The GC Playbook: How Tech Enables OneNeck's Strategic Legal Department

‍Welcome to our series, the GC Playbook, a blog series dedicated to practical legal tech advice from experienced in-house attorneys. Tune in to learn how legal can use technology to drive business growth and enhance legal operations.

This week, we speak with Chad Perlov, Head of Legal at OneNeck, a subsidiary of TDS and leading provider of multi-cloud and hybrid IT solutions. In today's fast-paced and complex business environment, in-house lawyers are not just legal advisors but strategic partners who work closely with senior management to drive growth and mitigate risk. Chad describes how legal tech tools can better enable the strategic GC by accelerating, enhancing, and improving collaboration in contract review.

Q: What are the biggest challenges you face in your role?

Chad:  We certainly are not just risk gatekeepers anymore! It's no secret at this point that in-house legal departments have irreversibly evolved over the past couple of decades from siloed functionaries to core business units, and one of the biggest challenges I've faced is reimagining the operational role my group must now play within an organization to facilitate successful outcomes throughout the entire business more proactively. A legal department is no longer seen as an appendage to the larger company - viewed as helpful in filtering out risk but not yet relied upon as a vital strategic organ. Now, successful legal department leaders are expected to develop and implement operational processes that tightly align with a company's key business objectives while managing risk from a more entrepreneurial perspective.

Now, successful legal department leaders are expected to develop and implement operational processes that tightly align with a company's key business objectives while managing risk from a more entrepreneurial perspective.

At OneNeck, our legal department is immersed as a connective hub within the various commercial, product, data privacy, finance, and other core business units. Our essential mission is to analyze and address legal issues with a problem-solving mindset, contextualize risk to help colleagues make informed business decisions more easily, and act as an internal process improvement leader. 

Q: How can in-house legal better align with business objectives?

Chad: A legal department should be structured to intuitively support your organization's larger strategic goals or key performance indicators. That means KPIs from the organization should cascade down to the legal department and directly inform on new process improvement ideas and initiatives. Recent examples for us include:

• Data integrity – overseeing the deployment of accurate customer contract data across multiple business platforms so colleagues can leverage that information to more quickly and effectively service customer relationship issues without time-consuming legal involvement. 
• Enterprise review prioritization – updating our intake processes to provide constant visibility of our review queue across the entire organization, empowering business leaders in different groups to collaboratively determine prioritization and reduce friction among business groups fighting over our limited bandwidth.
• Data analytics - mining information such as submission volume, response time, and analyst bandwidth to help measure our operational effectiveness and course correct as needed.  
• Business partner satisfaction - surveying internal stakeholders regularly to track satisfaction and identify areas of excellence and opportunity. 

Q: How can technology enhance your role as a strategic partner?

Chad: At OneNeck, we evaluate legal tech using a "primary use case" that is comprised of three essential criteria: accelerate, enhance, and communicate, as well as process-specific use cases that we develop to benchmark potential solutions against identified problems we want to solve or opportunities we'd like to exploit. Technology tools must first meet these criteria to be considered for a deeper review.

First, accelerate. The technology must help reduce the time needed to review and resolve matters. We are always looking for solutions that allow us to scale, optimize, and automate best practices without requiring more resources or headcount. Ultimately, as our business grows, we are constantly challenged to flatten the effort curve to get more done in less time. Meeting this criterion is a productivity play that can benefit any legal team.

Second, enhance. Technology must help us improve the quality of our work product. Technology can surface internal know-how to help reduce human error, inform on new laws or regulatory decisions, or automate gatekeeping parameters within workflows, such as approval requirements for specific provisions. As a GC, it's essential to leverage legal technology to support our responsibilities as a reliable business partner. 

Third, communicate. The technology must facilitate more consistent and efficient internal collaboration. Many legal tech tools are designed to address specific challenges in a vacuum without regard to unintended consequences that may flow across the business when implemented, leading to inefficiencies and errors. Technology should facilitate improved internal collaboration, not hamper it. Knowledge management, collaboration platforms, and other legal tech solutions that seamlessly integrate within a company's existing operating environment are critical.

Q: How can LegalOn help to improve legal operations in a company?

Chad: LegalOn enables us to review routine contracts like NDAs and identify areas that require closer attention, thus accelerating and enhancing our review process. Doing an initial pass with LegalOn helps us identify contracts requiring more time and flag terms needing greater focus – which can be a meaningful time saver. 

LegalOn enables us to review routine contracts like NDAs and identify areas that require closer attention, thus accelerating and enhancing our review process.

LegalOn's practice notes that guide us on risk and alternative language can save time and research in the drafting process. This functionality will be even more powerful once our knowledge library is baked into the system. I love the idea of tying our preexisting know-how into the framework of a contract review platform.

Q: What advice do you have for other GCs who want to use technology to be more strategic?

Chad: My best advice is to understand that technology is solely a means to an end. Rather than seeking out specific types of technology to integrate, first undertake to understand the business challenges that must be addressed. Survey stakeholders across your company to identify specific pain points and define desired outcomes. From there, you can draft up use cases to be leveraged as an objective scorecard to evaluate various potential solutions. 

By taking a more tech-agnostic approach, you will ultimately set yourself and your internal customers up for success by implementing a solution tailored to meet the business's specific needs rather than forcing the business to adapt to the needs of the solution.