Sydney CLOC 2019 - Don't go it alone

Sydney CLOC 2019 - Don't go it alone

Over the past two days Tony Macvean and I attended the 2019 CLOC Sydney Institute. I am grateful that CLOC allows law firms to attend. Getting into a room with in-house counsel to talk about their challenges and how they are changing is very useful for us to work out how we can build a better service. #bettertogether #smarterlaw. Here’s a list of my top 5 take-aways:

Don’t go it alone

Mary O’Carroll acknowledges that the discipline of Legal Operations is evolving and a lot of teams are just starting the journey. Steven Walker showed that Australia has progressed along the legal ops journey compared to last year, which matches what I am seeing on the ground. Mary highlighted that if you are new in a legal ops role then look to your peers and CLOC to fill in the blanks. It is our collective responsibility to improve the profession and there is a lot of help and positive energy around.

Data is important

By data, the most pervasive theme was finding out what you are working on, who is generating the work? Who is doing it? What type is it? How critical is it to the business? etc. In essence the focus is on Matter Management for now (and in some cases e-billing data). A lot of teams are doing their own take on the Matter Management journey. There are a lot of great tools out there now for in-house teams to use, and they are easy and cheap to get going. I don’t think any legal team is too small to engage with some form of matter management system. My advice is to just pick one and run with it.

We have provided matter management and query/reporting capability to a number of clients. It is very popular to have transparency on the billing and status of matters we are running for them, along with access to documents and emails we have on the matter files. The challenge with this for some larger clients is that we are only able to provide information on the matters we are running. I can see why every legal team that works with multiple law firm providers wants their own view across all firms and their internal work too.

There were many discussions around data. You will need it. If you don’t have it, go looking and also be happy to start with imperfect data. I saw a few case studies where teams which had no data spent a limited period of time capturing data manually to get an initial picture. It isn’t perfect but it is very useful as a start. Tony notes from a lawyers perspective that lawyers can sometimes strive for perfection at the cost of progress, so this was a great takeaway for him.

Get the culture and change part right

It was refreshing to hear Neil Cook talk about the Woolworths experience when they tried to put matter management in. They found it hard as they hadn’t really won the hearts and minds of their staff at the time. I’m sure that’s something we have all been through with many initiatives. It’s good to focus on really teasing out what you are trying to achieve and working out how to win the people over.

Denise Doyle from Telstra and Dion Harrington from Rio Tinto talked about using a broader organisational change context to give them permission to encourage change in their own team (and the business customers using them). That makes a lot of sense, as it’s hard to pick an organisation that isn’t going through some sort of efficiency, digitisation or other transformation strategy.

On the culture and change theme, a few speakers talked about surveying their customer base. That’s a pleasing trend. We have helped a few clients run those simple surveys and collated the results. It’s always a useful experience and one that is very easy to do. A lot of the time the business is really pleased that you are actually asking them.

Your customers will always want a premium service, but the business often doesn’t want to pay for that – especially for day to day work. A few of the case studies indicated pushback from the business when the legal team tried to change the service model. I think we need to be comfortable that this will happen but not to use that as a reason to abandon a change, rather to double down on comms, education and explaining the reasons for the change.

We have all experienced it being done to us as corporate life has become more lean. Outsourced helpdesks, lower percentage of administrative staff support, more DIY etc. Leaning out internal legal support is just another version of this sort of change, thankfully supported by heightened awareness of customer experience and a bunch of useful tools.

On that note…

Tech isn’t holding you back, prioritising the time is holding you back

I thoroughly enjoyed Alex Rosenrauch’s presentation about Office 365 and what you can get it to do for your legal team. What a terrific example of taking a concept, building a minimum viable product and getting many more benefits than you thought you would.

I thought that the creation of a digital front door for legal that captures and reports on requests to the legal team in only a few weeks was compelling. We use PowerApps in the firm for various internal processes and can echo the simplicity and collective power of the platform. It is a great example of using what you have at low cost to get a job done.

Tony was impressed with how quickly something 'good enough' could be built so I expect we will see a mini project kick off soon using these tools :-).

Of course, if you have something super sensitive or super complex then this approach might not be great, however there are many tools in the legaltech ecosystem which take these concepts further like Checkbox, Xakia, LawVu, Neotalogic etc. What Telstra has learned by interacting with their own system will help them make the right choice in the future. Not only that, they have some fantastic statistics to inform the next step of their strategy.

Adopt a humanistic approach - new skills needed

A strong theme running through this conference was also the humanistic side to legal practice. The discussion around customer experience, empathy, service design, meeting the needs of the ‘people’ was largely absent from this sector 10 years ago. Now it’s featuring in a legal operations context.

Kate Perumal from Lendlease said that in today's environment maybe her expertise is worth less than her creativity and ability to collaborate with the business. The environment we face is changing quickly, so being able to sit with chaos and uncertainty whilst maintaining perspective is valued. New skills, approaches and creativity are necessary. Gary Cazalet of University of Melbourne is a shining example of an academic who is going beyond the Priestly 11 to foster and teach those skills.

A comment that really resonated with Tony and I was "lawyers will not be replaced by technology, but they will be replaced by lawyers who know how to use technology". We think that is a very powerful statement and I expect it will be heard a bit round the firm.

George Beaton’s Masters of Legal Business is another great initiative. I am working my way through the course and find it a valuable learning and collaboration opportunity. The cohort of people in the course from a variety of different backgrounds really feels like an industry getting together to work out how to change. I think that it is finally sinking in that the answers come from a variety of disciplines collaborating, not just the legal team.

Law firms, in-house teams, universities and others in the sector are all working to improve how to grow, foster and develop the new age lawyers/legal ops people but we do acknowledge it is a hard nut to crack. We all need to build a satisfying career path for legal operations people otherwise they will apply their skills in another industry. We have a strong commitment to hybrid skills and have a few legal/tech hybrids in our team. A great example is Jasmin Chua who has just finished her Law Degree but is now considering a career in Legal Operations.

All that said, commenting on the makeup of the room on the day, Justin Moses made an interesting point that perhaps there should be more young people we have found and developed attending the CLOC conference. I think he has a point.

In any case, all this discussion gives me hope that the industry can change. In fact it’s hard to ignore it now which brings me to my main question. Why weren’t there more people there? It was a good crowd and noticeably bigger than last year but I am certain that there is a huge population of in-house teams that could benefit from a legal operations kick starter. I guess it might come down to the time spent keeping the wheels turning, meaning that it is hard to carve out time, focus or money to spend on this sort of activity.

I do know it’s the whole eco-system’s responsibility to move us forwards. Law firms have a long way to go too. I can’t help think that if our clients all pushed a little harder we would get there faster. When we get clients to engage with us on the Legal Operations journey we all benefit. A great example is in Anna Golovsky's presentation on Partnering with Law Firms which acknowledges that our clients do appreciate getting a mix of skills applied to legal problems. We have thoroughly enjoyed working with Anna and her team to help carve out better ways of working together with the aim of better, cheaper, faster services. An open & honest dialogue and willingness to invest on both sides really helps.

For my part I think we need to keep promoting CLOC and the discipline of Legal Operations to our peers internally, to our peers externally, to the students in the industry and anyone else that will listen. I also believe that from a law firm perspective, our clients will have a huge impact on the pace of transformation in the industry so I look forward to more of them pushing us harder.

Get the word out that there is a better way. Get the word out that there is help around. Carve out time to work on it as you have all the other elements at your fingertips. Don’t go it alone.

#smarterlaw #bettertogether

Sue-Ella Prodonovich

Author and Award Winning Business Development Adviser to Professional Services Firms

4y

Thanks for sharing the Peter.

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Matt Thomas

Head of Legal (acting) at Capella Capital

4y
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Anthony Kearns

Chief Client Experience Officer and Consultant to General Counsel

4y

Thanks Peter, I was there and learned things from this post.

Joni Pirovich

Blockchain & Digital Assets | Crypto licensing | DAOs & DeFi | Tax | Lawyer | Mum

4y

Thanks for putting the time into the summary Pete, and all you do for us and the legal ops industry

Great summary Peter, thank you. The #CLOC team worked to ensure we maximised local content to showcase some of the amazing local #legalops talent that is emerging. The scheduling issues identified in the comments are ones we are alert to. We'd love to schedule the event earlier in the year so it's away from competing events, but that's a challenge because of the London and Las Vegas events that are held in the first half of the year.

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