Join us as we sit down with Josh Kramer, the Chief Strategy Officer at Fileread, and embark on a journey through the evolving landscape of legal operations. Josh recounts his time managing the legal services for one of the largest pharma companies during a period of exponential growth amid the pandemic. The conversation uncovers the intricacies of assembling a robust legal team in the midst of global chaos. With a focus on the symbiotic relationship between technology, process controls, and departmental communication, Josh shares the invaluable lessons he took from that experience, now applied in his role at the startup Fileread.
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0:00You're listening to the Contract Heroes Podcast, your one-stop shop for all things contract management. And now here are your hosts, Marc and Pepe. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Contract Heroes. We are at the CLOC CGI event again. Uh, we, we came here last year. We had a couple of really cool episodes, but this time we're starting all over again. And this time we got Josh Kramer. He's the chief strategy officer at Filecoin. Welcome to the show, Josh. Thanks so much. Really excited to be here. So we had a really cool conversation. We've been speaking around, like, 30 minutes about your role, uh, when you were, before Filecoin, when, when you were, uh, it was head of legal operation at AstraZeneca? Yeah, head of, head, well, head of legal services. Head of, head of legal services. And I mean, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of stories there. Um, we were... I just asked Josh how long he was there, and it was six years, right? Six years.
1:05So you were, when you started, when it ended. When I, when I started, I was, I brought, was brought on as an IT business relationship manager for legal IT. And when I left, I was head of legal services. Okay. And when I got there, there was not really a, an e-discovery or a legal ops team, and so we, we built that, and we built it largely in 2020. Wow. At an interesting time. That was just, just, just about to explode. Yeah. Exactly. Just when, when the whole world was just about to change. Yeah. And, like, how was it? Like, I mean, I'm pretty sure you got the stories and lesson learns, but just give us like some, uh, like how it all happened. It was like March, and then you had to hire, like, thousands of people. Like, what happened there?
1:53Yeah, so the company, once we made the strategic decision to pursue a vaccine, grew significantly in a very short amount of time, and we decided to build our team, but we had the sort of final go-ahead in March of 2020, and so we had to build a lot of our team remotely. And we had to figure out, and we had team members, you know, we built out our team in, in lots of different countries. Yeah. And we had to kind of centralize it though, which wasn't easy. And the amount, the volume of work had a huge uptick. But at the same time, we were just bringing people on, and so figuring out, like, process and controls were really important. Yeah. And technology was really important, and really, like, understanding, having folks who could communicate really as translators was critically important. And when I say translators, I mean really between the technology side and the legal side, and between the legal side and the business side- Yeah...
2:54and between the business side and the, you know, it's like a- all of them, we needed one person who could speak to every one of those areas so that we could support all the functions that we supported. And, you know, I, I think it's interesting, right, w- before we started recording, we were talking about how, just how many people the company, the organization as a whole, were, were bringing on during that time period. But I mean, what was the, the before and after of, of the legal team? How, you know, how many folks did you have before this, this kind of expansion and, and what did it look like after? How many, how many people did you bring on, and what was that time period? Sure. So the size of the legal team itself didn't change. We built a shared services operation- Okay... to support legal, that we called legal services, managed the vendors, took care of e-discovery, a lot of the different things that you might, that might require heavy lifting and exist in the legal space but aren't necess- don't necessarily require attorneys. Mm-hmm. And I, I see contracts as fitting kind of right, right within that as well. And, uh, we ramped up to about 14 people- Okay... over the course of, like, a little over a year.
3:58And, you know, those people were people who had to be trusted to have access to, you know, the most sensitive data, and so careful hiring was critically important. Y- yeah. Um, really making sure that we could get people that we trusted, and then onboarding them in ways that both, you know, we wanna bring on people and allow them to flourish at what they do best. At the same time, you've gotta fit them into processes that are designed to standardize the work. And that's all the harder when you're in a remote environment- Yeah... and even harder when the company's growing so quickly and so focused on, you know, the, it was kinda one singular goal for quite a while. In addition, obviously, you know, all the other life-saving drugs, but, like, getting that vaccine out and making it work. And so being able to support that, you know, however we could was, was a critically important aspect. And how do you measure it?
4:54I mean, that, that's impressive because, I mean, you're, you're, it's like a change management master degree there, right? Because it's like- Well, we measured, yeah... yeah. And it's like, how, because I thought you were going to tell us, "Yeah, we, we hired like 100 lawyers," but no, you didn't. No. Like, how, how you make that happen? Because you have to change, like, a lot of things. You got a cultural one because you were, like, in the chaos in the, in the whole world, and then you need to deliver things fast with not that much people. So how it all started, like, did you have like a plan, or it was more like on the fly a- and you were learning, or a mix? I mean, it was far more the latter than the former. It was far more on the fly. But I, I have this saying I really like, which is that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Yeah. And sometimes if you slow down to make sure you get it right, you can then accelerate way beyond where you would've been at the same point if you had started out at a sprint, right?
5:54So when you imagine, you know, when you're in a marathon, you don't just start out sprinting, right? And when I think of, like, when I was in law school, I was often the last person to start typing on exams, but I often would write, like, one of the longest answers because I was sitting and planning it out. And by the time it got time to execute, to, to start typing, I knew exactly what I wanted to say. And so we wanted to get our tech stack right. Yeah. We wanted to get our processes right. And even though there was, you know, a lot of noise and the volume was going up, we knew we had to get those things right in order to be able to build a small team that we could, that would truly be scalable And so few of, so few of legal operations really are scalable- Yeah... that that becomes a challenge in and of itself, right? You're managing law firms, you're, you know, overseeing technology, working with vendors, as well as, you know, performing discovery collections. Supply chains, compliance, everything. And now, well, couple of years afterwards, and if you could say what are your, like, your top three key takeaways or lesson learned after all those experimentation, what would it be? Like, how, how would you grow a legal ops or a legal or whatever you wanna call it t- or legal service team fast?
7:15Yeah, so first lesson would be there's a huge difference between a good idea and its execution. Okay. Yeah, execution. And that, you know, I think Steve Jobs said that, like, a lot of people think that, you know, 90% of success is a good idea, but I think that, like, 90% of turning a good idea into reality is all in the execution. Yep. And there's been a lot of really great ideas really poorly implemented, and people have also, like, had ideas that weren't the best idea in the world that were so well executed that it was, like, successful anyway. And so I think, like, thinking about execution. The second is things need to be very concrete, and I'm really obsessed with value, and with, like, rock bottom value. So we found a way to measure our performance, and we measured it by what we, we called it cost per gigabyte collected. So we took- Cost per gigabyte collected. Right. Okay. Okay. And so we basically took every legal service that AZ required, and those were all our costs, and we divided it by the gigabytes that we collected for e-discovery to, as a measure of our efficiency. Okay. And so we had to manage costs on every, every managed law firm cost, managed technology provider cost, et cetera, against how busy we were. So if, if we had a ton of litigation, we'd collect a lot of data.
8:37Therefore, if our costs went up, that's, that's to be expected. And we didn't wanna be in a situation where, like, in a year with a lot of litigation we're considered expensive 'cause absolute spend is high. Yeah. In a year of very little litigation we're seen as super cheap because absolute cost is low. Yeah. 'Cause that doesn't really tell you your per unit cost, like how well you're doing, right? It doesn't tell you how well you'll scale. But using a metric that's on a per unit basis does tell you that. So, and then we could apply that backwards and forwards. We could say, okay, three years ago, if we were as efficient in terms of cost per gigabyte as we are today, we would've spent, I don't know, $10 million less. This year, if we were as inefficient as we were three years ago, we would've spent $8, $8 million more, something like that. And being able to apply that backwards and forwards really helped meet the super tough scrutiny of our, our GC.
9:32And our GC really hammered into me the idea that everyone at that company's job was to make and sell medicine, and if you were in legal, the way you make and sell medicine is by reducing legal cost without taking on additional legal risk. And that's how I view value now. And that's why, you know, I think, like, that getting to rock bottom value as quickly as possible in anything you do is necessary in order to be able to drive successful growth. 'Cause if you're on a faulty foundation, or you're not able to measure it, or you're looking at value in terms of its marketing rather than its end results, in the end you won't be able to take on the kinds of challenges that we were able to take on and succeed without astronomical cost. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and obviously it's interesting, you know, these, these lessons learned at a very large organization, right? And now taking that and moving to a company of, of under 10 individuals, right? So how, how- That was a bold move. So how has that, how is that move and, and those lessons that you've learned, uh, helping you to, to build out, you know, the team and the growth at, at FileRead?
10:39So that last lesson was a driver for my decision to join FileRead, because they have a tool that drives value. My joining an AI company just as the AI hype cycle is ending is a feature, not a bug for me. Yeah. Because I think a lot of the noise is starting to clear out, and signal will start to shine. You know, we scroll down halfway th- down our webpage, you can see the thing that our tool does, and it's like, I could challenge half the other AI companies, just show me a picture of the thing, your thing does, and it would, that would be the end of the conversation right there, let alone what value does it drive. And I could see what value it drove, so I was like, all right, that means this has the makings to be a successful product. Now we have to apply other lessons, like we have to make sure that our, everything we do is as scalable as possible. And, you know, one thing the experience taught me was how to be ready to be busy, and that's what I've been talking with my team a lot about, is how to be ready to be busy.
11:36Because what I say to them is, "Look, at some point we are gonna have dozens of cases going at once. We are gonna have some bug just because it just happens with technology. It's a great tool, but it just happens." Yeah. "And we're gonna have lots of lawyers yelling at us, and I want you all to know that now. And we're gonna be feel like we're losing our heads. And if we plan for that now while our heads are cool, and we make the right decisions and position ourselves well, make ourselves as flexible and scalable as possible, then when that hits it won't be a crisis." Yeah. And so, you know, we'll see if, if I learned the lesson right or not once it happens. We're busy now, but not to the point that, that we're, you know, at this, that, that we face a scalability problem. Yeah. But we will. Right. And I got one last question for you, Josh. And, you know, we're at Clock. One of, one of the cool thing is, like, we can learn a lot from the experience. You know, you can go to any panel, whatever, you can speak to the people. And right now- The biggest topic is, of course, AI. And we've seen this.
12:39I mean, we're CLM implementers, and right now, like, a lot of, of our customers are like, "Hey, uh, we also want to have AI." And our question is like, "Yeah, okay, for what?" Right? And I'm curious, like, with all your lessons learned on how to scale up a com- a team in order to solve, you know, fix really complex situations, if you had that type of technology three years before, because, like, GenAI was 2023, do you think it would help you to do things faster back in 2020? It would've expanded our reach so that we could've actually done more. Really? Like- Because- That- It would've- That's interesting... it would've let us do more of the kind of high-level work that we often see our law firms doing now. Yeah. We were trying to build a team that would insource the work, and tools like this help us jump from manual processes where you're searching and reviewing documents- Ah...
13:39to automated processes where you're getting answers, and from, like, gathering up facts to make a chronology to generating chronologies so you can focus on strategy. And what's funny is our value proposition to law firms is exactly the same, which is if you want to hang on to this work, you're going to have to do it at a higher level. Yeah. Your deliverables, every hour you bill needs to have more value. Mm-hmm. And these tools will help you with that. But we don't wanna do the work they do. We don't wanna take away their work, but we wanna elevate the value of the work that's being done so that the time is even better spent. And for people that are, like, looking for this type of solutions, now that you've been in both sides of the desk, either as a customer or now as a, as a vendor, like, how would you recommend them to approach to these type of technologies? That's a great question. And what I would say is ask yourself, "Would I still wanna buy it if it didn't use AI?" Yeah. No, I think that's great.
14:36And, and, um, you know, I guess before we wrap up, I just wanted to ask, you know, how... You said this is your first CLOC, right? What's that? First time- Yeah... at CLOC. So how, I mean, how has the experience been so far? It's been really good. I've gotten a really warm reception from folks. It's been interesting seeing former colleagues now that I'm sort of on the other side, but it's, it's good. That's great. You should be a speaker. Like, you got a lot of experience now. I've, I've spoken- I'm pretty sure-... spoken at LegalWeek. I've spoken at a lot of these things... I'm gonna put your name somewhere else for next year because, I mean, that, that kind of experience, it's, it's amazing, man. So- I appreciate it. I appreciate it... yeah, it's really cool. And, uh, you know, one other thing I'll mention, whether you put it on this or not, but I'm also here representing the Legal Data Intelligence Project. Yeah. And it's a project that's really designed to elevate legal and e-discovery professionals and to elevate the profession itself. Too often, people in our space get pigeonholed either, like, as sort of paralegals or, in the IT space, as just specialized IT folks, and we're, we're both and we're neither, and our capabilities extend well beyond that, as, as the CLM space really proves.
15:42Yeah. And so, uh, you know, I just, just wanna give a, a shout to that because I'm, I'm big on, like, elevating, 'cause I'm, I'm, I'm always so impressed by the people in this space. So- Yeah. Yeah... just thought I'd mention it. And Josh, if people will, would like to learn more a little from FileRead or yourself, where is the best place? Sure. Go to, uh, fileread.com, or find me on LinkedIn, Josh Kramer. I'm more than happy to talk to anybody who reaches out. Awesome. Hey, well, Josh, we really appreciate you sitting down with us, and, uh, we hope the rest of your time at CLOC goes well. Thanks for the opportunity. Yeah. I really appreciate it. Sure thing. And thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. This episode of the Contract Heroes is sponsored by Koho Consulting. Koho helps organizations of all shapes and sizes find, implement, and manage their chosen CLM tool. Whether your project is buy- or sell-side led, Koho can help you navigate the waters of the CLM space to make sure that you're getting a product that's going to fit like a glove for years to come.
16:40If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting.com.