Alan Bryan Discusses Legal Operations and Outside Counsel Management
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Here are some highlights of my interview with Alan Bryan:
The legal profession gave me the opportunity to help others.
You can never escape change. Change is going to occur in your personal life and professional life. I can only control two things, how I take in the change and then how I react to it.
It was decided we should be become more efficient, more lean, so the Legal Operations Team was born. It was built around this idea of having outside counsel management, but we also had a data and analytics team, that had project managers and data scientists, a communications person, a graphic designer and then of course, we have a diversity inclusion attorney.
We introduced Outside Counsel to why we created a legal operations unit and that was to become less of a law firm attached to a company and more of a business unit.
Law firms should be looking into technology. They should be looking into different types of employees for the firms, such as project managers and data scientists and others who can help guide the firm that are not necessarily lawyers.
Through our partnership with LegalMation we’ve found that the time it would take to review the complaint, answer the complaint and edit, we can reduce that total time by 60 or 70%.
There’s really no way to avoid Non-Lawyer investment or ownership of legal services in the US. It’s happening overseas. It will probably continue to grow here until it’s found its way here.
I think that lawyers will be doing higher value work, more business advisement than ever before. Some of that is going to cause the law firms themselves to change business models.
Now that we can leverage technology to have more RFPs, we can really get a lot more information on the front end. For instance, we can take that software and run an RFP and within two to three days, get responses back from a handful of firms as to how they’d handle the case. Again, it goes back to making better informed decisions. That’s what that technology does.
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Links referred to in this episode:
Alan Bryan LinkedIn Profile
A More Efficient Legal Department (article) by Alan Bryan and In-House Ops
LegalMation
PERSUIT
Corporate Legal Operations Consortium
ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model
Buying Legal Council
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck
Primal Leadership: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman
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Audio Transcription
To Download the PDF Transcript, click here. (Look in the top right corner and click on the three dots to download.)
Hi listeners, this is Chris Batz, your host of the Law Firm Leadership podcast. Today, I interviewed an Arkansas native, who’s a legal department executive of the Fortune 1 Company many of you know called Wal-Mart. We discussed the genesis and reason for his now role, to lead the Office of Outside Counsel Management and Legal Operations, better known as legal ops.
Just a reminder the PDF transcript of this audio is available to download. Go to LionGroupRecruiting.com/podcast.
As many of you know, we interview corporate defense, law firm leaders, partners, general counsel, and legal consultants. You’re listening to episode twenty-five of the Law Firm Leadership podcast.
Chris: Welcome to the Law Firm Leadership podcast. I’m your host, Chris Batz, with the Lion Group. Today I have the pleasure of speaking with Alan Bryan, senior associate general counsel of Wal-Mart. Alan leads the Office of Outside Counsel Management and Legal Operations, overseeing certain internal operations and processes as well as the relationship with all company US law firms. He also serves as adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas School of Law, where he created and teaches the first known law school course dedicated solely to the operation of corporate legal departments.
Mr. Bryan previously managed litigation at the Fortune 1 Company for its approximate 5,000 Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores across the US. Before joining Wal-Mart, he was a litigation partner with Arkansas’s then largest law firm. Alan, welcome to the Law Firm Leadership podcast. It’s great to have you on the show.
Alan: Thank you for having me, Chris. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.
A Desire to Lead
Chris: So Alan, it might be an easy question and an obvious one, but why Wal-Mart, why did you end up joining the behemoth of a retailer from private practice?
Alan: Well, a couple of things. I had practiced law for about a decade after graduating law school, had become a partner in my firm and was seeing a shift in the nature of my practice, which was general litigation, into financial-based litigation, bankruptcy-related litigation, all stemming post-financial crisis of 2008. I was also really thinking about long-term what I wanted to do.
One of my long-term desires was to lead people. I really started thinking about whether the law firm was the best place for me. I happened to be working at the time in my law firm’s Fayetteville, Arkansas branch office. Wal-Mart’s in the backyard. I decided in 2011 to take a leap so that I would have more opportunities to really not just practice law but also lead others.
Chris: It sounded like Wal-Mart gave you the opportunity to do that?
Alan: Yes. It so happened that there was a position open managing litigation that was store-related litigation, which was really my bailiwick. I took that position and really got to know the company for about 18 – 19 months and then was asked to manage all the outside accounts relationships.
Legal Operations and Outside Counsel Management
Chris: Lets pivot to that. Tell us about how this department came to be.
Alan: The position of outside counsel management is somewhat unique. There’s not a lot of corporate legal departments that have it, but Wal-Mart established the position in approximately 2005 to manage what it was seeing as a growing list of outside preferred account counsel. It was also at the time busy recruiting more outside counsel to not only bolster its capabilities and capacity but also to enhance the diversity of the outside counsel panel and the attorneys that work for the company.
There were upwards of 900 to 1,000 law firms that were at one time approved to do work for the company. There’s a lot of logistical management that goes into that. That’s where the position was created or why it was created originally. It has evolved since that time. In fact, as I took over the position it was still somewhat administrative, logistical kind of a relationship-based function. About three years ago, it was elevated to include not just this external management piece, but also to have an internal-facing look at our processes and procedures and people and really to find inefficiencies and drive efficiencies internally, which obviously touches the external outside counsel management relationships since that is the bulk of our spend.
Chris: How did this evolve as to the point where now you’re teaching it? Give us some more history as far as what happened with this role and managing 900 to 1,000 law firms. That’s a lot.
Alan: It is. I had the management portion of the position I’m in now for about two years before we established this legal operations team within legal. I had had an opportunity to really take a look at what had been done and what needed to be done.
As luck would have it, we had a bit of a leadership shake up. It was decided at the time that as a department, we should be looking at becoming more efficient, more lean, so the legal operations team was born. It was built around this idea of having outside counsel management, but we also had a data and analytics team, that had project managers and data scientists, a communications person, a graphic designer and then of course, we have a diversity inclusion attorney. This whole group was able to come together in about 2015 and really start taking a look at itself, taking a look at the legal department. We found a lot of things that needed to change.
The deputy general counsel came to me in August of 2015 and just asked me my thoughts on what needed to change. It was a lot. One of the first things we needed to do was to reset the relationship we had with our law firms, which had been – while it had been managed centrally through the office I described and several aspects of the relationship were still taking place in a siloed fashion and were taking place within the practice areas. One of the suggestions I had was, “Lets bring everyone in and get everyone on the same page.”
The second major thing we did, besides getting every law firm on the same page, was we undertook a very major data cleanup of our systems, meaning the law firms within them, the timekeepers within them, as well as a lot of documentation. This was to kind of lay the foundation for what we wanted to accomplish in the coming years.
Chris: When you said you brought everybody in and got them on the same page, did you actually have kind of a summit of all of the firms that came in?
Alan: We did bring in the major firms, the firms that handled the vast majority of our work, after about 15 or 16 months of going through this process of cleaning the data and renegotiating engagement terms and rates for firms. We brought in those strategic firms that handled the majority of our work. We really introduced them to the concept and the historical background of why we created a legal operations unit and that was to become less of a law firm attached to a company and more of a business unit.
That’s where I think you see, broadly speaking, a lot of corporate legal departments going. It’s no longer okay to simply say it’s legal. It’s a cost of doing business. What corporations I think want to see post-financial crisis is more and more effort in their cost centers to control cost and to create efficiencies. That’s where I think you’ve seen the growth of legal operations across many corporate legal departments.
Chris: Alan, what was it like to bring those outside counsel critical firms back to the drawing board? Talk about the function of this new department. How was it received? Did you have pushback?
Alan: We’ve had minimal push back along the way, but it’s more on technicalities. Actually I wouldn’t even call it pushback. In some instances it’s helping us improve on some of our initiatives that we rolled out to the firms, but broadly speaking, the firms were very receptive to it. They understand that while we are a Fortune 1 company currently, we are a retailer and not everything you see in revenue falls to the bottom line. We have always been cost-conscious. We’ve relayed that culture to our law firms and expect them to be efficient as well.
It was not a large surprise to most of our long-standing strategic firms. I think that if there was anything that was new, it was this idea that we were trying to become more and more innovative.
Law Firms need to Invest in People and Technology
Chris: What advice would you give law firms that are not caught up in the notion of innovation?
Alan: I think obviously it’s a firm-by-firm basis. But I think for a lot of firms, the conversation needs to be had about investments in people or investments in technology.
There is, for instance, technology now coming to fruition that is going to really change a lot of the dynamics of how law is practiced. Other firms need to be paying attention at least to the technological advances and how that will shift the landscape of their business model. At the same time you’ve seen for many years this continued growth of legal process organizations and alternative legal service providers that are really providing the purchasers of legal services different ways to do things. This I think had its genesis in the e-discovery realm.
As discovery became more and more of a complex endeavor, it could no longer be that you would provide a big group of banker’s boxes full of documents and have associates in conference rooms looking through them. Now things are electronic. You have technology that can find words within groups of documents and do all sorts of front-end work that attorneys no longer do. That was kind of the genesis of alternative legal service providers but also of this kind of wave of technology that is helping us practice law more efficiently.
To your original question, law firms should be looking into technology. They should be looking into different types of employees for the firms, such as project managers and data scientists and others who can help guide the firm that are not necessarily lawyers. I also know that what I’m suggesting, it’s a difficult proposition because most law firms are set up in a partnership fashion and so it takes a little bit of a really group effort to get there.
Recommended Legal Tech Tools
Chris: Do you have the freedom to share what tools you’re using now you alluded to and/or other types of tools that more advanced technology being brought to the legal market?
Alan: Sure. One example would be our use of artificial intelligence. We have tested various types of artificial intelligence within the discovery realm, in other words taking the bots and having them search through documents.
But in the spring we introduced a partnership with a company called LegalMation, which is using Watson technology to take a complaint and feed it into the LegalMation system and produce an initial answer and an initial set of interrogatories and requests for proof in two minutes. Now that takes training of the system. It’s something that can be done on repetitive types of complaints. Through that partnership we’ve found that the time it would take review the complaint, answer the complaint and edit, we can reduce that total time by 60 or 70%. There still needs to be an attorney there to review what the software puts out, but it’s obviously freeing up a lot of that attorney time to do more strategic-type tasks.
Another piece of technology we’ve really implemented here recently is a partnership with PERSUIT. It’s a RFP provider which allows us to leverage the process in a way that we can have a much greater volume. It also provides for reverse option function and feedback function through use of an evaluation system.
Now that we can leverage technology to have more RFPs, we can really get a lot more information on the front end. For instance, we can take that software and run an RFP and within two to three days, get responses back from a handful of firms as to how they’d handle the case. Again, it goes back to making better informed decisions. That’s what that technology does.
We can talk about many others. There’s contract management software. There’s a lot of knowledge management software that’s going to change how the practice is performed, which is really just taking older principles and putting them into a technological framework.
3 Resources for Learning More about Legal Operations
Chris: How can people learn more about legal operations and the role that you play at Wal-Mart?
Alan: If I was to advise anyone who’s just starting out to learn some of the basic principles, I would send them to three different groups, all of which can be found on the internet.
One is CLOC, Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, which has a lot of resources, but also it has a really good 12 pillars of legal operations to give a sense. They are things like vendor management, change management, financial management, and various other items of importance to any legal operations function.
The ACC, the Association of Corporate Counsel, has a legal operations group. This is a fantastic group of people who are collecting materials, obviously sharing best practices. One of the things that they’ve done that really is impressive is they put together the ACC Legal Operations Maturity model. If you’re just starting out as a corporate legal operations group, you can review this maturity model and see where you are and probably where you want to go.
The last one I would mention is Buying Legal Council. They have a procurement focus, so this is really honed in on the vendor procurement and vendor management piece a little more so than the other two, but it does provide a different way and its whole purpose is to explore different ways of procuring legal services.
The Future of Retail
Chris: Being at the largest retailer in the world, would you give us your impressions on the future of retail?
Alan: Well, I think that for some time has been an emphasis on the Omni channel, which is retail is no longer just simply relying on the brick and mortar stores to function. It is looking at all the different ways that consumers want to purchase goods and services. I would say that that is one of the things that will continue to evolve is the way and the places and the manner in which we purchase goods and services.
I think where Wal-Mart in particular is positioning itself is to leverage its geographic footprint in order to make all of that process easier at the same time providing convenience, where we can through our pick up program, which is very popular, our delivery and many of our online places to purchase goods and services. I think that those are some of the things that will continue to evolve.
The other thing that I would see is really looking at a brand-centric type of retail environment so that consumers who are really becoming more brand-focused have known places that they can go to get what they want. There are many other changes that are occurring that I’m not an expert in, but am glad to watch evolve, all of which means changes to the business model of Wal-Mart and any other retailer. I think that those changes help bolster or drive the need for everything I’ve been talking about.
The Future of Law
Chris: Where do you think the future of law is headed?
Alan: That’s a complex question, but we are in the midst of change whether some recognize it or not. I don’t want to say that legal operations is the end all and be all, but it is really kind of this transitional period we’re in right now from taking what I’ve described as kind of that genesis of more technology and different types of individuals doing different types of work in the e-discovery realm and evolving into this legal ops function.
I think what you’re going to see in the future is a lot more strategic work being handled by lawyers and a lot less of the commoditized work being handled by lawyers. I also think that there’s really no way to avoid non-lawyer investment or ownership of legal services in the US. It’s happening overseas. It will probably continue to grow here until it’s found its way here. I think that technology obviously is going to change the way in which we practice law.
The more bold predictions I think would be that you see more focus on niche lawyers. I think more and more people are going to have to find expertise. I think that lawyers will be doing higher value work, more business advisement than ever before. Some of that is going to cause the law firms themselves to change business models.
But I don’t believe that you will need less lawyers. In fact, just as we talk about all of these changes, the different types of law that are out there that need lawyers are changing as well. Who would have thought ten years ago that privacy law would be a big as it is, cyber security as big as it is? The internet of things is going to change the regulatory environment in ways we couldn’t have thought of 10 – 15 years ago. I never thought people who were practicing in expertise of drone law, but there are. Lawyers will be assisted greatly by technology and by non-lawyers.
Legal Operations Consultant and Certified Coach
Chris: Let’s assume things change at Wal-Mart and you found yourself on the street, what else would you be doing Alan?
Alan: One, I think that if I continued in the operations space, I would love to help other companies design their own legal operations function. That being from the smallest to the largest companies because I think there’s a place for it in all sides of corporate legal departments. Also, advising law firms on how they can better serve their corporate clients vis-a-vis this idea of efficiencies and technology and better processes and different people handling matters. I’d like to think that if I was no longer here, that I could continue in advising people.
I also am training to be a certified coach. I have always had a passion for helping others get to where they want to go or to solve their problems. I love solving problems. In my role today, I also end up being a de facto mediator at times, so that’s something also on the table. But I hope that Wal-Mart finds use still for me for a while.
A passion for helping others
Chris: Let’s spend a little bit of time on this notion of you being a certified coach. Who would be your client and what would be your target?
Alan: I think the core client would be lawyers just because that’s where my experience lies or what I really have a passion for. Specifically within that realm, I’d really like to help the generation that’s coming out of law school or has recently come out of law school to help find their way in this profession because I think it’s going to be evolving on their watch and it’s going to affect their careers much more than it will some of us who have been in the profession a while.
I have also had the experience now of being in a firm, being in a corporation, so I have a little bit more breadth of experience than others. Then in addition to that experience, I’ve also taken on a number of mentorships of younger lawyers and, in fact, law students. Of course, I do teach at the University of Arkansas Law School. That’s given me an opportunity to kind of hear from this generation that’s coming out and that has recently come out.
But beyond lawyers, I do think that some of my experience lends itself to an overall business coaching practice simply because one of the things that I’ve been trained on and have experience in now is problem solving. While you need subject matter expertise for some problems, some are as simple as using good logic and reason and using the best people in the best places.
My parents and the way they raised me…
Chris: What experiences in your life have caused you to want to be the leader that you are today?
Alan: I don’t know if there was any one or two or any specific formative events, but I would credit a lot of it to the way I was raised, with the virtues I was raised with. That’s what points me in the direction to serve and leadership. Based on the way I was raised, it gives me great satisfaction to help people and to help others solve their problems. It was more I think my parents and just the way they raised me to treat and to interact with others.
It carried over for me because actually when I was in my formative years I was not going to be a lawyer. I was headed to med school. I took a big U turn my first year of college and realized that it was not for me and that actually the legal profession gave me the opportunity to help others, maybe in a different way obviously than a medical degree would have, but it really built upon the strengths that I had, which were relationships with others, speaking, writing, and a lot of reason and logic. A lot of the skillsets that I had naturally gravitated me towards the law rather than the med school.
Family Life and Balance
Chris: How do you and the family enjoy life away from work?
Alan: My wife and I have two beautiful children. My son is six and a half and my daughter is four and a half. We spend quite a bit of time on their activities, everything from soccer to football, baseball, now starting basketball. Then my daughter: dance, cheerleading, gymnastics, and soccer herself.
My wife and I – I talk often about work/life balance when I speak places and have spoken about this before with a lot of lawyers. She’s not a lawyer, but she is a neonatal intensive care unit nurse and she works nights. With a little bit of help from others, we somehow manage a pretty hectic schedule and try to balance those activities. We just do it and enjoy it, every bit of it.
Recommend Reading
Chris: Do you have any recommendations or anything you’ve been reading lately?
Alan: It’s been a couple of years, but I think the book Mindset by Carol Dweck is a really important work. It really reaffirmed in me a lot of things about a growth mindset that I knew I had in me but I needed to read again.
Most recently I read a book called Primal Leadership by Daniel Goleman, which really talks about the emotional intelligence aspects around leadership and how those can serve you in different situations and which leadership style to take on in those various situations.
You can never escape change
Chris: Last question I wanted to ask is what is something, Alan, you’ve learned this past year or the past couple of years that has impacted how you live personally or professionally?
Alan: It’s maybe not something I’ve learned, but, again, it’s been reaffirmed recently, is that you can never escape change. Change is going to occur in your life, your personal life, in your professional life. For me, I’ve had a number of changes in the past year, both personally and professionally that have really – they increase your stress because you sometimes internalize those changes and really make them affect you more so than they actually do.
One of the ways that I try to look at those things is I can only control two things, how I take in the change and then how I react to it. I think really going through a lot of changes both here in the legal department, which are continuing, and then also in personal life, like I said, I have a very busy personal life, has caused me to refocus on balance and making sure that I’m headed in the right direction no matter where I go, but also to realize that there’s some things that are outside of my control and I can only react in the way that I can and be prepared for what comes next if I’m open to the change itself.
Chris: That’s excellent. Alan, thank you so much. It’s been an honor and a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for your time today.
Alan: Well, thank you Chris. I’ve enjoyed talking with you today.
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