booming in the Nordics, when it has been a bigger deal in USA for quite a while?

A: The legal industry is changing around the world and the Nordics is no exception because of a couple of factors:

• The GC role has been redefined as a business leader that must add the Law + People + Business + Process + Risk + Technology.
• Increased Complexity & Regulation: As the world becomes more complex, legal services become increasingly important to business outcomes. For example, GDPR is not a legal issue, it is a business challenge in which legal is intimately involved. The compounding nature of regulation is not a legal concern, it is a business reality that legal helps navigate. Complex laws. Complex regulations. Complex business deals. We are awash in complexity. And it is not a linear increase. The thing about complexity is that it compounds. The mandate to do more with less is a mandate to do things differently. We have no choice but to innovate. We simply can’t afford to throw expensive bodies at every problem.
• Entry of the Big 4: CFOs and CEOs are being advised by the Big 4 on how to reduce legal spend this increases the pressure on GCs who need to stay in charge of their own destiny.
• Evolving Legal Ecosystem: The evolution of cost-effective legal service delivery as a core business competency has resulted in tighter integration of the legal function with the business. This has brought new organizational demands, new types of accountability, and an entirely new vocabulary that is not taught in law school. Budget. Metrics. KPIs. Target Operating Models. Strategic Plans. These are foreign concepts to most lawyers.
• Big Data + Legal Tech: Technology certainly plays a role, but the proliferation of vendors makes it challenging to integrate systems and deliver real ROI as yet. On prevention, for example, we can deploy artificial intelligence to crawl our systems for red flags. Or we can use advanced analytics to not only get a handle on our legal spend but identify the spend drivers in our business operations. Any of us immediately think of leveraging technology as our route to scale and efficiency, and it’s easy to get distracted by bright shiny tools, particularly with such a proliferations of legal tech vendors on the market.
• And while tech is going to be pivotal – most CEOs top priority is digital transformation – it is not the only component (or even the most important component) that is required to deliver successful transformation. The data shows that many implementations don’t deliver value because transformation cannot be delivered with tools alone. In fact, when you look at the data – most recent Gartner’s Legal Technology Analysis Survey – the reported value and the adoption rates of a lot of the tech low. With pressure to reduce OPEX, it’s also challenging to get internal investment and we have a responsibility when spending company money to deliver a return. We need to make it much easier to use legal tech an encourage vendors to work together on better integrations and to build add ons to company systems like, Workday, SalesForce, and ERP systems.

Aine Lyons will participate in this year’s Nordic Legal Tech Day, as a keynote speaker and part of the legal operations panel, together with Richard Mabey (Juro), Christian Swartling (Stora Enso), Ghislaine Gunge (UnitedLex) and Leif Frykman (LegalWorks). Don’t miss the opportunity to listen to and learn from this great roundup of people. Read more about the event and secure your place HERE.