LinkedIn Live: Reducing Resistance In Legal Operations with Jenn McCarron

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. So Jen, this is going to be a really good one. This is our first time. I mean, we've done some live recordings, but then we edit it, and then we put it on the podcast, but this is going to be, our first one is going to be a webinar. So it's awesome to have you on the show. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. Finally I'm on Contract Heroes. I've only listened to you guys for a few years now. And I've only ignored, like, your first three requests. But not 'cause I don't love you. I'm just, I'm so busy I, I can't get to them all. But I'm so- time has brought us together now. What will, what should we talk about? So there's a lot of things that we can talk about. I mean, legal ops is one of the main- Legal ops... topic as always, like, like always.

0:57And I think all the planets are aligning, because I was just listening- Yes... to your last episode on the Clock Talks podcast, where you were talking with Carolyn Hale, and you were- Oh, yeah... talking a lot about the adoption and education of people, about not just tools, because there's a very, you know, common confusion that whenever people think about legal ops, they only think about technology, and that's a big mistake. Yeah. They're just like, "Implement a tech tool. I'm done, bye." It's like no, the journey- No... starts now. Exactly. So there's a lot of things that we gotta go here. And, uh, for the people that still don't know Jen, uh, she's a CLOC board member, host of the Clock Tech podcast, and director of legal ops and tech at Netflix. So, uh, with that said, let's kick off with our conversation, Jen. Uh, I mean, you being part of different companies, technology companies, I mean- Yeah...

1:53I can imagine, like, especially, like, companies like, you know, Spotify and Netflix, I mean, these companies should go, like, super fast with everything. And, you know, like, legal ops adoption, if you want to say it like that, or education, might be little bit complicated, especially when you're working with the old school lawyers. So, like, in your experience, like, how, how does that works? And, like, and can you talk, uh, also a little bit about your background too? Yeah. It works... Sometimes at Netflix, a few of us joke, me and the engineers joke, that the way is ready, fire, aim. Not ready, aim, fire. Ready, fire, aim. So places like Netflix and Spotify are moving so fast, and it's so info dense that you don't even know up from down when you're getting used to that when you first join, and you just have to start making stuff or building stuff and/or teaching. If you're launching a tech tool, which a lot of us are in legal ops and legal tech, you just have to, like, take your best guess and go live, and then s- try to stitch the people to it.

3:03So it's extreme speed, and I, I just told someone earlier today that I'm, uh, I'm at Netflix now five years. Like, what an amazing milestone to reflect on. And it, I, it might be 11 years of information, and, like, training and learning, and succeeding and failing and learning. And Spotify felt like that. I was there a year and a half, and it felt like four years of work and information. And then Cisco, I was there before that for something like five years. Cisco moved a lot slower and, but had a lot more tech in place, 'cause they were first in the space in the 2000s, early 2010s, with legal ops solutions that they built themselves, 'cause there was no big SaaS market like we know now. So in the slowness, I had a lot of space to create, and they let me be creative with training videos, which is a bit of our theme of discussion today.

3:59And yeah, before that, I was at a startup, half legal ops-ing, half touring as a musician. Before that I was a musician touring for a living, which means I had 97 side jobs. And, and five roommates, and there was a feral cat as a roommate, number six. And, like, it was, it was just a time of youth and my creative career. And, uh, yeah. And so, I mean, I just kinda got back into... I got into this work via temping, 'cause I don't wait tables. As a musician, I'm not waiting tables. So I temped, and it kinda turned into a, "Hey, you're kinda good at tech. Like, you're a little bit more than an office manager." And, uh, they pulled me into legal, and they were like, "Just do the tech," and everything was SharePoint. And I was like, "Fring, ring, ring," and then just fixing it all in, uh, uh, very quickly. And they were like, "You should work here." So I did. I just followed it, and that, that's 10 years.

4:59That whole c- like, temp placement to now is the 10-year journey. Wow. Wow. That's quite the 10 years. It's been quite the 10 years. The industry, as you, we all are in it together, has come up in the exact timeframe that I came up through that tunnel of opportunities. So it's like right place, right time, and I feel like I surfed the wave of all, of learning in this industry. And now, now it's, like, a thing, I think, we're now saying. Is that what we're saying now? 10 years ago, I was like, we were like, "What do we call this?" Nobody knew. It was legal technology or legal innovation, and then it was ops. Yeah. And ops encompasses even the tech piece now. It's like, cool. Right. Yeah. Yeah, and- Yeah, so that's the short story of it. Well, I mean, there's a lot of back there.

5:51Uh, well, for the people that wanna listen to a little bit of the Clock Talk podcast, I just put the links on the LinkedIn comments- ... so you can listen to it. There's one of the... Well, there, there's a lot of episodes. I, I, I think you're, like, over 50-something episodes already. Yeah, one of the- One of the wa- 50-plus... yeah. That's, that's, that's amazing. There's a lot of really great stories, and there's one, uh, that I was listening to it couple weeks ago with Steve Harmon, where you were back on Cisco. Yeah. And it was, and it was great, right? Because you were talking about, like, how you started with this, how you were working with Steve. Yeah. I had a, uh, the chance to, to talk with him at Clock, uh, last May. He, he's amazing. And then you were talking about the videos, and that's how I thought about the idea, because with a lot of the, you know, innovation and technology and legal ops, people forget about, okay, we have everything. We got the better, the best consulting, the best implementers. But once you go live, and you gotta e- educate the people because it, there, it's not just tools. It's new processes, right? It's new requirements.

6:58And I mean, myself, you told me it was a big mistake to send like, you know, huge pages, especially for people with... It's, it's, it's just like, you know, uh, bored about reading contracts, and then if you send them like- Oh... 15 pages manuals on, on how to use the system, they're just gonna hate you. No. And videos, I thought about that's the best idea. Yeah. And, and like s- if you send them an FAQ, they're just gonna come ask you that live. I learned that at Cisco, because I was the knowledge management program manager, and so I owned all the knowledge products. I owned all the websites, the intranets, the portals that we had, all the FAQs, links to tools, everything, and I inherited that project from someone else. And I looked, it was 20, it was 2,000 web pages. Wow. And I was like, I was like, "Are you FK? No one's gonna read this stuff. Nobody's reading the FAQ.

7:50Just because you made a list of all the questions ever asked, ever, you think a lawyer's gonna sit there and Control + F their way through it? No. They're gonna ping me 'cause they know they can get a quick answer from me, 'cause I'm, like, on every platform ever, always." I have five chat windows up right now, just I'm always- ... on with- when I wanna be on. And we s- I was challenged to cut through all the noise and create one training video as an alternative way to teach people versus slides or classroom training or FAQs or documentation. And so I started making videos there, but like I, I, I... Did I tell you guys this? Or I told Steve, or I wrote it in the post on LinkedIn recently. When they told me I had to make a video, I was, like, resistant and mad. I was like, "Video? This is a corporate job. I'm taking a break from creativity." "What do you mean a video?"

8:45And they're like, "An instructional video," and they showed me my friend Todd's video on how to use a video camera and set up video cameras for your work meetings. And I was like, eye roll. But sometimes I'm just, like, a teenager girl forever, like- ... I'm just, like, I just eye roll 'cause 15 forever. Um- But I, I made the video, and it, the first one really did suck. I'm here to tell you guys, it sucked, so. And you, I did not send you samples of the first video. But you gotta learn from your, from, from those setbacks. I'm not gonna say fail, but just, like, setbacks perhaps. Yeah. 'Cause you learn the most. I- i- if you want to. And, like, this is the key. Like, this is why I like places right now, like Spotify and Netflix, 'cause all you're doing is running into walls. And then your, like, face hurts, and you're like, "What just happened?" And it, and the people that survive in these kinds of places and thrive are the ones who are like, well, they wanna study the setback and the learning and the failure.

9:42So I watched my video back, and I was like, "This sucks so bad. I'm uncomfortable listening to myself. Why?" And I s- and I stuck in it, and I'm, I can hear myself speak in a video and not hate that. I got trained in that in music, being in music studios. You get over how your voice sounds very quickly, and you learn how to use it as an instrument. With 9,000 vocal takes into a studio room where there's 12 people sitting and judging you, it's horrifying. And after the 8,000th take, you're like, "I don't even care what they think. Did we get it?" So it taught me to not judge the creative process so much, and the early drafts, you need those to get to others. And I looked at my first video, and I was like, "Sound happy." I wrote this down for myself. I wrote, "Next time I record one of these, I do the voiceover, smile the whole time." I'm alone in a cubicle in my office at Cisco. I'm like, just sit there and be like, "Welcome to the Friday Minute.

10:45I'm Jen McCairn," versus, "Welcome to the Friday Minute. I'm Jen McCairn." And that, that's a huge difference in how people respond to what is coming their way in the video. People respond more to audio, you guys, than video. So, like, make sure your tone was good, all of that, like, just these things I've picked up along the way. And then by the time I left Cisco, I made 50-plus videos. F- between 50 and 60, and I was in love with the process, so much so that I all, I got recruited in Cisco to be a part of, like, a marketing video team. Wow. So Jen, was there a- anything in between, right? The, the mountains of texts that they were trying to send people to for, uh, to learn, a- and then the videos, was there anything in between there? Or, or, or was that the jump and the light bulb went on, you know, immediately with, with the team and said, "Hey, you know, this, obviously this isn't working. We're not getting user adoption this way.

11:43You know, let's try something else"? And it was immediate, the jump to video. Yeah, the in between was your typical corporate stuff we see attached to all tools: a help guide, a help desk, documentation, FAQs. Yeah. And, and classroom training and/or they called it, like, VOD training, and maybe they still call it that. Like, sometimes people will, on a recorded Zoom call, a recorded WebEx, a recorded Google Meet, you're presenting and you talk into your computer and record that, and it's like semi-classroom with your slides. V- voice on demand, video on demand. So there were a few of those, but the leap I took was absurd. It's absurd, and I, and sometimes it's like, how did Cisco make the business case to keep me on making videos? And we would chop that up and try to make a business case. And I think I, uh, maybe in the post I wrote, like, one of my videos had 100,000 views. That's a lot for a company, you guys. Wow. Yeah. It's a lot for everything, I, I, I would say. Yeah. Yeah. So that's...

12:50And then if you do the legal ops math that we all do, that's 100,000... Say it's a one-minute video on how to send something into the approval tool, 'cause that's what it was. The company-wide approval tool. Need anything approved, you go to this engine that Steve Harmon and team built- Mm... before Tap and before Checkbox and they all existed. That team built one internally with engineers company-wide. So say 70,000 times in one year, your one-minute video saved them a half hour of figuring out what to do. I mean, do that math, you guys. These are real numbers in productivity. Real numbers. I can't do the math 'cause it's end of day in New York. Can you guys do the math? 70,000 people saved... Oh, yeah, just say one, save them 30 minutes. 35,000 minutes? No. 70,000 times- Hours, hours, hours... 0.5, that's 35,000 hours. Yeah. Right? And then if you divide that by the number of hours in a work year, 2,000. Right? Mm-hmm. Right. Legal ops math.

13:59That's 17 and a half days saved or something- Yeah... in searching and not, maybe not finding. Wow. So we would just make these cases all the time and go, "Okay, I think, we think it's working. Ma- make it make the next video." Yeah. And I kept going. Well, that's, I mean, that's an easy, easy tangible ROI. Yeah. Right? You know, to, to see that value. So are, are we gonna show some of the videos? Let's show them. 'Cause there's probably some folk out there that are scratching their heads, I think, on what, what I'm talking- Yeah, should, should I show one or are you guys gonna show one? No, I, I, Jen, I think you should. You should share. All right. Let's see. Let's see if, like, all the sharing works. So- That would be better. My videos are not as good. And, and, and how I would decide to make a video is I would catch lawyers doing absurd things in spreadsheets. Like absurd. Like I caught someone sort filtering over, like, a three-hour span what you can do in three seconds. And I was like, "Linda, I can't believe this. Let me show you live in person." And her mind was blown when I showed her sort filter.

15:01And, uh, we started an ef- Excel efficiency series for lawyers just to g- like, tackle the most ridiculous things, and pivot tables were one of those things. Even all of us struggle with pivot tables. It's just, like, a logical set of steps that even I am like, okay, X, Y axis, right? You're making graphs. So I think I made... Here's one. I'm gonna share, I'm gonna share the pivot table one. When I find my share window again. Bear with me. I work in tech, I'll figure this out, I promise. Downloads. Pivot tables. Let's see if this works. Yep. All right, you see it? There you go. Cool. So you guys, the, the, the method- Welcome back to the Friday Minute. Oh, wait. J- I'm Jennifer McCarron of Legal Tech Talk. Uh, uh, uh, uh, uh... There you go. I, I paused it. Yeah, sorry. Let me back it up. This was made with PowerPoint, animating a PowerPoint, and recording my desktop. This is so lo-fi, but it kind of passes.

16:00And the influence and the inspiration as far, as far as the animation is Schoolhouse Rocks! It's very 1970s, early '80s educational cartoons. Simple, basic, on a white background. I voiceovered this. You'll recognize this, 'cause some of you listen to the podcast. But I, I didn't have this nice equipment then, 'cause I was paid a lot less, and we just made- Fair... we cobbled it together and I video edited it together in something like Camtasia. Uh, this is two minutes. I might cut through if it gets really boring, but just... And we put them out on Fridays and they were called the Friday Minute. Okay, let me, I'm gonna hit play on this. All right. Solutions, here to talk about pivot tables in Microsoft Excel. We've shown you a few Excel tips in other videos, but pivot tables are the next level in Excel efficiency because they help you and your audience study data. This is important because, after all, Cisco runs on numbers. I love this one. So as a member of legal services, do you find yourself increasingly using Excel- It's still running. You guys see it and hear it?... to manage large amounts of data? Yeah, yeah.

17:01Large data sets can be qualitative, quantitative, or both, and can result from a variety of places, such as data exports from Cisco tools like VAP, the Vovici survey tool, or maybe you're managing a legal analysis of a body of contracts. As you try to make sense of your data and present to your colleagues, managers, or customers, ever wonder how to get from data- Those are the people... that looks like this to data that looks like this? The answer is the pivot table functionality in Microsoft Excel. A pivot table is a data summarization tool that can reveal data patterns and trends with the ability to automatically sort, count- Oh, my lists. Listicles... totals, and average of a data set- I could have been a YouTuber. Listicles all day... with just a few clicks of the mouse. You set up the table structure by dragging the elements into place practically. You do it, and now I actually build a pivot table. The results are then displayed in the pivot table or the pivot sheet. So old Joe, don't stop. I like. No. To create a pivot table- Look at my clean desktop...

17:56you open and access the spreadsheet containing- Even in 2013... the source of data you'd like to work with. Let's look at this example of a VAP report showing all of the VAPs in March of 2021. I mean, this is hell. This is our hell, legal ops. If you want to know, of all the VAP approvers, what was the average time for approvers in engineering and legal to approve a VAP? Sample report. On the data ribbon, click the pivot table button. Data, click. And here I am using highlight and emphasis to guide their eye. Here you can drag and drop the data fields you will need. Approver and days pending actions- I know. You guys should know this is my old band in the background playing Will then change to show- I always went to actually that... average in the values box. Yeah, yeah. It is- I just pulled my old music. It's great. Thank you. Great. Yeah. And finally, filter the data so we only see engineering and legal approvers. Here we go. Done. Done. For more help on pivot tables, visit Microsoft's pivot table tutorial here. Thank you for watching. All right. That, that was my tagline at the end with this very scoopy way. I'd be like, "Thank you for watching."

18:58And I would really practice that in the mirror a lot so it sounded, you know, warm and thankful. And w- what was the, what was the response the first couple of times that, that you sent these out or, or added these to the library for folks to, to check out? The first few, because I was still finding good topics, were lukewarm or, or quiet, or I would just get, like, a one email back from a Linda like, "That was fun." And then over time, people were obsessed. Like, they... Like, some of them still write on LinkedIn to me like, "Your videos, dude." Um, and I, I always wrote a really good joke in the video around a vignette. So that one was, like, straight up, "Look here about pivot tables. I'm taking you through a spreadsheet to rock music." Other ones I set a scenario so that they can be the pro- like, they're the protagonist in the story. They're in the story. It's them, and imagine it's Friday, and you have to get your contract signed.

19:59And I would always write a funny joke at the end, so there'd be, like, something for them of, like, humor after the value, and they... I, you hook people with humor, and so they... I started getting fans. And then Lisa started- And it worked, yeah... Lisa started showing up to my meetings, a colleague named Lisa, and she's like, "I'm not even here for the meeting, I just love hearing your voice." I'm like, "Not weird. I, I... Cool. Cool, Lisa." "Hang out in the WebEx with us while we talk about something else." So people liked it, and Steve Harmon told me, I think around video 15, he said, "Hey, you're crushing it with these videos. People love them. Then they learn." It- how quick were the... W- was it able to see that users were using the systems better? Maybe there was better user adoption, uh, with, with the types of videos that you were putting out. I mean, was it almost immediate? Did that come with time? Was that like- That stuff's hard to say. Yeah.

20:53That stuff's hard to measure- Yeah... because it's hard to measure... It's hard to measure the other side of it all, and it's hard- Right... to say, like, like, what, what would you do? Would you look at batches of help tickets and go, "Well, they went down over a year- "... because they're doing the training"? Like, we thought about all of the ways to measure- Yeah... and some of this becomes that intangible stuff- Mm-hmm... that's difficult to do. But in, in terms of, like, the, the help, the support line of help, which was me and Farhad for a legal department of 500 to 1,000, we saw less requests. Like, anecdotally- Yeah... you see less requests. And you put these links out in front of people, or you link them on the tool itself, and you do see that, but it's hard. It, you just kind of measure in help requests over time, which- Yeah... you guys know they come in formally through a help desk when you're in IT, or they're just pinging you all the time. Yeah. So yeah, we saw that, but hard to really measure in, like, a super data-driven way.

21:53And how, how did you come up with, with the topics? Uh, well, it was mostly where people sucked. Okay. I was like, "Oh-" And I was like, "Oh- You got a list? F- yeah, I had a list. I had a backlog, and I'm like, "Oh, my God," like, I, I saw several people really struggle with, uh, f- Excel and using it inefficiently, so that's what inspired that series. But then, uh, sometimes I would do them on big tech rollouts going out enterprise-wide- Yeah... and be like, "Look, it's coming," uh, whatever version of Windows, whatever video conferencing rollover we were doing. So it was like a IT tech whisperer. And then when we were rolling out new products for legal, users had an existing product like Blueprint, the legal entity management software. It's now called Diligent, okay? But it's Blueprint for life, everyone, legal ops. They came to me and said, "People don't know how to use this tool. It's been up for a few years. Can you make a training?

22:48And we'll do a campaign around it, kind of a marketing, teaching, educational campaign. And, and we'll require everyone to watch the video and hit a box at the end in the learning management system." So my stuff started becoming learning management system worthy and making people, like, take the training and acknowledge you now know how to bl- use Blueprint. And so that was more of an overview of a tool. No, and it's, and I think that makes them more excited about, uh, adopting a new tool, because usually when it's, like, a big enterprise one, like, I mean, we do CLMs, and CLMs, it touches, like, a lot- Oh, man... of part of the, of the different processes. So you gotta get them, like, excited at the beginning, because we've seen- Yeah... you know, like, if you go during the implementation, but if, you know, you, you can spend thousand, hundred thousand or a couple million bucks for- Yeah... an implementation, but if nobody's using it, like, if, if the adoption- ... rates are low, it's just like you're just burning money.

23:47Adoption's really an important metric to measure and drive and improve on over time. And what improves adoption? Exactly, Pepe. Teaching people the value of this, how to use it, and breaking it down to a quick, digestible morsel of, like, these three steps, these four things, and making sure you take these videos and either do campaigns with big email campaigns pushing to people, and then you have to link them out places where people will find them again. And- Yeah... so we wound up linking them all, 'cause we designed all of our own front ends at Cisco, so we could put all the... links we wanted in a tool, whereas, like, if you license an Ironclad, if you license Evisort as CLM software, you might, they might not let you put a link on their tool because it's more their software. Yeah. So we were very fortunate with that. Okay.

24:42And if you're SaaS-ing everything today, you have to find a place where people can get this stuff, and admittedly, my videos got more traction at Cisco than they did at Spotify and Netflix because of the nature of, of I'm more SaaS now and licensing stuff. Yeah. I only have hundreds of views at Netflix. I'm mad and I'm sad. So I, there, um, one of our earlier guests, uh, Chris Skiepik, he, he works in the Deloitte Polin team, and I, I really like one analogy that he does when talk about the adoption process is to building campaigns like- Yeah, it's marketing... movie mo- like, movie premieres, right? Yes. You gotta, you gotta make noise. Speak to my language. Yeah. There you go. So it's just, like, making noise- Yeah... putting cartels everywhere. This is coming and the rollout, it's gonna start- Yeah... in two months. These are the benefits. So people are eager to start using it. Yeah. Right? So- Yeah. You guys wanna hear a nice failure story with a video? Yes.

25:42With these- Sure... videos, you have to make noise and go for the next level of, like, you're going for a little more flash, trying to use voice or music or both and visual to connect. And people can get caught up in trying to make a super pro video and forget to write a really good script, or forget to have a really good CLM implementation plan rollout. And last year at Netflix, we were rolling out a phase of CLM, and we worked with the pros inside Netflix to make a hype video, they called it. A one-minute hype video. And all I had to do with my teammate running this was scripting, and make sure you hit on the one, the two, the three, and we had a pro and they, like, outsourced a pro animator. This hype video, it was a movie premiere, okay? It was better than what you just saw, and the money that goes into that is the re- is resourcing, and cool, and then, uh, something happened with the first phase of the go live and we had to push it. We pushed it, uh, I think a quarter or a few months, and I was like, "What a fail."

26:50We overdid the hype video, but we missed some detail in some part of the implementation, and the team was like, "We're not ready," and we had to push. And me and my colleague really took a lot of feedback for that from ourselves. Like, don't go too hot on the polish and not have the substance, and it's better to have a better launch with a l- a video later than a video at launch with nothing to launch, people. Yeah. Life, life hacks. And, and how do you, like, you know, c- not, not configure, but you know, like, uh, prepare those kind of videos, especially for those big enterprise, like the, like the CLM? Like, do you put them, like, in shorter videos on the different processes, or how can people imagine that? Yeah, yeah. So there's a misnomer where many of us think, like, we're, we're all working corporate jobs, legal ops and tech people.

27:50We're not creatives for a living, so we're just like, "I'm gonna make a video, and I'm gonna show everything in the video." And what I learned very quickly, also, I'm just, like, a TV kid. My parents put full cable in my room at five. They thought that was making it, so I'm like... I, I sound like a '90s commercial, and I know short because I watched way too much TV as a kid, and I am obsessed with YouTube. Like, I'm devotional to YouTube. I pay for it, and sometimes I'm like, "What would I do if I had to take YouTube or Netflix? Hmm, tune in at 11:00." But I knew at Cisco that one minute was the limit, and that means, okay, you could go up to two to get into a granular lesson. That's it. That's the, that's the short form. And even that video I just showed you was 2:19, and I was uncomfortable with how long it was 'cause I've evolved so much. If I were re-editing that today with everything I've learned in 10 years, I would chop that so fast, and our attention spans got faster in 10 years with the TikTok of our brains and YouTube. So I would've chopped that down to a minute 30 max, and just, like, shaved.

29:00So you, you can, you have to go as short as possible and be as concise as possible in videos or you'll lose people. So I had short form, one minute. I had l- medium form, which was three to five, and I had long form, which was five to eight. And some of the lawyers would come to me and go, "I wanna do an antitrust training series, six-part 15-minute videos" and I was like, "Kill me first so that I'm dead and you can't assign me that project." Sorry, sorry to be- And do you have, like, a, and do you have, like, any particular script? Like, you know, the intro, then it goes something, or a plot twist- Yeah, and, and like- Or what have you seen that works? That evolves over time. Like, that evolves from just starting, um, a script st- I called it, like, a script storyboard format. Oh, I wish I had one of those to pull up. I'm gonna see if I can, uh, search one on the side, but it's a table. It's a three-column table on a Google Doc or a Word doc, and it's, like, what happens, or it's your text that you say.

30:05It's what happens in the slides, and it is any, like, extra note about this scene. It's a storyboard, essentially, with the scripting in there, and then you start to kind of piece that together. So y- you have to sit and write, and that's a, I think that's a pretty straight-up, like, Hollywood or YouTube creation process for any kind of video or TV. I don't know. I never worked in TV, but my podcast producer has. Drea, text me if that's how it works in YouTube and TV. Yeah, it's pretty basic, and the better the writing, the better that video, actually. You guys just saw, like, the writing was very good. The video and animation is very basic. Drea, s- my producer says, "Yes, queen." Uh, that's how they would do it in TV. So you can Google, like, script storyboard format and see, like, a... Or just start a three-column table, and if you don't know how to do that, I'll make you a video. Just kidding. Now I just say, "Let me Google that for you," 'cause everything is on YouTube these days. I thought you were gonna say you followed the, uh, the Taco Bell, uh, chihuahua commercial script, so. I mean, you can.

31:09If people learn that way, you can take any commercial and, uh, reverse engineer it and see what's happening. Yeah. Um, those are very classic presentation storytelling styles. Mm-hmm. And it's all out there on the Internet and in the literature if you need that as structure. I think I have so much of it in my head because, you guys, I have so much TV time. I would just put the TV on in my room. I can recite commercials and jingles from the '90s. It's disturbing. I think I have brain damage. But, uh, it's fun. When I'm... It's a fun party trick to do Sally Struthers' I- International Correspondence School list. So I have a format, I can hear it, and I, I write to it. But you can Google all of this, for sure. You can get a sample. Ask generative AI. Yeah. "Give me a, give me copy for a commercial- Yeah... for a one-minute ad for a product." Gen AI it. You don't even need all... You don't n- you don't need to bludgeon your brain anymore with TV like I did. So would, would that be, you know, if there's anybody out there listening and they say, "Hey, you know what?

32:10W- there's, there's some challenges we're facing when it comes to pieces of technology and, and I think we should start making some, some short form videos on this." I mean, obviously the first, the first thing you need to do is probably identify those, those pain points and, and those are the videos that you wanna make. But- Yeah... is that the next step, is the next step to, to put together a script? Yeah, yeah. A- and, like, true project management, like, what's the problem you have to solve? What's the information gap? That's what I always would say in knowledge management. What's the information gap here and what's the best medium to solve this? And I would challenge people sometimes who wanted videos on stuff that is not right for video. So one lawyer got creative, I'm air quoting, 'cause they don't teach creativity in law school. Shots fired. Um, but she was my friend, so she comes to me and she's like, "I love your videos. I wanna collaborate with you on one." I'm like, "Let me hear the pitch." And she goes, "You are gonna animate the org chart 'cause nobody knows how to keep up with the org chart.

33:04But if you're narrating it, and you're funny, and it's cute little people characters," which I'll show you in another video, "They'll learn it." And I'm like, "The org chart changes every week in corporate America. No." And she fought me on it, and my boss helped stand up for me. My manager was like, "Only video evergreen things." That's a different kind of training, and it's like, learn it on your own. It's an org chart. I'm not here to teach you the org chart. I didn't say that. I'm, I'm much more confident now, uh, 10 years later in, in work. Oh, let me show you guys this, uh... I have a s- a storyboard here. This is actually a really good one. Share screen. Share s- share screen. So, let's see. At Netflix, they asked me and the team to do a what do we do here presentation live or any format. It's a full hour. Teach the legal department what you do. And so I did, like, an, a legal ops knowledge management one.

34:00It was live slides, but we wanted to do a video opener, and this was during COVID where you had to, like, spice up your meetings, and we were all competing at Netflix, who can do the cooler video op- who can do the best what do we do here opening, and I'm so competitive. So here's, like, the background, and me and this other presenter are getting aligned. Goal of video. Context. This is very classic PM stuff. Presentation details, and look at this. Two columns. Video edit. It's cartoon animated. Blue is to be drawn. Oh, because this one, I was so... You know, we all went dark in COVID. I was like, "I'm gonna animate this myself, not use pre... these characters I used in that other slide deck. I'm gonna draw us." I was... COVID was so difficult. I mean, how did we get through that? I don't know. So I'm like, "I'm gonna draw this." I had to get... This is a little more technical, you guys. But here we are. Fade into, and then Jenna and I sat here and wrote up di- I wrote up this dialogue. I envisioned us having an intro convo as cartoon characters.

35:08And that's me, and that's Jenna, and those are my hand drawings of each of us. And, uh, this drawing of me, I took off a street sign in New York City. That's someone's street art that I thought looked like me, and I just took a picture with my phone. Yeah. And then I modified it to look like me and put on, like, one of my shirts. This is me. "What? Hey, what are we doing?" K- And she's like, "Hey, Jen, um, why are we next to each other? It's COVID. Put us into Zoom or something." And then I drew us into a Zoom. Cut to a Zoom. We're talking. We're having a dialogue. What do you wanna do in this presentation? How should we wow them? People are getting really good at these fun, kitschy openers. And so I... This is literal storyboarding. Then cut to the IP team. No, music team did this, like, killer rendition of The Witcher theme song in a conference room a few months prior. I was like, "What?" Comp- competitive. Cut to the next one. The IP team did a Brady Bunch video.

36:09Someone's husband worked in VFX. Netflix is insane sometimes. It's so fun and ridiculous. They did a fun video. And I'm like, "What are we gonna do?" And the funny gag was her and I were former musicians as a career, uh, but we're in a cartoon going, "What are we gonna do?" She was singing a song, and then she fake sings a song, and then we cut out. We cut out, and we're like, "Nah, let's just do Google Slides." And people's minds were blown, and we had them eating out of our hand for 45 more minutes. So here it is, two columns, but all written in. There's my slide that we got to. It was pretty fun. It looks like, I mean, you need to be re- really creative for that. I mean, I, I can't imagine myself doing that, but Yeah, so this is ha- this is, like, hazardous. This was hazardous level ambition. So I started drawing it all, and I don't draw every day anymore. I'm not nine in my childhood bedroom watching- ... '90s TV. So I started drawing, and six days in, and, like, no sleep, I... My eye started twitching, and I was like, "Crap, I can't do this. I'm not an animator.

37:20I just do little fu- goofy doodles." And so like any good legal ops person, where you can't, you should outsource to the elevate equivalent of, "Do you have a friend that can animate?" I found someone, and he took me over the finish line. But really, and I, I thanked him so much for letting me pay him nothing and get this great video m- over the finish line. And I said, "How'd you do that on, like, no money and no nothing?" And he said to me, "Really good writing in the script and basic storyboarding." He's like, "You give that to people, they can do it." So y- not to say go hire animators. I don't think you should. That's too much polish. I was intentionally trying to show off. The other thing I showed you guys, that format, PowerPoint, screen recording, speaking into a onboard mic or a USB mic. That's pretty cheap. Even speaking- Well, it works... to your slides is cheap. No, but that works. I mean, I think, yeah, of, of course you need people that are designers to do stuff. It's like what- Yeah, but-... Marc and I do for, like, to promoting the podcast. Sure.

38:27It's like there's no way we can do that. That'd be- You guys have a great logo. It's very comic strip. Oh, thank you. I mean, that was a, a designer. We had no idea. Yeah. We just, like, like, just, just gave them- Yeah, so, like, sometimes in life you have to go get a designer, and, like, I had to win the c- this mini meaningless, meaningful competition at Netflix 'cause we're all f- bored and inside. I had to win, okay, you guys? I had to win and have the funniest two-minute flashy intro video, but I had that eye twitch for six months. And I really second-guessed myself if that was all worth it, and it was a one in, one in time, and that wasn't scalable. So the videos I did at Cisco, they scaled on no budget, and let me tell you guys, uh, and I can show you another clip of how I scaled the video once I did the, a blueprint video again at Netflix. We went to a Netflix internal production. W- Many companies have, like, an internal production in marketing, and I'm like, "What would it cost to make this short form, three-minute video on a tool?"

39:33And they s- they scoped it out with me and they said, "$10,000 a minute is the cost-" Min-... for a minute. That's the cost for custom instructional design that is, like, animated, shapes, text, like, beautiful. 10,000 a minute is what that costs, and that's what I, I try, would try to tell Cisco leadership, like, "I just saved you 29K. I did this for, like, $500." Um, but yeah, that's what it costs, and no legal department should pay for that, ever. That is not y- That's like killing a fly with a cannon. So with all of this, this is not a podcast t- to tell everyone in legal ops, go out and try to start animating and pitching your leadership for this stuff, 'cause if you go to the pro, pro, pro level, it's $10,000 a minute, and no one would, uh, sign that. But could you do it with PowerPoint recording? Now, that was 10 years ago. Can I show you guys what you, what they do now? There's all these- Yeah, let's do...

40:34pre- pre-built character animation library SaaS solutions like Vyond. Have you heard of Vyond? Yeah. I, I, I knew they were out there, but I, I haven't heard of any of the specific names. So it's, like, 20 a month. It's PowerPoint mixed with... It's like Google Slides mixed with Adobe, the one that does animation, that... Premiere- Yeah... in the cloud for dummies. $20 a month. It's like what all the people are graphic designing in now in the cloud. It's like a- Can- Canva? Canva. It's like that for instructional design. Pre-built character sets. Ready? So I did, uh, I'm gonna share this screen. I did this in Vyond. It was for Blueprint. I did a Blueprint video at Cisco that was three minutes, so I already had the format of a script on how to teach someone legal entity management. So I remembered that and wrote the script and storyboard from there.

41:34We used Vyond, and with very little budget, like, way under 5K, like, very little budget that makes this stuff worth it, I hired someone who's a Vyond expert. They're out there. They're on Fiverr. And worked, and I managed them to creating this with my really tight script and visualization. So this is Blueprint. This is the scenario. I'm gonna hit play. Can you guys see this? Yep. Yeah. I'm just gonna do, like, a minute of it. Welcome to the Calabasas University video training series, where the legal operations and technology team teaches you about our new solutions. It's me. Today, we're partnering with corporate legal to talk about Blueprint, our new corporate legal entity management solution. First, let's start with this scenario. Scenario. It's nearing the end of the day on Friday, the day before your scheduled vacation begins.

42:27You suddenly realize that career-changing deal you're closing on needs a Netflix signatory from one of our entities in Mexico, and you don't know who inside Netflix should sign. Real problem. Enter Blueprint, Netflix's corporate legal entity management solution. In this video, you'll learn what Blueprint is- How to access it, and how to find what you need. So, what is Blueprint? Blueprint is a third-party solution that houses all corporate legal entity related information and supporting documents for all our corporate legal All right, I'm muting the audio. Yeah. So I take them through just visuals with narration, and how to use it, and come in, and answer all these questions, learning scenario, where to find Blueprint, um, how to find what you need. I go through that agenda, right? It's very PowerPoint-y. So she's still freaking out. You gotta check back in on your main character.

43:31Now she's in finding the corporate documents in Blueprint and, and here's one outstanding use case that gets, uh, asked a lot. My, my corporate... Hang on, let me pause this. My corporate legal paralegal wanted all the edge cases in the video, and I had to keep saying, "You're making it too long," so we, we landed on, you know, your basic use cases and some edge cases. And so this is her trying to get in some of those last, some of those last things. And then let me just hit play, but no audio. So she's still, like, cranking through scenarios. Here's one last scenario. Highlights for emphasis. Here's the PDF, and we're moving through an agenda. We get to the end, and I just gotta show you guys the ending, and let me turn this audio back up. Audio, audio. Updated in real time. However, because we are in a culture of constant change, so are our entities and signatories. If you see any discrepancies- Call to action... in the data, please notify us immediately.

44:42Hit us up if this sucks. And if you have any questions, comments, or even special requests, let us know. Up-to-date entity information makes doing business even faster, which means more shows and joy for you and all our members. Thank you for watching. Boom. And you know, I work at Netflix, so I, I got to put that on the end. Are you... Which is, I'm very blessed in that sense, but it's internal. It's not for commercial use, so I'm allowed to do that, but I would never go external with this. Nobody's watching, right? We got a few people here. Yeah, a couple people. But yeah, so that's an example of Vyond. $20, $20 a month. Oh my God, people are calling me. Sorry if it's ringing. Um, and she... That's Tiffany, and she works at one of my SAS solutions in contracts, and she's an artist, and a creative, and studied voiceover.

45:41She's a voiceover actor in real life who does product management, and we know this about one another. And I said, "Hey, can I just... Can Netflix hire her kind of separately to just do this one-off video?" Yeah. 'Cause she's a Vyond expert, and I, I learned that. And so she voiced it over too, so cool for me. I get to, like, step out and bring in other people's talent and creativity, and that was very inexpensive. No, I, I think the... I mean, obviously, there's a big level right there between the, the first videos you showed us and the, the, the later ones. Yeah. But at the end of the day, I mean, they all have the, the same, the same meaning, and, and I think they still get the same point across, which is a visual aid to help people learn. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I think it's something that we definitely haven't taken advantage of enough. So thank you for, uh, for turning those gears in my head. Yeah, I mean, will you guys hire... Like, what, what do you guys think when you see this? Because it's not, it's not hard to do, but it's not simple. It's time. It's engaging. Yeah. It's engaging.

46:41I mean, you need something like that because even if you give users very detailed manuals on how to do it, they never read it. And then it's just like, "Hey, I cannot send my documents. I cannot find my contracts." And it's like, "Have you followed the steps that we put in the contract?" And they never read it. So you gotta, like, continue doing it, so you gotta find a way on how to, you know... Like, I mean, we're, now we're used that everything just goes, like, really fast, right? So if e- even if, if you're googling something, when you go to a blog post or to a website, like, how much time do you spend there? Like, couple seconds, and then you just move to the next one. Yeah. Right? And videos are way more engaging, and podcasts too. Yeah. That, that's what I like because you, you can do, like, passive. You, you, you- Yeah... can be cooking by- while listening to the podcast. But, but videos, especially training videos, you gotta see them. Yeah.

47:37And if you find a way how to engage them and to see the, the full video, that's gonna be a game changer, especially for the, the education and, and adoption. Yeah, and it's a bit of... It's just, like, a bit of volume and, and/or a YouTube formula. You just have to make them. If you guys wanna get into this, you just have to have someone or you start and be committed to sucking and committed to doing the next one and the next one and trying to lift it up. I mean- Right... that pivot table one I showed you guys, I think I said it was video 15, it was effective. It taught, and it sounded like me, and I sounded, like, reasonably happy compared to video one. Now that's a voiceover actor, and now when I do videos... I mean, I'm podcasting more too, so I know how to sound like a woman not in peril- ... even, even if I'm in peril. Yeah. Like, when I did the London podcast, don't tell anybody, anyone listening, I was so jet lagged, and then I forgot to eat, and I didn't have a producer there just pointing everyone podcast-wise, and I was in peril.

48:43But then I would sit down with Caroline Hall and be like, "Hey," and just, like, and turn the switch on, and that comes through practice. With feeling like crap, but having to get these jobs done, so. Yeah, it would be like that. I mean, doing podcast hangover, it's really hard. Are, are... Do you guys have one right now? Are you hungover? No, but we were. No. You were. Where is the hangover? Am I, am I, am I headed for one? What, what's hangover formula? Too much podcasting? Too much partying sometimes, but it's, it's always good to see people in events, but, you know. No, just back- But, but it's good... back-to-back-to-back during one day is, is a little- Oh, it's crazy... yeah, you, you lose your edge by the fifth one, so. Yeah. Like, how, and how do you fuel yourself and your brain and your focus to, like, not, even though you're flatlined? I was flatlined by the end of Clock Vegas and London, and I don't even know what I said.

49:42And I had to do my intro for someone recently, and I said to Drea, "Can you tell me what we said on the podcast?" Blackout. Blackout podcast. I remember Bernadette's wonderful face and her e- effervescence, but what did we talk about? And Drea said, "Here's five things to remind you," and then I, it kind of came back. But it's, this stuff's hard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's hard. So, uh, yeah, we're running out of time. I, I mean, we can keep, like, talking for hours for this, so I- I can talk to you guys forever, but how do we close? I got one last question for you. Yeah. And especially because we've seen this at Clock. We were, this week, at the, at the World Commerce and Contracting event, and- Yeah... there's a lot of hype in generative AI. Oh, yeah. So I was, I was thinking about not just for the, the designing, and there are, like, these apps that they, they can do commercial videos by just, like, prompting them.

50:36I mean, that's gonna save a lot of time, too, and money. But I was thinking about, you know, like, those 2,000 pages manuals and FAQs. Oh, yeah. Those days are over. Like, now with generative AI it's like, you can, you know, feed the platform and then just ask questions. Those days are over. Yeah, you can feed any kind of bot with all of that, and then we could all roll up to bots now more universally and go, "How do I use Blueprint?" And the bot can come back with, "Oh, here's a starting guide. If you're more of a video person, here's your starting video, and here's your point of contact if you just need to call someone," like a Jen, like a me. I'll sit on the phone with anyone and tell them how to do tech. Like, I was in the elevator today in New York City, and it, the buttons were being weird, and I was like, "Everyone step aside. I work in tech." And I just started pushing buttons, and I don't need... Some people need a human touch, but generative AI can parse all of that. Generative AI cannot make a video, and it cannot make a TV show. It cannot write that joke.

51:38It can't put that intangible human element of creativity behind anything we do, in video making, in what lawyers do. There's an element of business strategy, risk prevention, creativeness. It can't do that. But it can give them a first draft of their contract faster than them searching- Yeah... five systems. Generative AI can give me a background on that art. Um, if I were hand drawing all of this again, generative AI can do my background in a, a Matt Boeing style, any, any cartoonist style. But the foreground, that script I showed you, okay, it could give me a first draft, but it's not gonna make it sizzle. So that's my thought on all of that. It's gonna relieve the annals of crap like you're talking about. But we still need creativity over the top of all of this to make this stuff sing. Yep. Well, yeah, and it's, it's been a great podcast episode. First time we're doing this webinar. It's, it's- Yeah... really fun to have you on the podcast. I just... This was amazing. What a brilliant idea you two had.

52:38I never played videos on a podcast with a webinar, with a LinkedIn component, and I've never shown these videos to anyone outside of Cisco or Spotify or Netflix. So thank you for bring- bringing an audience and being so curious. You've inspired me. Sharing really teaches me a lot, so it's very important to me. Thank you. No, thank you, Jen. We, we really appreciate it, and we hope we inspired some other folks out there to, to give this a shot. I know you, you definitely have inspired me, so I, I think we're... Before I go to bed tonight, I'm gonna figure out how we can utilize this when it comes to, uh, our customers. Yeah, well, call me if you want any advice, you know. Sounds good. I'll tell you what to do. Sounds good. Yeah. All right, guys. All right, thank you everybody for coming. So thanks a lot, and- Thank you, everyone. Oh. Take care out there, legal ops. All right. Bye, everyone. 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.

53:35Whether 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.