Catching Up with Dan

This week, the TeamConnect Maven catches up with Dan Welch, Mitratech’s Senior VP of Global Sales & Operations, who is presiding over today’s announcement of the new TeamConnect Legal Hold product.  With a background that combines engineering as well as sales, Dan is responsible for the sale, delivery, and support of Mitratech’s solutions.  In this role, he often finds his teams wrangling complex systems, a process the avid scuba diver sometimes compares to holding an octopus in his hand.  Yet, Dan actually prefers to tame the problem rather than manhandle it. “Especially for systems that have grown up out of organic needs, I like to start with the client’s pain,” he says, “and it’ll point to what’s perfect for a solution.”

Dan explains his love for underwater exploration as the result of one introductory scuba dive on a Maui vacation seventeen years ago.  He was hooked, Welch recalls, his eyes a twinkle. “We dove with a marine biologist who showed us how the nature down there all interconnects.”  Interconnectedness and complexity are big themes in Dan’s life nowadays.  Solving complex systems is what appeals to Dan about Mitratech’s new Legal Hold software, too.  “Instead of silo’d solutions,” he intimates, “the fun part of TeamConnect Legal Hold is that it forms an umbrella across multiple departments and skill domains.  It alleviates the breakdown in communication that will often occur under the pressure of litigation so that, for instance, IT can know whether or not to format a potentially ‘held’ disk drive from a departed employee’s laptop without involving them in the confidential issues at stake in the legal matter.” 

Solving these kinds of challenges is nothing new for Dan.  He brings a natural enthusiasm and curiosity to the process of facilitating rules-driven matters.  Indeed, Dan’s career has bridged the divide between Engineering and Sales for two decades as companies such as Triad, Callidus, Unify, Inference and Brightware serviced clients from auto parts megastores to American Airlines to American Express.  Nor is handling confidential material new to Dan, who has worked in previous jobs on software systems used by the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, and so on.  “We thought for years from the specificity of their questions that the Navy must be using my old firm’s product on nuclear subs, but…” he smiles, perhaps imagining the kind of marine life one could see from a Trident sub, “it was just menu preparation – although of course, that’s classified, too!”   

Nevertheless, the experience taught Dan an important lesson for legal matters, in which smooth process is paramount but content is confidential.  “The availability of TeamConnect Legal Hold tracking information is exciting,” Dan says enthusiastically. “It’s easily digestible because the system can interrogate other systems to find out, say, what percentage of personnel have received certain training,” and then, “whether all the non-compliant employees are in the Cleveland office – nothing against Cleveland, other than who wants to scuba dive in Lake Erie?”  

TeamConnect Legal Hold is also exciting “because it’s extensible,” he says.  “Like all Mitratech products, TeamConnect Legal Hold is a complete application that works as delivered, but our customers can configure the behavior of the application to meet new requirements while preserving the upgradability of the application. This truly is Mitratech’s distinctive competence.” 

But most important for solving complex systems needs for the world’s largest companies?  Availability.  “Mitratech helped a major pharmaceutical company get up, running, and rolled out in 45 days,” he says, “because our product delivered on the core requirements.  Once up and running, the customer enhanced and modified the solution through phases to where that company is now one of our most advanced customers.” 

The secret?  In TeamConnect Legal Hold as in life, says Dan Welch, “Don’t try to boil the ocean.” 

Getting to Know Michael

In a breezy convo with the TeamConnect Maven, Mitratech’s new SVP of Business Development Michael Schmitt recently admitted to being a fly fisherman.  That, and he once worked for IBM. 

With this much dirt on him, the Maven knew he’d have to watch the proud father of three carefully.  Nevertheless, Schmitt swears that, “As a salesman, I’m not one of those guys who can sell ice to an Eskimo,” and naturally, this is the first sign that the Maven’s about to purchase a frozen lake. “No, no,” protested the exec, “I’m much more a trust and credibility kind of guy.”

Indeed, Schmitt’s resume is built on long relationships.  After a five-year stint at Big Blue  outta college, he moved to custom programming at Spectrum for seven years.  JD Edwards saw him move up to SVP of Sales and Marketing.  He then hit Ariba as a Chief Marketing Officer, where he is credited with developing the company’s highly effective “spend management” strategy.  His last gig was a two-year stint at Siderean, a semantic search engine and content aggregator, and in the Maven’s experience, anyone who can outlast the toner cartridge at such places is not to be trifled with.

Perhaps patience is the key.  That fly-fishing background kept repeating with the catch-and-release insistence of a recurring dream.  Itself a blast from his own past – Schmitt grew up enjoying a Tahoe cabin and came back to fishing while living in Denver, today he brings the strategy and patience of the angler to bear on everything he does.

The unassuming exec today uses the Internet and 10K’s to fish for opportunities, but stands by the old-school strategy of gaining trust by knowing the client better than he knows himself.  When he’s not talking fishing, the seventeen-year veteran of fantasy football’s spoken word resonates with sports metaphors, and he’d rather score “a home run” with targeted online research than pay for huge consulting fees (or star FF players).

Trust, credibility and patience are going to be key for Schmitt in the next few months as he develops and expands the new Mitratech Affiliate program for partners who want to resell TeamConnect Express e-Billing.  TeamConnect Express is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) based spend management solution designed for legal departments that place a strong priority for controlling outside counsel spend.  Michael’s goal at Mitratech is to assemble a fantasy team of Affiliates composed of top-flight system integrators and legal management consultancies.  And whether he uses the fly-fishing or sports metaphor, the good news from the Maven is that he brings a genuine honesty and integrity to the process. 

Michael and his daughter recently caught a twenty-one inch rainbow trout on a weekend excursion to the Sacramento River (with a stop off for a 49ers game).  Naturally, the Maven suspected this was a Big Fish story, but photographic evidence confirmed the man’s truth. 

He’s the George Washington of anglers.

Thinking about “A calculation of value added by a law department”

According to Rees Morrison’s Law Department Management Blog, some legal departments claim that they are saving their companies millions of dollars per year by comparing their internal hours spent on matters to the billings they would have theoretically received from outside counsel for that same work.  Inside counsel work for less, evidently, so the differential in spending can be quite large. 

Rees points out a number of challenges to this approach to value estimation, including asking whether or not the inside counsel’s  “prices” include the full allocation of overhead, and whether inside counsel are actually performing the same types of work, and so on.  Challenges aside, billable hour comparison is a perfectly legitimate way to measure the value of a law department, though that value can also be assessed in a much more strategically compelling way. 

A legal department is, or at least should be, far more than just an alternative to an outside counsel law firm.  The General Counsel, and the department that he or she runs, has a huge responsibility for risk management that an outside firm hardly ever assumes.   The Directors of a corporation are tasked with a fiduciary duty to protect shareholder assets from risk.  As a corporate officer, the General Counsel is responsible for assuring that shareholder assets are as well protected as possible from legal risk, and in some cases, regulatory risk.   The GC must assess legal risks and take actions to mitigate those risks, usually in the form of contracts, intellectual property processes, and litigation.  At stake, in some cases, is nothing less than the asset value of the whole corporation! 

The outside counsel firm is typically a specialized tool used in the realization of these risk mitigation strategies.  In many cases, the outside counsel firm has specific expertise that is not available inside the legal department, so it is a symbiotic relationship.  However, from the perspective of shareholder value, the legal department plays a unique role that far transcends the simple providing of a billable service. Legal departments should not sell themselves short in their assessment of their value to the corporation.

TeamConnect is... a Metaphor for Life

Welcome back to our second TeamConnect blog as Mitratech becomes more and more a part of the Web 2.0 world.

TeamConnect -- it's not just a software, it's a spiritual goal!  This month, the good news is, TeamConnect is a metaphor for life, and the bad news is, TeamConnect is... a metaphor for life.  There's just no escaping it -- wherever we go, there we are.  So, hang on to your coffee cup, cuz the Maven's about to get existential on your uh... espresso. 

Immortal Beloved U(sername)
Like all great programs, TeamConnect contains within it a map of consciousness, and thus it has all the answers, if we only know what to ask.  Unfortunately, on the little queries like "Who Moved my Cheese?" TeamConnect yields "404 File Not Found," but for the big conundra, TeamConnect is practically the Oracle at Delphi. 

So... let's ask TeamConnect one of the great mysteries of life: What happens when we die (or ya know, leave the company)?  Do we ever truly disappear, or are we just sloughing off this mortal coil en route to another (hopefully, richer) place?  In TeamConnect terms, do we Delete a Username, or do we just become Inactive?  

The TeamConnect Magic 8-ball answer is that while you CAN delete a User, if you do so, you run into all kinds of attendant problems.   If you delete a user account, all references to the user are removed from all records, kind of like a jealous Ex cutting "Her" photo out of every family portrait (though naturally TeamConnect is neither sexist nor an enforcer of any dominant cultural standards).  Naturally, the more Projects (portraits) that User contributed, the more complicated a deletion becomes, because the system must find each reference in the database tables and remove them (plus all that photo cutting cramps your fingers).  In fact, a deletion has the potential to impact TeamConnect performance or even crash the system if the User was very active (or the family has lots of Ex's.)

In addtion to the family-portraits-that-look-like-Swiss-Cheese problem of Deleting Users, more problems arise when you try to review or reassign projects associated with that User -- there's no good way to do it.  Similarly, Users assigned to active workflow Matters cannot be deleted until that process has been completed (either by approving all associated invoices or canceling them), which is really tedious but the Maven just doesn't have an analogy unless it's orphaned kids being raised by a widow... and that's just too much drama, even for a software blog.

On the other hand, rendering a User Inactive is precise and painless.  Once Inactive, Users just can't Login or get assigned to any Matters.  TeamConnect removes Inactive names from appropriate places like approval routes (because it's much too hard to get approval from a dead name).  Inactive Usernames do appear, however, in the History tab of record fields such as the Created By and Modified By, so that we can all remember past team member triumphs and mistakes for years to come.  Like an Ex or a deceased family member, an Inactive User remains a part of our collective memory, they have a place in history, and their work can be recalled -- but most importantly, the license for that user is freed for someone to take their place.

In short, the TeamConnect answer is that we never truly die, we merely Inactivate. 

TeamConnect as Delphic Oracle is just as clear about taking the easy way out in other situations. The question before the committee here is "Can I Cut Corners in TeamConnect as in Life?"  The answer from On High comes back, sadly, No.

To wit, the temptation upon bumping TeamConnect from test to production is to move it back into a test environment and change the CSM settings to connect to it so that you don't "have" to do any nasty deleting and reinstalling like the manual says you do.  Unfortch, like taking liberties with a Username, it's only seems easy, and only at first.  Once CSM has synchronized with a Collaborati client, all the records that are already tied in with the old client ID will Swiss-Cheese-ify if ripped away to the new ID.  

The good news is, you can avoid this hideous Stinky Cheese nightmare and keep your records strictly existential and Cheddar with a clean delete and reinstall of CSM when your test run is successful.  However, to be able to delete CSM you have to make sure there are no unfinished (let's call them Gorgonzola) invoices that are pending approvals and basically no records attached to the vendors (think Limberger).  The best way is to delete the completed invoices first, then the vendors, and only then will the Great Oracle of Keeping Us Honest allow you to delete CSM cleanly and with Baked Brie. 

Again, sticking to the straight and narrow keeps your data clean: if you already have a working copy of CSM in test, chances are you should keep it the way it is and not to over-write it with a copy of the production version.  We are working on a provision to make this task velvety and easy-to-melt, but in the meantime, think of it as an exercise in good mental hygiene and mozzerella-goodness.   (Pizza or saganaki, anyone?) 

Updating Our Insurance Claims Litigation Solution Framework

The recession of 2008-2009 has put the insurance industry in a three-way headlock.  The economic slump has resulted in an increase in both real and fraudulent claims.  Operational budgets, including claims defense, are under intense scrutiny and facing cuts across the board.  At the same time, investment returns from the stock market and real estate, two staples of insurance float management, are off 20 to 30% from the beginning of 2008.   It’s harder for an insurance company to earn a profit today than it has been in a generation.

For claims managers, it is quite a challenge to have to handle more claims and detect increasingly common fraudulent claims while simultaneously cutting back on costs.  To make things even more stressful, there is also pressure to reduce losses in this more litigious environment.  For every claim that looks as if it is going to go into litigation, the claims manager faces a set of complex resolution choices that are more fraught than ever with risk to the company’s overall financial performance.

To help our insurance clients manage these forces better, we are expanding the scope of our Insurance Claims Litigation Solution Framework.  The framework, based on the TeamConnect platform, has been in use at major insurers for more than twenty years.  The new edition of the framework includes upgraded capabilities for litigation trend analysis and fraud detection.  It’s designed to provide claims managers with accurate, real time data on how claims are being litigated across a large claims organization. This practical intelligence about claims enables improved productivity for the claims department, which contributes to an improved expense ratio for the carrier. By helping staff attorneys gain a better understanding of effective claims defense practices, as well as detecting fraud, the framework helps narrow the carrier’s loss ratio.