Interview (Part 1) I Bill Novomisle (KorumLegal)

Bill Novomisle is senior litigator turned legal operations specialist with over 8 years’ experience in innovation roles. Bill has worked for both in-house legal departments and law firms across Hong Kong, China (Shanghai), India, Canada and the USA designing and implementing various process and technology based initiatives.

In his current role, Bill is a managing consultant of process and technology for KorumLegal, a legal innovator delivering flexible, value-driven, People, Process and LegalTech solutions to a range of clients from start-ups and SME’s to multinationals, financial institutions and law firms.

Cristabel Gekas from our TLF Vic Team sat down with Bill in Hong Kong to learn more about Legal Ops and KorumLegal.

You were previously a litigator working in Big Law. Why did you decide to move into a legal operations role?

I was originally trained and qualified as a litigator in New York City. I worked in Big Law and I had a pretty broad base of commercial adversarial practise, including litigation, arbitration and government investigations. It was very challenging work, so I hit the point in my career where I needed to decide whether I would do the work needed to be done to make Partner in my law firm, or whether I would pursue a different path. The partnership track did not hold much appeal to me, so I started to explore other things that were out there.

As I was conducting a job search, there was a relatively new general counsel at Pepsi Co Global, who was looking for a director of legal operations to help drive efficiency and budget discipline, and manage outside counsel and legal service delivery. At the time, this sounded utterly bizarre to me and I had no idea what any of it really meant, but it sounded super exciting so I went for the job.

At the time, I think there were only one dozen people in legal operations around the world, period. This was still a very new, rapidly developing field. CLOC would only be founded several years later. This job was an opportunity to create something from whole cloth. So long story short, I took the leap and never looked back.

That sounds fascinating! You are one of only a few people who have seen the growth of legal ops since its infancy. Can you tell us more about the development of legal ops as an industry and a discipline in its own right?

There are different roots in different geographies and companies. In different geographies, people are approaching different pain points. But at the end of the day, what everyone is working towards is a rationalised, technology-driven supply chain that delivers value for the ultimate client. 

In the United States, the most common area where you saw legal operations was in electronic discovery and the management of electronic documents, or in the outside counsel space, as there was a push to manage the extremely high outside counsel costs.

In areas like the UK and Europe, there was more of a focus on contracts or getting better control around mid-market M&A, or moderate value, strategic transactions.

In Asia, I feel like it’s all about contracts. There is a very different cost basis for how lawyers charge, so the pressures around engaging outside counsel in this region is very different – it does not tend to be as much as a pain point.

So tell us more about KorumLegal. What type of work do you do?

KorumLegal is headquartered in Hong Kong and we have offices in London and Singapore, servicing APAC as a whole. We offer the full suite of services across people, process and technology.

Our people division is a consulting division based on the flexible secondment model, where we can offer additional human resources for gap fills caused by maternity, project needs or expansion into new areas.  

In terms of process + technology, we have developed our own bespoke process methodology, specifically targeted toward legal services. The aim of our methodology is to create a process that is streamlined, that delivers value, and is quantifiable, so we can measure how the process is working

On the technology side, we are technology agnostic. We don’t have our own proprietary solution, but we help our clients make sense of the legal technology that is available on the market. It’s about matching the tool to the problem, as well as to the organisation.

We also offer managed legal services, which is really an amalgam of people, process and technology.  With this, we can take an entire segment of work off of a client’s plate and handle it all in a cost-efficient and high quality manner without the client needing to be concerned about headcount training, technology costs while also delivering quality work and tracking metrics.

Tell us more about the team at KorumLegal. Who do you work with on a daily basis?

Our consultants come to us from a variety of backgrounds. We have consultants with system engineering degrees AND law degrees. We have consultants who are coders with computer science degrees, in addition to being lawyers. We have some consultants who were general counsel. A lot of folks don’t have much knowledge about legal operations, so they shadow our more experienced consultants to upskill themselves so they can eventually lead these mandates themselves. 

Check out Part Two here.