INTERVIEW | SUSANNA KIPPING | LEGAL OPS, PROCESS & AUTOMATION
On behalf of The Legal Forecast, Vertika Batra virtually sat down with Susanna Kipping, the Head of Legal Operations, Process & Automation at Herbert Smith Freehills to find out more about her career journey, how her team launched the JobKeeper Navigation App in only 2 weeks and why Legal Ops really is in the business of law.
1. What did you want to be as a kid?
I really had to think about this one. So I actually checked in with my parents. I wanted to be a vet which is ironic because animals don’t speak and it turns out I’m a people person so that was never going to last. I went to an agricultural high school. I artificially inseminated a cow, I had to a wring a chicken’s neck. And by the end of it, I knew I didn’t want to be a vet.
VB: You have pets though, right?
Oh yes. Many. Many. We have a sausage dog, a cat, the whole Finding Nemo fish tank and before the fox got to them, we had chickens. I think pets give you balance. They make you realise that there are more things in life than focusing solely on solving work problems.
2. Have you picked up a new hobby during isolation?
No. I read that question and I know so many people who have learnt the ukulele and I’m just like, “Where did you find the time people?”. That seems to be bit of a thing. I haven’t even kept up with the hobbies I had beforehand.
VB: What hobbies did you have before?
Oh I’m a sedentary person. I’m a reader, and an occasional crocheter and an embroiderer. The only thing I have managed to do since COVID-19 changed our lives is to walk the dog everyday. That’s my thinking time where I contemplated the questions today.
3. You have worked in several roles during your 14 years at HSF. What was the motivating factor for you to become Head of Legal Operations, Process & Automation?
When I read that question, I was like, “Oh my! Has it been that long?!”. I’ve been lucky enough to have had the opportunity to work in a number of Business Services functions since starting with Freehills. There has, however, been a common theme of implementing change and really looking at problems or opportunities that existed within the business and helped people find out the best way forward, the best solution. The challenge is often not so much in landing on the solution, it’s in embedding the change.
So when the firm set up the Legal Operations function in mid-2018, I was given the opportunity to head up our Legal Automation capability and once again it was really around embedding change. Our initial focus was to help our legal teams produce a first draft of a document far more efficiently, making use of the knowledge that already existed in the firm, whether that be in precedents or transactional documents – bringing together not just the technical process change that was doc automation but also the behavioural change. In the past, senior associates may have had the responsibility to create the first draft of the document because they’d worked on previous transactions whereas now, using a document automation technology such as Contract Express, a grad will be able to do a first draft. So that’s been my underlying motivation – implementing that change and transforming the way that people work.
Working alongside me to deliver this change are the members of the Legal Operations Process and Automation team. We’re dispersed across a number of HSF offices and in addition to our core/permanent team, we have 2 lawyer secondees, 1 from our TMT team and one from ALT and then we have the very first graduate rotating through business services. We are very much wanting to welcome people with different expertise but also different experiences so that when we are working on an initiative, whether it be with legal design or with the legal tech that we are responsible for, there’s that real creative problem solving that you get when you have a diverse group of people supporting your lawyers or our clients. So it’s good fun!
4. What does your 'average' day look like? How has COVID-19 affected your work?
An average day is a balance between those things that are in train, that you know you have to deliver, and those opportunities that come completely out of left field. Members of the team will often get phone calls from our legal teams saying, “This is our challenge. Do you have any thoughts about how we can resolve that?”. In some cases, we are signposts because not all roads lead to legal ops. It may be that we are pointing people to our colleagues in KM or in ALT or in IT. But often, there is a broader discussion amongst the network in legal ops along the lines of “This is the challenge. Where have we done this before? And how can we help these people?”. And that happens every day which is great.
Since the 17th of March, when I started working from home, the biggest change I’ve noticed is that I’m speaking to more people more regularly. A really lovely COVID consequence is how much better the team is connected now. I mentioned before that the members of my team are located across 4 offices, and so when we had a team call it was always one ‘office’ team being altogether and then everyone else dialling in. Now we have some of the best team calls because everybody is by themselves, there is no head office, there is no main group. Everybody is in isolation equally and that has led to a far more collegiate experience and people are making more of an effort to connect. On the flipside, one of the biggest things I’ve noticed is that loss of incidental knowledge transfer. We have a home zone in the Macquarie Park office, where you’re sitting next to someone different everyday. It’s fantastic, just to get a sense of what’s happening because the majority of people that I work with aren’t in the Sydney office and indeed aren’t in Australia so often I miss what’s happening locally. So that’s been the loss, the incidental information.
5. Can you tell us more about the development of legal ops as an industry and a function in its own right? What is the biggest commercial advantage that a law firm stands to gain by having a dedicated legal ops team?
We put together our HSF Legal Operations team back in mid-2018 and that was very much as a result of wanting to mirror the way that our clients operated. We saw legal ops being well adopted within our clients in-house teams. I do think that has really worked for us, that mirroring, because clients have been very happy to work with us. The message that we heard from our clients since the HSF Legal Operations function was created was that there was a real push to do more with less in in-house. And with COVID, that absolutely is the case. There aren’t the huge budgets for in-house legal to implement bespoke legal technology and our experience has been that some clients reach out to their advisors to help them with some of the challenges that they are faced with. So legal ops really is that business of law. In my experience, this is a win-win situation. Within HSF, we are working with our lawyers to streamline their processes to deliver efficient and effective client service. This is the experience that our clients are really keen to make use of because we’ve ‘walked the talk’. And in return, that win-win piece I was talking about is we get to know our clients better and we get to understand how they’d like to work, what their preferences are and we make use of that internally to further hone our service delivery back to them. It is a beautiful circle.
6. We recently heard from Justin North, the Founder of Janders Dean, in our TLF On Speaker series on the legal ops hype cycle and the risk of applying operational management resources to the wrong area. In your opinion, what is the biggest mistake that law firms make when it comes to legal ops, process improvement and automation?
My experience and expertise is in that process and automation space so I might limit my response to that. Lawyers are excellent at solving problems. That’s the reason they exist. One of the challenges with that ‘solution mind set’ is the majority of the focus is on landing on the solution rather than admiring the problem. Problems come into the Legal Operations team phased as solutions e.g. ‘We need a triage tool’. To help deliver the most appropriate outcomes for the business we will go back and seek to understand the problem in greater detail through interviews, surveys and focus groups, surfacing pain points for all of the groups involved in the process.
Not taking the time to fully understand the problem has the unintended consequence of selecting a piece of tech that actually won’t work for the challenge. The other struggle point is making use of the tools that exist more broadly within the business, such as Office365. Incremental change is a beautiful thing. I do remember a lifetime ago I was very frustrated, I wanted to make big change because I thought that would get me to the end more quickly. But actually, my learning is that a lot of little steps get that feeling of motion, people get the sense of being on a journey so they’re not waiting for the big bang. Each of those incremental steps deliver value. Spending time really understanding the problem from all perspectives and all of the stakeholders and then making use of the resources that you may already have to deliver incremental change and improvement.
7. You are a member of Neota Logic’s APAC Client Advisory Board and recently partnered with them to launch the JobKeeper Navigation App. What was that process like? How was it received?
Using Neota’s technology enables us to engage with our clients on a ‘just in time’ basis providing them with guidance in timeframes that meet their needs. And the JobKeeper app is an excellent example of that, as is the Force Majeure app available for our UK clients. The JobKeeper app was entirely HSF driven and it’s a great idea to launch story. Over Easter, Anne Wong, a very new member of our team (she joined us 3 days before lockdown started in March) was reading some of the press around the JobKeeper payment and the complexity of the eligibility requirements. And at the same time, because she is a lovely employee, she was on our website reading our thought leadership on things that clients need to be aware of when making use of the JobKeeper payment plan and it was her idea. Over the Easter weekend, she built a prototype and then engaged with other members of our team including our innovation facilitator, Tessa, to work out how might we make use of this delivery mechanism to support our clients because we knew this was a challenge for them. And there were lots of really good, fast-paced conversations happening with our Tax SMEs at Greenwoods around what the potential solution could be. We had recently run a webinar that very much focused on this topic and were able to use the questions that came out of that webinar to help inform what the app needed to focus on to be useful to clients. We were mindful that in these circumstances where there was so much change and so much anxiety to be able to help our clients get the answers they need in a short interaction, at any time of the day, would be useful. So Anne had the idea on Easter Saturday and 2 weeks later we launched it. Really deep engagement not just with very senior partners and a diverse group of legal teams, but also with our Risk team because we hadn’t previously launched a client-facing app that was available to whoever needed to use it. Powered by Neota, content by HSF and creativity by HSF. Great feedback from clients who made use of the tool.
8. What is the most significant change that you have assisted to bring about since you took up your position as Head of Legal Operations, Process & Automation at HSF?
This is the question that I’ve thought mostly about and I think the change that I am most proud about is building the team of people who work with me in Process & Automation. I have been at the firm for a long time and whilst I’ve worked with some great people, I haven’t worked with such an energised, articulate and thoughtful team of people who all bring their own diverse set of experiences and expertise to bear on the challenges and opportunities we are presented with. There is deep trust and everyone’s perspective is valued. And I think that’s what’s behind things like getting the JobKeeper app out in 2 weeks. The team is structured in such a way as to fundamentally promote connection and collaboration. If there wasn’t interesting work on offer - to help our legal teams and to support our clients, we wouldn’t be able to recruit these people in the first place. In the business of law, you want people to feel that they’re making a difference and I absolutely think we deliver on that promise.
9. How does the Legal Ops function work alongside the firm’s Alternative Legal Services team to support clients with innovation and new thinking?
I would say that innovation is far broader than any specific team. One of the things we are really keen to foster is a more general innovation mindset. ALT absolutely delivers innovative solutions. Legal Ops is focused on the diagnostic piece which includes designing the solution. ALT then comes in and delivers the service. Within that service delivery, we are often working with the ALT delivery team to provide automation behind the scenes so they can deliver on the clients’ needs as efficiently and effectively as possible. Very interconnected and I would say we work more closely and more regularly with ALT than we do with the other practice groups.
10. What is your advice for law students and early-career lawyers who are considering a career in Legal Ops?
Go for it! When a legal secondee joins our team, we set their objectives around the potential business benefits for their practice group arising out of that secondment. Our aim is to return lawyers back to practice with that innovative mindset so that they are thinking, “Is there a better way that we could do this? Is there a delivery method that is more palatable to the client?”. My advice to lawyers who are considering a career in Legal Ops, I would say it’s not one or the other. There is hopefully the ability to weave. I do think time spent in Legal Ops is time well-spent.
11. What is your legal forecast? Where will the legal industry be in ten years?
I think Legal Ops will become more embedded in the way lawyers deliver their services. Our lawyers will be increasingly well-rounded both because of the evolving course content in law degrees, and the technical tools and process methodologies we upskill them in when they start their careers at law firms. In ten years, my sense is that this mix of skills and expertise across our legal teams will see law firms operating in the space that we currently see ‘owned’ by professional services firms.