Mission-Driven Legal Ops: What Legal Teams Can Learn from St. Jude

Thank you so much for having me.

Sure. So I have I'm going into my nineteenth year at St. Jude. I've always done operations. I started as a contract management specialist.

And when I started almost nineteen years ago, there were only four of us. I've been very intentional about the type of work I've done in the op space, learned, and how we develop operations at St. Jude. And so now there are three dedicated legal operations professionals, but we almost have thirty people on the legal team. So from four to almost thirty, we have an amazing chief legal officer in Robin Diaz, and she's been very supportive in how we build out functions.

Yes.

I'd applied to be on the CLOC board. Unfortunately, they picked other amazing people, so they have a great board this year. Then I was invited or got an email from Nicole asking me around becoming part of the education advisory council. And so I applied for that, had a discussion with Nicole, and I was invited to be part of the council.

Fast forward to developing the content for what you see happening here over the course of Monday through Thursday, and then, you know, they were like, oh, we need someone in to teach clock academy one hundred. And I was like, oh, that should be fun. Then it was, oh, we need someone to do speed mentoring. I'm like, oh, I'd do that and then tomorrow we are doing career development in nonprofits and so I guess I was like, oh, I could do that.

I'll be happy to do that. It was more of like, yeah, pick me. I'll do it. So it's my first CLOC and my busiest one.

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

I think with any kind of legal professional, you get to see the end result. So at St. Jude, you get to see the end result, and so that's what we kind of come to work for to see because sometimes you don't get to see it. And I think here seeing the end result, you know, we've been a part of a lot of the back end stuff, and so now you get to see what all the hard work was about.

I think a lot of people, the hype is the tech. And so one of the things that we trained yesterday, my colleagues and I that taught Clock Academy one hundred was before you buy the tech, make sure you have your processes in place.

Because even if you buy the tech and you implement the tech, it's sort of like, okay. Now you're gonna what are you gonna do with it? Yeah. You know?

Do you have a process on how you're going to implement it? Do you have process in how you're gonna market it to the team, train the team, get adoption from the team? Have you looked to make sure that what the tech that you're buying is actually gonna do what you want it to do if you haven't developed the process? So we you know, a lesson learned for us is we did purchase a tech because, you know, it was a thing to do at the time, and we ended up not leveraging the tech the way we needed to leverage it, and so that was dollars wasted.

And so now we're kind of, you know, collecting ourselves and, like, okay. How do we now implement the same type of tech but get the technology adoption from the team?

And so, again, we didn't have a process. We just bought tech. So we tell people all the time, develop your processes first and then get the tech. And so, you know, it's very you know, it's almost like going to a carnival.

It's like, I wanna ride that ride. I wanna ride that ride. I wanna play that game, and that's what's happening. It's like, come in come in, try this new shiny tech.

Can't ride all the So you gotta pick and choose wisely.

Yes but one of the things that we do when we go out to bid is once we pick our top as part of the bidding process the scoping document has here are all the regulatory requirements that we could come up against and please make sure you know what that, you know, you are familiar with those things. You don't have to know them verbatim but you're familiar with them and then the other thing is once we pick our top three vendors to actually pitch, we give them the guidance document. Like, you know, we don't do NDA, so as a contract CLM vendor, I don't want that to be what you show me because then, you know, it's useless to me.

That's not what we do. So we tell you, our current vendor, we literally listed out the top three vendors. Here are the types of contracts that we do. Here's where our volume is.

Tell me how you build this out for us. Here are all the guardrails around these types of agreements in which they have to stop here. Here's our contract management policy. How would you build it around that such that our end users aren't having to ask a being asked a ton of questions around certain things or if it's a health care contract, what questions do we need to make sure is in the workflow versus if it's research?

Do they have to answer these health care questions? They shouldn't. So we kind of give them the guidance and we look at who actually listens to us around that.

Sure. So one of the things that I've done so when we started looking for a contract management system, any conference that I went to that's who I targeted. So I just had quick fifteen, twenty minute meetings saying, hey, I'm going out to bid, Here's what we do.

Oh, absolutely. They had you know, it's like I have to be a good steward. That's a value. You know, that's value seven in our values, and so I have to show that I'm being a good steward of our donor dollars because eighty five percent or roughly eighty five percent of how we run the hospital is based on people donating.

Yeah, so it's seven core values. And when we're looking at vendors and so it's not only how you navigate your way through the St. Jude mission and say, oh, I'm I'm implementing value five which is, you know, being a collaborative partner across the institution. It's sort of like, okay, if I engage a vendor, what value, what Saint Jude value do I see with them, you know, is it value for the urgency of making sure that you know the patients have what they need, is it making sure that our patients are safe and that's the first value.

Are we being good stewards? Value seven. So those are the things that we're looking at and then we just implemented cultural principles which are sort of like an extension of the value. So it's like how am I delivering on impact?

Okay. Well, I'm making sure that I'm bringing in a vendor who is going to uphold at least three of these values. So as part of the RFP, we ask like what values do you see in collaborating with this vendor? So we're looking at that.

And when we decline you as a vendor and, you know, we've had some vendors that are like, well, apparently, you don't want the best and, you know, kind of snarky. And so we say, well, obviously, they're not That value. So and we use that. We stand on that because that's what we live by there.

You know, it's been embedded in the mission since nineteen sixty two.

It's just not a customary thing, though. So when someone starts talking about it, it's somewhat like, oh, wow. This person really is living and breathing the beautiful thing. It's really cool.

Yeah. Being responsible in how you continuing to grow and, you know, making sure that you're not just staying stagnant.

Even with the cultural principles, like, we're looking to advancing the St. Jude community. How are you being innovative? And so we're even looking at what processes are we doing where maybe we can innovate or maybe we can revamp it and talk about and start, you know, getting it embedded in our processes and our day to day to be like, okay, here's how we deliver on impact today. Here's how we grew the Saint Jude or participated in growing the Saint Jude community. And it's basically around just being collaborative and supporting any initiative or any, you know, development across organization.

Imagine a world where your performance is reviewed on the impact that you're making.

You know? And it's not always quantifiable. It's not always money. Sometimes it's actually I'm building better relationships. I'm helping a cause. We often live in this world where it's just money, and it's just about how much revenue. But when you actually counter that or couple that with this value based reality It sounds like you could actually be a very happy employee.

You you can, especially if you can say, hey. You know, legal saw a thousand contracts. Of those thousand contracts, we turned fifty percent of those around in less than, you know, ten days. We turned the more complex ones around in less than thirty days.

And so now people are seeing, like, oh, I did. I am impactful because, you know, in turning those contracts around or getting it finalized, you are able to get a piece of equipment on-site timely. You were able to get a specialty provider on-site quicker and credentialed quicker, stuff like that. So I think when you talk about dollars, we're talking about the end result.

Our end result is making sure that our kiddos have what they need and they have it timely and we're not the person that's holding it up. We never want to be that.

And one of the things that we do is if we bring you on as a vendor, one of the things that we do is your first kind of implementation or kickoff, if you will, we want it to be on-site because we want you to see, like, this is what the partnership means, and this is why we've brought you on to be the partner. So when we implemented our contract management system, we brought them on-site for four days and we wanted you to see our day in and day out. This is why we want this workflow to do this. This is why this needs to happen this way, this is why the contract process has to stop if they haven't done this piece and we showed you the hospital like here's where if this piece of equipment isn't reviewed right, here's the impact that it will have. And so I think having them see it, they're not implementing a contract management system. They are implementing a process to help us with our mission, and I think that's how we've tried to frame things.

It went well. We had some hiccups. Of course, with anything, you've had hiccups because, you know, in sales, they'll try to promise you the moon. Your salesperson will promise you the moon, but then you get a whole new team of implementation people. So one of the things in legal that we've partnered with our IT team to do is, okay, show me the implementation team too. So before we engage you or before we give you this, we wanna talk to the implementation team. So we can say, well, this is what your sales team told us.

What do you know to be true?

It's so funny because before while I was in between sessions, I started crafting the email.

Like, here's day one. This is what I did on day one. Here's the takeaway.

This is what I did on day two. Here's the takeaway. Here's what I did on day three. Here's the takeaway.

And, of course, on the last day, I'm probably gonna be traveling, so I won't get the last day. And so, like, you know, I'll give the summaries, like, something for us to think about. So I don't say, I think we need to do this. It's like, something for us to think about.

So we have developed an internship program for legal operations, and so we embed the intern into our practices. They're not just kind of sitting and reading documents or shuffling paper. They actually do our day in and day out. And so one of the things is as we were teaching clock one hundred, I'm like, maybe we should do a smaller version of clock one hundred, not the four hours, but maybe we should like, hey.

Here's what business intelligence is. Here's what these different components of the clock core twelve does, and this is what this means to you as an intern and how you're gonna help us navigate this. And so that's one thing. And then from today, it's more around navigating how we do change.

So it's more around how we do change. How do we develop change in such a way where you've already acknowledged that, you know, a lot of attorneys are very kind of anxious about using AI? How do we now start moving from recruiting entry level people to do what AI we know that AI is going to take over. So now how do we start developing them such that they are doing more assessments and more common sense analysis to say, the AI already did this red line, now I need to look at it and make sure that the red line, the logic was right, what they added makes sense, and it's not just gibberish, How are we now training and moving towards a more, like, we know AI is gonna take this over?

How are now training and developing people? And do we need to look at how, you know, updating?

Right. But you see it's not going anywhere. It's how many people here over the course of four days? So it's the profession is not going anywhere. Now how do you kind of move them in a direction to be ahead of pace of what the tech is going to do?

And thank you for thinking of me to ask me.

So much.