In this talk, Patty Corey shares her path into legal operations and what she's learned along the way. She explains how focusing on good processes, precise data, and teamwork between legal and procurement teams can make contract management smoother. Patty talks about how to clean up data, choose the right metadata fields, and build helpful playbooks that help teams work faster and more accurately. She also discusses how AI tools can help once a strong foundation is in place. Throughout the conversation, Patty highlights a key message: technology alone can't solve every problem; successful legal operations start with transparent processes, good communication, and keeping data organized and up to date.
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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. Well, hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Contract Heroes. Today, joining us from Aspen Aerogels is Patty Khoury. Patty, thank you so much for being here. We're really excited to learn a little bit more about your background and also dig into some interesting topics. But before we do that, we'd love to, to learn a little bit more about how you got into the legal operations space and how you got that title of Legal Op Superhero. Well, thank you for having me. I'm so excited. This is the only second podcast that I've done, so I'm a little bit nervous, but I'm gonna try to shake it off. But, you know, hi, everyone, my name is Patty Khoury. And so yes, I proclaim myself as a Legal Op Superhero just because I've been in the industry for the past seven years, and I really just fell into it.
0:58I originally thought I wanted to go to law school, and really through my journey of just working in different in-house contexts, I really realized that I love process, I love tech, everything to do with people and that integration. So that's kind of why I landed in legal ops, and I've been really enjoying my experience so far being in the industry. So I'm, I'm happy to get into any topics that we wanna discuss. That's awesome, Patty. We're really looking forward to hear about your experience. And at the beginning of the podcast, we were, like, just focused on CLM. Then we started with talking- Yeah... a lot of legal operations, now AI, because it's the new buzzword. Everybody wants to have AI. A lot of people don't know why, but they just wanna have AI in their technology, inside their organization. And now that you mention processes, yes, we will be talking a lot processes in this podcast, in this conversation.
1:52We, we're gonna be talking about how to clean up your data, how to extract some good or best market practices for metadata extraction, AI for redlining. So there's some- Yes... it all has a line. So let's start with the metadata, right? So what would you say is, or would you recommend with only eight core metadata fields rather than dozens? And I wanna know, like, when you're starting a project, of course, the legacy migration is, like, a heavy lifting, of course. We face a lot of sit- situations where customers wanna know everything, right? Yes. Yeah. That, of course, takes a lot of time. And a lot of the times when you wanna use your legacy contracts, there are m- maybe those 20 data points are not as important to be able to take better business decisions. So and all depends on the type of contract, right? It's not the same- Yes... maybe the service agreement, then a financial agreement, you know, a, a loan or whatever.
2:50But in your experience as a Legal Op Superhero, like, what would you say is, like, the best practice in order to decide? Let's start with top three, right? Let's start with baby steps. What would you say would be your top three metadata or data points that you should look for in, in to your agreements? Yeah. So I think to back up, like, when I joined Aspen, like, one of my main tasks was actually really cleaning up our repository, so I'm kind of speaking from, like, that experience and that project. But if I were to answer, like, the first three fields that really come to mind is because I think the first thing that people want is to run a clean expiration report on all of their contracts, right? Because if you have a lot of vendor contracts, for example, or even if you have customer obligations, right, you need to know when they're effective and when they expire. So I would say definitely you want your effective date, you want an expiration date, and I really think you want the contract type so then you're able to run, like, a report against it of, like, okay, how many MSAs do we have that's effective or expired?
3:53I'd also say counterparty as well. You wanna know very quick metric of, okay, we have this company, how many agreements do we have on file? So I started with eight. So those eight that I started with was title, counterparty, effective date, expiration date, the renewal term, so is it fix, fix with conditions, coterminus, perpetual, the notice period, so if you have to give a notice period before you cancel, the contract type, so MSA, NDA, and then contract value. So those are the ones that I started with, but I really wanted to run an expiration report because we didn't have any visibility into the contracts that were expiring. And of course, that means you're gonna overspend on tech you probably don't need or software licenses, equipment, things like that. So I really started with the pain point of what would this report solve if I were to run it. Perfect. And of course, once you have a CLM, there's a lot of data that you wanna have from the beginning, and we like to call it not just contact request, but the intake form, right?
4:53So and all depends, of course, on the internal de- department. It's not the same type of contract for, for procurement and in sales and marketing- Yes... than IT. So, like, how would you, you know, recommend on, let's say, redesign the intake process to ensure new contracts flow cleanly into the repository and to avoid having to do all this extraction again? You know, like- Yes... how do we know, like, those data points are in the intake form? A lot of the times, maybe that information is not part of the contract requester. Maybe it's the contract manager that has more information. Mm-hmm. For example, I like to always t- tell to our customer, maybe from the co- from the intake form, it's really hard to know what's gonna be the start of the agreement date. Yes. So how would you say l- to know... Be- be- because what we always say is, like, to make it as simple as possible, but with the required information, right, so the contract manager can start drafting their, their agreement.
5:53What would be your recommendations there? Yeah. It's definitely a loaded question because it all depends, right? But the way I like to think about intake is that it's really that front door, and you need the details, like, first for the, the attorney really to review the contract, like, if there is an escalation. So I think, like, from that perspective. But I also start with, like, the contract type really. If it's an MSA, an NDA, if it's an HR agreement, I kind of work through it in terms of what is the legal and business requirements. Like, what does the procurement professional need to know? What does a legal team need to know in order to review that contract? And then I think going from the contract type, you really just drill down. So if it's an HR agreement, you're probably gonna wanna know is it for staffing or consulting purposes, right? Is there going to be PII that's gonna be involved? So you're gonna ask questions really based on that contract type, or if it's, you know, a vendor agreement or a customer agreement. So that's a very simple way, I think, of looking at it.
6:51It's certainly not simple when you're going through the process, but I literally sat with, like, the attorneys, and I said, "Okay, for MSAs, what are we looking for? What are the details that we need?" And then from there, you're gonna figure out, like, okay, there's gonna be approvals based on those, right? So if I have a question that says, "Is this an HR contract that's for staffing and consulting services?" And it clicks yes, then most likely an approval is gonna have to be fired to the HR attorney, right? So I really think it's a, it's a big web that you have to kind of untangle. But first you need to work an Excel spreadsheet and figure out, okay, based on contract type, what is the information we need for each party that may touch the agreement, and then how are approvals gonna flow from there? That's how I like to think about it. Yeah, no, I, I think that's a great way to kind of start that process, too, right, and, and by contract type. And I, I, you know, I guess my next question is when we look at, at these intake processes, right, did the team start with a, a specific type of agreement for a reason or, or did you import all of the agreement types right out of the gate, right?
7:56Yeah. So it, it's interesting situation 'cause I kind of came into a situation where it was a failed system, and it was a turnaround. So I had a system, there were things that were built out, and I had to kind of tease, like, tease out what should I keep, what should I discard, what should be rebuilt really. But I think what... The way I thought about it is like, so when we had our intake forms, we really needed to overhaul our NDA process because when I roughly looked at the statistics of what I could pull based on the, the out-of-the-box AI fields that we had in our CLM system, 40% of our NDAs were on our paper. So 60% were, you know, counterparty paper, which I'm like, "That's unacceptable. Our attorney should not be reviewing this many NDAs." So I knew from that perspective I needed to somehow streamline this process. So it certainly was an overhaul of the, the field, but it also was a bigger change management project in instituting one NDA, which really is a standardized template, well-respected, I think, in the legal community and many businesses that use it.
8:59And so we implemented that, and that streamlined things tremendously. We went from 40% to 85% in a few months, and now that's pretty consistent across the board. So it really was looking at, okay, what's a quick win? What is a real need that we can really make a difference in what attorneys are reviewing? And so we really started with NDAs first. Yeah. That's a great place to start, right? And that's where most, I think most organizations should be starting just because of the volume, right? Let's automate that process. And like you said, using, you know, some, one NDA or, or a, another more automated NDA that's already kind of mutually beneficial is a great place to start and do that. And so I wanna kind of switch gears just a little bit and talk about something else that, that I think is an important part of these systems, right? And that's kind of creating a playbook for your team to leverage, right? And I guess kind of the same question there. How did you start? Where did you start to build that playbook? Yeah.
9:53So this is also a, a huge project, so I really enjoyed it, like, so much, and I think if anyone undertakes it, it's hard, but it, it's so worth it, so I wanna say that. But first we started with our vendor playbook because we just found that, you know, most of our contracts are in vendor paper anyways. Our procurement professionals are in the tool just as much as legal is, so we were like, "Let's start with, like, a vendor playbook." And so we really worked it out again by going by contract type. So if it's MSAs, if it's SOWs, if it's this type of agreement, we're then gonna have, you know, the agreement type and then what is the threshold of when procurement reviews versus when it needs to be escalated to legal. And so the threshold could be a dollar amount. So for example, if events contracts are under 25,000, we are fine for the procurement professionals to review and send for signature as long as, let's say, it doesn't have, I don't know, like, let's say, IP involved or something like that, right? So you're setting very clear boundaries within the thresholds, and then you're having some fallback positions as well based on the contract type.
10:59So I like to think of it in, like, three columns and really just starting working with your procurement people and having calls with attorneys to figure out what is our preferred stance, do we have a fallback position, what's the threshold that we're comfortable with? And now also taking into, into consideration those playbooks and how you can use them as guidance to, I like to call it, to a self-service contracting department- Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm... about, like, procurement, right? Because of course- Yeah... you don't want to involve legal in each NDA. That's just a waste of time. That should be something that can be agreed and approved and signed in just couple of hours, maybe one or two days, right? But when we're talking about more complex contracts, like you said, MSAs, maybe SOWs, where you need to have s- at least a lot of experience on what type of products or, or services you're buying, how have you used AI for this specific type of situation? And I think this will be, like, a good example, right?
12:00Because- A lot of people right now, they do wanna have AI, but they just still don't know how to use it, and I think this is a good example on how people can know some, couple of ways on how they, they can use these tools. Yeah, so y- it's a great segue because I always say, if you're gonna use AI, you need to know the why, why you're doing it, right? And if you're trying to streamline, you know, your, your redlining and your negotiation process, like the playbook is really the first place to start. So if you don't have a playbook, I think it's too early to think about a redline AI tool for your negotiation. So really start with the playbook, and I always say like a minimum viable playbook, so you don't have to build out every single contract type, like all at once. Maybe you, you take the highest volume. Maybe it's, okay, here's the highest volume, or if the more complex agreements you wanna start with, like you make that determination and build a minimal, minimum viable playbook, just like a, you know, an MVP, you know, a minimum viable product that companies do, right?
13:05And they launch to the customers. And, you know, it's not gonna be their, their end result, but it's something to start with, right? To test the waters. I like to think of it like that. So start with a playbook that's maybe on one contract type, and then you can maybe think about playing around with AI, and, and of course, that's a whole other discussion on what tool do you select and what's the lift involved with implementation, but that's how I like to think about it. No, and I think it's how I think we all should be looking at, you know, kind of every part of, of a project, right? It's difficult when you look at this, whether you're implementing a piece of technology or new processes and, and you try to do like a big bang, right? And I, I don't like the saying, but, you know, when people try to boil the ocean, right? And I think that's just such a, a good point is, you know, get some quick wins, get things stood up, right? Get that user experience that people are gonna be excited about and happy about, and then continue to build on that in, in separate phases.
13:58That's what we always say on the show and, and how we work with most of our customers. So Patty, I wanna... a couple more questions j- but, but something that we kind of ask all of our guests, right, is w- what do you see as maybe some misconceptions in the, whether that be the, the legal op space when it comes to CLM, what are, what are your thoughts there? Yeah, I think, I mean, I think everyone thinks that tech is gonna solve the problem. That's a huge thing. I really think it magnifies problems, that if you just select technology and you're trying to stand it up, it's not gonna fix your problems. I really like to think of, you know, technology, and if we think about CLM, like a mirror. If you stare at it, you know, it's gonna reflect back all of your issues to you, right? If you don't fix your processes first, you know, before you're thinking about selecting tech and you don't know your reasons why, that you're selecting a certain tool, then the process is just, it's gonna get even more chaotic. It's gonna stress out, you know, teams even more. It's gonna lead to a failed implementation and, and I kind of walked into that situation myself. It was failed, and it needed a turnaround.
15:01So I think that's one, like, big misconception, and I also think another one is that you have to do everything all at once. So I think exactly what you said, Marc, that you, you wanna stand up everything really quickly because you wanna show value. I think sometimes a lot of GCs are under a lot of pressure to implement, you know, a CLM tool. You know, people want to have access to their contracts, they want a smooth experience, and it comes from a good intention, right? Like, you want to do the best you can for the business, but it's not gonna happen all overnight, and it is going to take some serious work of understanding your process first. So those are the two things I see, but there's so many things. Like, we could have, like, a two-hour conversation just on misconceptions for sure. Yeah, for sure. It's like, it's not a magic wand that is just going to solve all your problems. There's a lot of homework to do pre-hiring or purchasing a new CLM. So Patty, I think now that we're talking about AI and also the processes, intake forms, I would say that, at least for my conclusion, is that you can have all of that type of technologies, but the thing is, like, what's the most important is to have your data structured, right?
16:13Because otherwise, it's gonna be, like, really hard, even if you're using the $1 million AI im- implementation project. It's gonna be really hard for the tool to understand your agreements, right? So even when it's maybe, like, the first step, I would say that's the most important one, to have a really well-organized repository. And considering that you rescued your repository- ... like, can you tell us a little bit, and just to close this conversation, what would be your two takeaways on how to do this, and what, what would you like to pass along to our audience? Yeah, I think it's first starting with that don't try to capture every piece of data. Like, it's great that these tools can allow us to capture so much, but you need to figure out what is the purpose behind the data. In our case, it's like we needed to run a clean expiration report. We needed that desperately. We needed to go out and get our procurement team canceling contracts, right, that we weren't using.
17:15And I'm, I'm happy to report that after we were able to have the expiration report over, you know, a six-month period, you know, we uncovered about a half a million dollars in potential savings, just because we have visibility now, right? So think about the reasons why you're doing this cleanup. Is it you really want this expiration report? How are we gonna get there? What data fields are going to allow us to run it very cleanly, and how we can automate the report? And I also will say that cleanup in a repository is a habit. It, maintenance is a strategy. Don't just think that because it's done, it means it's absolutely done. You need to continuously look at the repository, as it can make mistakes if, especially if you have a- any AI capabilities in your CLM tool. It can make mistakes, so take some time every single week and go through a folder.
18:05Or if you're manually filing contracts, you know, to verify certain fields, make sure that you're doing that, staying on top of it, and looking at the fields and verifying them, because it is really hard to clean it up, but it's very easy to allow it to get messy again. So maintenance is a strategy. That's really, like, the main point there. I think that's great, and I think these are some, some really great takeaways, Patty, right? Because you've been through this before, and you've seen what can happen if, if you try to do too many things at once. And, you know, I think that was the kind of the situation that you came into, and you really had to dig the team out of, of that situation. So I mean, it's an amazing thing. I think a lot of organizations out there can probably relate, and I, I think everything that we talked about today are some, some great points and takeaways for folks that are, are probably in, in similar shoes. So, so thank you so much for being with us today. Yeah, thank you for having me, and I hope that this helps anyone who is really in a dumpster fire right now and is trying to figure it out. Awesome. Well, thanks, thanks again, and thanks everybody for listening to another episode of Contract Heroes. This episode of the Contract Heroes is sponsored by Koho Consulting.
19:06Koho 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. If you'd like to learn more about Koho, visit their website at C-O-H-O consulting dot com.