Services for Corporate Law Departments
As a former practicing lawyer with an MBA, I’ve helped corporate law departments improve their business operations since 2014, starting as an embedded business analyst in a large corporate law department in California, then as a consultant helping corporate law departments find better technology, and finally working for Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, one of the largest legal technology companies in the world.
Along the way, I’ve picked up a big bag of tricks. Here are just a few of the ways that I could help your corporate law department get to the next level.
Improving Hourly Rate Management
I’ve has consulted extensively with dozens of legal departments about their rate management processes during my tenure at both Elevate Services and Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, one of the world’s largest and most-established legal technology companies. I edited the 2022 Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions Real Rate Report, the world’s leading source of legal rate benchmarking data, and have spent hundreds of hours working with the engineers and data scientists on the process and methodology behind that report. If your rate management process needs an overhaul or you currently suffer from a “process of no process,” I can help you put together a plan that makes rate management faster, easier, and more effective at controlling costs.
Legal Technology Strategy / Selection
The market is currently glutted with literally thousands of legal technology products. Many products will come and go without ever having generated even $1M in revenue, let alone profit, and they are highly unstable companies to do business with. At the same time, a number of established companies that are quite profitable have become complacent and are vulnerable to being displaced. The companies that strike a balance between innovaton and medium-term, bread-and-butter profitability and stability may be the best bet for many corporate law departments, but no bet is certain.
Many corporate law departments do not have the time and expertise to navigate the legal technology marketplace, with unfortunate consquences. Some departments put off technology issues indefinitely, creating a drag on both legal work and the management of it until something breaks. Others take a "passive" approach to creating a legal technology strategy and choosing the technology that should go into it, allowing marketing and salespeople from vendor organizations for their information rather than taking the time to educate themselves. Many of these law departments do not have the time or sophistication to discern actual vendor capabilities vs. claimed product features that are little more than aspirational, and may wind up with a product that doesn't meet their needs.
If any of the above sounds like your law department, consider hiring a consultant to help you design a legal technology strategy for the next 3-5 years and assemble the mix of software that will help you realize that strategy. Experienced consultants know the software in their space and can work with you to ensure you fully understand the differences between the leading products and how well those fit with the needs of your organization. Getting your legal technology strategy right is important because the right technology will pay dividends for years to come, while the wrong technology will constitute an ongoing tax.
In my prior job at UpLevel Ops, I helped 23 corporate law departments with their technology strategy and selection in many different areas, including e-billing, matter management, document management, compliance incident management, legal hold, litigation docketing calculators, eDiscovery service providers, collaboration tools, employee exclusion screening, GRC platforms, privacy risk management tools, conflict of interest tools, compliance policy managers, and compliance training providers. I later worked for one of the world's largest e-billing companies for 5 years and had responsibility for market intelligence and industry analysis of the legal technology sector. This deep background in legal technology, combined with my experience working in legal ops in a corporate law department, gives me an "inside baseball" perspective that not all legal operations consultants can offer.
If you are on the market for a subject matter expert to help you manage your legal technology needs, consider hiring an independent consultant like me who does not have relationships with any software vendors. Some consultants take what amounts to referral fees from vendors they recommend, potentially biasing their recommendations. Many others do not take referral fees, per se, but are known to do the bulk of implementation work for certain vendors and not others. Because they are specialized to perform implementations for certain vendors, they may be more likely to recommend those vendors knowing, as they do, that could represent additional revenue for them. An independent consultant who doesn't have a dog in the fight in terms of what vendor gets chosen is in a better position to provide objective help.
Fractional Legal Ops Director
Many small and medium-sized law departments do not have the scale to justify hiring a full-time legal operations director, instead appointing an attorney, paralegal or IT person to handle legal operations in addition to their other responsibilities. This often leads to work getting put on the back-burner or to a situation where the responsible person is having to simply do the best they can in areas where they have little background or skill. Law departments faced with this type of situation-- and who are not ready to make the jump to a full-time, dedicated legal operations professional, should consider hiring a fractional legal operations director to work one or two days per week to ensure essential legal business processes do not fall by the wayside.
A good fractional legal operations director should be a jack-of-all-trades, with experience in most if not all of the CLOC 12 Core Competencies Reference Model, the ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model, and other, similar models. For instance, a good fractional ops director should have experience with law department strategic planning, financial management, outside counsel management, legal technology, data analytics, and other areas.
If you are in need of a fractional head of legal operations, I have significant experience in all the above-mentioned areas and more, and would be glad to help.
Legal Operations Process Improvement
The average corporate law department has dozens and dozens of processes, some of which go smoothly and others that are cumbersome, ad-hoc, or non-existent. In many cases current law department personnel had no hand in creating these processes, but inherited them from prior leadership that did not have the time or expertise to design, build and maintain a quality process. Law departments that want to take things to the next level may find it beneficial to hire a consultant who can provide an objective, outsider's perspective on the current quality of the process and a path for improving it going forward.
Processes needing improvement could be anything, but here are some examples where I have been able to help law departments in the past:
Overhauling the process whereby the organization works together with outside counsel to create, record, modify, enforce, and report on budgets on individual legal matters
A more comprehensive process overhaul involving all four phases of matter lifecycle management-- intake/triage, planning, execution, and review
Feeding information gleaned from the review process of matter lifecycle management into related processes, such as law firm performance reviews, preferred provider panel creation and management, and the hourly rate negotiation process
Matter RFP processes and other processes where vendors are chosen and/or matters are priced into flat fees or other alternative fee arrangements
Managing your portfolio of alternative fee arrangements
Reporting processes, including periodic financial metrics, budgeting, diversity tracking, and tracking other law department goals
Establishing and maintaining quickpay arrangements
Processes to measure and maintain data hygiene
The legal reserves / contingent liabilities process
Risk reporting
CLE compliance
I put an emphasis on complexity reduction in my process design approach, removing unnecessary or low-ROI steps to create processes that are low-maintenance, boosting adoption. I also put an emphasis on listening and communication, painstakingly diagramming your processes and working with you to ensure both the current and desired future state of your process are represented accurately. My approach is tool-agnostic; we can use whatever tools you currently have or, if you aren't satisfied with those, we can find a new way.
Better processes increase business velocity by reducing cycle times and freeing up attorney bandwidth to concentrate on actual legal work rather than the performance of legal business procedures.
PowerBI/Data Analytics/Dashboards
I was one of the first consultants to implement HBR’s Counsel Command product, a well-known dashboarding offering created by HBR Consulting (now Harbor) and sold to corporate law departments, and have experience building a law department data and analytics program from the ground up. I worked with legal ops and law department stakeholders to identify the relevant metrics, define how they would be calculated, and build them into a SaaS-based dashboard offering used by the entire law department. I performed dozens of custom analyses using Counsel Command and Excel, and proposed a data hygiene effort that proved the law department had undercounted the number of legal matters going to minority- and woman-owned businesses by approximately 300%. I bring an “only the paranoid survive” approach to data that focuses on making sure data is complete, accurate, and well-understood before drawing too many conclusions.
In my later role with Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, I worked with data scientists and PowerBI to mine legal industry insights out of LegalVIEW Data Warehouse, the world’s leading source of performance benchmarking for corporate law and insurance claims. Those insights were published in LegalVIEW Insights Volumes 1-6, a series of reports that used benchmarking data combined with extensive consultations with legal operations directors in the Wolters Kluwer client base to analyze industry trends and recommend best practices for improving how outside spend dollars are used.
The legal industry is moving away from older business intelligence tools and towards more modern tools like PowerBI that are faster, more powerful, and easier to use. The industry is also engaged in synthesizing data from multiple sources (for instance, combining data from matter management/e-billing and contract lifecycle management systems) to form data lakes that serve as single sources of truth. I’m here to help you continue evolving with the rest of the industry, either from a high-level, strategic standpoint, or as a fractional data and analytics expert who can roll up his sleeves and help you get through day-to-day work.
Fractional Legal Data Czar
As I’ve written before, a statement like “Everybody needs to take responsibility for data quality” in practice end up meaning the exact opposite: “Nobody needs to take responsibility for data quality.”
A data czar is a single accountable individual who measures and monitors data quality and remedies data issues to make it easier and cheaper to mine insights from your data. The data czar adds value by working with you to evaluate the quality of your data, develop key zones in your data that are in need of improvement, and put together a plan to remedy the most immediate issues without losing sight of longer-term, more profound transformations of your data that could reap even greater dividends in the long-run.
Some large corporate law departments have designated, full-time data czars in house. However, most either do not have a data czar, or have as their data czar as a person who juggles many other, more tactical and time-sensitive issues that make it hard to ever get around to managing data quality. In the short run, organizations may get away with ignoring data quality issues, but in the long run neglecting these issues leads to a sort of “data debt” that snowballs and eventually prevents the law department from moving forward. In particular, organizations that do not address their data quality issues now will likely be prevented from harnessing the full value of data-hungry artificial intelligence applications.
Most organizations do not have the scale to justify hiring a full-time data czar, but that doesn’t mean data quality issues can just be ignored. Hiring a fractional legal data czar is a more flexible way of managing data quality issues, and can be cost-effective compared to hiring an FTE. I’ve worked deeply with legal data— particularly e-billing and matter management data, but other forms as well— for years and years, starting as a senior business analyst through Elevate Services and later as the primary person responsible for producing benchmarking research out of one of the world’s largest databases of performance benchmarking for corporate law departments. I have over 5 years of experience in product management, designing and building analytics products in the e-billing space and working as a subject matter expert on projects to maintain and improve the data quality in some very big databases.
If you are curious about whether you might benefit from hiring a fractional data czar, consider performing a top-to-bottom review of your data quality. If you do not have the time or resources to conduct this review internally, consider hiring a consultant.
Fractional Outside Counsel Management
Year after year, surveys like the Blickstein Law Department Operations Survey indicate that the #1 task absorbing the greatest amount of legal ops directors' time is outside counsel management, absorbing approximately 12% of all director time. Vendors have to be onboarded, budgets created, recorded and enforced, metrics tracked and circulated, preferred provider panels assembled, rates negotiated, and bills reviewed. Not all legal operations departments have the time or expertise to address these issues as anything but a one-off, which costs them time and money in the form of administrative snafus and (likely) suboptimal prices from their firms and other providers.
I ran most of the financial processes for a $156B legal department, including budgeting, AFAs, invoice review, dashboarding, scorecarding, and financial management of multiple massive legal matters, one of which exceeded $60M in lifetime spend. I later worked for five and a half years for one of the largest e-billing providers in the world, working with a large network of clients to understand their needs and business processes and building tools to help with all the above. If your law department needs help with outside counsel management, think of me.
Scorecarding/After-Action Reviews
Corporate law departments typically have hundreds if not thousands of active legal matters every year. When those matters conclude, there is an opportunity to capture data about the nature of the legal matter, how well it went, and lessons learned for doing better next time. The name the US military uses for such an opportunity is “after-action review,” but there are many other terms to describe this concept. While many insurance claims departments have mature after-action review processes, most corporate law departments do not do them at all, or do them in a very informal way that may enhance tribal knowledge, but does nothing to increase knowledge at the institutional level. When the attorneys and other stakeholders associated with the matter move into other jobs, the tribal knowledge leaves with them, and no permanent improvement occurs.
By depriving itself of any institutional record of how individual legal matters have gone, the law department also deprives itself of a key tool for managing outside counsel relationships. Without good data, for instance, it is hard to make a case that law firm behavior needs to change or that the current law firm performance limits the amount of hourly rate increases the law firm can reasonably expect to receive. In this vacuum of evidence, outside counsel management conversations, rather than being data-driven, can become driven by little more than intuition, anecdote, and interpersonal liking.
While it might appear, on its face, that the solution to the above issues is simply to ask law department workers to do better with after-action reviews and data hygiene, this is unlikely to be enough. From a change management perspective, it is very difficult to get attorneys to focus on a matter that is concluded (and that is therefore no longer urgent), because that takes time away from putting out legal fires that absolutely cannot be ignored until tomorrow. Therefore, a more realistic scenario is to appoint a “data hygiene czar” whose job it is to focus on the important (but non-urgent) task of ensuring meaningful after-action reviews are performed and data capture occurs. A solution that is divorced from having to put out legal fires—perhaps a fractional resource or managed service—has a much better chance of harvesting the most value when a legal matter closes.
I have extensive experience building and executing matter scorecarding programs and collecting and analyzing scorecarding data for use in rate negotiations and other aspects of the vendor management process. Some scorecarding programs get bogged down by being overengineered, which eventually leads to frustration and abandonment, but I can help your law department get on the right track with a scorecarding program that is quick and low-maintenance, thereby providing a high ROI.
Recoveries
Corporate law departments are very good at providing legal help when the company they work for is sued, when a transaction needs done, or when a client asks for advice. In other words, they are very good at reacting when their client bring a problem to them-- but are they good at proactively combing their clients' business in order to uncover to pursue causes of action and other revenue opportunities that might be seized through the legal process?
The c-suite sometimes complains that the law department needs to run itself like a business, and identifying and persuing revenue through litigation or other means is an ideal opportunity for law departments to demonstrate that they do not just passively solve brought to them by their client, but actively work with clients to boost the bottom line. But busy law departments struggle to find the time to identify opportunities for affirmative recoveries and secure the money and resources to secure them.
Hiring an outside consultant is one way to get started identifying current recovery opportunities, and set up a systematic framework to become organizationally aware when future opportunities present themselves. Helping corporate law departments construct such a system is a service I offer.