Digital White Papers

ILTA WHITE PAPER: NOVEMBER 2015 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 7 experience and best practices to accelerate positive change in the legal sector. They also focus on driving efficiency and effectiveness and providing a forum for establishing and extending operational guidelines for corporate legal departments and the corporate legal industry in general. WHO IS INVOLVED WITH LEGAL OPERATIONS? As general counsel and legal operations executives continue to redefine and expand the legal operations role, the ecosystem in which legal operations executives operate continues to grow, change and evolve, too. In the past, the legal ecosystem consisted primarily of only in-house and outside counsel. Today, the ecosystem includes outside counsel, managed service providers, technology providers, professional services providers, associations, courts, legal educators, investors and business executives. GCs and their legal operations executives are driving the expansion of the network of interactions to secure a broad range of benefits for the companies they support and the legal profession as a whole. With multiple facets of the legal ecosystem in flux, this is a very exciting time of progress and opportunity for legal departments, law firms, managed service • Financial Management: Manage the departmental budget. Track accruals and forecasting. Work with finance to identify spending trends, potential cost savings and efficiency opportunities. • Global Data Governance/Records Management: Create a records management program that includes a record retention schedule, policies and processes. • Growth and Development: Deliver improved GC staff and overall team performance by globalizing the team and creating a culture of growth, development, collaboration and accountability. • Knowledge Management: Enable efficiencies by creating seamless access to legal and department institutional knowledge through the organization and centralization of key templates, policies, processes, memos and other learnings. • Litigation Support: Support e-discovery, legal hold and document review. • Strategic Planning: Create a long-term strategy, aligning yearly goals and corresponding metrics. • Technology Support: Create a long-term technology road map that includes tools such as e-billing/matter management, contract management, content management, IP management, business process management, e-signatures, board management, compliance management, legal hold, subsidiary management, etc. • Vendor Management: Create a vendor management program to ensure quality outside counsel support at the right rates and under optimal fee arrangements. Hold regular business reviews. Negotiate fee agreements. Drive governance of billing guidelines. Since its founding five years ago, CLOC has been leading the evolution of the legal operations field for medium and large corporations. Composed of both businesspeople and lawyers and spanning sectors from technology to energy and finance, CLOC members actively share knowledge, practical About the Author Laura Peszek is the Legal Operations Intern at NetApp and an aspiring legal operations executive. She is in her third year of law school at the University of Colorado in Boulder, CO. Contact Laura at laura.peszek@netapp.com. About the Author Lisa Konie is the Senior Director of Legal Operations at Adobe Systems Incorporated and has over 20 years of experience working in the high-tech industry. Her focus is on ensuring departmental effectiveness and efficiency while scaling the department to meet business needs. Lisa is responsible for strategic planning and outside counsel relationships, technology and tool implementations, communications and knowledge management, department interns, training, and overall cross-departmental issues. Contact her at lkonie@adobe.com.

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