The Rule of Six: How to Get Legal Ops Messages Heard

Thank you so much for having me. I'm happy to be here.

My pleasure. Absolutely. So I am the director of legal operations and compliance with Baker Hughes. And in that role, my previous roles to that were all communications based.

So I've been in the role of operations for about three years. And prior to that, I had a twenty year career in communications, and that career spanned everything from every industry you can imagine and every kind of communication you can imagine. So we did retail, pharma. At one point in time, I was doing media relations for butter.

And then then we did everything from there to doing crisis communication, doing change management communication, doing internal communication, and general external communication as well. So a broad career in communications. And then I had the opportunity to move into legal operations, and that has been a lot of fun for me and has really played on my communication skills. Operations is a lot about change management and a lot about taking engaging people in goals and objectives, engaging people in processes and procedures, engaging people in company policies, and communications is a critical element to all of that.

Oh, for sure. Trying to think of a good example, but the general premise is that you do have to make it easy to understand. Right? That's the first thing.

You have to create that clarity. You can't have a lot of passive voice, for instance. You can't have a lot of generalization. You have to have, you know, a clear statement of what it is we're doing, what your role is in it, and then how you execute on that.

So, you know, what actions you have to take. And that's the clear breakdown that that we take when we're looking at something like this. You know, I can think about an example being a new panel for being launched. Right?

So you've got your new panel, your global panel being launched to your lawyers. The lawyers have to understand why we're doing this, why we have a global panel, and what its purpose is. They have to understand the benefits of that. You know, what makes this worth using?

Why will this help me? Why why does it matter to me? And then they have to understand the actions they're going to take. So what do you require of me and how will I go about doing that?

And so those are kind of the key elements that we're always looking for when we're communicating process change or system change like that.

Well, first, you wanna confirm that you got the messaging off. Right? I mean, you wanna make the message as clear as possible. And the easiest way to do that is, you know, I always treat myself as the lowest common denominator.

Right? Like, if I don't understand how to do this, nobody's gonna understand how to do this. I need to dumb it down for me so that then we can go out to everybody. That's the easiest treatment there.

Right? So you talk to me like I'm a ten year old kind of thing, and that works for a lot of people. So you wanna make sure that clarity is there. But usually, you can tell that the clarity was lacking by the uptick in what's happening.

So you get to watch your metrics. Right? You get to watch your process unfold. So as you said, people started doing it wrong.

I got a bunch of emails back or nobody took any action whatsoever. And that's how you know that your communication was off. And that is, you know, a key component of communication at all times is that feedback loop and that listening. So either the listening is because my inbox got flooded with questions or that listening is that you check the metrics on, you know, the article you had sent through and nobody's clicking on the link.

And then you find out you put the wrong link in the email or something like that. It's something terrible. That's the things that nightmares are made of.

So when you look at communications metrics, you're often looking I mean, from a communication standpoint, the dream is to have those metrics. Right? The dream is to have benchmarking data that tells you your reputation in the field before, and then you do your big communication initiative, and then you get your, your data about your reputation in the field afterwards. Nobody has that kind of money. Nobody's doing that. You, you don't get to spend that money on surveys just to, to see what people think about you. So you are always looking for another way to measure that success or another way to measure that efficacy.

And what you often try to do is find those measurable objectives that are thankfully measurable. So you look at that click through number, And then from there, you look at the was the action taken? What's our compliance rate? What's our end result? You know, what were we trying to solve and how much did we solve that? That's what we're looking for at all times. So you're always looking for an innovative way to measure that success, but you have to find something because otherwise, you know, you're shouting into the void.

Yeah. Absolutely. So it is we call it the rule of six, where you that people have to hear something six times, and that's for a message to really sink in. And it's a few communication surveys through internal communications work that has been done in the past that shows that that is the real key to success.

So you have to have people hit with a message six times. Now that becomes extremely challenging because people usually have you know, maybe you have an Internet and maybe you have a newsletter and maybe you have an email, but that's only three things. So with those three things, how are you going to then reach people six times? So now you're starting to get creative.

Oh, we're gonna put a poster in the department. Okay. Poster in the department. That's great.

What you really need is people to talk about it with each other. Right? So you need a manager to share it with their team. You need a peer to share it with, you know, another peer and say, hey, did you hear about that?

You need a subordinate to ask their manager about it. You need those other ways for it to come up in conversation. You need those other ways for it to come up sometimes naturally, but you need it to be reinforced six times. And it's that's no easy feat, but it has to be repeatable.

And you have to hear that.

Absolutely. In my opinion, and, you know, this is speaking as a communicator, so I might be a little biased. But in my opinion, I would say that communication aligns with every business goal you would have. So let's say you're trying to increase revenue.

Well, to increase revenue, you need to support expansion within your company. Okay. Great. So to support expansion, you wanna position your department as enablers of growth.

Right? You want people to turn to the legal and compliance department as the department that enables growth. So that's a communication goal. Or let's say your business wants to improve efficiency.

Okay. Great. To improve efficiency, the legal team needs to increase speed to support. Great. The communication goal in that is to engage the team in efficiency efforts.

Right? The team needs to know that they're being measured on speed to support, that that's important to the company, that that's important to them. Let's say your company wants to decrease costs. Okay.

You wanna reduce spent.

Okay. Kind of a counterpoint here, but maybe the communication goal becomes that you wanna share the value of the legal department. Right? You wanna share what the legal department is doing to create value within the company.

In that way, you're not facing that, you know, reduce spend conversation as often. Or, you know, a company wants to reduce risk. That's a pretty normal thing for companies to wanna do. And part of that, of course, is that you need to improve risk mitigation.

And to do that, a clear communication goal is raising awareness of company policy and procedures. So in every business goal that you're facing, there's, you know, there's a legal and compliance goal that measures up to that. And there's a communication goal that supports it overall.

Oh, no. You want again, going back to that idea that you have to hear something six times, you need those champions internally. You need the message to come from top leadership sometimes. You need the message to come from that, you know, that VP level.

You need that message to come from, standard manager level. The message needs to be repeated often. There's a communications theorist named Marshall McLuhan. Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase that I'm sure you've all heard, but that the medium is the message.

And the medium is the message says that, you know, how you're communicating is as important as what you're saying. And so who is sharing that message becomes just as important as what the message is. So when the message comes from the chief legal officer, you know that this is a very important message that is about legal and compliance. When the message comes from your peer, you know it, it's not as important or it's not as critical, But you start to get that feeling for the levels of leadership within your company and who should be sharing what messages and how that message should be permeating your audience overall.

Sure. That comes to the alignment factor. So you're always aligning to your business goals and objectives, and you're always aligning your message to the business goals and objectives. So, you know, we talked earlier about perhaps improving efficiency as a business goal.

But you wanna talk about the efficiency of the legal and compliance department, and you wanna share that message. And it comes down to that kind of reputational concept of, you know, do what you say and say what you do. So you've defined your reputation as a department of efficiency. So you are going to therefore be efficient, and then you're going to talk about how efficient you are.

And that's where you can really start to refine the value that the legal compliance department is delivering, but you can also start to showcase that value. So as long as you've got that alignment, right, you create that alignment with those business goals. So you become those things, right? You are a department that reduces costs when you have to.

You are a department that mitigates risk. You are a department that improves efficiency. You are a department that enhances growth, and then you start to show how you do those things over and over and over again. That's how you're sharing the value of the legal and compliance department.

Yes. And you can change the message to your increasing compliant growth. Right? Growth without compliance isn't growth you can maintain or sustain.

So it needs to be compliant growth. And so we start to focus on messages like that and sharing that message. Also highlighting, you know, if it's taking longer, you share why. Right?

Having that feedback back to your internal client that says, hey, you know, this is taking us longer to review because there is a heightened level of risk because of the country we're in or because of the group that we're dealing with. We're seeing a heightened level of risk here and therefore it's taking more time. And that's why, you know, we're not stalling for kicks and giggles. We're stalling for purpose and for for that compliance overall and really enhancing that and sharing that message.

If I could have all legal leaders sharing the message of why they're doing something, I think the legal department would never ever have that reputation as the department of no, but rather the department of absolutely with caveats.

And, you know, we're hearing different kind of stories about the adoption. And, you know, MIT just came out with a report that said ninety five percent of AI initiatives are failing. And I think to cut to the quick, the reason for that is that there's a lack of defined precise use cases in which AI can be used. Now because we use it all the time, maybe we don't have the best perspective, but love to hear what you're experiencing with your business teams as well as your lawyers on using, adopting? Is it fear? Is it tell us a little bit about how you're going through that process and what communication style you have to bring forward when you're trying to get people to really adopt something that they've never used before.

So when I look at something like this, I often think about there's a, a comic I like to put up on my screen when I'm sharing, when we're talking about AI. And it is two guys trying to push a wagon with a square wheel. And there's a guy over in the corner and he's got, you know, a circle wheel and he's holding it up and the guys look at him and they're like, no, we're too busy to hear about your new thing. We're too busy trying to move this wagon with a square wheel.

And while AI isn't necessarily, you know, the wheel in terms of how it's going to change what we're doing, it is what I like that comic for is reinforcing that it's a change in behavior. Right? You have to be open to new things, and then you have to try it out. You have to put some effort in to change your own behavior.

So as we're piloting AI, that's what we're seeing is that the change in behavior isn't there. So people aren't thinking AI first. They're not turning to AI to say, hey. How can I work with this?

How can I be better at working with this? You know, how can I improve my own prompting skills? They're not having that thought. They're going in, they're trying it with one Excel spreadsheet.

It's not working and they're shutting it down. So it is an overall change in behavior that is going to be required. And that's a bigger effort than just giving everybody an AI tool.

I'd say it, you know, it's a see all of the above kind of option there. It's that the you're trying to find the benefits. Whenever you're implementing a change like that, you want to be able to focus on the benefits. And with AI, the benefits are a little bit more nebulous, I'd say, than you wanted them to be.

Right? Everybody wants your legal AI tool to be a paralegal in your pocket. And it's not quite become that yet. I'm not saying it might not get there.

It might, but it's not that yet. And so when it disappoints at that high level of, well, it's not a you know, it didn't do this research for me in exactly the way I wanted it to, the way I like it, the way my paralegal does it. And so then they close the tool and never come back to it. So the message has to be more, in my opinion, around you need to learn this.

You need to adopt this. You need to make this part of your life and part of your skill set. And this is a skill set you will learn and not necessarily a tool to use for the skill set to learn. I think that that's the best way to position AI overall.

Eat your broccoli. It's good for you. I would say you do have to have that that benefits focus again. Right?

Everybody has a benefit they're looking for. Right? So if you're gonna tell somebody, Hey, learn AI, and that way you won't be left behind. You might hit a cord for them that says, Yeah, I actually, I was worried about being left behind.

And so or I was worried about, like, everything progressing without me. So you do have to find those messages for your listeners. And that's, you know, where legal departments are a unique beast in that way, because they do have unique listeners who are special in their own way. And I know you have talked about that lots on your podcast, so we don't have to go into it.

But with AI in particular, I would say that the, you know, some of the things that I have found that have been very successful from a communication standpoint have been, one, making sure that it's introduced in the right way. That is you now have the opportunity to learn this skill set. Congratulations.

You are one of few who get this opportunity. The other message that we go out with regularly is, you know, we have had, you know, the experts share how this can help you and where this can help you. We have also had their peers share. Hey, this is where this has helped me.

This is where I have used it. This is where I have found real traction. And having, again, you need that repeatable message from many different sources that is saying, Hey, this AI is good. You want to learn how to use this.

You want to incorporate this into your everyday.

It's not just the kinds of employees. It's the situation that we're in, right? There is a overall lack of readiness for change. People have seen too much change.

We're overwhelmed with change. We don't want anything else to change. I cannot handle the idea of going to my restaurant and seeing a new menu. It's not happening.

So the readiness for change is at an all time low. I'd say across companies around the world, I'd say we're we're there. Now that being said, change is real. Change is happening all the time.

All management is change management. Everybody has to be ready for change. You have to have that growth mindset in place. You have to have that readiness.

And the folks who don't, I think they do end up being left behind a little bit. They do, you know, your message goes out with one alert and then another message goes out and it has two alerts on it. It three alerts now. You've got little explosions that come out on the email.

You can only make things look so important, especially over email. And so what it comes down to is how often they're hearing it from their peers. Right? How important is this?

Well, it's really important because the CLO told me about it. And then my boss told me about it. And then I heard it from a VP in another department because they told me about it. And so and now it's starting to actually sink in.

But that's why we come back to that rule of six because a message from the CLO, well, I don't know how often you're sending those out, but, you know, you should try to use them sparingly. That's my advice. Don't always have them that will come out from the CLO. But when it comes out from the CLO, people typically pay more attention.

Right? You use that medium as the message kind of concept and you flag to that. And that's one of the key ways for making people pay attention and may making people sit up and be ready. But it is hard right now.

People are not willing to embrace messages of change.

Good strong communications in legal ops and how is it demonstrated? So I go back to the panel for an example, and we can talk about the Gen AI tool, for instance. So we have actually fairly good adoption of our Gen AI tool, and I'm pleased to say. It it is a clarity of message.

So one, you want that very clear message that says, you know, what are you getting and why are you getting it? So, again, when we positioned AI, we talk about it as being a skill to learn and not just a tool to have. And then we have it repeatable. So we had it, you know, launched to the pilot team that had access to it.

We reinforce it regularly with during all hands meetings, we'll talk about how the pilot is doing, what's the latest update on the pilot, where are the use cases, what are we seeing, You know, is there room in the pilot team? How long is our wait list? Elements like that. And then we have it reinforced by other people in the department as well.

So we have our chief legal officer talking about the Gen AI pilot. We have our IT team talking about the Gen AI pilot. We have members of the legal and compliance team who are super users, and they're doing little sessions with their practice areas to show how they're using GenAI and how it's saving them time and money. So it's that reinforceable idea.

And then, of course, we're coming down to the overall concept that, you know, we use every tool in our toolkit. We're assuring it's aligned. We're assuring it's clear. And then we talk about the success at the end.

Right? We are sharing the difference it's making, where we're seeing growth, where we're seeing productivity gains, elements like that.

Well, I was working with a different CLO at the time, but she and I were working closely together. And I've always worked with the kind of premise that clear thinking creates clear communication.

And I was working with her a lot on the thinking part. Right? So what are the goals and objectives of the department? How do they align with the business goals and objectives?

How are we sharing that with the team? What actions can they take to meet these goals and objectives to help us, you know, help the business win? And she saw that thinking, that process in me and said, you know, I think you do really well in a role like this in our organization. And so she moved me over.

And I am grateful because it's been a great time.

Shorter is better and concise, clear and concise. So your subject line cannot be something that doesn't fit in my screen. It has to be, you know, it has to be short. Three words is kind of probably enough for you.

And then the body of your email has to be, again, driven to a quick action, And that quick action is usually like, you know, click here for more information. But getting the key elements, you know, this is what's changing. This is what you need to do. And then click here for more information.

Getting people to at least know that they have action to take and what their role is in this message that's coming out. But it needs to be short and clear and concise. And don't have AI write it because AI is going to add too many frivolous words that you don't need in there. So short, clear, concise, no AI.

Absolutely. I've been very fortunate to meet Jeff and Connie and to work with them. And because of my Canadian location, I worked with them actually to develop our own little virtual community. So for those who aren't in those major centers where they hold their regional in person meetings, for those who maybe just can't get to those regional in person meetings, we have created a virtual community where we meet on a I think it's every eight weeks or so, and we have our own specialists come in who, you know, experts who talk to us about everything from, of course, GenAI to where your outside counsel policies should look like.

I have experts from across the board coming to talk to people and then building that community again. So having them and having access to that community alone has been great because I have met others who are in a similar boat to me where we're not in a place where there are lots of legal operations professionals locally. So we have people that we can call and talk to and ask questions of, and then we get to learn from experts as well. So just having those sessions where you have great people come in and teach you something new, you can't go wrong with a community like that.

It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.