Law Firm Legal Ops: Trust, Tech Adoption, and What Clients Want

Yeah. Thank you, Daniel, and thank you, Eric. Yeah. I appreciate being here and go Chiefs.

And I know that both of you have been doing legal operations way longer than me, but that is an interesting concept because when I think about legal ops and the very first time I went to a clock conference, there was this question that was being posed on the stage about the identity of a legal operations professional. But I've always looked at it through the lens of, especially with it, some of the origins at least of legal operations was always in house. In house meaning within a company. So talk to us a little bit about what it is like to be legal operations inside of a law firm.

I mean, Eric probably may or may not know this, but everything that the legal ops professionals are trying to do within the legal department with their attorneys, get them to use technology, get them to be more efficient, have them think about the business side of practicing as opposed to just the technical delivery of a legal service. All those things that happen in house happen at a law firm as well. And having someone to guide that and drive initiatives around those disciplines and protocols are where we can make a difference. And so if you think about the different practices that the attorneys are working in, some need certain attention in a certain area, others don't.

And so being a little bit flexible on how you're serving this broad group of think we have eleven hundred attorneys now, four hundred or five hundred some odd partners. They will tell you there's some uniqueness to each of their practices. And talking to colleagues inside law departments, they hear many of the same things I'm hearing. So we're fighting the same battles.

And when we connect, mean, that's some of the best collaborations we have. Those are the collaborations that win awards that are out there, like value champions and Clock Leo awards from prior iterations of their award system, driving twenty five, thirty, thirty five percent reductions in year over year spend with those legal groups, you know, we can hang our hat that we had a lot to do with that.

I feel like we've developed a rock solid formula for doing that, and it really starts with piloting with the right groups and the right teams. So identifying and this isn't rocket science. You had to identify some people who are susceptible to being changed and convinced that these tools are going to help them over the long term and get them on board with those tools and then start to use word-of-mouth where the other people in the firm want, hey, why can't I use that yet? It's coming, you're gonna get it, you know, you create a little demand. I'll give you a great example of this. So last year at CLOCK, sat in one of the workshops was create your own custom GPT and I sat in there and as they were trying to help you create a writing assistant I was like I'm gonna create me. I get x number of questions from our partners that are somewhat repeatable, you know, certain contexts that I can quickly identify what needs to happen.

Well you can put that into a custom GPT platform, call it a chatbot, call it a pre agentic, depending on how you want to term it, but built that out in OpenAI's custom GPT platform, went to my IT folks and was like hey this is gonna be value to our partners, they're like our tech stack's not ready yet to bring that in here. We brought it in and built it on the Copilot platform and identified ten partners that we're gonna push this out to.

The day I sent it out, the link to that pricing agent, I got two calls from partners I didn't even communicate with that that group had already talked to and they wanted to know why they didn't have.

Why don't I have access to that one? It's coming. Everyone's gonna get access to it. It's just gonna be stepped out. So if you can get and you pick the right people who have an influence within the firm, and again I'm talking from a firm perspective, they'll get the word out for you.

You earn the trust over the number of years that you've been in an organization. And once you've earned that trust with the partners, you're not gonna bring something to them that you don't truly believe is gonna drive some value, make their life easier, make their clients' life easier, or make their clients view them differently than they have historically. And that's the perspective I always approach partners with is how will your clients view you if you're doing this? And that seems to be a recipe that works well. I don't know if the IT folks or the lit tech folks who who know and have great, you know, relationships with those folks, Litigation tech, which we have a whole army of folks who do phenomenal things there. Like that seems core and foundational to what they're doing. We're we're trying to do maybe some additive elements that are maybe on the cutting edge, that they don't see out of the gate why I would go down this road or why should I invest time and effort in this.

So you have to pick your spots. And again, I think over the years I've been there, you can identify who's gonna be a champion for you.

Other legal conferences where I'd look around and I'm like, that's a law firm, that's a law firm, these are all law firms. Where are the actual clients going? And so you start to see and when you look at it through that lens and start to focus on getting to those conferences, like CLOCK, where the in house people are there talking about their pain points, talking about how they want to get better and you're like, okay, I found it and like I think my very first one six seven years ago was I got there and I'm like looking around like, these are all in house people. There's no law firms here. Like, I found it. This is the place you need to be spending time and getting involved with.

I've gotten really a lot out of this conference. It's a very well content curated conference. I guess I wanna go back to this question about trust because when we see all these new vendors, all this bling technology out there, it's interesting you don't see a lot of discovery vendors here anymore. You know you used to see a lot of CLM and discovery vendors, now you're seeing more AI native CLM, other kinds of tools. So the question I have for you is, you talk about trust and trying to sell something, market something, a new idea to a group of partners that are already on your trust list, great.

You probably aren't pushing the envelope if you're successful every single time. So you have to, like failure is part of that journey and taking a chance on a partner or group of attorneys to introduce something to them and then digging it to the curb and learning from that learning from that experience helps you with the next time. So, you know, picking your spots, we have a saying of working with the willing, you work with the willing. And so those are gonna be the folks that, again, predispose to and groups that you have built trust with, who are gonna listen to some degree about what you're showing and how you can, again, you have the financial background, there's a financial element to a lot of things that they're doing, you talk about outcome based versus outcome based pricing versus input based pricing and how that's changing.

So having those conversations and how this, if you're on an outcomes based pricing, I'm gonna say non hourly, you drive efficiency into that process, you know, you're gonna have gains.

You're gonna have opportunity to share those gains with your client. You're gonna, you know, if you if you think, yeah again we're getting into the hourly model versus non hourly model, which is a big part of what I and my team spend time doing. So I don't know, Eric, that answered your question or not around the trust, it's I think you build up over the years political capital and you strategically figure out where you're gonna spend that and who you're gonna spend that with. And so you build the relationships to govern or lead and then you decide how you're gonna deploy that or how you think it's gonna be most beneficial in a very broad way.

Yeah. It's it's difficult, especially across a broad group, both geographically dispersed and where they are in their career. Yeah, I'm trying to think through of some of the pockets of success that you might have. I mean, I can think of practice areas where one team within the exact same practice area has done a phenomenal job adopting the technology and getting that team to work.

And right across the hall, the crickets, that other team is like this is how we do it, this is why we can't do it that way, like they have the prime example staring them in the face and that team is, you know, at the top of a lot of lists at the law firm in terms of what they've done and so the OKRs and the metrics bear that out on how successful they are. But it doesn't translate always, to say, oh, once they've done it, you may even get pushback if you even try to point at that group. They've heard so much about that group's success, like they're tired of it. Like they don't even wanna hear it.

There will be, I believe eventually, but sometimes some clients aren't attuned to what can be done.

Yeah. If a client recognizes, right, the speed of legal is increasing tremendously. And so it's creating some dynamics that, good or bad, they're they're there, which is, I'm gonna make this up, you know, you handled ten depositions in a month, now you can do twenty in that same time frame. You're gonna move through things quicker because of the new efficiency tools.

What that does is, and I think some attorneys may look at what efficiency tools are out there, how's it making my life better? And now I feel like I'm working twice as much, I'm getting twice as much done but my stress level is elevated versus, yeah. So I think that dynamic is out there.

How different people handle it and how different firms and legal organizations are handling that dynamic, I think, is to be determined.

No. There's no fun in fishing.

Who wants to hear about how you're fishing when you walk around the offices and there's more it seems to me, in my experience, there's more joy in telling people how busy you are.

You and me both, don't disagree with that, I'm just telling you what I observe.

With with the, where so if I could, you know, wave the magic wand and give you six, eight additional hours in a week to go fish or do whatever, they're not gonna do it. You talked about your AI dividends. Writing it down is one thing, going and doing it is another thing. So if you have, you know, if your whole self worth is around how busy you are, then these tools don't appeal to you.

I mean, the opportunities here are vast in terms of meeting other people on your same journey or seeing where they are on their journey and maybe being able to assist them or give them some direction on, hey, think about this, think about that. And so I have found over the years, and we are able to bring CLOCK to our clients because as a I interface with a lot of partners who are like, hey, we have this meeting, there's, you know, Bob or Mary and they do legal ops, I don't even know what that is. They're new to the role, but can you come along?

Boom, there's an immediate connection there and if that person is new to that role, they may not even be aware of Clock. So you can make an introduction to hey, there's this industry group you want to know about and so you and we've gone so far as to sponsor clients to come here in the past or sponsor their membership to join, so just see tremendous value in all the content that's, you know, surfaced here at CLOC and the conversations that happen leading up to and after as well. I've been lucky to be part of the legal department treaty assessment playbook over the past, been a pretty long journey with a lot of great people, but we announced today the COMPASS tool.

Yeah. That's been that's been a phenomenal journey with a lot of in house groups, a couple folks from law firms, some vendor side folks and we've all been pushing this concept and this idea of you have the CLOT Core twelve, how do you like measure where you are in terms of your journey in a particular section of the Core twelve and maybe more holistically? And so we built out the playbook a couple years ago, that got published but then it's like okay, how can we really bring this to life? To now you have this next gen maturity assessment tool that can help with the conversations with your GC and your GC has with the C suite around what the department is doing, where it's focusing its resources, how it's impacting the business and how it's moving along this maturity curve from we're just really reactive to now we're developing and emerging and now we're like leading.

And so you can track that journey, you can take assessments around your team and your group in these different areas and you can save it and record it and come back to it and so, and it does, it helps tell the story to your key stakeholders about what you, as a legal ops professional, are doing but also what the legal department as a whole is doing to help the business. Yeah, Freedom members, the beta version's out there, I mean you could literally go on the website right now and the beta version is out there, you know, you fill in your name and your email address and you get the magic link to the assessment, it'll take you right to the tool.

Nido has done a phenomenal job, we're gonna have a session tomorrow on this in a little more detail. So yeah, it's been a great journey and this is just the next iteration. There's some AI components to it. I think about what's it gonna be like in the middle of the year, end of this year, next year at this time, where you can go with some of the newer technologies that are available.

Yes. Yeah. You got over on us last time. I'll give you that, Eric. Maybe we'll see you again in February.

Absolutely, Daniel. Thank you, Eric.