Legal operations management: how to get started

Sam Hammond: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Juro Community Session today, which is all about getting started with legal operations. I hope you're all good. For those that don't know me, I'm Sam. I'm currently a lawyer at a company called Seed Legals. I'm actually barely in week two, so a very fresh new role for me. Given the demographic of the kind of Juro community, some of you may have heard of Seed Legals. We're a legal tech company that helps startups automate their funding and grow their business. Some of my team actually might even be on right now. Lots of my team are really involved. Toby, our chief legal officer, is very involved in the community. So yeah, if you're watching, hello.

As well as being a lawyer, I'm also a very big advocate of legal ops, as is everyone else on our panel today. Having worked across four kind of startup high growth companies, I've seen lots of different bits and bobs of legal ops and how different companies do different things. So today should be interesting hearing from our panelists.

We're running today's session as a Q&A, and the Q&A is based on the questions that we received from the Juro community in advance of today. There were lots and lots of questions, so we will try our best to cover as many as we can. We probably won't get to all of them. As Theresa said, if you want to pop any additional questions in the chat when we go along, feel free. And we've got 10 minutes at the end to try and pick up on those.

We have a lovely panel with us today, legal ops professionals. So I'll let them introduce themselves. Jo, do you want to go first?

Jo: Jo has had a bit of noise in the background. Sorry about that, folks. The neighbors decided to get the chainsaw out this morning. So apologies in advance. Hi, my name's Jo, and I'm the general counsel from way back, actually. So I've seen all aspects of startups. I've been a founding general counsel for a company with six regulated products all the way through to scale up and exit to Google. So there's not too much in legal operations I haven't seen and experienced. And I'm really excited about joining today, sharing some information and also learning from the panelists who do this as a job. It's amazing.

Sam Hammond: Thanks, Jo. Anastasiia, do you want to go next?

Anastasiia: Yes, thanks. So I'm Anastasiia. I'm working at BlaBlaCar. This is a community-based travel network. If you never use BlaBlaCar, I invite you to do so. We operate in 21 countries today. We have almost 30 million active members. I'm here in this company since 2015, and I've changed seven or eight positions and I worked in three different teams. And since 2019, I joined the legal team. I actually do not have a background or legal degree. So I think we'll bring a bit of a different vision today. I actually have a degree in journalism from St. Petersburg in Russia and moved to Paris also in 2015 when I joined BlaBlaCar. I'm happy to join the session today.

Sam Hammond: Thanks, Anastasiia. And then finally, there's Victoire.

Victoire: Hello. Thanks. Thanks a lot to receive me. So my name is Victoire Sully. I'm working in Paris at Qontour, which is SaaS for SMEs. We are a payment institution and working with companies. And I've joined Qontour two years ago, not as a legal operation, but as an in-house lawyer in eminent tax. And then I've started working on legal operation. And to be completely honest, I didn't even know what were the legal operations first. So it was a total discovery. And now I'm the only legal ops of the legal team. And I'm also working on impact. I'm an impact project manager. So a lot of growing projects and legal operations helps me on a daily basis on every topic. So super pleased to discuss how to get started with this job because it was me two years ago. So I know it well, and I am pleased to discuss all your questions and answer all your integrations.

Legal operations management with limited resources

Sam Hammond: Thanks, Victoire. Yeah, so welcome to everyone. We've got some great experience in the virtual room. So we've separated the Q&A for today's session into three general sections. So the first one that we've got is called how to get started with legal ops with limited resources. And we know that lots of members of the Juro community are sole counsel or in small teams.

I've certainly been in a couple of very small teams. So this is a very pertinent question. So to the questions that have been submitted on this topic, the first one we have is, what are the best practices for a sole counsel or small legal team when it comes to legal ops? And how do you implement effective legal ops with limited resources? Basically, the topic here. So Jo, do you want to touch on this first?

Jo: Sorry, the suspense. This is a great way to kick off because I think it's the fundamental starter of coming into a startup. You're generally starting with a mess, and you've got to figure out how to provide some structure in there so that you can lead the strategic legal goals whilst allowing the company to function. So I would say three things. Think about the end game. What's the end company goal? And keep that in mind in strategy when you're thinking about your operations plan. Bring the leadership team along the journey with you.

If they're not buying into the changes you're making and why, it's going to be very, very hard for you to execute on a strategy that makes your legal team viable. Think about lean execution. And by that, I mean, most startups have got a lot of pressure within the team to keep it lean. Legal team should always do that, and compliance team should always do that too. That is part of building your agenda for how you can operationalize your legal function and also bringing that focus into alignment with the company goals. So I would leave you with one more point on that, is think about the biggest company goal, which is always going to be commercialization and revenue. Start your ops there, and that will bring everyone on a lot quicker and show some metrics and evidence-based value with the pain of sometimes putting in operations and the benefit that you see at the end.

Sam Hammond: Perfect, yeah, and some of those topics we're going to touch upon later as well, aren't we, in terms of round metrics, leadership, all that good stuff. Anastasiia, do you want to touch upon this one?

Legal ops management with small teams

Anastasiia: Yeah, I think I would join mostly on the practice side. If you work in the small legal team, maybe you are alone or you have two people or three people, then I think the question is what actually you can do in practice, maybe from where you can start. Actually, joining the legal team in 2019, I joined as a paralegal and I didn't know nothing about legal business and I didn't speak legally. I started to learn and I understood that actually the biggest bottleneck is business. Sometimes they do not understand what legal speaking about and the opposite and they do not receive enough information from each other. So I understood that our job will be mostly like to build a bridge between these things. And I don't know, if you look for some tips, like where you could start and how you can start and without any budget involved.

For example, at BlaBlaCar, we received tons of questions from legal teams, which were low-value work to respond to them. I don't know where to find different certificates, certifications, shared capital information, and so on. As a tip, I think the first thing you might want to create a front door for business, so at least you will win a lot of time by not responding to questions and just sharing the links where information is posted. So something like self-service, you need to think about information governance in your team.

Also, I understood that lawyers are so much flagged with different work. They need to do contract reviews and to do different research and analysis. And sometimes they just forget saving documents on Google Drive or they do not understand, they do not have the proper channels where information is coming and going out. So set up information governance within the legal team. Also, as another tip, and I think which could be first base of legal operations in your team, you might want to think about knowledge management within your team, which seems like a nice to have, but actually it is something that is bringing so much use later because every year when you work and when you like, I don't know, you work in the same company for multiple years, you start to receive similar questions.

And sometimes in emails, you get lost or like you want to read the research from previous years. So when we set up a knowledge management in the team, it kind of saved a lot of time on looking for information. Also, the tip, maybe the practical tip, what I would suggest you to start with is to take a notebook of the software you already use and to see how you can use it differently or at a full capacity. So you need to understand the tech you have in the company and how to maybe you can adapt it to use within your legal team. If you have Azure Cloud, for example, you can use it for like Confluence.

You can start to use it for knowledge management. You don't need to purchase a specific software. Maybe you don't use at full capacity your contract management to take time to understand how it's working, what functionality it's got. The biggest problem what I see between lawyers that you actually do not have time to understand all of these things or set up basic processes. And so what we did in the legal team of BlaBlaCar, we just grouped all together in the team and we made lawyers brainstorm on how they want to organize things. And so it won't be a top down, but like the idea coming from them. Like that they would be more eager to maintain processes that they set up in the team. And that's how you can start and build a good base organizing legal operations in your team. So I've been a bit more practical. So I guess I give you the word further.

Sam Hammond: Perfect, yeah, no, excellent. Thanks so much for sharing all your experience. Definitely picking up on some themes and experience I've had in my own workplaces as well then. Jo, I can see Jo nodding along as well. Victoire, this is quite a kind of broad topic. Do you want to chime in?

Victoire: On this topic, I think that Anastasiia and Jo said everything, but we can discuss... I think we can go on another question.

Sam Hammond: I definitely agree with what you guys are saying. One thing that I always bang on about in pretty much everywhere I go, particularly the smaller teams, is utilizing the existing tools that are out there. Because then you can kind of bypass some of the tricky bits, like you don't necessarily need leadership buy-in to use an existing tool. The IT team might already be using it, so there are often additional costs, et cetera.

Using existing tools to manage legal ops

So yeah, I just find the biggest thing that has the impact, which is like you're saying, Jo, if it's something that has a big impact on clients and they go like, wow, that's amazing. Then that's half the journey that problem solving. It makes everything easier from there. And to Anastasiia's point, sorry, you'd be surprised how much the technology that's already being licensed or built into the company can really work hard for you. That was a really brilliant point. There's so much there that we can do as legal teams to make life simpler for everyone, including ourselves.

Jo: Yeah. Most of the tech companies I've worked at, and I'm about you guys, and I'm definitely hearing it from just now, is everyone uses all the same similar tools and tech. So you can kind of, there's a bit of transferable skills in terms of seeing what different companies do, but using the same tool. So it can be easy to kind of utilize learnings from before is what I found.

Sam Hammond: Cool. Okay, that was great. So next question, Victoire, maybe this is one you can help out on. Yeah. So the question was, what teams are key to getting on board when rolling out legal ops?

Victoire: So yes, on this question, it can be super classic, but of course, your team, the legal team, because this is the first team to unbound when running out legal ops. They are your first point of contact on a daily basis. So of course, you have to unbound them on every new topic that you want to implement, new processes.

You have to ask them and communicate a lot with them, asking them where is the problem and then helping them to solve it. So first, your team. Second, and because Legal Ops is also about digitalization, the IT department, it's really important because they are crucial, fundamental in maintaining legal technology. They are asking questions about security, data protection, and when you come from Europe, it's really important. Also the finance team, I will say, because we have common processes together. I mean, at Qonto, we are working hand in hand with finance for purchasing processes because we are using a tool that the finance team is using too. And then we are at the end of the process, meaning that we have to sign with our own tools. So yes, a lot of processes in common with the finance team. Of course, the compliance and risk management teams. Why? Because Qonto is a payment institution and we are regulated.

So we have a compliance and risk team that is not part of the legal team. So it's really important to know the border and to communicate well together. And because it's also a way to prevent risk and litigation when you have perfect process implemented with those teams, you have to prevent as early as possible as a legal team on crucial subjects. And of course, depending on the name of the teams, but all teams that are negotiating contracts with you. It can be the partnership team, the growth team. I do not know what name is used in your own company. I know that in scale-ups and startups, we have super weird names sometimes. But the ones who are negotiating contracts with you, ask them to be in the negotiation as early as possible. So I will say that those are the teams that have to be on board with the operations.

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