Building Agile Legal Operations at Scale with Jessica Vander Ploeg

Made with speech-to-text software, so a few words may be off.

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 Contract Heroes. Jessica, thank you so much for being here with us, and before I flip things over to Pepe and he gives us a, a little bit of an understanding of, you know, what we're gonna be discussing today, be great if you could give the, the listeners some color on your background and, you know, how you got into the, uh, legal space, uh, in general. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me here today. I really appreciate it. So I have spent my entire career in operations. I started in interior design and architecture. I dabbled a bit in market research, and then my first move into legal was actually into court reporting. I ran operations and M&A operations for a large court reporting firm that was based out of Nevada, and that was my first kind of dabble in the legal ecosystem.

0:58And I actually had someone reach out to me and say, "Do you wanna work in legal operations?" And I said, "Well, I do." And they kindly said, "No, you don't." And that was actually my first move into legal operations. I had the great pleasure of working with Connie Brenton, who I lovingly call the mother of legal operations, and I spent some time with her at NetApp, uh, and was in tech basically that entire time afterwards until joining Belron. So the, with NetApp for quite a while working on legal operations. I then ran legal operations for Micro Focus, which is a UK-based tech company, and was then acquired by OpenText. Spent some time there, and have now been with Belron, which is Safelite's parent company, for the last 18 or so months. So not necessarily a linear journey into legal operations, but definitely a rewarding one. Yeah. It's not a linear one, but it's a very interesting one, Jessica.

1:51And I'm, and I'm kinda curious, like, with all this background, you know, and also working on tech, like, can you tell us a little bit on how's the Belron's legal operation set up and your role within the whole organization? Because I think a lot of people, there's a lot of different organization that they only have, like, legal, and legal means everything, contracts, litigation. But they are still struggling on what actually people in legal ops can do or how they can help people, not just in the legal de- department, but also in the business. Like, can you give us a little bit brief summary on how that works at, at Belron? I'd be happy to. Absolutely, and I think it's a great question. It's kind of like when you wanna see how someone's closet's organized. You're like, "I know what mine is like, but how is everyone else's?" I always use that analogy because every organization, I think legal operations works just a little bit different.

2:44So I am actually a team of one at Belron. I'm our vice president of legal operations, and I run legal operations for Belron globally. We have a 70-person legal team that crosses around 13 to 15 different countries, and a big portion of my role supports our group function, which sits in the UK, probably about 60% of my time or so, and about 40% of my time focuses on all the other countries and facets of legal. But legal operations for me is, runs the entire gamut. A big part of what I do is strategy and foundation building, just because of where Belron sits in its maturity level. But I run technology. I run financing. Uh, I help our general counsel, our group general counsel, and all of our regional general counsels with strategy, mission, vision, values type work. Where are we heading? What are our KPIs? How are we building this foundation of where we want to go? And I think now that we've built that foundation, we're really heading into tech and process enablement. Do we have the right people in the right seats?

3:47Do we have the right processes supporting them? How do we bring in technology? I have a really deep love of technology, so that's where I will tend to focus if left alone for too long. But really, it's the gamut of legal operations. I don't manage contracts. I don't negotiate contracts. That is not my sweet spot, but if you need to figure out what's in them, what technology we use, how do we process them, what does it look like when it goes from one step to another, my bread and butter. But it's contracting. It's financial management. It's strategy. It is technology management. It's knowledge and document management. It's community management. It's comms. It's how do we bring all these things together to create a cohesive legal function, and how does legal operations help to become the glue of that? And I think one of my favorite parts of this role is actually that we do get out into the business quite often. Uh, so we recently completed something called Right Task, Right Person.

4:43Do we have the right people focusing on the right things in the right moment? Uh, do we have the right level and the right seniority of person doing the correct task? And had the opportunity then to present that to all of our general managers in the different regions and partner with them to say, "What does it look like to allow your legal department or your legal function within your country to become all that it can be?" Well, it looks like a partnership. Looks like a partnership between legal and the general managers and the leadership. So it's really great to be able to get out into the business, whether it be from an automation perspective, a partnership perspective, or just strategic thinking in the business to help us make sure that legal is acting as the competitive advantage that it can be. No, I think it's a... I don't know, I don't wanna say maybe not unique, but it's a very interesting way of, of kind of looking at everything, right? And I think when we're on here, we're talking about a number of things, but, but having the right people in the right position and, and having the right processes in place, you know, once you have that and, and, and you've built that foundation right, then it is time to look at technology.

5:41And, and then you can bring in some different applications to help support the organization, but, you know, you need to know what issues you're gonna be solving for before you go out there and start to evaluate these pieces of technology. And when we, when we talk about legal ops, I think that there's just a wealth and an overwhelming number of, of pieces of technology that could be- Could be used a-and leveraged, right? And, and, uh, you know, CLM is, is still a huge part of that. That was, you know, a very large buzz, uh, you know, maybe a couple years ago now. Now, it's AI is, is a huge focus. But, you know, I think we wanted to take the conversation, Jessica, is, you know, you've been able to... Obviously, you've, you've been at the organization, you've been at Belron for, for 18 months now, right? You've really been able to entrench yourself inside the organization. And, you know, we'd love to get an understanding of how you're going about helping the organization to evaluate these different tools and applications that you're looking at to solve some of the problems that the team may be running into. Yeah, it's a great question, and I think the focus always has to start with people, which is exactly where I started.

6:41So it was meeting with the team, figuring out what's going well, figuring out their pain points, figuring out the concerns that they had, and then starting to build almost this mind map of where do our opportunities lie and what technology then supports those opportunities. I come from tech, which in most SaaS-based tech companies, very, very contract heavy. It would be silly to not have a CLM or some type of CLM adjacent product. Belron doesn't operate like that. We have contracts, but we are not nearly as contract heavy as a traditional tech company might be. And so for us, it didn't necessarily make start, make sense to start at that CLM route. It makes sense in the moment to say, "Well, what are our challenges? What are we facing? Do we have contracting challenges?" Absolutely. Would we love a CLM at some point? Sure. Does it make sense for where we are from a number of contracts, level of maturity, level of processes, level of templates? Probably not.

7:41And so what we did is we said, "Well, how do we positively impact the contracting journey or the contracting process without going out and spending six plus figures? And how do we do it in a way where we can be agile, where maybe it's not as sticky as some of the other technologies can be, and what does that look like?" And so we actually started with a small group. So we've got a team of 70. We started with about seven, and we said, "How do we positively impact this group?" Because they were our most contract heavy group. And what we realized is they had two major pain points. One was pre-signature redlining, and the other was post-signature metadata extraction. And it took some digging to get there, and it took some really shiny technology coming out and people going, "Oh my gosh, I love it, it's so shiny." And me going, "But does it solve your problem?" And I think that happens a lot in legal teams, is almost everything these days from an AI perspective looks shiny, but what is the thing that you're actually trying to solve?

8:38And thankfully, that question got us back to pre-signature redlining and post-signature metadata extraction. And so we did onboard two technologies, one for pre-signature, one for post-signature, but we almost immediately opted out of the full CLM route because it just didn't make sense for us as an organization. And I mean, that's a contracting perspective that we're looking at in, in that microscope or in that moment, but we kind of did that across the board. What technology makes the most sense for our level of maturity, for our level of budgetary spend that we will allow, and for the individuals that we have within the team? At some point, would we love a wider, more holistic solution? Yes. Does it make sense for our organization now? No. That's very interesting. I love it, like how you, uh, focused. That was like a laser-focused way on how to adopt point solutions, and that was perfect. The redlining was one of the big things, and actually, we have seen that, right?

9:34A lot of the times what we tell our customers is like, "Start with the low-hanging fruit," right? You, you don't have to go with the Ferrari when you just need like a small car, right? And I think that's a really good way on how to start, and that can be like considered as a success case, you know, or maybe a POC. And once you hit certain, let's say, threshold or milestone, then you can adopt that CLM. In your opinion, Jessica, like what would you say, like what needs to happen or, uh, so you can decide, "Okay, we need that CLM"? Is it like contract volume or is it anything else? It's a really great question. So I think for us, it varies based on the organization. For Belron specifically, what we're gonna be looking at is, do we have the right level of maturity? Have we done the necessary homework to show that we're ready for a CLM? Do we have our templates in line? Do we have our playbooks in line? Do we have fall back clauses that make sense?

10:33Do we have a team that's willing to use technology for that? And maybe even more so than willing, do we have a team that wants technology for that? And to your point, does our volume of contracts necessitate it? Belron works in a bit of a way where countries have a lot of autonomy. And so for us, there's also an element of change management. Does it make sense to change what each country legal team is doing and bring them onto one unified system? Can one unified system do all that we want it to do, and can we find something that's good enough? So I think there's a few boxes there that we need to check on the road to becoming ready for CLM, and I think for a long time, as you mentioned, Marc, CLM was a really shiny object, right? It's now been overtaken a bit by AI, but it was so shiny. But I think the hard part was at times it was underestimated how challenging it can be to onboard one and to fully implement it and to implement it successfully. And so legal operations professionals were coming in and going, "We need a CLM," and then running towards that, even though maybe they could have had a quicker win or an easier win or a less expensive win.

11:37And so I think in order to have a CLM and have it be successful, you need to show up with your homework done. And if your homework's not done, there is a very good chance that your implementation is not as successful as it could have been, and I'm not willing to put my legal operations reputation at risk if we are not ready to then do that, and to make life harder on my entire legal team if we're coming to the table, but we're not truly prepared to actually onboard a CLM. And do you think that these two point solutions needs to be integrated so they're not, like, silos? I mean, in one way, redlining, that's, like, on-the-go, right? All negotiations are different. You can use AI in order to maybe put, build playbooks there. But the other one, like the extraction of post signature, is it, like, important for you to integrate with other solutions for... I mean, my guess would be a repository like SharePoint, right? Or something like that. Like, how did you approach that? Yeah, it's a great question, and I think...

12:37I always talk about point solutions in the manner that they're a win for me today, but they're a headache for me tomorrow. Because today, it's like shiny technology, people are happy, we're automating how we're doing things, AI is helping. Yay. Tomorrow I'm like, "Oh, it doesn't actually talk to anything, and now I have to go put in the work to make it talk to things." So it was part of our consideration. Is the quick win impactful enough for the headache that will potentially come? And we decided, yes, it was. We think for now our pre-signature is okay as a standalone. We are building playbooks in it. The technology is not innately sticky. I can pull my playbooks out at any time. I can import and export. So we feel good about that one being on, on a standalone basis because we can kind of, we can get things out of it if we need to. The post signature is much stickier, and we do want it to connect to the things. So what we've done initially is we've set up API connections from DocuSign. So what we're doing is the moment something's signed, we're ingesting it in, it's automatically doing its AI review.

13:38It then has a human in the loop over top to validate all of it. But to your point, Pepe, what we'd love to do at some point is then push that into a SharePoint for safekeeping if need be. Right now, the fact that it sits in DocuSign, and it sits in this additional technology feels sufficient enough. But how easy it is, is it to get out of it? And I don't actually know the question to that at this point. So could there be benefits down the road? Absolutely. Would I love all of my technology to talk? Would I love all of my technology to be integrated? Yes. But for us to get quick wins right now, we're okay with it not being fully connected or integrated at this moment. But it will be a headache at some point, right? No, I think that's a great way to look at things, right? And like you said, right, I mean, it, it might be a headache in the future, but if it's, it's solving the problems that the team is facing now, then, you know, that's something to worry about at a later point in time. And I, I guess when you are looking into the future, are you, is the team starting to, uh, to already look at...

14:36Has this allowed you to maybe find the next challenge that the team is facing and, and what's going to help you solve that challenge? Yes and no. So I'm not sure that onboarding these two technologies specifically called out any other gaps, if you will. But what it did do is open our eyes to how technology can impact the team, and then going back to the team to say, "Okay, we have a little bit of technology. What else benefits you? What else are you still facing challenges with?" And so what we've done is we've actually formed a, a subgroup, a working group, if you will, that focuses just on legal technology. I see a obnoxious amount of legal technology every month, but it's because I love technology, and I want to stay up on the marketplace. We do have a dedicated team, though, uh, a raise your hand team, right? A volunteer team that says, "We want to look at technology. We want to evaluate where the future of technology is headed, and we want to do that with the needs of our organization in mind." And so we recently actually sent something out to say, "Where are your additional pain points? What haven't we solved?"

15:34And then did a specific deep dive into chat wrappers, if you will, or, you know, the Harveys, the Lagoras, the Wordsmiths of the world to say, "Will this make an impact?" So they are taking a very targeted look at technology that makes an impact. I take a very wide look at all legal technology as and when time allows. I think I'm probably at about my hundredth technology in the last 18 months that I've looked at. But even seeing that much, I can't keep pace with the legal ecosystem, which I think makes conversations like this so important because it, it unearths people that are doing all of this technology looking and allows us to connect with them so that we can. But I think one of the main things that we keep coming back to is, outside of contracting or even alongside contracting, workflow automation could make a really incredible impact on our organization, which I think workflow and CLM have just innate elements that are similar. And sometimes you'll find workflow in CLM, and sometimes you'll find CLM-like elements in workflow. But that's probably one of the most important and voluminous things that continues to come up.

16:39Workflow could solve this. Workflow could solve that. Whether it's a standalone workflow or whether it's workflow inside of CLM, it's still something to be seen, but definitely something that keeps coming up for us. Considering all that experience, you know, researching all these different softwares, and with AI, there's an AI for almost everything. What would you say, like, trends and new challenges that legal operation teams will face in the, I wouldn't say five years, maybe in just one year? I think buying technology is probably one of the biggest challenges that legal operations is facing right now, and it's because five, 10 years ago it was buy or build, right? That was it. That was your only choice that you had to make, was buy or build. And then once you decided, say you decided buy, okay, well, then is it point or holistic? The end, right? There's no more decisions to make outside of choosing the technology. Do you buy or build? Is it point or holistic? Well, now you have this element of is there AI or not? Well, if there's AI, do I buy now or do I wait?

17:39Is the buy now, is there enough positive impact or positive momentum or ROI coming out of it that it will make an impact, or do I wait the six months to see what else comes out? I think the technology landscape is changing so rapidly that the choices that exist for legal technology are 10, 20, 30, 40x what they used to be. And because of that, the choice becomes harder. But not only is it just the volume, it's that- My pre-signature and my post-signature now kind of cross in a little bit in certain ways. The chat wrapper that I'm looking at crosses a little bit with my pre-signature, and depending on the chat wrapper you look at, it crosses with my post signature. If I buy a CLM, it crosses with all of those things. I'm not sure there's any one technology that does anything perfectly out of the box. I don't know that there's an A+ technology that exists. There's a lot of A technologies now, but none are perfect, and none will necessarily be perfect for your exact organization because we all have our own needs and we're all such very special legal unicorns.

18:41But how do you buy in the moment with all of that noise, without even considering the fact that for the longest time, legal has been its own special unicorn, and we've always wanted and desired legal specific technology. But now you've got, you know, the Lindys of the world that are not legal specific, but have AI and workflow and the agentic aspect, and I could probably use that and maybe not need a workflow technology. So it's the complexity of the legal ecosystem, if you're not in it every day and thinking through these things and how AI affects it and how it changes it, I think you get left behind pretty quickly and start making what feels like a normal technology decision, but because of our ecosystem right now, is actually a very dated technology system or technology decision. I'm gonna go just buy a standard CLM. I'm gonna go buy a standard e-billing technology. I'm gonna buy a standard, you name it, matter management technology.

19:36If you're not thinking about how AI changes that, how non-legal technology changes it, how from six months from now, the technology you look at will be wildly different, you may very quickly get left behind. Yeah, and I, I mean, I think, you know, when you are evaluating these tools, I think that has to be a huge question that you're, you're asking these organizations, right? Now is, you know, one, how is AI going to affect the application today, but also, what is your roadmap for the next six months to a year, and how does that impact the, the technology in itself, right? Because like you said, everything is changing at, at such a rapid pace these days that, you know, that's going to play a huge part in whether that tool can scale with you or if you're going to outgrow it in twelve months. So I love the perspective, and I think, you know, one thing I wanted to circle back on before we wrap up, Jessica, is, you know, we talked about change management and how you have a bunch of, of different, in your case, right, different countries that are doing the same thing, but probably in different ways. Mm-hmm. And what was it like to roll out two pieces of technology that the team did move forward with? What was it like to roll those out to the different countries, and, and what was the user adoption like there?

20:37Yeah, it's a great question. And to be fair, so the two technologies that we rolled out crossed two countries. Okay. So we weren't crossing all of them, but of the two countries that they crossed, it was taking into consideration time zones, it was taking into consideration ways of working, it was taking into consideration, uh, what user adoption looked like, how familiar they were with tech, how open they were to tech, and we actually had two very different groups, one who is using AI in just the most fantastic ways, and then one that was just getting started and was still a little bit skeptical. And so as we brought those two together, the things that we realized were helpful, at least on a short term basis, was one, scarcity. So we only had seven licenses initially, right? And those seven licenses allowed us to have the conversations of, "There's only so many. If you wanna try it, you gotta get in early and you gotta actually try it." But what we then used was this almost like mentee-mentor, uh, kind of relationship, but it was really, we had this really sophisticated user. How can that sophisticated user support and help the other users to adopt?

21:42It was not immediate. It was not instant. It... I wouldn't say it was necessarily hard, but it took work, right? It took having those conversations. It took setting up those meetings. It took putting parameters in place. It took bringing along our power users and having them train our users that are still getting up and running, and sometimes it took retraining. Like, we're still trying to get full adoption of one of the tools. The other one was, is much easier to get adoption on, but we're still trying to get full adoption on one of the tools. And I think even though it only crosses two countries, what we're looking at is small doses, a roadshow of sorts, and making sure that people know the value. I will say, we started with seven for this one technology and, and that's all that we could get to raise their hand at that point. We then piloted a chat wrapper and had forty-six people raise their hand, which is mass difference, but that's a byproduct of seeing the two technologies that were onboarded, understanding that there's a level of scarcity, understanding that change is coming and that it's positive, but also doing it in small doses. I see a hundred technologies for my legal team to see three.

22:49So making sure that I'm the one that's taking on the burden of the change and all of that that we talked about from the tech ecosystem and making sure that they're seeing the best of the best, the easiest of the best, the providers that are going to work with them in the most direct and, and supportive ways makes it a lot easier to digest technology than if I were to say, "Let's go look at a hundred technologies. You guys are in, right?" And they'd be like, "Please leave now." So it was definitely a process. No, that's, that's great, and, and I think that there's a lot of organizations out there that can probably learn, right, from a number of the things that we've talked about today, but especially that last, that last kind of, those last statements that, that you made r- regarding the, the question that I asked, and I think that's why it was important to, to bring up. But with that said, um, I do wanna wrap up here. I'm sure we could continue talking about this for hours, but this has been a, a great conversation, Jessica.

23:41And if, if folks wanna connect with you and learn more about y- your, whether that be your evolution in- inside of this space or, you know, how have you solved, uh, other challenges in your career, um, where's the best place to do that? LinkedIn, absolutely. Okay. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I will say I'm not the best at checking messages, but I do get around to it, and I would love to connect. I connect with the ecosystem pretty regularly. I love to talk tech. I love to talk AI. Reach out. I am an open book, and I would love to have a conversation. Awesome. Well, thank you, Jessica. We really appreciate the conversation. Absolutely. Thanks for having me. All right. Bye everybody, and thanks 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 years to come.

24:36If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting dot com.