alt.legal: Real Talk With Unilever’s Head Of Legal Ops

Last week, I heard a general counsel give a talk about the radical things he’s done to shake up his legal department. I was really into his talk, but then he said that his first and perhaps most important hire was a head of legal operations.

Legal operations? Really?

Look, I’ve heard a lot about in-house departments and law firms operationalizing their work, bringing best practices from the business world to the practice, at long last. And I’m all about borrowing from business—my company implements Lean Six Sigma practices into our processes.

But sometimes, legal operations feels like more bark than bite. Are partners really going to bend their work schedules and deadlines to a law firm’s certified project management office? Are in-house counsel going to jam their strategic judgment into a GANTT chart? I’ve seen where legal ops can work, but I remained skeptical.

Fast forward to this week. I’ve been in London this week, meeting with clients, which gave me the chance to meet Saswata Mukherjee, Global Legal Operations Director at the consumer products behemoth, Unilever (€53.3 b in 2015). I appreciated meeting him for his easygoing personality and candor. I asked him for this interview, and he agreed, which I also appreciated.

The next day, we met for coffee and I got to pick his brain. I now have an even greater appreciation for him, and for what legal operations can do.

Saswata Mukherjee: There’s always a lot of conversation around legal operations, but it’s tough to actually execute on it. I put my hand up for that job, and now I am the global head of legal operations and a member of the legal management team.

Ed Sohn: What are the ways you contribute to the legal department at Unilever?

SM: Let’s start with external provider management, like alternative services from providers like you. I look at who we work with, how to work with them, where we have opportunities, and importantly, how to get our law firms involved with them.

ES: Do outside counsel ever show any attitude about that? I expect that when you get law firms involved with alternative legal providers, you might get some friction.

SM: No real attitude, but sometimes people are reluctant. We need every firm and provider to be able to explain their value. And firms ultimately have to start to understand our priority on collaboration.

ES: Collaboration? Not as easy as it sounds.

SM: We really do require and value collaboration. There will always be some people who may not want to collaborate, but ultimately, we still make it happen. For example, on a project a while back, we asked three different law firms to contribute to a single draft. They all worked on it and got it done. They all claimed some inefficiencies due to the arrangement, but I didn’t see that on the bills.

ES: How do you decide to do things like that? Just experimentation?

SM: Well, primarily, we look first at simplification. That’s another area my job covers: simplification and efficiency. That really means questioning everything you do, how it’s being done, and ultimately, whether the outcome is always providing value to our legal department.

It’s not about adding another layer. Usually we start with what we should stop doing. Do we really need to approve every time someone wants to put some kind of artwork on the back of any Unilever package? We’re happy to work with our branding people to establish broader legal guidance. What about RFPs? How often is that heavy process providing real value for legal?

After knowing what you should stop, you can then decide what you should outsource, and finally, what you should do more of.

ES: In the midst of that simplification exercise, how does the business play a role?

SM: People often don’t understand that the best in-house legal function is to be within the business. The business doesn’t come to you and look at you as a pure lawyer. The business requires business judgment from a legal perspective, then the pure lawyering comes next.

The business drives what legal needs to become. To that end, in-house teams have to keep innovation moving forward, and the support for that has to be there from outside counsel and providers.

ES: So in a sense, we’re back to collaboration again.

SM: Yes. Collaboration has to be internal, as well as external.

ES: How do you get your huge legal department to buy into all of this, including the collaborative effort?

SM: That leads me to a third area I cover in my job: training and learning. Here at Unilever, we’re very proud of our Legal Academy, which is a formal training and learning program. As part of it, we emphasize soft skills that lawyers need, including collaboration — internal collaboration with your teammates and collaboration that spans the globe.

People often say that lawyers don’t need to know what the law is all the time; they need to know where they can find it. Sometimes it’s not “where” the law is so much as “who” has it. Our legal team worldwide is around five hundred people, including compliance and patent professionals, so it’s very possible that someone else can help with what you’re working on.

ES: Is there space for technology to help?

SM: Ah, that’s my final area of coverage: evaluating and understanding technology. Technology can be a difficult thing for corporate legal departments, because it’s tough to get influence over where other areas of the business have a need. There’s a lot of uncertainty around whether we have the right technology to meet legal needs. Recently, we’re trying to reach out more to legal technology providers, to get solutions built specifically for legal.

But technology won’t solve everything. You need the right process and people around it. If you make investments into specific technology but don’t have the right people to operate it, it could really be a waste.

ES: What’s an example of something that’s worked for you?

SM: I’m not just saying this because you’re with Thomson Reuters, but Serengeti [now Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker] has been really great for us. Getting visibility and data on spend changes how we can manage our firms and providers. I can now go to outside counsel and review how they are allocating their effort, because I have the data.

Overall, technology has the potential to be really disruptive, and it’s not moved at the pace that we’ve thought it would. I really am unsure of what’s possible, but whatever happens, it will be fast. It will happen in five years, not ten.

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Ed Sohn is a Senior Director at Thomson Reuters Legal Managed Services. After more than five years as a Biglaw litigation associate, Ed spent two years in New Delhi, India, overseeing and innovating legal process outsourcing services in litigation. Ed now focuses on delivering new e-discovery solutions with technology managed services. You can contact Ed about ediscovery, legal managed services, expat living in India, theology, chess, ST:TNG, or the Chicago Bulls at edward.sohn@thomsonreuters.com.