Tracking KPIs in Contract Management with Amy Sennett

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

0:00Welcome to another episode of Contract Heroes, the show where our guests, and sometimes us, provide best practice recommendations on all things related to contract management. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Contract Heroes, where we're not the heroes, our guests are. And today, we have, uh, the associate general counsel over at OpenText joining us, Amy Sennet. Uh, and before we kick things off, I'd like to flip things over to Amy so she can give us a quick background on, uh, things that she's working on over at OpenText, as well as, uh, her previous roles and, and how she's kind of grown and developed, uh, in her, um, uh, business sense. So Amy, thanks for joining us, and, uh, would love to just hear a bit from you real quick. Thanks, Marc. Thanks, Pepe. Really looking forward to this conversation. Excited about this opportunity.

1:02So yes, I am associate general counsel at OpenText. I have been there, um, for a little over eight months, so it's a new role to me that I took on during the global pandemic. I've been dealing with all of the challenges of, uh, meeting and growing and leading my team virtually. But, um, let me give you a little bit more background on how I got there. I, um, have my JD and my MBA from Harvard. Um, I was always thinking in the back of my mind that I probably wouldn't be, quote-unquote, just a lawyer for my entire career. Um, I think some part of me had a sense that I really enjoy being a part of organizations and teams that are building towards collective goals, and, and, um, that having more of a sense of, um, business, capital markets, uh, leading teams, uh, all the stuff that you pick up, entrepreneurship, all the stuff that you pick up in an MBA program would, would serve me well, and it definitely has. Uh, after law school, uh, was at a firm, uh, did a federal district court clerkship, um, and my practice was really evolving into a securities litigation, white collar defense and investigation practice, which is common to a lot of, uh, young lawyers who get into big law firm, big law work, um, at some particularly US and multinational-based firms, working with a lot of executives from industries. And in this case, I, I was in Boston. I have been in Boston for, or, uh, Boston area for many years.

2:46Um, in, in our case, a lot of, uh, executives and companies in the region that are in the financial services space, in the healthcare space, biotech space, um, those to be, those tend to be some of our key industries in this, in this area ar- out around Boston. Um, and, and I think there were two trends that I picked up on, to, to go to your point about, um, how do you think about that switch between being at a firm versus going in-house. Right. So the first I thought of, I, I, I realized that even though I was only maybe a fourth or fifth year out of law school, my practice was becoming increasingly specialized, right? Uh, the goal when you're, are, um, outside counsel, when you are in a law firm is really to be a subject matter expert. To be that, um, that expert that a company calls when they, it's truly bet the company litigation or a bet the company issue, and they need the world's, nation's, you know, region's top mind on this particular issue, and they want someone who's done that thing over and over and over again 'cause they know that you've built up that expertise.

4:03But often that means that you are an expert in a really niche area. Because to be an expert, you really have to be zeroed in and focused in on, on, on kind of a very small slice sometimes of, of, of the legal world, uh, a, or a particular legal issue. For me, that's not really how my mind works. I enjoy the, and we- we'll get to this more about what my day job entails today. I enjoy the diversity of problems that come across my plate. Uh, and the fact that I'm a little bit dangerous because I know a little bit about a lot of different things now as an in-house generalist. And, um, I sort of worried about becoming niche, that, that, that didn't really appeal to me. Um, the second, the second trend or second, um, theme that I thought about i- in terms of my career and should I stay at a firm or go in-house was in-house, the fact that you are, a- as I alluded to before, a part of a team that is building something.

5:10You have collective purpose. You have this goal, get your product to market, get a new feature launched, raise capital for the company, expand your market presence, um, go public. Uh, and I, I li- I like that, like, all the row, you know, oars are in the water, we're all rowing together type thing, and we're collectively kind of depending on each other. When you're outside counsel, it's good and bad. You kind of get to come in, give your advice, give your recommendations , you know, ma- fa- ... present a report that particularly in the space where I was, where you're doing a lot of internal investigations that you then may share with the board or executive teams or whatever. Um, but you're, um, and again, particularly on the litigation and investigation side, you're really only there when something is going wrong in the life of the company. And, um, the other executives that you're meeting with, your clients, uh- I, I would go to these board meetings, or I'd go to these senior exec meetings, and I would be so excited 'cause I was like, "This is cool. We're meeting with the CEO. We're meeting with the CFO."

6:18But they dreaded seeing us because we were coming to tell them about some regulatory investigation or bad news that we had unearthed, you know, as a, in a, in, as a result of doing this investigation and interviewing all of their employees. So I really wanted to be about, you know... I guess it really comes down to doing something that's accretive to the company, doing something that's adding value as opposed to kind of being in this world of cleaning up messes, you know, being on the defensive. Um, and so that's been, that, that was, uh, two of the big themes that I think about when I think about the shift to in-house and when I think about counseling people who are considering making that move. Um- Right. And that happens a lot when you work in a firm, right, Amy? Like, I don't know, when a client asks you to draft a contract, then you send the final version. Maybe you st- you are involved with the negotiation, but that's it.

7:12But when you work inside the company, you get to see what happens post-signature, what happens to those contracts, and, and how it may affect the business of the company, which is, like, completely different when you work just like an outside counsel. Like, okay, you just do, do your, your, your work and then bill your time, and that's it. Absolutely. Uh, and that's a double-edged sword, right? There's some, sometimes where you think, "Oh, man, I, I finished that task. It's off my plate." But when you're in-house, you are, you're a part of the implementation, right? Right. You, you know, you can write a beautiful memo, you can write a beautiful contract, but if it doesn't... Um, or you can write, I don't know, uh, you know, other documents. I, i- if it doesn't actually get implemented by your business partners, by the other functional, uh, cross-functional groups o- in the company, it's sort of just an academic exercise. Right. And do you remember how were those first days, Amy, like when you st- when you l- left the law firm and then you start working on the first company? Like, what was, like, the, the, the, the biggest struggles that, that you have to face? Because this, this is, like, completely new, uh, way of thinking, right? And, and, and, and way of working. Yeah. Um, so my first in-house job, I moved to a s- venture-backed company- Mm-hmm... a SaaS company called Catalant, also in Boston. I was the second lawyer. Um, and we were about 120-person company at, at the time.

8:53I think, again, th- exactly on this theme, the biggest challenge, the biggest change, was realizing that I had to persuade my colleagues outside of the legal function to take my advice, right? Or, or, or- Right... or to, to, to adopt what I was recommending, or to, you know, um, just to, to make them, uh, g- get, like, buy-in, basically, on what it was that I, I, I thought we, we should do. Um, and that, that's actually, um, it's not a given. I think in, um, a law firm, you're working on a big team, say a big litigation team, and you have partners and junior partners and senior associates and associates. And while there's a lot of stress and a lot of stressors, I, I think it's less common that I, I experience a sense that, like, we were internally at odds, right?

9:56We all were kind of like, "Okay, we know what we need to do here. Step A, step B. We draft this, draft that." We're generally in alignment on the strategy and the approach. Whereas you come into an organization and legal really has entirely different goals than the sales team- Right... than the product team, than the finance team. Um, I mean, sometimes your ally in in-house tends to be sales and fi- uh, uh, uh- ... legal and finance tend to get along pretty well. But, um, you realize that, like, yes, you're all on the same team on a very macro level, but day-to-day interactions with sa- interactions with sales and customers, right? Like, legal and sales in-house is, is a t- a tenuous relationship. It doesn't matter what organization you're at, it's always got tension in it. And, um- Right. They, they-... because they have fundamentally different goals about what our functions in the organization should be.

10:54And they want to close as soon as possible, whereas in the legal part, it's just like, "Wait, wait." "There are, there are some risk parts that, uh, we have to take care before closing this deal. O- otherwise, um, something bad will happen there." And Amy, so now that you're in the in-house parts, like inside the company, h- how does it feels or, or, or when does a company needs to hire an outside counsel? Like, now, I mean, it... I think a, a lot of things are, are happening right now inside any, any kind of companies on the industry. Budgets are getting reduced. And, uh, and, and now when you have to s- uh, to ask for a law firm to work with you, so when that happens? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So again, I think it goes back to kind of generalist specialists and that dynamic again.

11:55I believe that the in-house legal team needs to be an expert in your business. Right. In particular, your commercial contracts. You guys should know your products, your sales processes, your routes to market, your channel, um- You should be living that. You should, you should be the experts on that because that's so relationship driven. Mm-hmm. And it's so much about knowing your partners in those other functions and being able to work well with them, communicate well with them. So I tend to think, uh, commercial matters, commercial contracting matters really should be kept in-house because you should be, um... you as your inter- in-house legal team should really be the experts there. Right. In, in your own business. You're, you're the expert in your own business. When you think about a topic that is impacting lots of businesses, um, across an industry, across, across different industries, right? Um, that, and where you don't necessarily need specialized knowledge of the particular firm, particular company, or its product set, um, but you want someone that's kind of like getting things at, at scale and doing this over and over and over again in different contexts, that's when I think about going to outside counsel. So for example, GDPR. Right.

13:21Implementation of the EU's GDPR, um, directive, to me, that's a good example. I mean, obviously law- a lot of law firms made a lot of money counseling on GDPR, but I think overall that's the right approach because you don't have to gain that specialty, deep, deep knowledge within your own company maybe initially. You want someone who is educating themselves and kind of then spreading their knowledge across many, many firms. And so you pay for a little bit of their knowledge. Similarly, something, um, I would say, like again, during the global pandemic, when COVID hit and, um, you know, we have all these new workplace regulations, rules, they were changing constantly about how to deal with sort of employee relation matters- Right... uh, office safety matters, uh, it was like, let's go to a law firm that is becoming a deep specialist in this. I don't need this specialty in-house.

14:20I just want the, like, market standard for what an outside firm is advising 10, 20, hundreds of companies, right? And, and kind of spreading their know- we're letting them go out and get that expertise, and then spread their knowledge across all of their firms, or all of their clients, because they don't really need to know the details of my cybersecurity business versus somebody else's ERP business versus somebody else's other SAS business even- Right... even outside the technology space, right? Yeah, that's interesting, and that's, I think that's something that I've just never even thought about is, is, you know, when organizations should go out there and, and w- w- look for outside counsel. I, I didn't really, wasn't sure what to distinguish between the two, so yeah, Pepe, that was a great question. I just learned something. So- Um, so Amy, I mean, you know, touching on, uh, you know, we kind of talked about, uh, working with those other departments and, and bringing people together and, and how kind of difficult that was at your first organization.

15:19Um, you know, to, to talk about like legal tech and, and the new role that's kind of being developed, right? So it's legal ops and, and bringing somebody in to kind of work that tech stack. I mean, you know, I, I obviously Catalyn and OpenText are, are, are very different sized companies, but do you think that no matter what the size of the company is, do you think that having some type of, uh, you know, obviously in our case it's contract life cycle management, or, or other tools to kind of be able to show other departments what you're working on, make sure that data's being spread through the organization, do you think that that helps these, these different teams kind of come together and make sure that they're all, they're all working towards, um, the same goal? Especially with sales. Yeah. Especially with sales. Yes, absolutely. Um, and due to, um, you know, my first in-house job was a company of 120. Today at OpenText, I'm the lead lawyer for the cybersecurity, uh, business within OpenText. That's about 1,400 people. OpenText itself is 14,000 people.

16:22But I think some, some similar principles are gonna apply over and over again, and even if you were to look into a small company, a small in-house legal team, they're probably using tech, I'm, I'm saying that in air quotes, um, in some fashion. It might be a spreadsheet that they track, right, things on. It, you know, so look, if we have a very expansive definition of legal tech, they're doing something to track their work. They're doing something to track their output, um, just to stay organized, right? And, and it's as your company grows, and hopefully you have more resources at your disposal and your legal function grows, um, you're able to actually, uh, hopefully play with some of these, uh, fun and, and potentially very impactful tools that are custom-designed for legal teams to, to d- to do, um, exactly this. To really, um, expose the data that you can derive from your legal function. And we can talk, I can talk much more, much more about that and how, how I think about what types of data is really insightful. Yeah.

17:32And that, that was gonna be my follow-up question is- ... what types of data do you think, you know, folks should be pulling? Esp- let's say from the beginning, right? They just implemented a CLM tool. What types of information right out of the gate should they be looking to kind of start tracking and understanding and being able to pull reports on so they can share it with others inside the organization? Yeah. So let me give a little bit of a medium to long answer on that, and of course, let me ca- I, I think really I wanna caveat that by saying you have to know your organization. You have to know what, who's influential and what information will be impactful and meaningful to them, right? Um, and you have to know sort of like what problem are you solving for? By implementing this tech and by pulling out these, by pulling out this data. Um, you know, one thing I'll say is, I'll give you my journey into this a little bit more.

18:34So at Catalant, and credit goes actually to someone who was in a, I think you could say she was in a sales ops, she was sort of like our sales ops leader, um, at the company, to really pushing me into exposing exactly this type of data. Um, essentially we started, and I, I won't go into the specifics of what tech we used, but an intake form that then surfaced data on the back end. And so any time a contract was submitted to my department, to my team, we would collect information such as, you know, just who's the customer, what's the deal size, put in the sales force link to the opportunity, who's the rep, which, um, team or territory team are they on, right? Who's their manager? Um, and then roughly some stuff around like timelines, like when, um, when was this submitted. And, um, and then we would essentially, uh, update the status of that contract. Again, not a super sophisticated system. That's really the only, those maybe 10 fields are all we were capturing. Um, so anyways, this sales ops manager is the one who gets, gives, gets the credit for convincing me to do this.

19:48I was very nervous, uh, to do this because I think legal leaders do need to be careful that the data that is exposed doesn't get used against you, right? Um, you, you wanna make sure that it is, um, you know, if the classic example is a contract has been sitting unsigned for three weeks- Right... four weeks, I don't know what, whatever, every business has different contract life cycles. Um, in my old company, that would've been way too long. So, but I wanted to make the point that oftentimes the reason the contract was sitting unsigned was not because it was sitting with my team and we were twiddling our thumbs. It was because we'd sent a draft back to the customer and we hadn't heard anything. We'd had radio silence from the customer for three weeks, right? Right. And so I needed to make sure I was capturing the right fields to expose the data to tell the story that I wanted to tell.

20:46So in that case, in that past company, you know, we did have a lot of tension, as I was alluding to, over what was allegedly like slow contracting, um, slow pace of contracting. But by capturing what the status of that contract was, not just the initial date it was submitted to legal, we were able to say, "Oh, we have 10 of 15 contracts sitting with the customer. The problem is our customers aren't getting back to us. We need to be in a sales cadence where every Friday we check in and we ask them where's the s- where's the status of their, of our, of our contract with their, with their legal team." Um, or, "Oh, all of our contracts are stuck," I don't know, "at signature. You know, like, hey, we should implement an e-signature tool because like, you know, it seems like it's a real hassle for people to like sign these things." Um, those are hy- that's a little bit more hypothetical example. But, um, what I think you'll notice is I really tried to make the data that we are collecting work for the legal team and to improve the relations between sales and legal. Right.

21:56I mean, there's, there's a lot of things that you have to take into consideration just exactly because of that. And we've seen with, with some, uh, some clients that they still want to, um, to know how long is the turnover, right, for any kind of contract. But there are certain parts of the negotiation process that it's just, it, it's, it's not that it's not their fault. It's something that is outside their hands and, and they cannot control it. Not even with outside parties, but even with inside parties. If, if, if there's an, an approval that is needed by the, I don't know, the CFO or something because we're talking about a huge agreement, but the CFO is, uh, on holidays. I mean, there's- Right... a lot of things. I mean, this is a very simple example, but that's why it's important to know the legal metrics that will help to achieve the goals. So in that case, Amy, what would you say would be correct KPIs that should be- Mm... uh, used by organizations with that experience? Yeah, yeah. I, I wanna be careful. I think, uh, you used the word KPIs.

23:03I'm thinking like, you hear a lot about legal metrics versus- Okay... I think we've mentioned or I've mentioned to you guys the idea, I kind of like the phrase legal analytics a little better. Okay. Right? Um- Yeah, totally agree... metrics suggests like there is some sort of SLA that, um, you know, the legal team needs to hit to turn around X contract in Y number of days, and they do it Z times a month. I, I think it's possible that that could be useful and effective in a, in a situation where you truly have a very high volume of a non-negotiated, standardized, templatized document that is gonna go, you know, just fast f- cycles and you wanna get volume going. But anything that is requiring deep legal touch, deep legal negotiation, I think, as you say, can be subject to a lot of different factors that may have nothing to do with the speed of legal or with the, um, you know, the extent of, even the extent of the negotiation.

24:14If it's hung up on an approval, you could have a, a relatively smooth negotiation that just still needs approval. Um, so you gotta be careful, uh, that you don't oversimplify things, um, in terms of- Time. I think people, people hear metrics, KPIs, they immediately go to days, weeks, turnaround times, those types of things. For me, what's been more impactful is seeing, um, trends in other places. So I referenced, for example, that we tracked where requests were coming from, meaning which sales rep and which territory group was that rep a part of. Um, in our case, we also had the reps organized by, uh, industry, t- customer industry. So in that case, I could see like, oh, you know, all my contracts with healthcare in h- the healthcare space, like those ones really take a long time, right?

25:11Um, or all, all my contracts from that, that territory group, um, you know, always end up taking longer than we think. So now I can identify that group might need more training. Maybe there's something specific to that customer set that I'm not addressing in my contracts. Maybe I can create a piece of collateral that helps explain the contract to the, that, you know, that customer audience. Um, I think for me, having, um, those types of more qualitative trends as opposed to quantitative turnaround time type, um, metrics, data, KPIs, that's, that's been more insightful for me. Right. And, and how have you been tracking those numbers? Like, which kind of software have you been using for that? Uh, so in my past life, um, I've seen it done through actually a Jira ticketing system. Mm-hmm. That, uh, I think Jira is an Atlassian product. Um, and again, very basic- Right...

26:14um, kind of form submission that then created a back end where we could go in and, uh, look at the data, data kind of in like tabular table format. Um, you know, I've seen even more rudimentary, I haven't done this, but I've seen it, just Google Forms for intake. And then more sophisticated I've seen, um, Conga is a tool that I, um, have access to today in my team. Um, again, uh, that has really strong, um, intake form, very customizable, highly configurable for both intake, getting, getting fields of metadata attached to requests and a- a- attached to, to contracts. Right. So, uh, and what about, I mean, this is a pretty basic one, but electronic signatures. Like have you still been using any kind of paper formats, or everything is right now on, on digital? Everything's digital.

27:20That's good. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah, definit- definitely for me, um, uh, makes absolute sense. Yeah, I mean, I think everybody that, that, you know, especially after last year and, and what we're coming out of with COVID and everything, you know, if, if you're not using at least an e-sign solution, um, you, you probably should be. It's a little hard to get stuff signed if nobody's in the office, so, but, um- Absolutely... no, I mean, and it looks like we're, we're coming up on time here, so we really wanna, you know, thank you for coming on. I, I think some of these different takeaways and, and different ways to look at metrics that you should be analyzing, recording, and being able to share with other departments, I, I think it's a huge help, and I, I think that, uh, a lot of other folks out there who are just starting their journeys and are at, you know, smaller organizations are gonna have a lot to take away from this. Um, so you know, I would, at the end of this, we usually ask for, you know, maybe one or two takeaways on, on the topics that we've touched on.

28:15So, you know, based on, on the things that, that we've talked about, I mean, what would be those two major things for, uh, let's say, uh, you know, a company who's either still doing things m- maybe a little bit more manual, or, or they're looking to, to go out there and, and find their first, you know, software application, maybe it's a CLM tool. You know, what are those two big, um, uh, metric takeaways that you think that they should definitely be trying to keep an eye on to, to make sure that they're, uh, staying aligned and, and pushing, you know, the, the entire business and, and what they're, they're looking to push forward forward? Yeah. I think, one, it goes back to really understanding your own business and your own organization. So we've talked about how different metrics could be helpful or hurtful depending upon the circumstances. So you need to know, are you a high negotiation, all about showing speed and throughput?

29:12Are you about, um, actually long contract cycles for big deals, very customized for very sophisticated customer base, and you wanna show where the bottlenecks are in that process, either internally or externally? You really gotta know the cadence and the rhythm of your business and your contracting life cycle to know, uh, what data you wanna be pulling out and what data you wanna be highlighting out of a, out of a tool to make it useful. Um, and then I think you gotta be an advocate for legal, um, and use these tools to your team's advantage, right? I always say as a manager of the legal function and, um, that I, my, you know, one of my top priorities is just to be an advocate for my team. So don't set up legal tech that makes your team look bad. Set up legal tech that makes your team look great. Yeah. And, a- and show off a little bit, you know? Yeah.

30:12And, and show where you need more partnership from your other internal stakeholders, cross-functional stakeholders, sales in particular. Um, and then go out and build those partnerships 'cause, um, and, and close more deals 'cause that's really ultimately what we're here to do in-house. Um, if you are an in-house lawyer, you should be- I s- I always say, like, you should be in the, you're in the revenue generating business. Um, and so you need to get on the same page with your sales, go-to-market team, and, and, and the legal tech and the data that comes out of it can be a huge resource in, in forging that relationship. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I, I think if we've had one constant on the show that everybody's always talking about is make sure that, you know, you, you, you get your data and you have your processes laid out before you go out there and try to find a piece of software to, to solve those issues. Um, because I, I don't think anything slows down a sales cycle more than not knowing your internal processes and, and what you're looking to accomplish, but, but just hoping and, and holding your breath that you're gonna go out there and find something that's gonna solve all those problems.

31:18I, I think that that's definitely something that all of our guests have, have had in common. Right. Other- other- otherwise you'll be only automating a broken process. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Amy, thanks for joining us, and, and if anybody wants to connect with you or, or learn more, uh, about some of the stuff that we've talked about today, where, where can they, um, reach you? Yeah, they can find me on LinkedIn. I'm Amy Sennott, publicly available profile, or you can email me. My email address is asennott, S-A-S-E-N-N-E-T-T, @opentext.com. All right. Awesome. Well, thank you, Amy, and, uh, thank you everyone for, one, for listening to another episode of Podcast Heroes. We hope to see you back here real soon. Thank you.