What skills and technologies do in-house counsel need?

Adriana Linares:

Hi everyone, and welcome to LegalTech Matters, a podcast by Litera. I’m Adriana Linares, I’m a legal technology consultant and trainer. I’m excited to be part of the podcasting family. And my first guest, on my inaugural episode for LegalTech Matters, is Colin Levy, which I’m very excited to chat with because we have been Internet friends for quite some time, exchanged a couple of emails, and I’ve been very curious about his side of the legal technology community, which is mostly corporate lawyering, and legal departments. And I tend to hang out more in the solo, small, mid firm area, so it’s going to be a great conversation. Hey, Colin.

Colin Levy:

Hey there. Thanks for having me.

Adriana Linares:

You spend a lot of time dedicating your knowledge and information about legal technology to the Internet, so we appreciate that. And I wanted to get you on, to tell me about some of those things that you’re passionate about. But before we start doing that, tell me about you. What does Colin Levy do? Where did you get your law degree? Where do you live? How did you get here?

Colin Levy:

Yeah, absolutely. So, I got my law degree from Boston College Law School in 2010, which seems ages ago at this point, thanks to a variety of years, including the pandemic. And I focused most of my legal career thus far, on working in-house for a range of different companies, a range of different industries, including one stint with a startup earlier in my career, and one stint as effectively sole in-house council for another company.

Most of those industries that I focused on have been tied to tech, and I’d say something that occurred to me as I was working through, with all these different companies, is that a problems that they all faced, as legal departments, were relatively similar, in terms of managing contracts, managing transactions, managing workflows, relationships, people, expectations. And so that kind of really started me off on this journey of wanting to learn more about ways in which people can overcome those challenges through process improvement, and also through technology. And I’ve been really lucky to have engaged with, and had a large number of conversations with, a wide range of different people, who all have sought to do different things to try to improve the legal ecosystem and make it more suited for the needs of today’s clients and businesses, and have done that through technology, and or through other means such as process improvement.

Adriana Linares:

These are all very fancy words that you’re using, Colin. And, they’re the types of fancy words that us down here, in the lower layers of legal tech, don’t spend too much time talking about, like process improvement, and knowledge management, and contract management, and I’m sure there’s a lot of talk about AI in your world. Now, in the defense of my world that I typically live in, that’s obviously changing. And, for the first time, at least in my 22 years of doing this, I’m hearing a lot about that, down in the lower levels. And I don’t mean lower as in a caste system, I mean, down here, where we’re just smaller sized firms, or corporations, or companies.

So, tell me a little bit more about the technology that’s important to corporate lawyers. Oh, and before I do that, let me… I had asked you about this. I saw a really interesting tweet from Legal Evolution, that I thought was very timely, for my having a conversation with you. I found this fascinating, and I don’t know how accurate it is, but it’s just amazing. It says, “There are now more in-house lawyers working in the U.S. than lawyers working for BigLaw, 115,770 in corporate versus 107,209 in BigLaw.” And then the tweet goes on to say, “This has significant implications for the sourcing and development of legal talent.” What does that tweet mean to you?

Colin Levy:

So, well, first of all, that tweet doesn’t… The numbers actually don’t really surprise me that much, because I have seen over the years, many companies realizing that it’s actually cheaper, and more effective, to have lawyers working for their businesses, in their businesses, as opposed to hiring outside counsel. I also think that, it also is an indication of the need for businesses to have people who are tied to, and aligned with, the needs of the business, that you often don’t get quite as right when you’re working with outside council, because outside council have more than one client, more than one company that they’re representing and working with.

So, I think in terms of sort of the implications for lawyer training, and lawyer development, that simply means that there’s a greater expectation placed upon lawyers to be better business people. And, have a better understanding of the language of business, which is data, and have a better understanding of just how businesses operate. And, understand that… sort of legal decisions are business decisions, and accordingly, you need to kind of account for that, when you are analyzing issues, and providing information, and counseling and support, to your clients.

Adriana Linares:

I had not thought about that. That a lot of corporations and big companies must be moving their legal departments in-house, instead of outsourcing. But that’s a very interesting… So has that been a trend you’ve seen, in, sort of in corporate legal, where that has been happening? And did that start pre-pandemic, because of the pandemic, or it’s just sort of been a natural trend that is maybe amplified because of the pandemic?

Colin Levy:

So, I think it’s been a trend that’s been ongoing for some time, partly due to the fact that businesses, as they grow, their needs grow more complex, and varied. And, on top of that, legal departments, often being seen as a call center, are being asked to do more and more with less. But that doesn’t necessarily mean less people, just may mean less resources, but have people doing more and more things.

And so, I do think that there has been a trend of legal departments getting bigger, as businesses have grown. And in certainly some industries have, I think, benefited as a result of the pandemic and people working more… remotely, excuse me. One, I think a particular segment could be cybersecurity, for example. Other types of data privacy-oriented businesses, because law firms, and businesses, are also realizing they need to be more careful, and treat their information in more secure ways, as a result of people not all being in the same physical spot together working.

Adriana Linares:

When it comes to the technology that you encourage corporate lawyers to adopt, what are the two or three, or five, how many there may be, top technologies, or resources, or dashboards, or type of technology that you think every law department should have?

Colin Levy:

Yeah. So, I think every law department really should have some form of contract management system. It doesn’t have to be super complicated. They just… It just needs to be some system that can effectively do a bunch of things. One, function as a repository, allow you to quickly find your agreements, and organize them by type, and by length. And two, that keeps track of key milestones and notifications, such as billing dates, renewal dates, things along those lines. And then if you need more complicated functions, you can have tools that can provide some negotiation functionality, and or drafting functionality as well. So that’s one type of tool that I think every law department should have in some form or fashion.

Another, I would say, would be some sort of project management, or workflow management, tool. Because lawyers traditionally are not very good at managing projects, and as they have more and more tasks that they’re asked to do and manage, that tend to be long term, email just doesn’t cut it.

You need to…

Adriana Linares:

Agreed.

Colin Levy:

…have another way to manage those different tasks, and also manage the different tasks that, or the different subtasks that, are done by different functions, and people within the business. And so, these project management tools, and workflow management tools can really help you centralize that need, and allow for better, closer collaboration across functions.

So those are two key types. I’d say a third, would possibly be some form of outside council management, or spend management platform, that allows your department to keep track of kind of how much spend you have with outside council, why it’s costing that much, and that allows you better control over your use of outside resources as well.

Adriana Linares:

That’s great, very helpful. What about… Let’s bring it down to the basics, because that’s where I spend a lot of my time, and I always say, “You cannot put a lawyer in front of me, that I can’t somehow help.” And I mean that from the day-to-day things that they use. So, I spend a lot of time training on Word, and Acrobat, and practice management systems. Obviously when the pandemic started, I spent an insane amount of time helping lawyers figure out how to work remotely. So, bringing it back down to the basics, you recently tweeted that you participated in the development of a guide, to help lawyers with Microsoft Word, one of my favorite topics. So, when it comes to the basics of what… You just described what a law department should have as some of the basics. What about the skills that any lawyer should have, regardless of how big or small their law department is?

Colin Levy:

Yeah. So, basic tools of trade every lawyer should be, not just familiar with, but be able to use effectively. So, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Acrobat. And quite frankly, I think most lawyers think that they’re using those tools well, but they don’t realize that there’s a lot more functionality with all those tools that can be very helpful to them, that can help automate some time-consuming tasks, especially with regards to formatting, and or editing.

And so, I really think it’s incumbent upon lawyers before they start looking at kind of the shiny new tech, to really have the basics down right. And there are plenty of ways to kind of learn more about these tools. For example, you, I’m sure provide a lot of training. There are other ways as well, there’s Preservice, which is this sort of, this assessment tool that can help you get up to speed…

Adriana Linares:

Yep.

Colin Levy:

…on some of the basic ways to learn basic functionality of a lot of these tools. And I really think it’s incumbent upon most legal professionals to be well-versed with the tools that you use every day, because that’s just sort of basic expectation of, I would think of a client, and essentially tables stakes, before you move on to some of the more shiny, or fancier so-called tech that exists out there.

Adriana Linares:

Well, I completely agree with you, and I feel that a lot of times, a client hires lawyers expecting them to be very tech-savvy, to be on the cutting edge of technology. And, I’ve been doing this a long time, and I have not seen that across the board, regardless of whether I’m talking to a solo in Des Moines, Iowa, or a lawyer at one of the largest law firms in the world. The tech skills continue to lack, no matter what. And, a lot of times where they really lack, aside from Word, because no one really ever takes the time to get a good Word training session, but Excel, right?

So, I cannot tell you how many lawyers I meet, and work with, who’ve said, “I don’t use Excel for anything.” And, I cannot imagine as a small business owner, and as a person who manages my insurance, and my bills and even my home, and my stocks, and my investments, not knowing how to use Excel. It seems to me that in a corporate environment, that would be incredibly important, to be able to use Excel for analysis, and projections. And do you find that the attorneys that you get to work with, and talk to, are pretty good Excel users, or do you get a mixed bag, or are they living in my world?

Colin Levy:

It’s very mixed. There remains a lot of lawyers I think, who hear numbers, or quantitative analysis, and or who just think that it’s not something they need to be necessarily concerned with. My view of that, of course, is, when you’re working in-house, you have to speak the language of business, the language of business data, and largely numbers. And so, Excel can be very helpful for that. And, there’s… It’s not that necessarily hard to learn kind of the basics [crosstalk 00:13:15].

Adriana Linares:

Right? Agree.

Colin Levy:

There’s a lot more powerful functionality you can learn as well, but just simply learning kind of the basics that Excel, I think can be very useful. I see a lot of lawyers using Excel to kind of track things, and kind of organize matters and things, and that is not really where Excel’s strong point is.

Adriana Linares:

That hurts.

Colin Levy:

So, I would start by saying, use Excel for what Excel is good with, which is data analysis. Don’t use it for… matter management, or checklists, or tracking, things like that. That’s just simply not what it’s designed to do, even though there are, as I said before, many legal folks who do still use it for those.

Adriana Linares:

I know those people. Would you say… So in my world, I typically deal with practice management programs, which are great. There’s a dozen decent practice management programs out there that help the private law firms, or regular law firms, to manage their practices. In your world, are we talking about project management systems? Would they be the equivalent of a case management system, in your world versus mine?

Colin Levy:

Yeah. So definitely, I think project management would be more aligned because in my world, legal cases, that’s not really kind of a thing in legal departments. There are sort of matters that you manage, but they tend to be projects that require not just your legal input, but also require the input of other functions. And so tools that can help bring all those functions together and collaborate effectively, I think are really important tools for legal departments to have.

Adriana Linares:

So, a friend of mine called me two weeks ago, one of my oldest and dearest friends from elementary school. We’ll call him Rick. And he said, “Hey Adriana.” I used to help him with his private in Orlando, for years I was his technology consultant. And then he disappeared, and I didn’t hear from him for a long time. And, I was oddly enough, recently thinking about him and he called me. Actually, he didn’t call. He landed in my inbox through the contact form on my website. And he said, “Hey, I need your help again, call me.” So I did, and we chatted.

And it turns out, that for the past couple years, he has been working in-house. So he went from being, I swear, I think he was a personal injury lawyer, this was 15 years ago I was helping him, so I don’t remember, but we were right next to the courthouse all the time. So it must have been… Or criminal defense. It was criminal defense. Okay. So he went from being a solo practitioner, and then a small firm owner, and somehow got, what he called, “the job offer of a lifetime,” and became in-house counsel at a company out of state, out of Florida. And then recently, took another job opportunity back in Florida, where our roots are, and with a large company. And he said, “I need contract management software, and I need help for building this legal department.” So I think it’s a new company, and it’s just taking off, and they brought him in because he has some experience that they appreciated. And he said, “Where do I start?” I said, “Oh, wrong tree. Let me send you to another tree, Colin Levy, and talk to him about what it takes to really get a law department off the ground.”

Where would you tell him to start? Because I have a feeling, there’s probably a lot of companies, and corporate lawyers, that are in this position where, like we just discussed, the law department is new, they’re moving it in-house, or, I mean, can there be any more startups on this planet, these days? So, where would you tell someone to start, if that was the position that they’re in?

Colin Levy:

Yeah. So, I think it would start with kind of, understanding kind of how things operate currently, kind of what the lay of the land is. What are your current processes? Where are the pain points? Who’s close to those pain points, kind of involved with them? Get sort of a basic assessment, and then once you have that assessment under your belt, move on from there and get a sense of, okay, well what in an ideal world, what do I want to have? How would I want these things to operate?

And, use kind of the data you’ve gathered through getting sort of your lay land, and where you want to end up, and use that as a guide to help you figure out kind of what you’re looking for, and what questions you ask when you sit in on demos and things. And have someone like myself or yourself, on their side sitting with them to help them kind of navigate, because there are a lot of tools out there, a lot of them kind of seemingly seem to do the same thing, or similar things. And it’s important to really kind of get really good sense of what it is they all do, how long will it take to get these things set up, will it work with other tools you have, what kind of level of support will you have? Those are kind of the things you want to want get in a sense of as you’re navigating through this world.

And also quite frankly, you want to get a sense of the financial stability, and also kind of the customer base that’s in these companies as well. Because you don’t want to go with someone if you they’re sort of a fly-by-night operation, which I don’t think… I wouldn’t say that too many of them are necessarily for that…

Adriana Linares:

Right.

Colin Levy:

But at the same time, if you’re going to go through this exercise and investment, you really want to make sure that you’re putting your money in the right place, and ensuring that not only is it the right tool, but it’ll also be used by your people as well. So, you want to include other people who may be using this tool on those demos as well, to ensure that they like it, and they’ll use it. Because you don’t want to buy something that ends up being shelfware in the end.

Adriana Linares:

That’s so true. And that goes across the board, right? Include everyone who… I mean, I hate using the word stakeholder, it sounds so Internet, corporatey, buzzwordy, but it’s true. And I tell my clients all the time, include the secretaries, the paralegals, and the associates, because they’re the ones that are going to also be part of using the product, and you don’t want to throw something on it that they’re going to hate. Plus, there’s a lot of valuable input, that you don’t realize comes from the people that you collaborate with on a day-to-day basis that, you don’t know what you don’t know, as they say.

So, we mentioned, you mentioned project management software, mentioned contract management and review software, collaboration tools. Is there anything that does it all? And don’t be afraid to name names. I always want my guests to name names and talk prices, because I think that’s really what a lot of listeners want to know. So, if you were having this consult with Rick, the new in-house attorney, at a new company, what products would you recommend he start with looking at? Do you give him a short list, or do you give him a long list?

Colin Levy:

So, that’s an interesting question. I… The list, I think, this is a very lawyerly answer to say, but it depends, again, on what you’re looking for.

Adriana Linares:

Drink.

Colin Levy:

But there are definitely companies that can offer, sort of a platform-based type of solution. I mean, Litera, of course, is one that comes to mind, because they offer a range of different tools, and can be helpful. There are plenty, there are other companies as well, depending on your need. I mean there’s one of the larger ones that use, probably some of the bigger departments, is Onit. So, that would be another one. So, I think there are kind of this platform-based tools, and then there are kind of other ones that are more specific and more attuned to kind of individual needs, depending on whether it’s contracts, or collaboration or what have you.

One for workflow management that I happen to like, is Proxy. I happen to sit on their advisory board, but I happen to be a big fan of them. They’re also are plenty of really great contract management tools out there as well. Some of the good ones, I think include Malbek, EverStore, there’s Ironclad, of course. So, those are some of some good ones out there. But, it really, honestly, I do like those companies, but I think it’s really up to the individual consumer to figure out what works best for them. Are some tools just generally better than others? I do think so, but it also really is up to you to figure out what works best for you.

Adriana Linares:

And I guess, maybe a good point to make is, there are options out there. You don’t have to be sitting around with Microsoft Word tables, and Excel spreadsheets, and Zapier, and trying to move data from…

Colin Levy:

Right.

Adriana Linares:

…one place to another. You don’t have to necessarily build your own. And I always talk about lawyers building their Rube Goldberg machines of technology, where they’ve got Zapier, and all this stuff, and they’re trying to move data around, and when one piece breaks, then the whole machine stops working. So, I guess what I want to encourage anyone to do who’s in this position, is do their research. They can always reach out to you, and get some consulting services from you. You seem to be very well-versed in what goes on in the corporate world. I think that’s a good point to make, which is, even if you’re with a smaller corporation, or if you’re with a small company and you’re the in-house attorney, really need to tech up.

Colin Levy:

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Quite frankly, I think that the winners over the long term, will be those who are the tech-savvy, forward-thinking, proactive legal folks. Because, at the end of the day, technology is not waiting for anyone, or any business to catch up to it, it’s continuing to advance. And really, it’s up to, I think the legal industry as a whole, to try to just not fall too far behind.

Adriana Linares:

I feel like we made such massive leaps and bounds during the pandemic. I mean, really, we moved a mountain. Seriously, moved a mountain.

Colin Levy:

I hope so.

Adriana Linares:

And I hope so, and I hope we can stay there. I don’t want to see the mountain getting smaller, and smaller away.

Colin Levy:

Right.

Adriana Linares:

As we move away, I want the mountain to come with us, so I agree with you completely. Colin, it’s been so nice chatting with you, and thank you for educating me, and helping me understand a little bit better, about the corporate world. If listeners want to find, friend, or follow you, how can they do that?

Colin Levy:

So they can find me on LinkedIn, under my name, Colin S. Levy. They can find me on Twitter, clevy_law. That’s C-L-E-V-Y underscore law. They can also go to my website, colinslevy.com, which I should mention, I will be relaunching later this year slash early next year. I’m really excited about that.

Adriana Linares:

Awesome.

Colin Levy:

And I also have some potentially other exciting news to be sharing in the future, in the not too distant future. So, stay tuned.

Adriana Linares:

Well, that’s great. And I’m excited about your website. You’ve got some great interviews on there and some great conversations, so I’d be excited to see it get some new life breathed into it.

Colin Levy:

Thanks so much, this has been an absolute pleasure.

Adriana Linares:

It’s been a lot of fun. Thanks so much, Colin. Thanks everyone for listening to another episode of LegalTalk Matters, by Litera. I’m Adriana Linares, and hope to see you all sometime soon.