During the three-day event, more than 80 talks were given on a range of topics including automating legal department processes, implementing contract lifecycle management software and lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic.
While the speakers hailed from different industries like finance and transportation, some recurring themes and novel insights emerged from their presentations. Here are three takeaways from the panels attended by Law360 Pulse.
Conduct Internal Surveys
Several panelists mentioned conducting internal surveys to identify problems in workflow and get feedback from departments about their views on companies' legal operations.
At the panel titled "Taking Legal Operations to the Next Level: Building a Business Case and Roadmap for Change," Tara Gay Sarnoff, vice president of legal operations at American Express, said Thursday that leadership should communicate to employees why completing surveys is important.
In addition, Sarnoff recommended internal surveys be answered anonymously by employees to get more candid feedback and be easy to complete.
"Technology has to be intuitive. If you have to explain it, it is not going to be successful, so we were very thoughtful about how the questions were worded," Sarnoff said.
The value of conducting internal surveys is that the results can be generated into data that can be used to support implementing new technology or making changes to workflow processes, according to the panelists.
User Adoption Must Be Earned
The challenge of getting lawyers to use new legal operations management software was a recurring topic in the panelists' discussions.
Lawyers, especially senior ones, don't want to adopt new technology because they want to stick to their own established work processes, according to the panelists.
During the panel titled "The Wraparound: A Strategy to Launch New Technology Without Driving Lawyers Crazy," Wendy Rubas, general counsel and corporate secretary of health care company VillageMD said Wednesday that legal operations professionals can tell attorneys to use tools because they have to, but the method won't achieve user adoption.
"User adoption is earned by tools that solve problems," she said.
Implement Tech In Phases
Another recurring topic at the CLOC conference was that technology needs to be implemented in phases.
At the panel titled "Weathering the Storms of Change: Learnings to Navigate your Legal Transformation Journey," Paul Means, executive director of the technology and data legal group at Morgan Stanley, said Wednesday that technology should be implemented in small pieces and changed gradually.
"[Technology implementation] doesn't have to be a two-week sprint. It can be a three-month delivery timeline," Means said.
Rubas noted during her talk that changes will need to be made when implementing technology because users will flag missing features and request improvements. She recommended keeping a running list of changes and release those together in technology updates.
"You have to stop thinking something is done. That's old days. You have to think like Spotify: 'It's a version,'" Rubas said.
--Editing by Lakshna Mehta.
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