Digital White Papers

ILTA WHITE PAPER: NOVEMBER 2015 WWW.ILTANET.ORG 9 Lisa Mango, Senior Director and Senior Corporate Counsel at Autodesk, posits that JDs might have an advantage in the role due to their deep level of understanding of how lawyers work. Brian Hupp, Director of Legal Operations Strategy at Dolby, alternatively suggested that understanding the workings of a legal department simply takes the right skill set, including a willingness to "jump in and start doing" and having the people skills necessary to persuade and gain trust. As an operations professional, "you're a negotiator. You're a collaborator. You have to be a good listener; you have to be strategic." LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY Legal operations executives strive to be on the cutting edge of legal technology. Operations teams target areas of process inefficiency, and they do so in part by leveraging the latest in legal tools such as e-billing, workflow automation and dashboard analytics. A few of the processes and technologies recently implemented by legal operations teams to drive efficiency, save money and better leverage in- house and outside counsel resources include: • Fully automated non-disclosure agreement portals • Workflow technology, coupled with Lean process improvements • Benchmarking technology used to determine the "right rate" for outside counsel fees • Contract management tools that streamline and accelerate the way legal supports revenue- generating contracts • Technology integration that provides analytics/ metrics/reporting for better operational management • Centralized business analytics dashboards that provide better visibility into departmental performance LEGAL OPERATIONS: RELATIVELY NEW AND ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL • Managed service providers being utilized to develop spending, savings and other metrics to extend and enable the department in a nimble, cost-effective way • Unified litigation support technology for legal holds, integrating HR technology and leveraging data collection processes and technology to streamline e-discovery HOW DO CLOC EXECUTIVES VIEW THIS ROLE? Legal operations professionals share one critical trait, and all stress its importance: they understand the fundamentals of how lawyers think and work. While operations executives acquire that knowledge through different education and career paths, taking a lawyer-centered approach to shaping legal departments is crucial to their success. Business teams are looking to legal operations to provide innovative legal operations solutions to meet their commercial goals.

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