Making Contract Management Work For You
Search for the latest in contract management and these days it’s all blockchain and smart contracts. It’s an exciting time to be a GC or a Legal Operations Director. All of a sudden legal is at the centre of a technology revolution that will place it squarely on the map of business impact and real change. But there’s that little detail about not even having a contract repository yet. How are you supposed to run if you haven’t even learned to walk yet?
How HESTA Created the Ultimate Legal Filing System
Legal processes depend on the smooth flow of documents – and the bigger the company, the more work for the legal team in keeping track of these crucial workflows. With no centralised documents filing system, it was no wonder the legal team at HESTA Super was finding it difficult to perform day-to-day tasks. When lawyer Jorden Lam joined the organisation five years ago, she decided to change all that. Jorden will be speaking at this year’s Legal Innovation & Tech Fest. The Search for a Tailor-Made Filing System HESTA Super represents more than 850,000 people working in health and community services. The company holds $46 billion in assets invested globally on behalf of members. Lam found there was a problem at HESTA around locating files, how to file contracts, and the process to follow if someone wanted to engage a particular service provider. “My CEO regularly asks me these things, and as a lawyer, I have a genetic defect: I have to know the answer to every question I’m asked. More and more we kept having conversations around what we were doing about contract storage.” Lam says people generally want to know where a contract is for two reasons: Someone has made a mistake and the contract needs to be consulted to see what recourse and rights are available. Someone wants to renegotiate on a fee or see if there’s a way to add an additional service without paying too much for it. But at HESTA, the process of locating a contract involved everyone who had a part in its creation, processing and scanning into the intranet. Then there was the issue of versions – was the up-to-date contract the one labelled ‘Final’? ‘Final – Version 2.1’? ‘Final – use this one’? It could take a while to locate the active contract. “We thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could have all those files in one place?” Lam remembers. “Wouldn’t it be great if it was more than just a repository? Wouldn’t it be great, now people are a little more aware of legal risk, if we could have an end-to-end contract procurement vendor management system? One where people could be reminded when it’s time to renegotiate on a fee or if we had 90 days before a contract expired. If we could automate all this, then that work gets cut from the legal team.” With that in mind, Lam called other super funds, spoke to some contacts at banks and to friends in other industries, and posed the same question: Had anyone heard of a contract filing system that handled work flows? “Everybody gave me the same response, saying it sounded cool, but we don’t have anything like that.” Difficulties of Driving Cultural Change At this point, Lam recruits her colleague Nikki on her mission, who she describes as a “lawyer, project manager, change analyst comms consultant and friendly neighbourhood hustler”. “Every successful legal project needs a Nikki. She gets things done. She’s savvy, bold and energetic and unafraid to be a complete pest to all the executives in the organisation. Most importantly, she’s really good at building strong relationships. Because that’s what you need to get things done.” Nikki introduced the team to Yammer, which Lam describes as “Facebook for work”. Nikki used Yammer to engage staff and spread the word about the contract filing project, now known as Project Justice. Although innovation requires coming up with great ideas, Lam says the hardest part is driving the cultural change. The Project Justice team had selected a filing system vendor, but ran into trouble because it had not engaged properly with HESTA stakeholders: Risk and Compliance Member Engagement Administration and Insurance Investments Member Advice Technology Marketing and Communications “The reason was that we were designing for me,” Lam admits. “I wanted to know where the contracts were. I wanted to know what our obligations were. I expected everybody to file their documents so that I could have that.” Taking a step back she realised ways were needed to engage staff across the company and make them see it was in their interest to get on board with the filing project. Recruiting Execs and Cheer Squads The team started by enlisting executive leadership, which is key to any company-wide project success, Lam says. Each HESTA department was filing documents differently – on someone’s hard drive, on a server, in a desk drawer. The aim was to make filing so easy, so intuitive, that everyone wanted to do it the same way. Convincing executives that the project was important meant Project Justice could enrol staff in workshops. Some of these lasted a few days, some a few hours. “We talked through requirements, like how do you want that click button to look?” says Lam. “We looked at that fine level of detail that allowed the vendor to build the program using staff feedback.” Then there were the cheer squads, staff tasked with spreading the good word about the new system. These sprang up in Risk and Compliance, Administration and Insurance, Technology, and Marketing and Communications. “As lawyers, we don’t necessarily spend enough time building these internal relationships,” Lam says. “It’s not just about engaging with Marketing when they want a PDS sign off, or talking to IT when they want a service provider agreement reviewed. “If you build strong relationships across all your business stakeholders, when it comes to something like a change project they are more likely to be on board, to be your cheer squad, and help the rest of the organisation come on board too.” Key Requested Features of the System The intensive staff workshops allowed the Project Justice team to identify the two main filing capabilities requested by staff. The first of these was drag and drop. Staff wanted to click on a contract and drag it straight into the system. However, the project experienced a hiccup when it failed to realise this needed to work the other way too. Certain teams needed to drag and drop multiple files from the system to an email at once. None of the vendors had that function built into their system because of security issues. But it was a requirement, and through working with their vendor, Project Justice came up with a way of achieving it. The second requirement was automatic naming conventions, the system had to automatically generate a file name. A tool like this is contingent on metadata tags entered with the file, which meant an easy way for entering metadata was needed. The solution was a populated pop-up box that appeared when a file was entered. Staff then ticked the appropriate metadata tags for that file. Change Requires Engagement Lam says Project Justice succeeded through strong engagement and by involving people in the design process. “As lawyers, we tend to work alone. But that’s not how you get projects like this done. It’s important to emphasise that legal services are so easily commoditised these days as guys out there are doing AI stuff. “Your value as a lawyer is in your ability to do so much more than just the technical legal. The technical legal is a given now, it’s this other area of engagement that’s important in your ability to get things done.” Lam says when her team took a step back and thought about how to get people to buy into Project Justice, they realised they needed to emphasise the fun of engagement. “The biggest part of Project Justice was that it was really fun,” says Lam. “It was a great way for the legal team to engage with the business, talking to people and helping make their lives easier.” Jorden will be speaking at the 2019 Legal Innovation & Tech Fest, inspiring audiences to rethink the role that a lawyer plays in a world rife with disruption. About the Speaker Jorden Lam is General Counsel & GM Commercial Affairs at HESTA Super Fund. In addition to key accountability for HESTA’s legal risks, Jorden is also responsible for developing and leading the implementation of a program of business improvement activities. This includes scoping and assessing the current and desired future state of the organisation’s commercial practices and processes, to identify solutions and improvements to complex challenges faced by the business. This post originally appeared on the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest Australian blog.
Demystifying the Vendor Conundrum: The Areas of Need
The changing landscape of legal sees many companies supporting an in-house legal counsel model, which brings great benefits for the company – some of which include risk management, access to legal support, performance management and succession planning. Samiksha Kader, Legal Counsel at Tiger Brands will be presenting at Legal Innovation & Tech Fest, sharing her learnings around the needs and challenges presented for in-house counsels. We caught up with Samiksha in the lead up to the event. Samiksha – we look forward to having you present at Legal Innovation & Tech Fest. What motivated you to get involved as a presenter at the event? I realised that many of the challenges faced and experienced by myself are also experienced by my colleagues and I would like to share my thoughts on the vendor conundrum as well as share possible solutions, and also learn from fellow colleagues on how they deal with common challenges. Tell us about your story/career journey in the legal space? And what do you enjoy most about your work? I was raised by a single mom. I was exposed to a very different reality than many of my friends and family, where my mum being the sole provider in the household and also my sole caretaker filled the role of what I later learned to be associated, in some instances with the role of a “man in society”. Being exposed to such an independent and strong female role model, I began to question at a very young age how society viewed and treated women. Given the strong opinions I would share, people regarded me as a feminist and in time, that passion to fight against the stereotypes of the world expanded to fight against racism and violence against women. I believe that law was already in my story long before I realised it was. I always want to contribute in some way to a better place to live. I suppose I gravitated to law to make that difference. Through my career, I was exposed to many aspects of the field, from matrimonial law, criminal law to IT law. I spent much of my career at Business Connexion Group, an ICT company. I really enjoyed being part of an innovative industry. What I enjoy about my job till today is that I am exposed to all facets of trade, which I get to learn about i.e. FMCG, IT, Pharmacy etc. I am still very much a human rights law enthusiast and although I have not had enough time to dedicate to it, I believe that I will keep trying to make that difference, however small. A challenge for in-house counsels is wading through the vendor conundrum to find the solution that supports all the requirements seamlessly. What are the areas that need to be focussed on to get this process right? 1. Data Management and record retention 2. Workflow management (audit trail, workflow and work load management, benefit analytics) 3. Template generation tools. About the speaker Given her background of being a specialist in ICT Law and having worked for one of South Africa’s most prominent ICT companies, Samiksha Kader had access to a fair amount of technology at her fingertips, most of which was never meant to support legal, but Samiksha found ways to make it work for legal. She is obsessed with efficiency and is always looking for answers to work smarter. Samiksha is very artistic in nature and believes the practice of law is an art form not administrative. She loves freedom, peace and nature. Her main ambition in life is to live with passion and love.
The 8 Hottest Topics Shaping Legal This Year
This year sees the launch of the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in South Africa, the first event of its kind in the country. You might be wondering how the agenda for this event is developed so as to be on point with the latest pressing issues in the industry. It’s down to a unique research methodology that really gets industry professionals speaking their minds and sharing real challenges, plans and trends. A series of roundtable discussions and interviews with legal professionals results in a list of hot topics that have been debated and discussed within the community. It is these topics that will shape the agenda for Legal Innovation & Tech Fest 2018. This Year’s Research This year’s research groups saw over 100 senior professionals from law firms, in-house legal teams and alternative legal service providers getting together for small face-to-face discussion groups facilitated by an industry thought-leader in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Discussions revolved around the challenges and ideas for improvement and innovation in the world of law. Key Themes The following 8 themes emerged from the roundtable discussions as being most important to the legal community: The legal ecosystem, legal business and the lawyer of the future Building the skills and capability for successful innovation Data-driven decision making – what you can measure you can manage The strategy, the ROI and the business case for innovation, change and collaboration Leveraging user experience to drive user adoption Demystifying artificial intelligence, automation and augmentation The vendor conundrum – sales, implementation and beyond Stakeholder, project and change management The discussions around these topics were captured in an extensive research report which you can download here for more detailed insight. Legal Innovation & Tech Fest 2018 The inaugural Legal Innovation and Tech Fest will launch in South Africa in June 2018 and will demonstrate how legal innovation is being enabled by technology through a combination of case studies, thought-leader presentations, discussion groups, product demos and panels. All based around the key topics brought forward by the community in this report. We look forward to building the agenda and continuing the inspiring conversations around these themes. See you at Legal Innovation & Tech Fest 2018!
5 Insights Into AI for Legal Professionals
At the Legal Innovation & Tech Fest in Australia in 2017, Sam Nickless, COO and a Partner of Gilbert + Tobin presented on the early experiences with artificial intelligence (AI) at his firm during their implementation and experimentation with elements of AI. Sam summarises the key points of his presentation here.