Peer to Peer Magazine

22 risk posture as well as the pros and cons of agreeing to exceptions, the GC is better positioned to negotiate vigorously with the client's in-house counsel or procurement teams if needed. Whereas an individual lawyer might overlook or be tempted to agree to a "Most Favored Nation" clause, for example, the GC and risk teams will be able to argue that this is strictly against firm policy, or impossible due to prior agreements and obligations to other clients. Design Processes for Flexibility Automating workflows for conflicts management and intake makes the NBI process faster and more efficient, helping to break down silos of information within the firm, and reducing the amount of manual data entry as well as the risk of human error. However, some firms embarking on automating intake and conflicts find that the design and planning phase takes much longer than expected — in some cases as long as 15 months to two years. The temptation to "over-engineer" workflow automation stems from a desire to program every rule, plan for every contingency, and automate every step of the process. While the intentions are certainly understandable, in practice, firms can find themselves overcomplicating workflow design and/or creating a system that may prove too rigid to accommodate future changes to the firm's business. It is understandably frustrating to go live with an elegant system that took two years to design, only to find that it ages poorly and needs to undergo a significant overhaul within a year when someone new joins the organization. Rather than trying to "automate everything," we recommend a more flexible approach that allows for likely real-world scenarios and allows the risk team to adapt processes based on how well they work in practice. For example, the freedom of the intake team to re-prioritize, eliminate, or add approvals based on recent feedback, approver efficiency. For example, any client information that has already been captured by the firm can be displayed — providing the client with the opportunity to add, edit and correct information as needed rather than starting from scratch. Any information requiring further clarification can be flagged as part of the workflow, providing the firm's intake, risk, finance and IT teams with the opportunity to follow up with the appropriate client contacts to address any issues directly, rather than having to rely on a single lawyer to broker information. This can be especially helpful when conducting AML and KYC checks requiring detailed financial information, for example, or discussing security and information governance requirements. Similarly, the recruiting and conflicts teams can provide prospective lateral hires with a secure web site where they can provide background information so that potential conflicts can be evaluated, cleared or mitigated quickly once the candidate is employed by the firm. Opening the direct lines of communication between the client's organization and the firm's new business acceptance team can help to alleviate the administrative burden on individual lawyers, improve the productivity and efficacy of the central intake and conflicts team, and reduce unnecessary delays in opening new matters and starting client work. Leverage the Office of the General Counsel in Client Negotiations Centralizing the negotiation and management of engagement letters and outside counsel guidelines can significantly reduce future risks and costs to the firm. In recent years, many firms have seen a growing number of clients issue outside counsel guidelines. Many OCGs specify requirements that are inconsistent with the firm's own policies and procedures or define terms of business that may be disadvantageous to the firm. Historically, some firms have unknowingly accepted these terms due to largely decentralized processes, with OCGs themselves literally forgotten in desk drawers or the electronic archives of individual lawyers. The proliferation of OCGs today presents an important opportunity for the Office of General Counsel to step in and assist with client negotiations. Rather than making individual lawyers responsible for negotiating each and every requirement, the GC can be positioned with the client as the "bad cop" with ultimate authority to agree to specific terms of business and make exceptions if and when appropriate. The Office of the General Counsel will generally have a broader and more informed perspective of client terms across the firm's business than any individual lawyer. Armed with an understanding of the firm's It is understandably frustrating to go live with an elegant system that took two years to design, only to find that it ages poorly and needs to undergo a significant overhaul within a year when someone new joins the organization.

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