Name: The Value of In-House Teams: Metrics for a Compelling Story
Uploaded: 2025-06-11T18:16:09.133Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: The Value of In-House Teams: Metrics for a Compelling Story

Transcript for "The Value of In-House Teams: Metrics for a Compelling Story": Hello, and welcome to the value of in house counsel, what metrics tell a compelling story. We know that law departments enable the business to drive revenue. They resolve disputes and oversee regulatory compliance. They partner with the c suite and the board on every kind of strategic initiative. But without the right metrics, their contributions can be overlooked. In this webinar, two accomplished legal operations professionals explore what to track, what to report, and how effectively to communicate to key stakeholders. We're gonna have the participants on stage throughout the panel, and at the end of the hour, we're gonna have time for q and a. And at the close of the program, we will answer the q and a questions. My name is Chuck Kellner. I'm a strategic discovery adviser at Everlaw, and I am honored to moderate this panel. I welcome Stephanie Corey and Juanita Luna to the stage. Thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for contributing to this program. Steph, let's start with you. Can you share a little bit about your journey in legal operations, and what are the things that most interest you in doing this work? Yeah. Absolutely. And I am really grateful to be here, especially with my dear friend, Juanita. So thank you, Chuck, for having me. I think, you know, that I came into legal operations like a lot of us did purely accidentally. I came from the finance world before I joined legal operations, and it was, really, you know, this interesting time in legal operations or the the practice of law, I guess, where people started to look at data. So I think our topic here is so, so apt and, of course, it's only grown. But I was at HP for over a decade. I assumed I'd only be there for a year or two and then move into one of the businesses, but I stayed there a lot longer, and my role kept expanding. It was super, super interesting. Every day was different than the day before. I I had a lot of fun, and I really learned a lot while I was there. And then I had a brief stint at VMware, and then I moved over to Flextronics when my dear friend took the general counsel role over there. And they've never had any form of formal legal operations. So I got to start from scratch there. And, during my tenure at HP, I was able to start the clock organization with some other, Bay Area counterparts and legal ops leaders, and, and that was really quite an adventure. And then most recently, I started LINC, the Legal Innovators Network, which we recently sold to Tech GC, now known as the l suite. So we're a part of the l suite now. So really immersed in this space and have been living and breathing it for longer than I care to admit, frankly. Thank you, Stephanie. Juanita, tell us a little bit about your journey. What, what interests you about the work that you've been doing, and, how did you get here? Thank you, Chuck. And, great to be with you and great to be with Stephanie. I've been a lot of fun. I keep learning from Stephanie. I, started my journey with a small law firm, and that evolved into a regional role at Latham and Watkins, which was a I was there a long time, about ten years. Hopped over to a management consulting domain, loved it. We're gonna go back to a law firm, but an opportunity came up several years later, and I was, executive director of the law firm for for some time. I just after ten years, it was, you know, that was pre way, way pre COVID. Everybody's living on a plane, going to all the offices, etcetera. And, I connected with a a a former partner who is now general counsel, in house for a large company on the West Coast. So he said, can you help us figure out how to run this like a law firm? So I crossed the street, into in house, and really love that. Fortunately, became aware of the, baby clock, which was great. So I followed along, with that, and it's evolved wonderfully. And I think what interests me most in the role let me finish up. So I I stayed with that company almost twelve years, retired from that, but I didn't wanna leave. I thought it would be like dropping out of graduate school or something because there was so much going on, and I'm glad I stayed. So I'm independent consulting now, and I have a, a few smaller clients at some part time. But I, I love it, and it keeps changing. And just when I think I'm gonna, like, wrap it up, well, here comes AI. So there's just too much going on to leave the industry, and and that's that's the story of why I like it so much. It's just ever changing, ever having impact. It's a lot of what, Chuck said at the outset about, even metrics. You know, metrics is the door to strategy, frankly. And so having the seat at the table and seeing others in the industry, evolving their their careers and their impact on on their operations has been very enjoyable and rewarding. Juanita, thanks. So, I'm gonna start with this well worn theme called doing more with less. And, Juanita, I'm gonna queue this up for you I think. You know, I I come from the ediscovery background where, you know, everybody's looking at giant growing volumes of data and increasing data complexity and not a lot of growth in resources to be able to manage it. You know, and I know from learning from you and Stephanie in the legal ops world, there's a giant gap between the growing workloads that law departments are facing, and the budgets and head counts really aren't staying the same. In some cases, they're even shrinking. So, meanwhile, the expectations on in house legal continues to grow. You were talking about, you know, a little bit about the cost pressure, things coming into, into play, and, you know, a a a lot more pressure, you know, certainly on the law departments over the last few years. Can you talk a little bit about that more with less? What do you what are you seeing these days? The the good news is efficiencies. The I think all of our tools, have and tools available have improved just so significantly. So, currently, I think all our companies have a lot of cost pressure. We know that. There's economic uncertainty. We know that. Legal does not get an exemption to that, and legal, I think, is even more important in what's going on. I mentioned when we talked the other day that in December, a lot of companies were already getting ready for what what were the what if scenarios with tariffs, and wanting to anticipate, varying degrees of what that could look like, so that they were prepared to prepare further. And I know that's continuing to change, but the, significance of legal, and that strategy is, not small. And so, there's pressure on legal and, very compelling, significant issues for companies, and that puts new pressure on legal ops. But I think most of legal ops is ready. It's it's knowing your data, and we'll get into that and what to do with your data. But the, ultimately, I'd say in recent years, there's just been rapid investments and rapid maturity into technology, and systems and and just analytical tools. And and I'm talking about simple things. We're not talking about, you know, these are all 7 figure products. There are so many products out there. There's so much of we will and everyone's talking so much about AI. There are so many resources available to do what you need to do. So, it sounds, oh, no. My budget's flat or my headcount's flat or I've gotta go down to x percentage. It's actually pretty doable because we we we have, increasing tools and there's people out there, if you don't know, but there's a lot of people out there who who know how to get something done with less. This is a very generous community, legal ops, and everyone shares. So it's it's not like you have to go hire 10 consultants to get to get your work done. Thanks. Thanks. So, Stephanie, so it wasn't that long ago that legal ops, like, it wasn't even a word. Like, nobody knew what that meant. And then when it sort of came into being, it was mostly directed at, you know, primarily reducing outside counsel costs. You know, a chief legal officer said, somebody do something about these bills. But now legal ops is, like, it it's a lot more. It's it's strategic. Can you can you tell us a little bit about, you know, what you have seen of the growth of the discipline over the time period that you've been involved with it? Yeah. And I'll say that my job, and I bet Juanita would say the same thing. When when we started, it is night and day. I mean, a 180 degrees different today than than where I started. And thank goodness because when I, you know, it's when I started, I would have had no idea where to even begin with, with the stuff that we're presented with today. But I also think a a lot of it is, like Juanita said, I think there are tools out there that are incredibly accessible and affordable. And so as we think about, you know, where we started, you know, some of us twenty plus years, some of us ten, fifteen years ago, We were looking at this this really complex environment of, of all, getting lawyers to do things differently, and there was no culture of that. Right? You're getting lawyers to to work in different ways. Like Juanita said, the the technology, you were looking at a 7 figure multiyear implementation of pretty much anything you wanted to do, and that's not the case today. And we you know, and and I would say, you know, when I certainly when I moved into this role, it really was I came from the finance world as I said, and it was really about getting our arms around outside counsel management. That's what I was hired to do, really understand the budgeting piece and outside counsel management. And so a lot of us did come in from, you know, that that finance, that really figuring out what are we spending because oftentimes, it was anywhere from, you know, 50 to 80% of a legal team's budget could be outs outside counsel. So it it was very important to understand those numbers. Now I think we're seeing it shift to a much more strategic approach if if you wanna say strategic operations, where, you know, Chuck, you used the phrase earlier, doing more with less, which is incredibly demotivating. I think it's such a hard thing and should be a hard thing for teams to swallow. And in fact, now with the new advances we've seen, especially in technology, but the ability to understand what's happening in our organization. So to make these determinations, I think it's doing less with less, really, at the end of the day. So it's really being able to analyze what is happening in our department. What of all, what's outside counsel doing? But we've got good systems and controls in place to generally understand that work. So now let's look inwardly. What is the team working on? How is that work coming in? Does it even meet the threshold of coming to legal to begin with? Should lawyers be even looking at this? Can we build in thresholds? Can we build in self help and client enable enablement? Can we build in some, you know, AI that's gonna answer a lot of these things on on our behalf instead of coming to lawyers? Run the metrics around those things, understand what work is happening, and then make strategic decisions on whether or not legal should even be in the business of doing x, y, or z. And so I think, you know, that's where the legal ops leaders really have to be playing in that kind of a space versus just, you know, micromanaging spreadsheets, which is which is kinda where I started in this role. Stephanie, thanks. I think you've answered the question about why are we here and why are we talking about metrics. But, over to you, Juanita. Can you talk a little bit about the the the methods, you know, the the growth of benchmarking, with respect to metrics in the law department, you know, tracking rates to tracking industry comparisons, and what's what's driving it? You know, I I know that, you know, in prep, you and I had talked a little bit about the concept of, preventative law, and maybe we could, work that into then, what we're talking about, what kinds of things to track. Sure. So benchmarking's been around a long time. I worked with, four different general counsels, and each wanted to know, what are the others in the industry doing? And call your friends at such and such place, and they know about CLOC, and they know about other other organizations, Antebrolon and ACC. And, it's it wasn't even, only about rates. It's even who are they using or, what metrics you know, you know, what is your litigation department tracking, for example. It it can get real real refined. So I I think the benchmarking is a lot about, a variety of things. It's not just about rates. And, obviously, we're always careful and thoughtful about comparing rates, and that's where you go to your sources that show averages. But they don't always apply. The the you know, there's there's not an average rate for a certain type of litigation because there's too much, but it depends on x, y, and z. But it's interesting and it's important, to know what what your I don't wanna say competitors because a lot of us don't have competitors. You know? It it I was with the utility, and that was the only utility in Northern California. That's not a competitor. But you wanna know what your colleagues around, are doing. I think so when you when you talk about benchmarking, it's also just comparing and understanding what's going on. And so the data is what you need, and that's where legal ops comes in. They know how to, figure all that out and and know, different understand different approaches, and that's where preventative law comes in or I would say, that's the term, a proactive law. It's almost like medicine. You know, you you eat right and you stay healthy, and that's preventing other things or preventative law. Or personally, you get a prenup or you have a state planning or whatever. So now comes law, and it's preparing for that employment issue or this litigation, and it's being ahead of tariffs before. It's it's proactive. Go ahead. Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. No. I'm I'm no. Please. I'm I mean, that that's it. I mean, there's just a lot of opportunity to to be involved earlier for general counsel, for legal ops for your law firm to be involved earlier in the core business, to try to have a line of sight into what's ahead and being ready for it. Thanks. So that leads into step. There's a million things that you can track, you know, just like Juanita alluded to, all sorts of things about your health or your personal life that you can track. There's all sorts of activities, all sorts of endeavors going on in a law department and in the business that is, using the law department to further its goals. How do you decide what to track? How do you pick that? And, Stephanie, I'm gonna start with you but then flip over to Juanita to to to draw on her experience as well in terms of how do you decide what to track by the myriad things that you could you could go about measuring. Yeah. And I am curious to hear Juanita's answer too because, you like you said, Chuck, there's literally a million things you can track if you go to our website, but I know that you will also be offering the link in the docs tab of this webinar so people can access the direct link. But under thought leadership on the UpLevel Ops website, we have, we have a list of lit I think it's eight slides of everything. We we keep this super comprehensive list. People have added to it over the years. We try to keep it as up to date as possible. We're in fact about to update it to add in more AI metrics. There are so many metrics that you can track. And so, and I get asked this all the time. So what are the main metrics I should be tracking? And I always put it back onto the legal team to say, well, of all, there's some basic ones and and this slide right here shows, you know, just here's a couple. Sampling of the things that you can track. But really at the end of the day, keep in mind these couple of things. One is it's hard to collect this data. It's not magical yet. And so, oftentimes, what you're doing is you're pulling from several different data sources and you have to coalesce it and you have to make it pretty so that, you know, you're you're you use some kind of visualization tool, whether it's Excel or BI or whatever, Tableau. You're it it it is not without effort to produce this data and visualize it. And secondly, it what we find is the things you are tracking, it does tend to drive behavior. And so that if you start tracking in, cycle time, for instance, and not or not explaining to people why you're tracking these things or with any level of you know, you're also gonna track complexity because, obviously, quicker issues get solved much more quickly than more complex issues, etcetera. People will get nervous about that. And so when you're looking at collecting data, think of two things. One is it's not easy. Two is it drives behavior. And so be very thoughtful in what it is exactly that you wanna track. And and I want you to think about the story that you're trying to tell because, because you are reporting these you're using them for different reasons. Some of them you're you're gonna be reporting. Your GC will be reporting to the the c suite. So some of this data will be used to tell you know, to do the annual meeting that you do with, you know, the g my GC would meet with the CEO every year. Right? And we would have to talk about what was happening in legal, do do the legal review. We it was called a legal review. So those metrics are gonna look different than the metrics you're sharing with your clients. Your clients will be more specific. It might be on, hey. You know, we've sped up contract life cycle time. We've reduced our contracts by three pages. We took out a bunch of clauses that we were, you know, constantly negotiating that just we found to be unnecessary, and we've automated. And because of that, we've reduced the entire life cycle by, you know, a month for each contract type or or whatever. Right? So what story is it that you wanna tell your internal clients? And then other metrics are gonna be told to communicate, down within your organization. And so they may be things like, you know, staffing, like HR related. This is where we're getting more legal pressure to do this, and so we're gonna be staffing up this department. It's the story internally that you're gonna be telling to your team to keep them engaged and informed on what's happening. So there are different reasons to track different things, but I think that the main point I wanna get across is you should be very thoughtful in them. And and you need to communicate why you're tracking things because you don't you never wanna make people nervous about this or give them the wrong idea. And once you realize that you are or not or if you are not using a metric, for instance, let's say you've been tracking something, but you're just not using it to make any, you know, decisions or or or drive anything in the department, stop tracking it. You know, just let it go and start looking at other things because it this is an ever evolving, you know, program. Right? What you're tracking and what you end up jettisoning jettisoning. Right. Oh my gosh. I can't talk today. But you know what I'm saying? Right. Right. I I do. But, like, this seems like a lot. So, Juanita, like, how does it work? You just, like, open the door and everybody just comes in and dumps metrics on you, and they just make stuff up and they send it to you, and you send it along to the board and it lights them up and then Yeah. That's exactly how it works. I'd I'd love to say ditto, to what what Stephanie said. I I I joined, my in house job, which was my last in house job. I told for the GC, said, come on over and help us run a law firm. The term was data rich insight poor. We had so much data and a lot of people, tracking data, and they didn't and I asked them why. They didn't know why, and they didn't know what they were producing, and it wasn't producing anything. You know? Stephanie said, tell your story. It didn't tell a story. And so you you you had to do the upfront work to dig into, well, what do we have and what do we not need? And you'd find out that someone was tracking something for years because somebody, you know, a hundred years ago liked it. So so you've gotta reset. You you you gotta listen to your GC and your practice head heads, but, your clients, your internal clients, and what's the company doing, and what's going on in the in the in the world. Right? And that will inform. But there's some some metrics right out of the gate, certainly, that are not hard in terms of your total legal spend. We talk a lot about outside counsel, and I and I think things have come full circle. That was my emphasis. And now, again, now that I'm on now, that's my current emphasis. It's it's very, very, very significant, metric on how our outside counsel are doing in terms of cost and budget accuracy and, forming accruals, performance, time to and sign, time to resolution, and settlement accuracy. Those are all important depending on the company as stuff said. But I think the, you know, the the cost per matter is important. Your total matter span, your staffing ratios, are very important, and internal too. You can track that internally as well now. So so, you know, you you really gotta take a step back because you probably have the you know, companies probably have the data. It's just what do I do with the data, and and how do I call the data? Because chances are you're you're using you have twice as much access to you have access to twice as much data than you need. Right. Pat, do you mind if I may I interject and just add on to what Juanita said because it's so good. I completely understand. Yes. It's all come full circle. I could not agree more. It's kind of funny because when it it really is all about outside counsel right now. But I would say, oh, it's a little bit different too, which shows how our industry has matured, I think. And I'm curious, Juanita, if you see this as well. Before, it was really about the very basic metrics. What what are our main law firms? What have, you know, cost per matter? What are we spending, you know, by matter type? You know, really digging in on just the the what. And now I think I see legal teams finally finally, I think I say that because I think it took too long, trying to change behavior with their law firms. And I don't think they were using the data to do that earlier. And so now rather than just the spend data, I'm hearing things like, I wanna know how they're using AI, how they plan on passing that savings on to me. I want to know how they're using our data. I you you know, so even even the metrics with law firm spend and how they're, you know, how we're be how we're working together, I think even those have matured a lot over the last few years in a very good and positive way. And I and I'm happy to see that. And the the only other thing I wanna say is, I I think and it's necessary. It's become necessary for a variety of reasons. One, because the hourly rates have gone up astronomically, and I think we're in in crazy times. And so people want to see the savings. But the other thing is that they're really pushing for value based pricing too, and they need that data in order to do the alternative types of the arrangements. You need data in order to really be able to negotiate these. So we've we've seen it come full circle and full circle in a more mature way, which I think is a very positive thing. That's just what I you know, my 2¢ on that one either. That that that leads me to understand a little bit that, you know, not every matter, not every ticket to the law department is the same. You know? Got a contract done, get privacy question answered, get a transaction done. But, you know, is dispute resolution different? You know, I I heard you talk about time to resolution, and I'm wondering if just as a matter of preventative, metrics that that there's some emphasis now on, things like time to insight. Like, how how soon can you find out what happened in order to avoid some of those costs and risks down the road? Yeah. I I think that informs that metric that you're referencing, informs who your your more keen strategic partners are. And it's just talks about the the evolving relationship with outside counsel strategy is through strategy, core strategy, business strategy is all about it and having, what what's going on. I do think you need to start with the basics. If if you don't if you're not tracking, if you're not data visualizing your data, you didn't do need to start with the beta basics to get to that point. But a lot of them got this point or have arrived at that point. So, again, dispute resolution, there's so many components of it. So, yes, it's easy to say, what are they you know, why are they spending so much money on legal or legal? Very frustrated with the increasing rates, but, the value. So so the importance, the emphasis is more on, okay, what's the value for what I'm paying for? You're not gonna go to the cheapest doctor. You're gonna go to the best doctor for what you're working on, and that's that's true with law. And so you're gonna invest doesn't mean biggest. That means who knows your business and who's had success in these areas. And the data helps you track that and you and and and find that, and do something with it. And and and this was touched on before, but internal client satisfaction surveys, not everybody does them. Those are really important in your companies. So, again, within, you know, how does HR think you're doing as a business partner or IT, etcetera, and your core business units. And those aren't hard to do. But I think tracking those over time, is really important. And so whether it's internal or external trends, and so you wanna start as soon as you can because you wanna see how does this, you know, year to date compare from last year to date, at this time. And, obviously, the world has, you know, the world the country will have an influence on that, but you know that. You you know what it is, and so you you can strip it out. So I I mean, I think that's interesting talking about measuring value. So it's not just the comparative costs of widgets and not necessarily, you know, just decreasing the amount of time that a matter or the ticket is open, but then what's the value to the business? You know, how how do you tell the best story to be able to do that? You know, in instead of deluging the c suite or the board with with information about what the law department is doing, You know? What are some of the the good ways to be able to distill it down so that you are consistently telling your story and you are consistently showing value? We did, and and I know other companies are doing this. It's a one three ten view. So when you get to your dashboards, they will think of it as a one second view, a three second view, and a ten second view. So the ten second is gonna be for your practice group for well, Legal Ops probably has, you know, a three hour view. Where you get into all kinds of data because because we love data and we wanna see all of them. But you get to your practice group leader who's very busy internal, and then let's see the ten second view on what's going on. So this this, I would say, this is a dashboard for your outside counsel. So, so the internal lawyer who's in charge of this matter or this firm, this this is for a law firm, and this is all redacted. There's goofy names in here and made up numbers. But it tracks a lot of different things in terms of it has your basics. So it's one snap, and I know who to call or who to email. Your contract performance. How are we doing against the contract? What are my top matters, what are we spending, what's the staffing ratio. So this is not to be read right now on this, but it it's a it's a visual that just, that that the lead lawyer can can take this and talk to the outside counsel. This has been around for years. And we developed this, I think, in Power BI. But you take this and you roll it up to all litigation or all practice group or, you know, employment or or regulatory, and that might be a deputy general counsel view. And then you roll that up to the department. Right? And that's, that's the three second view for the general counsel. And then you get your over and that's just how's the department doing, and what are my top matters in the department, and what are the top trends in the department, and what are our ratios? You know, are we using too many partners or whatever? And then that can roll up to the one second deal, and that's CEO or board, whether what's the most important message, and they can just see a quick, hit on what's most important to me. And you learn that, and it just evolves. But we've had a lot of success with the one three '10. Be because this is 2025, you know, we need to talk about AI. Right? I mean Yeah. It it it has to be discussed. And, Juanita, you had just mentioned, you know, I think we built this in Power BI. But Right. Scott, there's a lot of things now that are more simple and faster in terms of being able to analyze them than they were just even a year or two ago. Can can you talk a little bit, I mean and and even give us some examples about the kinds of things that you used to analyze, and you would have to crunch the numbers, you know, before the advent of GenAI compared to what you're able to do now. And how how's that working out in terms of being able to deliver the top line metrics? Yeah. I mean, it it's a game changer, Chuck. I know, people have really been talking about the only thing we're talking about is AI, but I drink the Kool Aid. I use it every single day. And I think where we're seeing it really help in analytics is twofold. of all, where you could really get AI data is in in client enablement tools. So things like bots that answer questions, that route work, you know, that intake and workflow. AI really supports that entire, you know, process, and you can actually run reports showing how many questions are coming in that legal never even has to field because we have a bot answering these questions. So you get that AI data just from, you know, from actually AI doing the the the work. And, and it it can be not only an incredible time saver and efficiency, you know, and the the whole doing more with less that we all talk about. But also, I had a client once one time say to me, I feel like a bot because I'm answering the same questions over and over again. And so and I thought that was such a great way. There are things that we do where we feel like bots. And so if you could put an actual bot in there doing those things, it just takes it off their plates and and it it brings work joy. Right? People are a lot happier doing more meaningful work instead of cutting and pasting answers over into a Slack channel or what have you. So a can do the work and we could get that data, but then I think Chuck Kellner what your real question was, was about was how can AI do the analysis. And, and so I what we're seeing is it's getting better and better at looking at raw data like this and being able to do those analytics. It is not perfect yet. I will say that. It what I have found in my extensive use of AI and how can we use it to analyze client information and give us more meaningful responses and recommendations to them rather than us eyeballing the data. Right? Like, can we use AI to actually do a better job than we can do as humans? It's not quite there yet because it's not great at reading Excel spreadsheets, frankly, things like that. However, we what I we we do have a team of flex, engineers who are experts in this. So they are ending up building, like, kind of assisting programs using Python, and I'm already well beyond my technical abilities just by saying that phrase alone. So they do these, like, aid, kind of programs that work along with the AI to help them help them actually map each of the fields. And when you have a program like that that works within, you know, within the AI, it does an amazing job at doing the analytics. And also working I am not a BI expert. And in fact, when I was in house, I wish we had a BI expert on the team, but they were busy doing you know, working for other departments within, Flex, for instance. And I know that a a lot of my colleagues are in the same boat. We don't get the resources when we're in legal that we wish we had. So the data scientist people, they weren't helping legal. They were, like, off helping the the production people. Right? Right. And so the beauty is it's kind of a a, a leveler in terms of, sophistication. So while I'm not a BI expert, we have somebody on our team who's actually building out these beautiful BI dashboards who would they weren't a BI expert either, but just using an AI assistant to help them build out these these BI dashboards. Because it does things like write code and and, you know, it it is very technical. Right? Like, you it's like having your own technical assistant and you could tell it do this, do that, and it's actually doing these things. So it can do it's getting better at analytics. With helpers, it's already good at analytics, but it can also build these beautiful dashboards for you even if you don't have a BI resource on your team. Does that make sense to us? Yeah. Yep. It it it does. So, Juanita, just in terms of, you know, some of these newer tools, monitoring outside counsel, using AI tools, for example, to analyze billing reports, feeding back findings, and metrics to outside counsel and sort of creating expectations with them. What's your experience with them? You know, a bunch of the listeners on on here today, they're they are outside counsel. They wanna know how to do a good job to be able to feed into this workflow, to be able to feed into these metrics, and to be able to have satisfied business clients. So it's it's voice of the client. Right? And and so with with, in house with legal ops, it's voice of of who who's my client. Right? And it's the legal department and it rolls up with this. But, as Stephanie said, there's so many tools out there, and and a lot of law firms are way ahead of internal of of in house legal op. So they probably have it. I think it's just understanding, again, being that strategic partner and listening and understanding, your client business and what's important to your client and preventative law, being ahead of, no one has a crystal ball, but seeing the light of what that looks like and and, where are the the pitfalls, one can anticipate. I think it's hugely important. And I think being proactive, here's something we're seeing about your business, or here's something we're seeing about your activity over the last six months or twelve months, etcetera. And just one segue I wanna make one one staff talked about intake tools. That is so powerful. When we talked about we talked about cost pressure of the legal department, that that enablement of resource allocation, the tool to help you allocate your internal resource and where you're spending the most time, intake just informs so much, in addition to responding to, your clients. But I think, you know, back to your outside counsel being a partner, I I think I think the the I think the law firm partnerships have improved a lot. I think I think the cost pressures, because that's that's the primary pressure, have have influenced, you know, back to value. How can I be value valuable and more valuable, to to my client, and having a seat at the table? And and sometimes depending on, you know, a pretty significant, matter, a seat a seat with the with the CEO level or or the board. I mean, we we've had, where I used to work, we had a a couple of times for unfortunate reasons, but we decided to invite, you know, one of the key lawyers from a law firm, to go to a board meeting to discuss something. That that's pretty valuable. Thanks. Thanks. So Yeah. Chuck, just to just to add on to that too. If the law firms are listening and wondering what kind of data would be helpful to their clients, they should ask them. Because I think just having that simple conversation of, you know I I'm guessing, Juanita, because I actually never did work in a law firm. But I'm the scenario you described earlier about being the data rich, insight poor kind of scenario. I bet that happens a lot at law firms where they've got all of this data. Right? But they don't necessarily know what story to tell. And it's worth having you know, you don't have to do it with every client, but your your key clients have that conversation. Say, you know, we've been tracking all of this matter information for you. We know what trends are are happening in in your space in particular. We know that these new tariffs are gonna be affecting you greatly. Like, what information would be helpful to you? What what can we what can we give you? And that will make your partnership so much more solid than I mean, I think that's the best way to keep a a a good client is by offering a service like that, which should not be a terrible amount of work. Right? Just asking that question. Oh, yeah. Right. It's what they know. And and I think just one quick point. Sure. In house. I know a a large, large company that, every year has a community of council meeting where they physically invite, if they can't invite, they their their sort of key, outside council to come, you know, half a day. It can be on video, but more powerful in person and have a conversation. So I I think it's also on on and and legal hop legal ops ran that. So I think that's also important for in house to, to open. You know, it it's both ways. It's it's what Stephanie said. It's it's out from the outside counsel and and an initiative on both. That's what I'm saying. Thanks. So as a final point, I'm gonna ask you each to anonymize a success story. But before I do that, I wanna ask the audience, if you've got questions, please put them now, you know, in the next few minutes. Put them in the q and a box. And then, at the end of the program, we will knock out as many of those as we can and maybe even answer them after the program is over by, by email if we've got your contact information. What I wanna do now, Juanita, starting with you and then to Stephanie, is to be really specific about our success story. You know, we hear about, you know, you need to measure what you want in terms of impact, and you're not gonna get it if you don't measure it. So I'm wondering if you could talk about, you know, a a situation that you've had, just a very concrete situation that you've had in terms of a success story where the businesses come to you and they said, here's our problem. Here's the pain point. Here's what we wanna do. And you set about developing a metric to that that led to a particular success. Juanita, can I start with you? Sure. So for me, it was in the claims area. So the law department doesn't have claims, but they receive claims for the company. And so I worked for a gas and electric company. They have a lot of claims every year, and that can be weather, and that can be a slip and fall. It can be all kinds of issues or power outage or whatever. And so claims, matured its systems, overhauled its systems and data and recategorized everything and had a very great platform. And they started putting together pulling together this dashboard, so there was a a winter with heavy storms, lot a lot of claims. And the metrics that we had on one page were time to resolution, time response time, time to resolution, all kinds of, dollars. Right? You know, claim asked, claim received, etcetera. So lots of data, but real just pop, pop, pop, pop on a page. And, when I showed it to our GC, it, supposed to say it was for January and February. It was the most claims in those two months that we typically had in a year, and it was wow. So that went up to the c suite to that went up to the board. That was a big deal. Obviously, it informed the lines of business, and, and they were thrilled. It's less money on and and we were able to show savings to the company as well. But that was a very tangible success for it that that claims was doing. And I will say I met, with a couple of people from the department at at the end of last weekend. And, Stephanie, you'll be proud. They now have a bot doing all of this. So it's, it it it's it's something that matured really well, but it was a huge success story that really put clients front and center because one thinks that if you think of, like, automobile claims or claims, it's something nobody really thinks about. It's sort of back there. No. It put this department front and center as as having a meaningful, tangible, significant cost impact, to the to the company for a bunch of reasons, not only reputation. So No. So the business set out the strategy. Legal ops went and designed the program, set the metrics, collected the metrics, used that to manage the solution, and then delivered the solution. Right. And and you're right. When we started when we when we saw that the system when we knew the systems were old, etcetera, the thing we did was listen to the customer. So we interviewed gas, we interviewed electric, etcetera, and finance, and then we developed. Thanks. Stephanie, you're on. Yeah. I I was thinking about this and, you know, I I think one of the biggest successes that I had in my career was the transformation, of the flex legal team. It was Flextronics when I was there. Now it's flex international. But when, when the our John, who is, my business partner, started up level with me. But when, he was the GC, they never really had a, that they had a GC who was basically just managing outside counsel. So when you look at the spend data, it was really ninety, ten, eighty, twenty in terms of 80 of the legal spend was going to outside counsel. And this was their model. No knock on the person who was there before us, but they really just they wanted most of the legal work outsourced. When you do it that way, of course, it's expensive, but you're you're losing all of the institutional knowledge and but, you know, there's a there's a lot of reasons to pull work inside, especially the strategic work that you wanna keep in house that's, that's core to to whatever it is your business is. So over the course of about four and a half years, Juanita, and I worked to moving it more towards a fifty fifty split where we built our in house team. We built the capabilities. We built the skill set. We built, we had a a very robust and very talented team in India as that who were flex employees, but they were, you know, it was, instead of hiring in the Bay Area, we had we did a lot a lot of hiring in India including my team, the operations team. It was a a an incredibly successful program with a very healthy and and functioning high functioning legal team, and we were able to move that split of spend to fifty fifty. And when you looked at the numbers in total, we did so many programs, that would would be close to what Juanita heart too where, you know, we implemented as as CLM, e billing, you know, all the things to get a a data management program, all the things to get, you know, the controls around how legal is we we had a great, 360 degree evaluation program with our top law firms. We did all of these wonderful programs and we we had a mentorship program for young lawyers, etcetera, and we did that all within and never moved our budget. It was we were able to hold everything flat over five years, but because we were pulling work in house, doing some alternative fee arrangements, doing all of these efficiency initiatives, we we didn't increase our budget at all. So it it an incredibly successful program. And I will say as we exited Flex, the maturity level of the department kept increasing because moving from just showing spend data, for instance, like, what we're spending with law firms and all of that, all of that is critical, of course. But to now now how is legal adding value to the business? And those were the metrics, like reducing contract life cycle, getting revenue in the door faster, etcetera. Those are the more mature metrics that you wanna show as your department matures. And so it was it was a good successful program for sure. Thanks. So I think we have just a couple of minutes left. And I Juanita, I wanna ask you and then Stephanie. What's the next frontier for metrics for legal operations? Boy, I think it's, the next frontier. I I guess I can more answer the how than than the what. Certainly, wrap arms around, AI. I love it. I just absolute it does everything. It does RFPs. It does presentations. It does it just does everything, and it's and now it's not perfect. But, you know, you don't wanna turn yourself into a robot either. So it's as it's as good as a draft as as you're gonna get, I think. And so, just getting out your comfort zone, and I think it's just accelerated even more in the last six months. So I think I think using that, continuing to listen, it's it's hard to know what's ahead given the state of the world right now, I think. But but really considering what if scenarios is is hugely important, and then using the the tools that are readily available, to get there. Yes. This week. Go ahead. So do you think the business is driving the use of GenAI in the law department or the law department is taking it on on its own initiative? Like, I see some pretty astounding numbers from chief legal officers adopting use of it themselves. You mentioned that, and I think that's right. I I think legal is is more brave than I thought it would about, being finding it it's it's corporate level. And and one thing I was gonna add I've been hearing lately, it's more about knowing the questions to ask than the answers because you can probably find a lot of the answers, but but really considering what questions should I be asking, to inform what we have. Thanks. Stephanie? I think that this is a space where legal ops can really shine, and I think this is a new era for us. I couldn't agree more, with Juanita. And, I will say if legal ops you need to harness this. You need to understand how to use it in your department. You need to understand because the lawyers aren't now I'm I'm I'm gonna say this and then I'm gonna contradict myself. The lawyers aren't necessarily gonna be the ones out there experimenting and testing new things and building their own bots and figuring out ways to use it. That is gonna be your job. That's gonna allow you to really cement yourself in your roles. But I say that, but the last AI event I ran, it was a room full of GCs, and I asked them who is using it. And last year, half the hands went up. This year, every single hand went up. But here's what was really surprising and why I'm contradicting myself. I asked them who built their own bots, who'd played with, like, that. Like, I'm gonna build my own custom GPT or custom gym, and half of the arms went up in the room, half of the hands, which I was really surprised. So the lawyers are dabbling in it, I think, and GCs, to boot, which is they are kinda, you know, being more brave, Juanita. I agree with you. And unlike any other technology that I've seen in our space. So I think this is a game changer, and we need to lean in. Thanks. So, Stephanie, we're gonna post your docs, you know, in into the link here under documents so that people can get those. But tell us again the name of the website where people can go to get those resources. Yeah. Absolutely. Thank you. It's just UpLevel Ops. And, if you go to, thought leadership and scroll down I mean, there's a ton of great thought leadership. It's it's not behind any kind of gate. You don't have to give us your information. You just download it. But scroll down. It's it's down pretty far, but you'll see list of KPIs and metrics, and it is comprehensive. But, again, just to give you ideas of some of the things you can be tracking. Thank you so much. Stephanie, Corey, Juanita Luna, thank you so much for your time today and for your thoughtful participation in in developing the content for this webinar, and, I hope to see you all at the next conference. So we're moving now to q and a. If you've got some of the last questions to drop in Hi, everyone. Thanks. Juanita, Stephanie, what a great job. Thank you for all of that outpouring of information. We've got about ten minutes for questions, and, Stephanie, I'm gonna give you the one. We've got some curiosity out there. Are you seeing a lot of departments using one overarching dashboard with data lakes behind it. What are the some of the preferred tools behind that? Are you using Power BI? Are there other, you know, AI tools that you're you're seeing behind those dashboards? You know, what's what's driving some of the the visual displays? The visual Yeah. Great question from, Stephanie. I know her well. I see some friendly, faces and names in the in the chat there. It's Chuck, I would love to say that we see a lot of this, but I bet Juanita would agree with me. We just don't. I would say the there probably are some very mature organizations out there who do have these data lakes and who are, running Power BI or Tableau on top of it. Those are the two, you know, big reporting tools that we come across. But the reality is the the vast majority I would I would this is a guess based on what I see, but probably 95% of legal teams do not have this. So if you don't have this, Stephanie, do not feel bad. I would say that very few legal teams are mature enough where they're they are literally just getting systems into place. So are they mature enough to be able to collect all of this data from all of their systems and have these really robust dashboards? Not yet. However, I will say, you know, and and this is me beating the AI drum again, but I do think that we're gonna see that, hockey stick slope upwards because I for all the reasons I we we just talked about. Right? Like, you you don't get the the business intelligence experts coming to legal saying, hey. How can we help you? They're just not focused on legal. And so now though, I I admitted to not being a BI expert. But that being said, with AI, we've built some pretty incredible dashboards for clients even though we don't, you know, necessarily have, native BI developers on our team. Right? But because we're all now Vibe coders playing around, in AI, you can actually get some really, really beautiful visualizations of what's happening with your data. So I do think we're gonna see, that that hockey stick like I was talking about where you don't need to have giant data lakes. I think we'll be able to pull data from systems and be able to report on on them much easier because we'll be able to manipulate that data with with our AI tools on in all honesty. I hope that makes sense. But I think this next year for contracting and reporting, I think are gonna be the two big areas where we really see AI making a huge difference, if that's helpful. Thanks. So, Juanita, for you, there's a couple of questions here I think that are related. Are you seeing any metrics that really light up the board? You know, we always want something to bring to the, to the c suite, to the board. Are there metrics that that are always impactful in terms of what senior leadership wants to see? And are there new metrics that we're starting to see on the horizon, things that we weren't able to capture before? Yeah. I think I think current is, trends, you know, year over year trends and different periods of time, etcetera. That's important because many, many departments have had, data for quite a long time, so they can see year over year what's happening. We keep saying data tells a story. What's newer, I think it's in the area of preventative law. So risk mitigation, risk avoidance, advisory. You know, we know legal is having a seat at the table earlier on, either at the c suite or, heads of the core industry core businesses within a company. And that advice and counsel, is meaningful and impactful, in terms of business opportunities as well. So it's, legal is doing a much better job, I think, of telling its story not only on spend, which we've always been doing, but more on the strategic areas on inside. And as I said, preventative law. Thanks. Juanita, I wanna toss you another one. You know, I I have been a timekeeper for most of my career. I've worked for a software company, and now I'm not. But there there's always this sort of burden in keeping time and tracking metrics and feeding them in so that people can keep tracking. What's the best way to get buy in from lawyers who might be skeptical about tracking time or, data on a particular matter? Yeah. That's that's a challenge. A company I worked with, required lawyers, to do time sheets, and it was that's why I left a law firm, which probably wasn't the real reason, but it's a it's a it's a great response. But I think it's understanding, listening, of course, to the concerns and then addressing them head on and telling the why. Because we know the aggregate data is gonna tell a a great story. It's gonna inform workflow management, which is huge. We talked about that earlier stuff, talked a lot about that earlier. This helps that. This feeds that. You know, back to what I just said about preventative law, you know, it's gonna offer those kinds of insights when you have that kind of data. I think it's important that the, tools are easy, that and that they're you know, it sounds simplistic but well trained, but also identifying, advocates. Not everyone's gonna be negative to your advocates and champions early on and and probably getting a pilot group together if you've got the time, but just constant communication, you know, listening all the time and addressing. Great. Thanks. Stephanie, one more for you, and then I'm gonna ask you each to give me a one minute wrap up. So, Stephanie, you know, we we can count widgets. We can count all the tactical stuff, how many tickets, how many contracts, how many so on and so But, you know, you've got activities in the law department that are strategic. They're not tactical. They're not that sort of counting exercise. How do you impress upon the c suite and the board the value of those strategic efforts? You know, how do you metricize that to be able to report it effectively? Yeah. I mean, I think the number one thing you wanna think about is what do your clients want. And so so often, we go into legal teams, and there is we we do assessments. Right? And we'll talk to their clients, and they're like, oh my god. They're try they're either too conservative or sometimes, you know, they just go off in a different direction. So in other words, legal is not delivering the services that their clients want, and that's a real mismatch. And so those conversations really need to happen at the c suite level. What is the risk? of all, what are the goals of the organization? What's the risk tolerance? You know, what hey hey. Yes. Of course, we need to be protecting against some risk, but business is inherently risky, And so you cannot protect against all risk or you're protecting against all revenue. Right? And so I think really understanding what your clients want and delivering metrics around that is so important. And then you don't have to go through this, exercise of, like, what's you you'll you'll figure out what's valuable to them and that's what you're reporting on. And then you don't have to make them try to make them pay attention. They're gonna pay attention because that's what's valuable to them. And a lot of it revolves around revenue and getting, obviously, right, and getting revenue in the door faster. And so if you could focus on that, and and then also risk avoidance and and, you know, one of the things we used to do because I was, at HP, I was in charge of information governance is, like, showing that our competitors or other colleagues were slammed with major sanctions and we weren't because we have our stuff together in this area. And so showing where you're doing big cost savings, I mean, that's important too in showing the business, you know, you're you're we won't get sued and our reputation won't be at risk because of these things or what have you. So make it, if you make it important to them, they're gonna pay attention. Thanks. So, twenty seconds each. Juanita, parting advice. Parting advice. Data tells your story. So get get your data right. It's not that hard anymore. You know, listen to the voice of a client voice of a client. Listen to your lawyers. Listen to your clients. Communicate, communicate, communicate, tell your story. Stephanie, ten seconds. Start small and build organically. Thank you so much. Thanks everyone for joining today. We hope to see you at the next webinar. We hope to see you at the next conference. You know where to find us. You know where to find Stephanie and Juanita. Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks, Stephanie. Thank you.