Picture a crucial contract trapped in a digital abyss, while stakeholders scramble to review it one after another, causing delays, errors, and missed opportunities. Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is the knight in shining armor. With automation, collaboration, and visibility, CLM transforms your procurement process into a streamlined powerhouse. Say goodbye to lost contracts and endless paperwork. Embrace CLM to unlock efficiency, compliance, and accelerated business growth. It's time to reclaim control over your contracts and triumph over the chaos.
In this episode of the Contract Heroes Podcast, we are thrilled to sit down with Sol Brody. Sol is the Executive Director, Legal Operations at Boeing. The Boeing Company, along with its affiliated companies, engages in the global design, development, manufacturing, sales, servicing, and support of commercial jetliners, military aircraft, satellites, missile defense systems, human space flight initiatives, as well as launch systems and services.
During our conversation with Sol, we discussed contract management challenges within a large organization and the implementation of a CLM solution at Boeing. Sol talks about his role and emphasizes the importance of collaboration and efficiency in contract management processes. We also discuss the ownership of contracts at Boeing and the challenges faced in finding the right workflow solution. Sol shares his experience fitting into his role and working in such a large organization. Our conversation also touches on key performance indicators (KPIs), automation, compliance reporting, and building a legal operations team. Sol suggests identifying pain points within the organization and involving internal business partners to advocate for its necessity and help make a compelling case to the C-suite.
WHAT WE DISCUSS:
[00:30] - Sol’s perspective about the conference and how it has changed since his first visit in 2019
[01:24] - Ownership of contracts at Boeing and Sol’s role in assisting attorneys with a structured approach
[02:48] - The implementation of a CLM solution at Boeing
[04:14] - Challenges faced during the implementation of the CLM solution at Boeing
[06:06] - The role of CLM solution in addressing pain points at Boeing
[07:44] - Sol’s experience of transitioning from one company to another
[10:47] - Key performance indicators (KPIs) for legal operations during the post-signature phase of the contract lifecycle
[12:44] - Opportunities for automation in compliance reporting
[15:13] - Building a legal operations team and gaining support from the C-suite
NOTABLE QUOTES:
[00:06:07] - “I think part of it, it's just a lot of white space in between. We use a lot of emails. And so just imagine an email goes into a procurement agent, it sits for a couple of days until someone gets it. It then needs to work through the process. There's no less than ten other functions that need to weigh in on whether there's some element of privacy or global trade or insurance or some other risk that we're trying to mitigate. That has to be worked many times in serially rather than parallel.” - Sol
[00:13:52] “Legal doesn't own the policy, we should not be stepping into that white space to tell you what the policy is supposed to mean, that's for the policy owner to do. So it's really about how does the right work get to legal, how do we deflect work that makes sense upstream either to the policy owner or to the requester, or that we can put into some sort of knowledge bank that people can go to and get a quick answer to.” - Sol
USEFUL RESOURCES & LINKS:
Episode transcript
Read the full transcript
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. Saul, thanks so much for joining us. Um, you know, it, it's been a crazy couple of days here. I'm, I'm sure that you've been walking the trade floor a little too much. Um, so thanks for sitting down with us. But first off, let me ask you this. What, what do you think? Is this your first time coming to CLOC? No. Thank, thank you for having me on the, on the podcast. This is my second time. Uh, I came, uh, in 2019 pre-pandemic, that was the first. This is my second. Okay. So, uh, how has it changed since the first time you were here? Um, surprisingly- Not at all?... it hasn't changed that much. Not, not at all? Not r- not really. I mean, it, I think the, the layout's the same. Um, I don't remember the walking being so much. But, uh, I could always use getting the steps in.
0:57Before this, we were talking about kind of the, the legal space at, at Boeing, and you were talking about how you, you don't own the contracts there, right? You're just kind of a part of the process. So I, I know you've only been there for a handful of months, but how is that laid out? D- does, uh, does a team own the contracts, or is it just a, an enterprise-wide kind of focus where everybody owns their, their own contracts? Each of the businesses themselves own, uh, the contract relationship, whether it's on the buy or the sell side. Um, and then there's a corporate function that's f- responsible for indirect supply chain, and that's really where I've started, um, having only come to Boeing in the last six months. I was trying to assist our, our attorneys with a more structured approach to the receipt tracking, monitoring, mining of the contracts coming into them from the indirect supply chain, recognizing that we're only one element it, of it, meaning that there's not only attorneys, but we also have privacy professionals, uh, global trade professionals, uh, other parts of the, the long global compliance organization that play a role. When we sat down to, to map it out, we not only invited those elements to the workshop, but we also invited the, uh, indirect supply chain as well as the contracts and risk management team, which is another team that, that owns the pro formas, so that everyone is aligned because it's really important to understand, or it was important for me, that the tail wa- wasn't wagging the dog.
2:31It's interesting that, you know, you, you've sat down and kind of mapped that out. So did you map that out internally before you started looking at CLMs, or was that kind of the process once you had, had picked a solution and you moved forward and you started mapping that out once, once you started implementing the solution? As far as I understand it, uh, Boeing procured the CLM solution many years before- Okay... I got there, and there's one business that has been implementing it. As we sat down map- mapping out what the, what the process was for the indirect, uh, supply chain, we were looking at one potential, uh, workflow solution. But as we launched the workflow, as we invited the, the team that implemented the CLM solution for the commercial business, we realized that whatever we were looking at originally probably wasn't ideal because we'd have to do a two-step implementation. And the team was very adamant, and I have to agree, that what was the purpose of putting in place a temporary structured workflow when at the end of the day we were looking to do a, a, a much broader end-to-end solution.
3:40So you guys just, uh, decided to jump in the deep end and, and kind of really try to implement everything all at once? Uh, as I said, most of it's already been im- Okay. Well, so the commercial side has implemented it. They have not fully implemented it in a way in which the business legal attorneys are engaging in the platform yet, and we're looking to leverage their, meaning the, the IT and the, the commercial, um, contracts team's experience and lessons learned, as we go ahead and try and eat the whole elephant from an indirect- Yeah... supply chain standpoint. Okay. So there was a, a little bit of a phased approach there- Correct... you know, went out, went out with other teams first. And I mean, what would you say that some of the biggest challenges that, that you're facing, maybe not just with the implementation, just in general, that, that you see on a day-to-day basis? W- what does that kind of entail? Well, I think part of it is that there's a lot to do.
4:32Um, and so it's really working with people and prioritizing, uh, the initiatives that we have with the limited resources, whether those are people or, or dollars. Um, and it's making sure that there's this strong alignment, not only across the, the functional teams for whatever process we're looking at, but also with IT because they're responsible for budgeting, implementation, uh, integrations. And so there's a lot of moving pieces, and it's really just learning the organization. I spent 12 years at my prior company. I knew most of the players. I could go straight to them, uh, describe what I was trying to do, understand how the bureaucracy works. Part of it is just learning, uh, and networking and, and, and gaining that, uh, that two-way trust between, uh, my colleagues. Yeah. Right. I really like how we just kick off with this, uh, uh, with this chat, Saul, and when you said that the contracts are not owned by legal, right?
5:31So we, we've seen that actually with, with, with a lot of, of our customers and, and also looking at the focus that a l- a lot of CLM vendors are doing, uh, regarding how other stakeholders inside the company, such as procurement, for example, or, uh, supply chain or, or even sales, right? So which are, like, the main pain points that you see, I mean, besides inside the legal team, uh, in the other, uh, commercial departments, and how do you think those can be solved using a CLM solution? Well, I think part of it's just a lot of white space in between. We use a lot of emails. Right. And so just imagine an email goes into a procurement agent- It sits for a couple days until someone gets it. It then needs to w- work through the process.
6:22There's no, no less than 10 dif- other functions that need to weigh in on whether or not, uh, there's some element of privacy or global trade or insurance or some other risk that we're trying to mitigate. That has to be worked, many times, uh, in, in serially rather than parallel. Uh, eventually it will get to legal, may be or may not, uh, have questions. It will go back and forth on email, lots of white space, not a lot of transparency in the process. Version control can be challenging at times. I think there's a myriad of challenges when you have an unstructured approach and email is your process. I mean, especially at such a large company, right? There's, there's a lot of different departments, there's a lot of moving parts in, in an organization like, like Boeing. And, you know, I, I'm just curious to hear your perspective, and I think maybe our listeners might be too, about moving from, you know, you were at a company in this space, right, and you moved over to a new corporation.
7:19So you were saying how it's been, maybe not difficult, but just probably time-consuming to understand how y- your role plays into that, that corporation. So, I mean, how have you incorporated yourself in trying to interact with other people? And, um, are a lot of people virtual still, and you're, you know, trying to meet with them? How has it been fitting into the new role and, and trying to, to work in the new organization? Well, I, you know, I'm blessed to have a chief legal officer and, uh, and a vice president whose, you know, direction to me at the beginning was take the first six months and really learn the organization, meet the people. And so I had the chance to go around the company, eight major sites, talk to 350 plus, uh, attorneys, paralegals, support staff, non-legal professionals, and really start understanding what the pain points were, meeting people face to face, um, in most instances. So I've had the opportunity to really take a step back and look at it holistically and try and understand, okay, where, where are some of the low-hanging fruit that we can go and try and attack quickly, but also at the same time, how do those things hang off of a larger strategy, a lar- larger vision as we try and modernize and, and move ourselves forward.
8:34And, and what are those low-hanging fruits? Well, I think some of that is just workflows that we can, we can put in place. Uh, normalization with IT in terms of budgeting. As an organization, I don't think this is di- this is too different than other large companies. Uh, the law and global compliance organization is fairly new. You're... We're, we're a Frankenstein of different organizations that were pulled and shoved together because of the needs, uh, to, to, to mitigate risk and the, and the legal pressures at that time. And now taking the time to say, "Okay, that was the right decision to make. How do we now optimize the organization? Where do we see that it would be beneficial to have, uh, some sort of cord up capability? Where does it make sense where there's coordination and, uh, collaboration?
9:24And where should the practice areas or the, or the, and the subject matter experts really just be able to engage with their, their clients, wi- with as minimum amount of administrative pressure upon them as possible?" My job's solely to make them better. How can they be effective and efficient, and at the end of the day, go home just a little bit happier? That's a good one. Right. And, and I think, like, a lot of those, uh, low-hanging fruits comes... I mean, it depends on what part of the contract life cycle process, right? We were just talking about, like, there's a lot of email going on, especially on the contract request phase. Mm-hmm. So maybe, like, a automatic and dy- dynamic intake form, depending on the type of contract, will be, like, a solution in order to save time, right? In, in- instead of just writing an email requesting a contract, and that's it, right? And, uh...
10:18But thinking about, like, now post-signature phase, like, do you see any, uh, maybe, uh, important KPIs that, uh, legal ops needs to have, like, very clear that it's going to be useful for the, uh, CLO, or maybe for the VP of legal, or that, that they usually have to report to maybe finance teams, right? Like, ca- ca- can you give us, like, some, some examples of, uh, o- of some KPIs that, that can be useful? Well, KPIs that are useful is how close are we to budget, uh, for outside counsel, and we partner very heavily with finance. They do a fabulous job. Knowing my prior company, a lot of the work had to be done by the legal operations team. It's great to have a partner in finance who's really on top of it, really can predict- Yeah... and project. You know, working with HR in terms of, uh, resourcing, where do we have gaps, uh, where do we need to bring in, uh, headcount, where do we have headcount pressures, how do we make sure that all our gaps, uh, from a legal and compliance, uh, perspective are, uh, carefully, um, analyzed and, um, the right people are put in the right places.
11:27Uh, I have not been able to implement as many KPIs as I'd want, uh, particularly around, uh, law firm spend. I think there's a real, uh, opportunity to understand how we're staffing our, our cases, and where do we really find efficiency, not from a cost perspective, but from a value perspective. Right. And sometimes it may be a cost play, but it's really about how quickly can we get to the right result with quality. Right. And- Let me change it, uh, a little bit, because we've seen a lot of s- well, not CLMs. We, we can talk about, we, we can keep talking about automation, right? Like business process managers. Like, you just, like, built a lot of workflows. And, and we've seen a lot, uh, of those implementation trying to tackle, uh, manual work for compliance purposes, you know? And now the, the lot of companies are very, uh, worried about getting certified, like being ESG, you know?
12:26Like, do you see any opportunities for, uh, maybe not just consulting firms, but for, uh, vendors that are looking to, uh, automate or to make this type of compliance reports, uh, easily for the compliant team or for the, or for the legal team? I always say there's opportunities for automation. It's really trying to understand what, how the companies work and where the data comes from. I mean, ESG's a perfect example. Unless you have some sort of coordinating function, it's really hard to get at all the right data necessary for reporting, and each company may report it slightly differently. So something that's highly configurable, something that would create the dashboard that matches the, um, the commitments that the, the company's made to the board or to the street, I think is, is really important. And it's not always about automation, too. I think- Right... low-hanging fruit, for example, looking at the integrated supply chain, there's some steps that we can do before we even automate.
13:26So part of my, uh, vision or, or discussion is, how do you lower the volume coming through and raise the difficulty of the stuff coming to legal? So it's a funnel. Right. And so some of those are checklists, whether you're working with an HR professional that says, "This is decis- decision tree you need to come down. If you get to point A and you haven't talked to compensation, for example, don't come to legal." Or if there's a policy out there, go read the policy. Legal doesn't own the policy. We should not be stepping into that white space to tell you what the policy is supposed to mean. That's for the policy owner to do. So it's really about, how does the right work get to legal? How do we deflect work that makes sense upstream, either to the policy owner, uh, or to the, the, the requester? Or that we can put into some sort of knowledge bank that people can go to and get a quick answer to, but to be careful that we're not replacing good legal advice with some sort of wiki, 'cause that's not gonna work.
14:26So one last question, Saul, and so we've been talking a lot with few in-house, well, a lot of in-house departments that they still, let's call it, operate in a traditional way. They don't have, like, a legal operation team inside, uh, their organization. And a lot of general counsel are trying to make, like, a business case, so, so, so they can present to maybe the CFO or, or to the CEO, right, on how having a legal operations team can help the company. What would you recommend to those general counsels that are, like, trying to build, uh, their own legal operations team, and how it would make sense for, uh, uh, somebody inside the financial team, for example? Well, I think you have to step back and, and look at what the work is that your attorneys are doing. Look for pain points that your, your client and your internal business partners might have.
15:23Your internal business partners can your big- be your biggest advocates- Right... in supporting the general counsel, particularly if they say, you know, "I keep on submitting the contracts, and it takes forever to get them," or, "It's gets routed the wrong way," or finance is saying, "I'm not hitting my, my budget," right? These are aspects of work that you really don't want an attorney to be doing, in my opinion, unless they're an attorney that, that wants to go into business operations, 'cause business operations takes a, a different, a different form. You want your attorneys to be thinking about legal matters and applying... You know, they're highly paid people to do really complex work. And so, uh, you have to ask a CEO who says, "Well, yeah, that, that, it makes sense to have an attorney do that." I, I don't think there's many CEOs out there that will do that. And then there's also benchmarking data. Gartner has information, ACC, Clock. There's lots of other, other people in the industry to go talk to and find ways to, uh, sell the message to the C-suite.
16:24Yeah, and I think that's what we're seeing, right, is it, you know, whatever you're implementing, any legal tech, you know, legal tech, it, it, it shouldn't be just for legal. It should be for everybody, and you need to get those other departments involved so you, you, you, you have to have their buy-in. You know, your, your project's probably not gonna work out if you implement something just for your department and then try to bring in those business processes later. So it's definitely what we talk about all the time, so. Saul, I appreciate the conversation. This has been awesome. Thanks for joining us. Well, thank you very much for the invitation. All right. 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. If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting dot com.