Canadian Lawyer InHouse

39 CANADIANLAWYERMAG.COM/INHOUSE NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2018 L a w D e p a r t m e n t M a n a g e m e n t all the emails were already at the bottom of my screen or I would get pulled into the North American time zone. We also have business in New Zealand and folks on the West Coast, so requests are coming all the time and I didn't have a good way of staying on top of things." His desire was to have a triage or in-take system where his business unit clients would have to first submit a request for legal work to be done and it would be tracked and vis - ible to everyone involved. It would also be assessed as to the level of risk involved. In his previous GC role, Nguyen had got to a point where he had created a Word document everyone had to fill in as they were submitting legal requests, but now he wanted to take it a few steps further. "I often joke that the legal department is sometimes a bit of a black hole — it's not how I want to work, but it inevitably ends up being that way. Demand for legal services is so high and there was no way to prop - erly triage and determine what I should be working on," he says. CREATING THE SOLUTION Nguyen partnered with one of the company's developers and created an application that requires a request be submitted to him with certain fields filled out first. It is then reviewed by legal operations co-ordinator Margaret McKee, who acts as the frontline of all mat - ters before they are routed to Nguyen. The tool was built on Resolver Core, a SaaS-based integrated risk management platform that services more than 1,000 cus- tomers around the world. The form asks for simple information such as who is the contracting party? What is the proposed due date? What division is it for? What is the type of request? Support - ing documents can be attached through the app and submitters are asked to complete a risk assessment based on established terms. Now Nguyen and McKee can generate simple dashboards that provide updates on matters Nguyen is working on in real time. It can also connect with third-party plat - forms such as Salesforce. Nguyen can also provide the executive team with a chart that shows the type of legal request by division to assess who is using his time the most. "The pain point was really what am I working on? What should I be working on? And, ultimately, what is the priority? There are multiple sales deals going on at the same time with different value of strategic impor - tance," he says. "There was no good way for someone to tell me what I should be work- ing on. It was usually whoever was scream- ing the loudest or first in first out. No one really knew the status of a matter at any one time." There was also the expectation of the fel - low members of the executive team who all come to meetings with reportable data on what they were working on. "I have always believed in being a self-serve department whether making templates or documents available, and now with the app the status of matters is available, so no one needs to ask me to check the status of a file. That drives the accountability of the person asking and gives complete transparency to the legal process," he says. A triage system to deal with workflow is something members of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium are always talking about, says Nguyen, who is a member. "It's the first step that teams looking to become more operational in nature look to do be - cause it's the number one pain point — the amount and number of requests and deter- mining who is the best person to be work- ing on something." Nguyen had looked at some off-the-shelf solutions that offer complete systems for law department management, but at this stage, he was only interested in the front end. "In a perfect world, I would have used the entire suite I looked at, but it just didn't meet my needs," he says. He says contract lifecycle management is something he would want to do, but he cur - rently manages it through Salesforce. "The organization is very much a Salesforce com- pany in terms of tracking the status of sales deals and being a document repository." Nguyen was also working on a limited budget and would only have used a fraction of the larger tool he looked at purchasing. At this time last year, he saw Resolver's main enterprise risk management software tool as an opportunity to leverage its tech - nology to build something that would work for him. "It is strong in permission-based roles, strong in notifications and strong in work- flow and that's basically what I needed. In an enterprise risk world, you look at a risk, set the risk and assign it to someone to go deal with it with an overall picture of what needs to be done," he says. Nguyen sat down with the junior prod - uct manager at Resolver and talked with her for about an hour and a half and showed her his basic workflow as to how he thought it should work in terms of triage. She then built the app in a couple of days. "I needed to have a relevant voice at the executive table in terms of talking about data and metrics — we are very data driven and make decisions based on data, but we were flying blind when it came to legal," he says. "I go to meetings where I expect finance to have their decks and spreadsheets and charts of how we're doing from a financial perspec - tive — same with sales and marketing. HR also has metrics on how long people are stay- ing. The page I submitted in PowerPoint was There was no good way for someone to tell me what I should be working on. It was usually whoever was screaming the loudest or first in first out. It was not a good thing because something inevitably got missed or no one really knew the status of a matter at any one time. PETER NGUYEN, Resolver Inc. PHOTO CREDIT: ROBIN KUNISKI

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