Podcast | Legal Leaders Exchange |Understanding legal intake and triage

Nathan Cemenska

Hi everybody. Nathan Cemenska, I am the Director of Legal Operations and industry insights here at Wolters Kluwer ELM solutions. That means that my job is to educate myself, clients potential clients, and the industry at large about legal operations, trends, and best practices. And thank you for joining our podcast today.

We have two of the top people from legal operations, both of whom are Wolters Kluwer clients and we are going to be talking about legal intake and triage. If you don’t know what those are, you should. We’re going to go into the definition of these things for those who aren’t familiar, but just so you know, the recent Blickstein Law Department Operations Survey indicated that out of eight or nine different categories of technology, legal intake, and triage had the most interest of any type. And it was also the fastest-growing level of interest. So, this is something that you all really do need to know about. But before we get into that, let’s have our two guests introduce themselves. What about you first, Tiffani?

Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh

My name is Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh I manage our legal operations team here at DHL Supply Chain, Stacy?

Stacy Lettie

Hi, this is Stacy Lettie. I am the Director of Legal Operations at Adtalem Global Education.

Nathan Cemenska

Thank you both so much. So I don’t want to belabor the point, but I do think it’s fair to our audience because some of them might not be familiar. How would you define legal intake and triage and maybe give an example or two of what it is that we’re talking about? What about you first, Stacy?

Stacy Lettie

So legal intake and triage are a little bit different, although they work very, very intrinsically together. So legal intake is the process whereby you are taking matters or cases into your legal department. How does the work get to you? And how does it get to your department? Triage is the process of looking at the matters that have come into your intake system, whatever that is, and looking at it to make sure that the appropriate information is there — the contact information is there, any associated documents are actually attached to it — and making sure that the matter is complete, or sufficiently complete. And then, let’s say, assigning it to a responsible attorney or paralegal to actually work on the matter.

Nathan Cemenska

Hold on a second, I’m confused. What about just doing it the old way where like some random person emails you and nobody knows where it’s supposed to go? And there’s no document that a matter was ever opened or completed? What’s wrong with that Tiffani?

Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh

So much is wrong with that. It leads to a lot of issues within your department. You have duplication of work, potentially, people lose track of what they’re working on. There’s no visibility into the type of work that’s coming in. There’s just a whole host of issues when you don’t have some type of system or process in place to help you manage the intake of your legal matters.

Nathan Cemenska

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. One of the people who helped me sort of get the lay of the land when I got into this job was a former client and he had worked at a law department where they had over 1000 attorneys and, of course, that that means that they would have a number of non-attorney, so-to-speak, folks in the law department as well. And he was speaking with the GC one day and the GC admitted that he or she had basically no idea what half of the attorneys under them did all day, except what the AGC said. And they didn’t necessarily know except what the people below them were saying. So that is the problem that we’re trying to do away with by doing this legal intake stuff. And Stacy, you actually went so far as to call legal intake the “foundation of everything that you do” there at Adtalem, can you talk about what you mean by that?

Stacy Lettie

Yeah, so I look at legal operations, you know, CLOC has the CLOC circle. I actually think that in my mind, a lot of what I do is almost like building a house. And so you know, if your foundation on your house is not solid, everything else will fall apart. And I view intake as the basis for everything we do, because it feeds and informs all of the decisions that we make. So, what do I mean by that? If you are looking at the makeup of your legal department, how many attorneys, how many senior attorneys, how many paralegals, how many admins do we have? It’s really tough to decide whether or not you have the right staffing mix if you don’t know what kind of work you’re doing. So how many contracts are you doing? How many NDAs? Do you do how much litigation comes in every month? You need to know all of that information, which is another word for what we call data.

Every single piece of work that comes into your intake becomes a piece of data that helps you to assess your needs in a particular area and make good decision making. Without that intake, you’re guessing. And without an intake system, if one person doesn’t show up to work, gets injured unexpectedly, takes some medical leave, and you don’t know where their work is, you now lose the benefit of everything that they know. And you’re kind of shooting in the dark.

Nathan Cemenska

Thanks. Yeah, I think the benefits are pretty evident in both of you are from leading organizations that actually already have legal intake. However, the bulk of the industry hasn’t even started. So could we talk a little bit about the journey of going from basically zero to 60, if you don’t really have anything currently?

Tiffani, I think you two or three years ago started this journey, maybe you could talk a little bit about the before state and then kind of come-to-God moment where you realize can’t do it this way anymore. And then the way that things are now.

Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh

We started a few years ago, when we realized that, you know, we needed a better process around our intake. Because we just had so many issues, there was a delay in responses, we were doing duplicate work. And it was becoming a big problem. So, we started with talking with our teams kind of trying to figure out where the bulk of – they thought the intake was coming from. And out of that we identified two practice areas where we knew we wanted to start, because we knew this was brand new, we know our business, we knew we were going to have to have a phased approach until everyone got used to it and there was proven success. So we implemented an intake tool for those two practice areas, we did leave it pretty open-ended, because we knew we wanted to build on it with other practice areas with other countries and regions.

After the first year or so we had some proven success. We had a lot of good feedback from the business, we made tweaks along the way. We then decided to continue the rollout to our other practice areas and extend it to all of the countries that we support throughout the Americas region. So that’s where we are today, we rolled out the intake tool for all areas and all countries in the Americas a little over a year ago. And we’ve just had great feedback and great user adoption, because we’ve made it pretty simple for our business partners to submit the requests. But we’re still getting all of the upfront details that we need to be able to triage and figure out how we should allocate the requests coming in.

Nathan Cemenska

Tiffani, I assume that this was a somewhat iterative process, you basically said that the intake is somewhat elegant, and perhaps even minimalistic so that people don’t feel like they’re having to fill in all these unnecessary details. How much did you have to go back and forth before you arrived at your current state?

Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh

So, it did take a couple of months of planning. To be honest, we wanted to make sure that we were asking the right questions. Because we know if we make something too complex, then our users aren’t likely to adopt it. But at the same time, we wanted to make sure we were getting the right information. So we did have a lot of working sessions talking with our teams, and also some very specific business partners to figure out the right information that we wanted to capture and how to make it as simple as possible for the user.

We did the same exercise when we decided to roll it out to other practice areas and other countries. We took our initial tool as the starting point. And we said this is what we have, are there additional things that you need for this to work for your area as well?

Nathan Cemenska

So and you also said the US started out with one or two practice areas in the States, it sounds like. How did you choose those folks, were those just the ones where it seemed most appropriate, or the ones that were the most enthusiastic about giving it a shot, or what?

Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh

It was actually the areas where the business was most vocal about needing more support.

Nathan Cemenska

Okay, good methodology. And, Stacy, let’s go to you. So there’s been a lot of layoffs, I guess, compared to the past, at least in the last three to four months, I keep seeing more and more stories. It doesn’t sound like we’re in a horrible situation, but we may be headed into a situation of lots of layoffs. And I do believe that some of these are going to be corporate law department employees. And the reality is that that is going to put a corporate law departments in a position where they just end up going to outside counsel for more, in my opinion. And you call this, if I can take the liberty of quoting you, the “stupidest decision that companies can make.” Could you please explain why?

Stacy Lettie

Oh, yes, that was one of my one of my classic quotes, I suppose. It is a really short-sighted thing to do. Listen, the reality is I have had the great honor of living through several of these economic blips, as I like to call them, because I hate to call them the big R. But what ends up happening is, companies will look at what they think of as non-revenue generating departments and think that’s the place to cut. Legal is always one of them. Because they just assume that the work is still going to get done. And oh, we can, you know, use somebody else to do it. Or, you know, it’s okay, if we’re down one or two lawyers, it’s fine. But the reality is that you can cut five lawyers, you can cut three lawyers, but the work that comes into the department is still going to be there, you’re not cutting the actual legal work.

As a matter of fact, in rough economic times, I would guess that legal work actually increases, people get more litigious, you know, contracts that cut, you end up with employment issues from doing refs, there’s a lot of stuff that pops up when you start to lay people off. And we did a couple of looks at data within our department. And this is another great way to use data. You know, we looked at how much we were sending out to our outside counsel. And we looked at the line items of what exactly they were doing. And they were doing a lot of work that was not difficult to bring back in and in source. And we were spending an awful lot of money. And we went to our finance department about – this was just after COVID, after you know, we’ve had huge, huge, huge layoffs and the legal department. And we said to them: Listen, we want to hire six people, and it’s gonna cost I don’t know, I think it was about $1.6 million. But we think that over time, we can save closer to two and a half million dollars on outside counsel fees over the course of the next year. And we tracked it and we went back to them.

Just over a year later, at a board meeting, we were asked to provide the data around what we had saved in outside counsel fees. And we had saved probably about 115{e421c4d081ed1e1efd2d9b9e397159b409f6f1af1639f2363bfecd2822ec732a}, of what we initially said we were going to save just by bringing the work in house. It is always cheaper to do the work in house than to send it out. So it’s a word of caution to all those companies out there, if you’re listening to this, that there are better ways to save and to tighten your belts as a department than to cut people.

Nathan Cemenska

And I think that this was implied by your answer, but basically, legal intake/triage-type tools and the data that come out of them are going to allow you to make that business case that we should not lay this person off or that we need to hire another person. And if you don’t have that data, then you’re basically just saying like, “dude, trust me, like we need another person.”

Stacy Lettie

Exactly! And that’s actually one of the ways that I sell the concept of legal intake to legal leaders, because a lot of them don’t want to deal with having to put things into a system or having to track things or having to, you know, save their emails into an intake system. And one of the things that I say to them very often, almost always is, listen, when you come to me in March and you ask me to put another head in the budget, I need to be able to make an argument to the General Counsel and he needs to make the argument to the board that these are the amount of hours that we generated in this department with X amount of people. This is how many projects we did. This is how many projects we close. Here’s our average lead time. Here’s what we spent an outside counsel. And we need to be able to translate that into a story, for lack of a better way to say that, as to why we need that additional head, and how much more we can push into our internal work so that we can save $50,000 here or $60,000 here, or whatever it is.

Nathan Cemenska

Understood. Okay, here’s a question. This one’s for Tiffani, do you think that, basically, each and every legal matter, however small, or however big, really ought to go through a legal intake tool so that it’s trackable? And that the organization has knowledge of it not just at an individual level, but at an organizational level? Or do you think that that is going too far and trying to boil the ocean?

Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh

My team really does push for all of our information to go through the intake tool. And we use this, I would say, even before we use our matter management tool, because the little intake tool will capture, like you said, everything from you know, a general question that’s coming in to a large issue that we’re being made aware of.

What’s good about it is – one, we can see what the volume is, if we have a similar question coming through at an increasing volume, maybe at the same location, throughout the company, then we can sit down and say, is there something more we can be doing? Can we be a bit more proactive? Is there some type of training we can provide to better answer this question in the future so that they don’t keep coming back to us? I think it’s definitely something that we strive for, to give us a holistic view of all of the legal issues that we’re working on.

Nathan Cemenska

And I think, Stacy, you feel similarly right, that everything can go through, and that it should go through? Is that right?

Stacy Lettie

I do. I think I have had to be a little more flexible with my team. I think there’s – I work in education. And so we get a lot of these one-off little phone calls about students or phone calls from students. So there, we’ve had to really be very iterative, in what we’re putting in our guidelines.

For attorneys, we have a set of guidelines that we publish, regarding the system. And as part of it, it talks about what does and does not need to be part of this part of the system. So we’re a little flexible. Listen, if it was up to me, we’d have everything in there. But I also don’t want to be in a position of creating essentially what’s no more than a billable hour sheet. So I try to be flexible and be reasonable.

Nathan Cemenska

Let’s do one last question. They say that attorneys should be working at “the top of their license,” meaning that if they’re, you know, a 59 year old attorney that’s been doing consumer litigation for 35 years, they should not be making copies.

Do you feel that intake and triage might reveal some inefficient ways of doing business that are happening within your organizations and allow you to restaff and retool? Like, for instance, maybe some contracts are, you know, actually getting too much attention at the expense of other work that could be done? What do you think Tiffani?

Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh

We’ve actually used the results from our intake tool to look and see how our work is allocated mostly in our contracts and in our HR areas. And we did have some findings where we had more senior level associates working on items that could be passed down to a lower level team member.

So we do have the open discussion, we work with the teams, we provide recommendations on what we’re seeing and how they can potentially reallocate some of the work and the things that they’re focusing on. Not only do the more senior-level individuals not need to be working on these things, but it’s also a learning experience for those lower-level team members to be able to take on more of that work and get involved in some of the things that they weren’t previously.

Nathan Cemenska

Yeah, I mean, that is one of the issues that I’ve heard talked about quite a bit recently in the legal profession, is how does knowledge transfer happen? And sometimes attorneys have a problem delegating, they like to do things themselves, but how can the young people coming up learn if they’re hogging all the work? So I will let you have the last word, Stacy, what do you think on this question of really analyzing is the right work being done by the right person at the right time using this data?

Stacy Lettie

I think this is one of the most valuable things that you can do with this data. And I think that some attorneys see this as you almost being in a gotcha kind of position. You’re trying to catch them, you know, not working as hard as they can. But really, it’s a tremendously valuable tool to elevate the kinds of work that we’re doing in the legal department, making sure that the work that we’re doing is value-add to the company, which is good for everybody.

Because, to me, doing value-added work is really good job security for everybody. And that kind of makes us recession proof. And it also helps us to look at what can we push down a little bit and justify hiring paralegals or junior attorneys, really freeing up our attorneys to do the really good work that we know that they can do, and the work that will really showcase their abilities and their talents.

Nathan Cemenska

Thank you. Yep, hard to disagree with those sentiments. So, we are at the conclusion of our time, but I wanted to thank you, Stacy and Tiffani, both of you for coming and sharing your knowledge. I meant it when I said at the beginning of this podcast that you’re two of the most sophisticated, most knowledgeable folks that are out there in legal ops right now. And I’ve definitely learned a lot from both of you in our conversations. And I think that the audience and I both just learned some valuable additional insights. So thank you so much for joining us, and to our listeners, have a good day.

Greg Corombos

That was Wolters Kluwer ELM solutions Nathan Cemenska, joined by Tiffani Hamilton-Huynh, Legal Operations Manager at DHL Supply Chain and Stacy Lettie, Director of Legal Operations at Adtalem Global Education. This podcast is hosted by Wolters Kluwer ELM solutions, the market leading provider of enterprise legal spend and matter management, Contract Lifecycle Management and legal analytics solutions. For more information and additional guidance, please visit wolterskluwer.com or call 713-572-3282. Please join us for future podcasts on optimizing legal operations and achieving your legal and business goals.