Pioneering Recognition: KYL Wins Its Third ILTA Distinguished Peer Award
It’s a hat trick for one of the pioneers in legal tech adoption and Legal Operation, as Keesal, Young & Logan have become three-time winners of one of the industry’s leading awards.
This morning at ILTACON 2019 in Orlando, Justin Hectus, the CIO/CISO of KYL, picked up the well-deserved new hardware: The 2019 ILTA Distinguished Peer Award for Transformation Project of the Year (under 100 attorneys).
Justin, of course, co-founded Keesal Propulsion Labs (KP Labs), a consultancy within KYL focused on helping clients build workflow and process automation “ecosystems” for legal departments and their stakeholders. Specifically, the ILTA award was earned for their work with NetApp, a Fortune 500 global enterprise whose Legal Operations are led by other leaders in legal tech transformation: Connie Brenton, NetApp’s Chief of Staff and Senior Director of Legal Operations, and Emily Tueben, its Senior Legal Operations Manager.
At Mitratech, we’re proud to say we’ve worked closely with all of them over recent years. Our TAP Workflow Automation solution was the software utilized by KPL and NetApp as a cornerstone of this project. It’s also the solution KP Labs recommends to other clients, working in partnership with Mitratech.
Awards are great; ROI is even better
There’s a litany of impressive results quoted in the press release about the award:
KP Labs and KYL now manage 52 workflow processes, running more than 30,000 total workflows per year, for NetApp in combination with NetApp’s legal operations team and Mitratech TAP professionals. These TAP workflows automate and streamline processes throughout the company with more than 70% of the activities supporting sales, finance, go-to-market operations and business units outside of the legal department.
The real net-net, though?
A recent study calculated a return on investment of $123.45 each time a workflow runs.
Connie Brenton had good things to say about how KP Labs helped with extending TAP into other departments and units at NetApp, too:
“KYL’s KP Labs has allowed us to scale more effectively, build stronger relationships with our clients across the enterprise, and propel more workflows across the finish line,” remarked Brenton. “KP Labs became our TAP SWAT team, working with multiple and different business organizations across the NetApp enterprise. This unique partnership enables a culture of speed and simplicity and creates a competitive advantage for NetApp.”
The work KP Labs has been delivering is an expansion on the initial success NetApp had already reaped with TAP, which you can check out in a detailed Case Study. As Connie described it at that time, “it’s one of those crazy, life-changing technologies.”
Pioneering the changes shaping an industry
The burgeoning growth of Legal Ops and the accompanying rise in the adoption of systems and tools like TAP to contain costs while improving efficiency and client service isn’t an evolution that was bound to happen. It takes advocates, evangelists, early adopters – the kind of pioneers who forge a path for the rest.
As companies continue to invest in Legal Operations, they’re following the lessons of these leaders. CLOC’s 2nd Annual State of the Industry Survey found more of them are spending on legal technologies, with 72% of the respondents saying they had a technology roadmap in place.
That’s a substantial improvement over just a few years ago, and that progress owes more than a little to the evangelism and real-world examples provided by tech adoption and Legal Ops trailblazers.
KYL, KP Labs and NetApp absolutely count among that rare number. So it’s been our absolutely privilege to work with them.
