Redefining Legal Operations: Change Management, Data & AI

Thanks so much, Daniel. Thanks, Eric. You know, I'm honored to be beyond this and excited to share some of my perspectives and, you know, my story with your audience.

Yeah. It has been an interesting path and, you know, I've kind of arrived at where I am today by taking a go where you're needed type of approach to my career. And that's taking roles within a organization that may seem scary or a role that I may not feel like I'm ready for, but if that's where the business needed me jumping in, getting started and, you know, being successful.

But with that said, you know, it started fifteen years ago as a environmental consultant where I implemented SAP for oil and gas companies. I supported oil and gas companies in their annual GHG emissions and reporting. From there I moved on to Accenture.

That role there at Accenture, I was implementing SAP as well, but that expanded out of just EHS to environment, health and safety into maintenance and operations. I ended up leading the North America SAP asset management function or domain for Accenture. And then, you know, by the time I left, I was leading large scale global ERP implementations, you know, for Fortune five hundred companies.

What kind of made me or what prompted the shift to legal operations was largely just some personal items that had come up in my life.

My mother had been diagnosed with cancer. My son diagnosed with dyslexia and being in consulting can be very demanding on your time. And I knew I needed to find a different career that would allow me to give my time that I needed to my family. I was fortunate enough to get connected with Jessica Vander Ploeg.

She saw my background and experience as an asset, even though it was not directly related to legal operations. But she saw, you know, my background in tech innovation, tech transformation as something that would be a valuable asset in a legal operations type role. And that's when I moved to Micro Focus working under her. Since then we've been acquired by OpenText and now I am director of legal operations at OpenText and leading the legal operations function.

Absolutely.

Yeah. And, you know, that was one of the things I noticed right off the bat was I was a bit surprised at, you know, how far behind legal appeared to be as a function in data, tech adoption.

And it's also what keeps me motivated and interested today because legal seems like one of the kind of last frontiers when we talk about true digital transformation within an enterprise. But I remember coming into the office one day and seeing one of our attorneys walk in the front door with arms full of papers and just take them into a conference room. And he did that every day. And I was like, oh, wow.

There's a mindset of liking to work on paper.

And that's just not something that I had been part of as you know, implementing ERPs and large scale digital transformations.

You never saw anybody with paper. People didn't even take notes on notebooks. So that's been something that's I think surprising and also very motivating and exciting for me in this role because there's so much room for opportunity and you know, being able to start gathering the data so that we can make real data driven decisions that have a meaningful impact within our department across the business is very exciting to me.

Put it in the You know, actually so my prior experience implementing ERPs actually prepared me really well for working and driving change within a environment like a legal department.

And that's because I worked for oil and gas companies. And they are also, you know, when you go to field personnel who you know are working on drilling rigs and you're talking about how they're gonna start using a new software system to do their maintenance and scheduling.

They're not keen on starting that and so learning how to relate to my stakeholders or the individuals that are going to be kind of going on this transformation journey with me is something that I learned through consulting. And so I was able to apply that in this setting. It's slightly different because you're kind of having to figure out, okay, you know, all these individuals within the legal department, what motivates them?

What are the issues they face that if I can help with will help build trust, will help build their buy in? You know, I didn't come in and say, oh no, I'd like starting from scratch. I have to completely relearn this. But it's change management is difficult always, but so important. And the only way that you can have something be successful is if people are buying in and supportive of the transformation that you're trying to put in place.

A couple examples come to mind specific to this. And, you know, one is almost like a mindset shift of, you know, legal has always been kind of a gatekeeper for the business.

And I think the future is, yes, remaining as a gatekeeper, business enabler.

And one of the things that we did and we put in place was say we built a almost like an intake form for our procurement team who was sending in requests.

Any request. We're buying toilet paper. We need legal to review it. Things that should not be coming to us were coming to us.

And so we built this form. They could go. They'd answer some questions. At the end, it would tell them, hey, you're good to go.

You don't need to come to legal at all. Move forward. Or it would say, thanks for submitting this. Legal needs to review and it would get assigned to someone. Just seeing that that reduction in volume coming in like our attorneys really appreciated that. And in making their lives easier, their jobs easier helps when it comes to then rolling in initiatives that may not have as direct of a benefit to them. And that will get me into my second example.

Recently we rolled out a contract tracker for our commercial legal team. It's essentially a place where our attorneys go and log the various tasks, activities that they do, information about that. Is it a revenue generating agreement, non revenue generating, is it on third party paper or OpenText Paper, etcetera?

This was not something that attorneys were excited about being rolled out, right? They're like, what do you mean? Now, Instead of just me taking care of the task, I have to go into a system and then enter this information about it and you're going to include how long I spent on it. If I wanted to, you know, enter time, I'd be working for a law firm. But in reality, it's we're wanting to capture this not because we want to do checks on, you know, individuals. What are you doing? It's we want to be able to have insights on where as a department, where is our effort and energy going that we need to or that we should focus on maybe finding alternative ways of doing it to free up capacity to make their jobs easier.

We were seeing a inordinate amount of time being spent on NDAs.

Can we put in place a NDA self-service where the business can go and without having to engage legal, you know, for a simple template NDA just automatically get it. Or it could be, you know, how do we educate the business about using OpenText templates instead of, you know, customer paper. If we can convey to them that if they start with OpenText Paper, it's going to speed up processing of their deal or get it to closure, you know, twenty percent quicker, they'll be motivated to start with that as opposed to before they may just say, oh, the client sent me their contract. I'll just send this to legal and we'll start with this.

As part of this, it wasn't just a tracker that was created. There is, BI dashboard.

That was also built out that has extensive metrics and ways of slicing the data. I'm also very proud of this whole solution because it was actually built and implemented by one of our commercial attorneys with partnership with our legal ops team. It wasn't something that IT built, so I thought it was, you know, very neat that we were able to do this internally.

It started though as anecdotally, this is what we think is happening or what we expect to see just because, you know, people's stories of we get so much third party paper, for example. So we started with these kind of base dashboards or KPIs.

But then over time, as we saw certain trends start to arise, I'd raise other ideas of, okay, let's look at the data in this way. But up until that point, we didn't have data on this. So it was a bit of a and continues to be a journey of transformation just from a KPI perspective of as we get more data, we're able to draw more insights as we see certain trends, it raises additional questions, etcetera.

Yeah. Absolutely.

Anytime we are considering a kind of technology driven approach to solve a problem, the first and kind of preferred method is do we sell something at OpenText that we can leverage and use to meet this need. We call it OT Trust OT, but that anytime we're gonna start any sort of technology evaluation, we start there. And then, you know, we do use number of our own tools, whether it be workflow automation or legal hold, etcetera.

And that's always where we start. Then there's always of course the scenarios where we may not have something that fits and then we go start to look externally in the market, evaluate various tech providers there, do demos, do trials, etcetera.

I think the AI piece is interesting.

Interesting in that it's very challenging right now. One with the landscape, the focus on it, but then also how do you put something in place in practice? One of our use cases that we're evaluating right now is AI supported contract review and redlining.

I've been having some conversations with our attorneys and there's different views on what would be preferred, right? So it's everyone's like, yes, we need to have our open text playbook and guidelines set up in whatever system.

But then there are some that are like I want the tool to automatically generate the red lines that can get embedded into the word document, you know, right away. But then there are others that say no, I think that takes too much away from the attorney and it makes it too easy for them to think or I guess to make these changes without thinking or reviewing extensively. So I wanna be able to have the AI scan the document, but then just call out here are the things you need to look at. Here are suggested changes, but not have those applied directly in the document. And that's those have been interesting conversations.

It's a lot about the context. Right? I mean, I think when you look at the market, you hear about process and solutions and technology that will solve, like, a CLM problem.

But then when you really dig into it, it's like, well, what's the kind of contract you're talking about? Is it a procurement contract? Is it a legal contract?

Is it a transactional?

Or is it a fixed time? So, like, when you're buying toilet paper, you might not need to have the same level of scrutiny in a contract as you would when you're buying a company. Obviously, there's different methods and ways to think about using technology, and I think the market will just say, go buy this generative AI drafting tool, and it'll help you build clause libraries, and your work is done. But I think in many contexts, lawyers wanna be able to review every single clause to make sure it's standardized against the primary baseline clauses. And they wanna have fallbacks, and they wanna consider the jurisdiction and essentially the context. So one question that I've always kinda struggled with is, how do you measure internal client satisfaction?

In simple terms, the teams that are working on the commercial side, they're trying to sell software, they're trying to engage a new client, Then they have to go through the general counsel's office to get a contract completed or evaluate a business issue. How have the business teams responded to some of the initiatives that you've enabled through technology and new process?

And looking at our, especially when it comes to AI, our partnership with IT has been critical from the beginning, not just because of their expertise in evaluating, you know, whatever tools we may be looking at or possible solutions, but they also have a visibility across the enterprise that we may not have. Our other teams looking at solutions that are similar, right? Should we combine efforts to look at things? And that has been and will continue to be extremely important.

But I think there's still more that it didn't catch and I'm just gonna review the whole thing anyways.

One of the approaches that we've taken for that is, you know, take a agreement as we're doing the trial, take an agreement that you had reviewed in the past that you'd redlined.

Put in the blank template, run it against the playbook, and then compare its output to what you had actually redlined and put into that document when you reviewed it, you know, without AI assistance. That's helped.

From an operations perspective, it's been interesting to see some different dynamics. And, again, this is specific to the AI contract review, but there seems to be two different perspectives. Vendors some vendors giving our end users the ability to kinda create or change their own playbooks.

And others that treat it more as like a white glove type of service of, no, you don't make changes to your playbooks.

You send it to us. And at first, I saw that as kind of a downside to those solutions because I'm like, I don't wanna have to rely on you. But then as we've done additional trials, I've really come to see why they're doing that. And it's because of the importance of how the playbooks are configured, what prompts are put into that AI agent that is going to one hundred percent drive the responses that it puts out. And if you are then giving say attorneys who may not be trained in prompting or prompt hygiene the ability to essentially configure those playbooks, they'll start to get outputs that they are not happy with, that they disagree with, and you end up breaking that trust in that tool. So that's been an interesting thing that I've observed.

We've changed our approach to even how we do these trials over time based off some of the feedback and learnings that we see. Initially, it was like, alright, we start with just these two kind of generic templates that we may not build in any of the localization to them, even though we have some degree of localization on, say, a professional services agreement, you know, might differ just slightly between geographies. But at first, we just put in one, had the team use it. And for folks that were expecting that localization to also be applied and then it was not, it negatively influenced their experience with that.

And so as we moved on, we've made sure to kinda build that in wherever possible so that they can get a true sense of it. We've also found that what's really helpful is when we see that there maybe needs to be a tweak to the logic or to the playbook that's configured during a trial leveraging that as a real life example of, okay, what does getting this change made in the system look like? Is it engaging the vendor and how efficiently expected, etcetera?

Great question. I think that, you know, this to me is the biggest thing that is keeping us right now from realizing all the benefits and potential that, you know everyone expects to see out of AI and generative AI. You know, a AI agent is only as good as the data that it has access to and the data that it has been trained on.

And people care when they're doing their work. They care immensely about, you know, it leveraging content and knowledge that is relevant to them in their work.

And that's a difficult thing right now to essentially give maybe a specific AI agent access to a variety of different data sources. You know, say for instance, something gets access to all the documents on my OneDrive. Well, I may have, you know, versions of documents of the same document on there and none of them are the final, say, executed version. That's somewhere else. That LLM or that AI agent is going to pull from those documents whether I wanted to or not.

And so do we have this like fragmentation almost of AI agents and chat agents in the market where you know each individual tool, is introducing their own AI agent within their application.

It has its own connections and what I anticipate is there's going to be kind of a harmonization and I think we're going to see an almost like an AI orchestration layer come into play where enterprises are going to have a central AI orchestration layer that is connected to all their data repositories that then we ask our tech providers who have their own AI agents instead of connecting to AI as they do now, they're going to connect directly into this orchestration layer that kind of has universal governance by IT, right? It's one central place to manage access, data, connections, etcetera. It's reminiscent to me a lot of what happened with single sign on where there was the same fragmentation.

Each application had their own username, ID, password management.

And then we saw a rise of these kind of identity management tools that centralize this. Introducing single sign on. There was standardization around SAML etcetera.

And today, you know, every tech application that I buy at OpenText, we enable SSO instead of using username password.

That application connects to our identity management tool. We sign in through SO and I think we're going to see that same type of scenario happen with AI and foundational kind of AI models where we're going to tie these siloed agents are going to connect to a single kind of enterprise AI foundation layer. And I think it's really early on in this and it's I'm very interested to see where this goes because I think this is when we're going, once we get that to a degree that it can be implemented at scale and across an organization, I think that's when we're gonna start to really see some of the transformative things that we're all hoping for from AI.

Say this person's coming in with a non legal background. I would advise them that their outside perspective is a strength and an asset. It's not a hindrance. And anytime we're going to move forward, innovate, transform, you know, whatever buzzword you need to have people who are taking a different perspective and approach at kinda analyzing the problems we face and putting in solutions.

So that outsider perspective is key and to lean in on that rather than, you know, try to subvert or hide that. I would also reinforce the importance of change management, getting to know your department, the culture within it, and immediately building trust across the department so that the legal ops function, you know, you as an individual are viewed as someone who is there to help and support and make people's lives easier because establishing that early on will help significantly when inevitably you are putting something in place or trying to enact a change that may not clearly have benefits to the individuals who are having to adapt to that change.

I'm absolutely thrilled and excited to be attending next week, the legalops.com conference. It'll be our third year of attending.

I can't speak highly enough about the attendees, the providers, just like the level of expertise. And then I'm blown away each year at the content that's delivered in the sessions. And inevitably every year I can't attend every session that I want to. And so even when I come back, I end up watching lots and lots of recordings once they're posted on the legalops.com website. But I think I'm most excited of just connecting with peers, colleagues, the vendors, and, you know, having thought provoking conversations, whether it be AI, whether it be change management, etcetera. That's what I'm looking forward to.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate you guys having me on.