BDO's Legal Tech TalkDriving Change: Navigating Legal Tech Adoption
About this episode
Recorded live at CLOC in Las Vegas, Daniel Gold and Eric Derk talk with Laurie Engel, legal operations lead at Lennox International, who came to legal operations from commercial real estate. Laurie explains her no-judgment approach to getting users to adopt new tools, how her team sources technology before bringing in IT, and how Lennox is approaching AI policy and use cases.
Key takeaways
- Users adopt new tools faster when they get plenty of notice, support and no judgment for struggling with change.
- Showing people up front that a tool means fewer clicks and less time is the strongest adoption argument.
- A rollout that goes badly still has value if the team captures the lessons.
- Laurie's team evaluates and sources legal technology first, then brings IT in.
- Lennox wrote a company AI policy and is weighing a more robust one for attorneys, with security as a central concern.
Full transcript
Transcript from BDO's published episode, edited for transcription errors. Speaker labels added by Gold Standard Leadership.
Welcome to BDO's Legal Tech Talk podcast. We're joined by judges and legal professionals to discuss emerging trends, regulatory updates, and the latest headlines.
We'll provide tips to help your law firms and legal departments make the most out of legal technology.
Hi, everyone. I'm Jared Crafton, BDO's forensic technology practice leader.
And I'm Daniel Gold, forensics principal and leader of the eDiscovery managed services practice.
Let's get started with this episode's exciting topic.
And welcome back to another special edition of BDO Legal Tech Talk. And we are again live here at the CLOC Global Institute in Vegas. And we're very delighted to be sitting down here with Laurie Engel, who is the legal operations lead at Lennox International.
She brings with us a background in both legal technology, communications, and probably my favorite part, which is change management.
She is known for her resourcefulness and adaptability in implementing legal technology solutions and driving change within legal departments. Lori, thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
Well, this is great. So, Laurie, the very first thing that I wanted to ask you was is really based on your experience in change management, when I said one of my favorite things, and legal technology, how do you approach driving adoption? It is probably the single most challenging thing that we ever find with legal professionals in particular, attorneys even more in particular, in driving that change so that you can get a return on investment of the legal technology that the company has invested in? How do you do that?
Well, one of the things I like to try to remind myself is no judgment.
You know, I tell my teams, my users, we've got you. There's no dumb question. We know it's maybe daunting, but we're here for you. We've got resources. And if I don't get alarmed when they're alarmed, then things go better. And communicating, you know, letting them know well in advance what's coming, You know, popping a change on them like that is not good.
So plenty of notice and just, like I said, no judgment.
That's good. And does that no judgment lead to essentially meeting them where they are?
Exactly.
Yeah. Some of the things that I've experienced or maybe been challenged with around adoption is when you buy a tool and roll it out, maybe sometimes that tool is purchased by IT or by other people who are not consumers, like the legal teams who are not direct consumers. It's almost like a human element to get people to actually use something that they didn't actually have the input on the selection process.
So with that kind of like as a backdrop, how do you actually, like, bring a horse to water and show people that there's better value in breaking away old ways of working and ushering in kind of new ways with this, like, with tech adoption?
Well, I mean, you hope that if you're getting a new tool or a new piece of technology that there's it's either more efficient.
Right? There's either fewer clicks, less time that they have to be in it. And if you can show them that upfront, you know, if you can take other companies use cases or best practices and show them upfront, this is the amount of time you're gonna be saved. Or, you know, maybe you don't it's not a required tool, but if you don't go through there, then you don't get our attention first, you know.
And so I think that showing them upfront that it's going to be fewer clicks or, you know, a more user friendly interface. It's a better product than what they had. I think that that helps drive that. But also, I'm gonna go back to it.
Just letting them know that we're here to support, you know.
What do you do from an implementation standpoint? So a lot of technology is okay. We got the tech used to be in the old days that we had to install software with, you know, CDs and now it's just logged into a new website.
Is there a magic recipe to getting that adoption other than meeting them where they are and saying it's okay, right, and if you need us we're here, but is there like a magic pill that attorneys can take that'd be like, hey, yes, this is what I do. Like, what's been so successful for you?
I'm sort of new into this legal ops world. I would say maybe about five years, And the only one implementation that I've gone through did not go well. So that one, I'm not gonna speak to anything we did in that in that one. We are about to roll out a new CLM right now, and so I might be able to speak on that more in the future.
Because our big one that we did recently, not at this company but somewhere else, it didn't go all that well. And we had users that were global, you know, they were from all over. So we had language barrier as well. So that was a little bit of an issue. So I am looking forward to having a successful case for you the next time we talk.
I'd argue that even if a rollout didn't go well, what makes it successful are the lessons that came out of it.
One hundred percent. Absolutely. Absolutely.
That's the thing that I was I always say I've always learned more from my failures than I have from my successes. You know, when I go through implementation or some product evaluation that doesn't go the way my client wants, I just kind of have a bag of knowledge now. It's like, okay. This is not gonna work in this environment because everything's contextual. Right? Well, this client operates in Germany and Lithuania and the United States. I just learn more from my failures than I do from my success.
Absolutely. And if we don't, we're doing something wrong. Right?
Yeah. Exactly. And when you came out the CLOC, for this conference, what were some of the outcomes that you were hoping to get out of this today?
Sure. Well, of course, you know, I wanted to hear everybody talk about AI just all day long. Yeah. No.
We we have written an AI policy at our company, and we're really trying to look at more tools that are legal specific. Right? I mean, yeah, sure. We have access to Copilot, but maybe something that's a little more robust for attorneys.
So I just wanted to be in the room and hear some of those conversations. And I have even in a workshop that was hands on, and that was fun. Learned a lot that I can take back and share with the team. But then also, we, down the road, might be looking at another e billing matter management tool.
So I was here kind of just looking at those booths as well. But otherwise, just ideas on, you know, moving forward, being more strategic. And I think I did. I think I've come away with a lot of that.
It's funny when you guys go through tech evaluations, do you have them led by IT people, or do you do your first pass at looking at the top three tools that you wanna maybe do POCs with, and then you bring IT in?
Yeah. The second.
Yeah. The latter. That's kind of the new way of doing it. It used to be IT would come to these shows or go to legal week, and they would say, hey, Laura. I think I have three great things for you, and you look at them and they never fit a bill.
So Yeah.
They have bigger fish to fry, I think, than our little legal department. Point too. And I mean, we were looking at a source to pay kind of RFP and they included us in some of that, you know, because they had to because there was a contract component. Right?
But other than that, I mean, they're not real concerned about our daily, you know, tech needs. They're just busy. I mean, they're Right. They've got their hands full with other things and other departments.
But I mean, yeah. So we kind of source those out, you know, just originally at first, and then we bring them in.
Yeah. I'm wondering, is there a shift, do you think, in how companies are handling the procurement of SaaS based software, which again would be different than the world of, you know, the old servers and gotta install things on computer systems.
Yeah. I would say I would agree with that, though I haven't been at Linux long enough to kind of really witness that. So more to come on that from you.
So let's go back to something else you said before. So you've you're new to legal operations five years. Right? Why don't you share with us a little bit about what the other world that you were in and how does that compare to the world of working with lawyers?
Yeah. So I came from commercial real estate. So I was in commercial real estate, you know, in Dallas. I had my real estate license. I was on years ago on one of the leasing teams, at least one of the big high rises downtown. So I was really doing a lot of marketing of portfolios for owners and a little bit of leasing.
That was a hard industry to be in, but it was private. Right? So I was in the nicest buildings and the nicest you know, we go we had the nicest technology, and, you know, nobody was worried about that. And so from there, I went into my first publicly traded company, and it was a culture shock to say the least.
But, yeah, that was where I kinda tripped and fell into legal ops, just from working with a global general counsel that to this day was just one of the best people I've ever worked with. And she just was really good at looking at people's skills and going, why are you doing that? I think maybe we should do this. And just offering her expertise, and so that's what she did as she went, why are you doing what you're doing?
I've got something else for you to do. And so she introduced me to it, and I fell in love with it.
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It's amazing that you have brought over to legal operations world. Sounds like a lot of the lessons that you learned, especially from the general counsel that you worked with. And it almost sounds like, I'm gonna be presumptuous for a moment, but almost sounds like that's so ingrained in your day to day that as a leader, it sounds like you may be doing the same to others as well.
I certainly hope so. I mean, that's something that I learned from her and yeah. Definitely. I hope so. I've been included in a, like, an up and coming leaders program in our company. And so I'm active in that this year and looking forward to growing in that and bringing it also back to my legal ops legal department.
Question about AI. When you're thinking about using AI, are you thinking about having your inside teams, legal paras, lawyers and paras, do more things like research and writing as opposed to shifting over to outside counsel? Or, like, what are some of the ideas and use cases in which, like, there's Vincent and Harvey and some AI language models that are built for lawyers?
So how are you kind of exploring use cases? And maybe you could talk a little more about the context of what you're doing there.
Sure. So I think that from what I've gathered from my team recently, I think they're more concerned about just maybe research at this point in time, maybe around labor and employment. But just from what I've learned being here, I think we need to really look at what they're grounded in. I mean, do we want them to, you know, be extracting off of our prompts from our own data, or are we out looking for research and a set of data from another company? So I don't think we've talked about that as a group very thoroughly, and I think we need to be really thinking about that.
Laurie, it seems like there are so many companies who are doing exactly what you just said. There's a lot of thinking about how to do this right. There's the one side where you could just jump all in and just say, let's just, you know, open up the box. You could use whatever tool you want. But I think it's the companies who take a step back and, you know, Eric and I have heard this before from other folks that we've interviewed on the show and that is, well, what's the problem we're solving for? And it's that basic business question.
And if you can answer that basic business question, it sounds like you guys at Lennox are really taking the time to figure out, as you said, there's different contexts upon which you can utilize Gen AI, and that's wonderful. But in every single one of those con whether it's e billing, whether it's contracting, or it's drafting, or whatever it might be, is it solving a problem or are we just finding a solution and then creating the problem from it?
Right. I don't see us well, we're also gonna be very concerned about security.
So, you know, like you were saying, you know, getting a product and just jumping in. We're gonna be very concerned about what we put in there that's maybe proprietary or confidential. We're gonna be very concerned about that. So we do need to make sure that we are thinking wisely about what we wanted to do and what has to be put at the base, you know, in order to get what we want out of it.
So we have a lot more talking to do. We've been, you know, having demos of for our team, not just here for me, but, you know, I need my lawyers to see it. So we've had a few demos. Nothing we're in love with right now, so we'll keep on the search.
One thing that Daniel and I debate frequently is if you give legal teams more firepower with their technology, and this is monumentally, like, more firepower, will they actually lever it? Will they take advantage of it? So kind of the question, will they do more work inside? Or what's the promise of inside teams?
Do more or less, multi hats, like, the stuff that we always hear over and over again. Well, that's potentially a reality right now. But we've lived in this antiquated paradigm for so long about, well, I just I'm a major and a minor, and I have fourteen different things I have to do. And I can't focus on my priorities because I'm scattered and but now we might actually be able to look at more data, get through it faster, rethink about what you do every day.
Like, we can actually break away all those old excuses. I'm not so sure that the guard that we have in place today is gonna be able to do that just because it's gonna change the way people work.
Yeah. For sure.
It sounds like you've got a lot of education that you are accumulating both here as well as there. But as respect to here, what you have picked up, whether it's the demos or whether it's the sessions, right? Everything seems to be about AI. No one else could talk about anything else.
I look at the education that you get, anyone gets out of ten Z's is really as a gift. And it's a gift that's worth sharing with other people. I feel like being able to share what you learn is probably one of the greatest gifts that one could give. And as a leader, I think that it's, you know, behooves us to be able to do that.
How are you gonna share this gift of knowledge with others at Lennox?
Sure. Yeah. So one of the nice things about CLOC and the app is that you can download the presentations, right, from each session. And so, really, what I would like to do is just go through each one because, you know, not everything is applicable to every team.
Right? Or, you know, maybe you joined a session and they started from, you know, ground zero on a topic and then went up through full adoption or as far as it'll go. And so I just am going to kinda summarize everything the way I think it's best for our team. And then I may, you know, just present that to them and let them know.
But some of it's just for me. You know? Some of it's for me to help me build processes and not tools, really, but more like guidelines for our team or department. So some of it's just for me to help grow in my role, and some of it definitely needs to be shared, and I will thank goodness we can download those slides.
Well, even with the guidelines that you're gonna create from the materials that are you said are just for you, ultimately, those are gonna be for the benefit Oh, wow. Of everybody else, and it will bear those fruits.
Absolutely.
Laurie, thank you so much for joining us.
Sure. My pleasure.
Thanks.
Thank you for having me.
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Daniel Gold is an attorney and a Principal at BDO USA, where he leads eDiscovery managed services. He hosts BDO's Legal Tech Talk, co-hosts the NeLI Pod and founded Gold Standard Leadership.
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Daniel Gold writes weekly on leadership, legal technology and eDiscovery.
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