Key Findings from the Fortune 500: Legal Ops Pioneers Reveal All
At Interact 2019, Brian McGovern of Mitratech will unveil insights he’s gathered from Legal Ops teams at over one hundred Fortune 500 companies.
His General Session presentation, Key Findings from the Fortune 500, will also include Rick Radice, VP & Chief Operations Officer – Law, Compliance, Business Ethics, External Affairs at Prudential Financial, Inc., and Justin Hectus, CIO/CISO at Keesal, Young & Logan and CIO at KP Labs Keesal, Young & Logan / Keesal Propulsion Labs.
The fast and steady rise of Legal Ops has become a global phenomenon. The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) has seen its membership rise from 40 companies in 2015 to more than 1000, including 25% of the Fortune 500. At the same time, this growth has led to growing pains for legal departments.
As the Legal Ops function grows, so too does their embrace of legal tech to deliver against the expectations of corporate leaders for in-house legal to function like other business units. Delivering quantifiable value and legal tech ROI are now central concerns for General Counsel and Legal Ops leaders.
Legal Ops enthusiasm – and questions
What Brian found, over the course of a year meeting with these Fortune 500 Legal Ops teams, was a high degree of enthusiasm for change. Along with a lot of questions and concerns about the best ways to implement it.
As he explains in a forthcoming ebook that will explore much of what he’s learned over 2018-2019 from these teams, prospective technology adopters are seeking to “do something that’s very big and very interesting, something that might at first seem risky for the company, risky for their careers, but they’re excited about making change happen.”
Part of that involves reaching out to experts – like Brian – possessing a track record of success in legal tech. As Senior Vice President and Legal Chief Data Officer at AIG, he led the largest enterprise legal management rollout in the world, involving $2.5 BN in spend across thousands of US and international users. This saved AIG about $1.2 BN over the course of 5 ½ years, and was a pioneering example of how technology could benefit Legal Ops and legal departments.
Insights and sound advice
“They want to get sound advice,” Brian says in the ebook, “to hear about best practices and experiences from someone who’s stood in their shoes and already went through that process.
“I think my favorite stories I’ve told them – and their favorite stories, too – are about all the things I did wrong in our rollout at AIG, so they can learn a few best practices about how to ‘not fall into that pit.’ They’re the stories that get the biggest laughs, but they also stick with people.”
During their session at Interact, the three leaders will present a multi-faceted examination of what’s underway within corporate Legal Ops, and valuable insights for their audience. Each of them brings a unique leadership perspective to the topic; Justin Hectus and KP Labs, for example, were recently recognized for their work in helping clients build workflow and process automation “ecosystems” for legal departments and stakeholders.
