Transforming Legal Departments: Tech and Inclusion

Thank you, Daniel. And Eric, it's great to be here.

Thank you.

Also at CLOC, I am the chair of its diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging council.

For each of those programs that I've implemented, the first and foremost thing I had to do was make sure I had the approvals necessary and the people pain points. I needed to understand that these folks on the team or the lawyers in the group were experiencing not the most efficient way of saving documents or comparing documents or drafts. So as a result, I met with them. I did a sort of a round table with various leaders from various practice groups, and I asked, you know, what are your pain points, and how can I help you as a legal operations director to improve and enhance the way you work so that you, in turn, can focus on law?

And as I did that, I determined, you know, we'll need a document management system, a centralized location so that when people come and go, there's this one source of truth where we'll find all those documents.

And so we went down the path of partnering with a third party to implement our NetDocuments tool.

With the KPI system, that was my GC coming in and asking, how do we know what each practice group is doing?

Explaining that he doesn't want this to be like a law firm where we're taking time sheets and, you know, clocking every fifteen minutes that a lawyer is working. But he wanted to get a sense of what each practice area was working on, whether, say, compliance was far busier than environmental or if employment could perhaps help with the litigation team. And so I partnered with a third party, and we created this KPI system focused on his priorities.

And since creating that system, we have been able to do cross training in certain areas, move lawyers from one practice area into another, and to reduce the number of reports we have to send to him each month.

And this is a report that Ed Bastian reviews with my GC every month.

We have made hiring decisions based on these results, and it's been invaluable.

Right. So, again, we work with a third party. We told them the various filters we wanted to build into this tool.

And from there, we build it out. We didn't have engagement initially because lawyers, especially those at Delta, came from a law firm. Yeah. So they didn't wanna go back to the time keeping days as in the law firm. So we explained to them, this is not something that's gonna take a lot of time. If you work on a matter once or ten times each month, we only require that you go into this KPI system and click a button once.

And then at the end of the month, I generate this report on the activity, on the risk, on the value of that matter, and so on and so forth, and then what practice area it pertains to.

Yes.

Yeah. So the KPIs report is full of data. So we had graphs that would show the number of matters that this particular group worked on, this practice area worked on. We would show how many matters they opened, how many matters they closed, and a host of other filters that we would build into this.

And by doing that, we were able to demonstrate by telling a story. You know, here's where we need help. Here is where we can benefit from, you know, hiring someone. Or you know what?

We are not very busy in this area, so can we cross train someone from employment to help out with litigation?

And quite frankly, we have a flight plan every year. And one of the flight plan objectives is for us to cross train, to be able to collaborate across different practice areas, to make us all better, you know, and make us more valuable to the company.

Well, first and foremost, we have the best lawyers in the world in our law department.

We absolutely do. And I believe that and, you know, so does my GC. And we have lawyers who actually care about Delta.

And they will raise their hand whether it's their area of expertise or not. And so looking at this data and realizing we need help in one practice area or another, it was easy to get someone to move over, cross train, and help us to align where we needed to be aligned with respect to the areas that we needed support.

It absolutely is. And it's gotten to the point now where we will have lawyers coming to us saying, listen. I can help in this area. All of the practice group leaders and myself meet with our GC on a regular basis.

And it's oftentimes that we hear from these practice group leaders that someone on their team has asked to learn or work in another area. And, you know, that's what makes us all successful.

You know? It's collaborating.

It's learning new skills. It's being cross trained. And what's great about that too is it's trickled down to paralegals and to admins and, you know, it's just our culture.

You know? It makes us all more invaluable.

Right.

Listen. We know our lawyers work hard. We don't have to sit there and watch the clock with them. Mhmm. They work hard. And they're not nine to five. They're nine to whenever we need them.

My GC and everyone encourage, you know, balancing, you know, life and work. Mhmm. And we do that. You know, we work for an airline. We wanna be able to say, hey. Go take your trip. Go enjoy your family, whatever.

But we're committed.

And, you know, when you love what you're doing, it doesn't feel like work at all.

So, you know, we have all of the changes that have come up in the past one hundred plus days. I mean, I'm speaking for my individual self, not for Delta, but from a CLOC's perspective. We haven't wavered on our commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

We have set a pathway from day one to ensure that everyone feels like they have a place here, a place where they can grow, prosper, network, whatever the need is.

This year in particular, we had started it a little bit last year, but this year in particular, I thought it was important to set up you know, most companies have what they call BRGs and some people call them different things. You know, some a group for pride, you know, LGBTQ, a group for black employees, etcetera. So I set up various groups to meet, meetups we call them. So on Monday, we kicked off with a CLOC Cares group.

It was a community effort. We went to Saint Jude's and we supported them, helped to clean up their thrift shop. We did some laundry. This is a organization that helps at risk children and adults too, quite frankly.

Many, many years ago, it would have been considered like an orphanage. Of course, they don't call it an orphanage now because we're hoping that irrespective of your age, someday we will find your parents.

So we spend the whole day a half a day there, and that was part of the whole DEIB community effort.

So yesterday, we had a meetup with our LGBTQ group as well as our neurodiversity group. And today, we had a meetup with the BIPOC group.

You know? So we're trying to build a community where everyone has a place, and they know that we see them and we hear them. And we have allies that's invited to join us. So everyone's included. It's all about inclusiveness.

And, you know, I'm here for it.

Oh, there will be a knowledge drop. First and foremost, I've invited my legal ops specialist to join me here today. So we have divided and conquered the sessions. So we'll go back and we'll do a knowledge drop. We'll do a summary together. We'll present that to my GC, and he will determine how he wants to leverage that information.

Just for my peers, I'll let them know across the company what I've learned, how they can join Clock. I'm always promoting Clock anyway. And, of course, I'll be on LinkedIn talking about everything.

Thank you too, Daniel. Appreciate it. Thank you, Eric.