“We really pride ourselves as somebody that can go into a company and put on the team’s jersey, so to speak, and act as the advocate for the person who hired us. In order to do that, you’ve got to know your environment. So we listen a lot. We take a lot of notes. We ask a lot of questions. And we very much try to keep an open mind.” -Jeff Marple

In this episode of Control the Room, Jeff Marple and I discuss how innovation can sometimes appear taboo in the legal operations industry, and the opportunity the legal world has to embrace and expand upon it. Jeff shares how knowing “your client’s environment” allows you to offer the most effective solutions to individual businesses’ needs. He explains that setting the right intentions for group events can allow the audience to participate without fear. He also shared the challenges & insights gained from transitioning the Boston Legal Design Challenge,a former in-person event built for law students to explore design thinking methods, to the virtual landscape. . Listen in to hear Jeff’s point of view on “advocating for your customer” as your North Star and how to harness your unique value in your work, across any industry.

Show Highlights

[1:46] Jeff’s Start in the Workforce 
[6:00] The Opportunity for Innovation in Legal Operations 
[14:09] Setting the Intention of Participation During Group Events 
[19:28]  The Virtual Influence Challenge 
[25:34]  The Journey of Jeff’s Professional Roadmap & the Service Perspective 

Links | Resources

Jeff’s LinkedIn
Keesal Propulsion Labs
The Boston Legal Design Challenge Podcast

About the Guest

Jeff is the current Director of Digital Transformation Strategy at Keesal Propulsion Labs. Before Keesal, Jeff most recently served as the Director of Innovation for Corporate Legal at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. At Liberty, he led the investigation, testing, and implementation of new technology, processes, and business models to improve how legal professionals get their work done. Jeff also provided consultative and incubation services to support the organic growth of transformative projects and ideas and was responsible for advancing a culture of innovation within Liberty Legal. In 2019, the Association of Corporate Counsel named Jeff’s department the “Legal Operations Team of the Year.” Jeff was at Liberty for 21 years and held roles in Systems Development and Insurance Innovation. He is the co-creator of the Boston Legal Design Challenge, serves as a formal and informal advisor to several legal tech companies, and often speaks at legal technology and operations events. In 2020, Jeff was inducted as a Fellow of the College of Law Practice Management for his significant contributions to the legal profession.

About Voltage Control

Voltage Control is a facilitation academy that develops leaders through facilitation certifications, workshops, and events. Today’s leaders are confronted with unprecedented uncertainty and complex change. Navigating this uncertainty requires a systemic facilitative approach to gain clarity and chart pathways forward. We prepare today’s leaders for now and what’s next.

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Full Transcript

Douglas Ferguson:

Welcome to the Control The Room Podcast, the series devoted to the exploration of meeting culture and uncovering cures for the common meeting. Some meetings have tight control and others are loose. To control the room means achieving outcomes while striking a balance between imposing and removing structure, asserting and distributing power, leaning in and leaning out, all to the service of having a truly magical meeting. Thanks for listening. If you’d like to join us live for a session sometime, you can join our weekly Control The Room Facilitation Lab. It’s a free event to meet fellow facilitators and explore new techniques so you can apply the things you learn in the podcast in real time with other facilitators. Sign up today at voltagecontrol.com/facilitation-lab. If you’d like to learn more about my new book, Magical Meetings, you can download the Magical Meetings Quick Start Guide, a free PDF reference with some of the most important pieces of advise from the book. Download a copy today at voltagecontrol.com/magical-meetings-quick-guide.

Douglas Ferguson:

Today, I’m with Jeff Marple, the Director of Digital Transformation Strategy at Keesal Propulsion Labs, a digital transformation company serving corporate legal departments where he helps law departments of the Fortune 500 become better versions of themselves through the intelligent use of technology. Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeff Marple:

Hey Douglas, how are you doing today?

Douglas Ferguson:

Doing well, doing well, glad to have you on. And it’s been a long time coming and happy that we’re here.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah, same here. I’m real pleased and honored to be on your show.

Douglas Ferguson:

So to get started, let’s talk a little bit about how you got your start?

Jeff Marple:

Well, every year that’s a longer and longer story. I started, I guess, as a professional, 21 years ago. I started as a Customer Service Representative for an externally facing software product that was owned by Liberty Mutual. And I started by resetting passwords, answering phones, resetting passwords. I was burning software to disk and mailing it to people. This was in the year 2000. And from my Windows 95 machine. And I did that. I worked in that organization within Liberty Mutual for 14 years, ended up running the Product Planning and Development wing of that organization. So, doing all the software development around what our new features and functionality was going to be as well as supporting the application and the platform.

Jeff Marple:

Moved out of that into a claims innovation role for a few years, was the first innovation manager within a commercial insurance claims organization. Spent a little while flying drones over roofs and over disaster and catastrophe areas trying to understand whether or not those could be a helpful tool for our adjusters in those types of situations and keep people from falling off roofs. That was an interesting time, it was before you were allowed to fly drones legally in the United States for commercial use. So we were figuring all that out, trying to figure out what the regulations should be. That was an interesting time. And did some work as well with infrared cameras at that time, trying to understand whether or not you could use those to detect moisture in walls, et cetera, et cetera. So I did a lot of hardware work. I went from software sort of to hardware. I did a little bit of software work while I was there. And then there was an opening for an innovation position in the legal department.

Jeff Marple:

And one of the guys that was in claims had gone over to head up that organization, it’s called Legal Operations. So I went to work for him over in legal, never having never worked really with lawyers before. And I was there for about six years as the Director of Innovation for Corporate Legal at Liberty Mutual for about six years, five and a half, and did a variety of projects there, worked on bringing in a lot of different cutting edge tools. A lot of them having to do with artificial intelligence. I did a lot of work to understand what the technological ecosystem was offering and whether or not that would be a good fit for us. And additionally, I was trying to turn heads on innovation and opening everyone up to new ideas.

Jeff Marple:

And that’s where I met you, Douglas, is what I was doing that job. And then about four months ago, I left Liberty Mutual, happily, not happy to leave necessarily. It was a bittersweet departure. Liberty had been a great home for me, but I was offered a job at a company called the KP Labs. KP Labs is a legal technology consulting firm. We do everything around legal technology strategy, design, use case identification brainstorming, engineering, implementation, communication, metrics, you name it. We can run the whole thing. It was essentially the unit that I came from at Liberty Mutual is KP Labs, but KP Labs does it for multiple corporate legal departments around the country.

Jeff Marple:

So that’s where I sit now. That’s what I’m doing today. I went from about 30,000 people to have about 30 people. And now I’m the Director of Digital Transformation Strategy. And we focus on two main areas. We focus on workflow automation and contract intelligence, and we try to help out a variety of Fortune 100 legal departments figure out those technologies and how best to use them.

Douglas Ferguson:

And that still is focused in the legal operations territory. Is that right?

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. So I went from legal operations to essentially working for, like our clients generally are legal operations groups within those corporate legal departments.

Douglas Ferguson:

So the folks that haven’t heard of legal operations, what’s the quick definition?

Jeff Marple:

Sure. Legal ops, or legal operations, is usually it can vary a little bit from department to department, but it is usually everything but the practice of law. So it’s all of the things that need to happen in a law department in order to facilitate the lawyers being able to practice law. So that’s technology, that could be knowledge management or library services, that can be auditing and billing, that can be reporting metrics, project management, budgets, finance, communications, you name it. All of those things tend to be housed in the legal operations group.

Douglas Ferguson:

Which is fascinating because I think there might be a few listeners that are thinking to themselves, “Why this legal department conversation on Control The Room?” And I think the legal ops angle really explains it and it opens the door up for the potential for innovation in the space of a legal department.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah, I mean, if you haven’t had the pleasure, get four or five attorneys in a room to try to discuss the best way forward, and you’re going to have differing opinions and they tend to be strong personalities with strong opinions on how to do things so controlling the room in those situations is a key skill if you’re going to work in legal ops. You need to be able to come in and speak with authority on what should happen. That can be intimidating. When I first started in legal, I was very intimidated because lawyers are really bright people, but they’re not necessarily trained in the areas that we are familiar with around technology, project management process, you name it. They’re trained to be lawyers, so they often need help in those areas. And so you need to be able to help them out and tell them how to do different things sometimes

Douglas Ferguson:

This came up in our pre-show chat and this notion of the need to be decisive and to come in and specifically as a consultant you’re in this position where you were hired for a specific need, and so coming in with the answers, setting that direction. So I was curious to hear how you also kind of walk that line between being the expert, but also keeping the beginner’s mindset enough where you’re still open to innovation and open to new ideas so that not everything is just a nail if you have a hammer?

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, that’s a great point. That’s kind of our mandate here. So when we are hired to come in, we are being brought in because we have had success in the past and we are at least considered by the market to be good at our jobs. Man, I can tell you that the people I work with here are excellent, really, really, top notch. Fantastic people. It’s the reason I left Liberty to come here because I feel like these guys are the varsity and I wanted to play with the varsity.

Jeff Marple:

But when we’re brought into a situation into a corporate legal department we’re being brought in to do a job. We need to do that job and we need to get it done. If we were waffling around and letting other people in the room sort of tell us how things should happen, well, then we aren’t doing our job. Our job is to get it done. And you can have a lot of dissenting opinions. A lot of times folks don’t necessarily want a third party coming in and telling them how things should go. Conversely, if you did hire a consultant and they came in and they were like, “Oh, I don’t know how to do this.” That’s not exactly what you’re expecting from a consultant when you bring them in on a project.

Jeff Marple:

At the same time, you have to be an incredibly good listener because you’re coming to this fresh. I mean, one of the other things we talked about, Douglas, one of the challenges I’ve had since I’ve been here is, I was at Liberty for 21 years. I knew where everything was. And I didn’t know, I knew somebody that knew where it was. I’ve gone from that to knowing where nothing is. And now multiply that by every single one of my clients. When I go in every client, I have multiple companies that I’m working with, they all have different cultures, different people, different org structures, different projects, different things they’re trying to accomplish.

Jeff Marple:

And so we really pride ourselves as somebody that can go into a company and put on the team’s jersey, so to speak, and act as the advocate for the person who hired us. In order to do that, you’ve got to know your environment. So we listen a lot. We take a lot of notes. We ask a lot of questions. And we very much try to keep an open mind. As you know, I’m sure in your experience, you will get hired by a client sometimes and they will have a very set idea around what they think should happen. And once you get in there and you start learning a little bit more, you understand that maybe that solution isn’t exactly the right fit for that problem. And it can be a difficult conversation, but if you can actually understand what their requirements are and then serve up the correct solution, you’re going to be doing a better job for them.

Jeff Marple:

And that’s something we really try to do is understand the true requirements of what we’re being asked to do, and then deliver that solution as opposed to maybe exactly what we were brought in to do.

Douglas Ferguson:

Often, too, it comes back to what you were saying a moment ago around the org structure and who is mandating what and where the requirements coming from and who’s passionate about this thing versus that thing. And mapping those things out can be quite informative.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. Almost every organization, I don’t even want to lay it at corporate, every organization has their own Game of Thrones going on, to an extent, and there are agendas at play and different things that people want to have done, and people have different opinions on how things should be done often. So trying to understand what all the push and pull is and why people are behaving the way they are is a key part of our job. So we’re always trying to sort of get some of that inside information around those things as well.

Douglas Ferguson:

So what are some go-to strategies? Say you got a new client, you’re about to start to engage with them. What are some approaches to better understand their perspective and what their true needs are versus maybe what they’re asking for?

Jeff Marple:

Well, sometimes they’re coming in and they think they have a pre-prescribed solution, but I really try to focus on where they’re trying to get to. So one of the things I really try to do, especially with brand new clients is have them describe the end state and how people are feeling about it, how they’re feeling about it, how the constituents or the users or the customers and whatever it is we’re building, are feeling about whatever has been built. How do you want so-and-so feeling? And why would they be feeling that way? If you start to unpack some of those things, that can be a real North Star for whatever we’re building.

Jeff Marple:

It makes it a lot easier to pivot as you start to unpack things, when you can hold up some of those initial conversations, and it almost always comes out even some pre-sales conversations. You can always sort of hold up that North Star and then use that as a way to recommend potentially changing direction, if that’s needed. So that’s a good tip.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, that’s really cool. And even if it’s somehow let’s say incorrect or misinterpreted when it was initially collected, at least it puts a stake in the ground that people can react to.

Jeff Marple:

Yes. Yeah. It makes things tangible. And so much of our job is turning the intangible into tangible and turning it into something that you can see and touch and feel. So getting those things down on paper and getting them out of the out of the ether is a big deal. And I try to write down even specific quotes that someone says in an initial interview and again, holding those, and sometimes we’ll even slide those into presentations. It could be in an opening presentation, or it could be at a closing presentation, to sort of talk about what we intend to do, and here’s the quote that is the North Star. Or when we’ve delivered successfully on something point to that quote and say, “This is what we were asked to do. And here’s what we built. And we think this satisfies that.”

Douglas Ferguson:

Using their language is such a smart pro move that I think so many people miss. It’s no different than when we’re facilitating in the moment, in the session, and we don’t want to write something on the wall or capture something in the mural that’s a translation of what someone said. That’s a big no-no, right?

Jeff Marple:

Yeah, man.

Douglas Ferguson:

We don’t want to put it in our own words, paraphrase it, and make it all neat and tidy. If we do, we want to confirm it. I think we do that in reports and proposals all the time. And it’s questionable.

Jeff Marple:

I mean, there’s a time for your opinion, but that may not be it. At first you really have to be a reporter and not a columnist, especially with the facts. And what people say are, in fact, facts. Now you can then take that and then walk somebody through why you think, what your opinion of what that means is, but you should start with that. And again, like you said, that makes it an anchor, something that you can build off, that’s the foundation to build the rest of the house on. I’m mixing my metaphors left and right here, by the way.

Douglas Ferguson:

No, it’s all good. It’s metaphor soup. It’s tasty. So let’s talk a little bit about some of the work we’ve done in the past. And something that came up in the pre-show chat was this notion of making sure that these gatherings, events, or what have you, were not just one way or one direction. And I think that was something that we really, when we collaborated on a couple of speaking opportunities, this was really key to how we wanted to show up on stage, so that it wasn’t just a presentation, and that we got people on their feet doing things. So I’m just kind of curious how that shows up in your work today, as far as focusing on making sure that information is not just flowing one way and that people are participating and included?

Jeff Marple:

Yeah, so Douglas, I’ve learned quite a bit from you over the years, so thank you. One of the things you’re referring to is the presentation we did with a corporate legal operations consortium in Las Vegas. It was like three years ago now where we had about 80 people doing a very quick design thinking session in a hotel ballroom at the Bellagio, which was a ton of fun. And everybody, I think, really had a great time during that session. That becomes to me even more of an obvious need as more and more of those industry events are becoming virtual and not in person. If you’ve got to sit, like panels are sometimes pretty boring to begin with. Now, if you’ve got to sit through a panel of speakers talking about legal technology for 45 minutes on a Zoom call, it’s real easy to check out or check your email or check Slack or work on a PowerPoint presentation or whatever it is that you’ve got to do.

Jeff Marple:

Now, if that same presentation is relying exclusively on audience feedback, and there’s a back and forth that’s occurring between the presenters and the audience, and in order for that presentation to go forward, information has to flow from the crowd back to the presenters? That’s a whole different story. And if I’m in the audience, I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to that second presentation. Everybody likes to feel included. And if you have something to do, that just keeps those brains, keeps that brain, moving and gets you thinking about whatever the subject is at hand. Those panelists that I was referring to that may be delivering fantastic content, but it might be hard to continue to focus on it when you’ve been sitting staring at a screen for eight hours a day for the last year and a half.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, it gets into retention too. And this is backed by learning science and studies of how the brain works, et cetera, et cetera. I mean, there’s just lots of research to back this stuff. And this notion of having people inter-leave, having people take a moment to integrate, so they’re taking the act of doing something and contributing, it forces them to like confront the gaps that they have in their understanding of what’s being said. Because if they’re going to formulate a question or a response, they have to integrate it enough to where they can think about what that means for the work they do.

Jeff Marple:

Totally. I mean, it brings me back to my eighth grade science teacher, Mr. Stephens, which I kind of wish he was listening to this, but I’m sure he’s dead. He would require us, we would have to read a chapter, and then do the questions at the end of the chapter as you do in eighth grade, and it was biology, I believe. But he had an additional requirement, which we just hated it at the beginning of the year, but by the end of the year I totally understood why we had to do it. We had composition notebooks and we had to essentially summarize each page of the chapter that we read by something. He called them reading notes, taking notes while you’re reading. And then we had to turn in our books. I don’t know if he ever read them or not, but each week we’d have to turn in our reading notes and if they weren’t done, we would get dinged for it. And I learned so much biology that year, just from the simple practice of doing that. Nobody failed tests that year. Everyone got great grades. And it was because we were paying attention.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. The journaling’s a powerful thing. And that’s the only thing we introduce into our facilitated experiences, our training moments or our meeting moments, just to give people a moment to journal and doodle and integrate, then we’re going to be doing better than most.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. I agree. Totally. It’s a trick I still use today when I’m really needing to focus on something. It’s get out something and write stuff down as I’m reading and listening, what have you.

Douglas Ferguson:

And I think writing is quite a bit different than typing.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. It is. It’s way more free flow for me. I have this problem where I have the most terrible handwriting in the world, so I don’t necessarily know what I’m writing.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I have to type it up at the end of the day.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah, which gives you another pass at it too. Doesn’t it?

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. Another integration point.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s when I synthesize and organize. Because when I’m writing, I just don’t worry about, I’ll just capture it.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah.

Douglas Ferguson:

It’s pretty liberating to not in that moment feel like I’ll have to apply my own thinking. I just make sure I capture the essence and then later I can think about what it means for me.

Jeff Marple:

I’m trying real hard to do that. To kill my meetings five minutes before they end so that I can do five minutes of the sort of note editing, so I can write a little more free flow, but also then tee it up so that somebody else can look at it and understand what the hell I was doing. So I’m trying to end my meetings five minutes early to sort of get that done these days.

Douglas Ferguson:

Nice. I commend that effort.

Jeff Marple:

It’s an effort. It’s not a success yet. So, standby.

Douglas Ferguson:

Another project we worked on was something you’ve been doing for a while and we collaborated last year because it was going virtual. And so you were curious about having some conversations and exploring the possibilities of where it could go and how to design for a fully virtual version of this kind of design challenge that Liberty Mutual and Suffolk University were doing. And so I’d be curious to hear your thoughts, now that some time has past, and maybe how it’s influencing the work you’re doing today?

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. So the Boston Legal Design Challenge is something we started, Bob Taylor and I founded that at Liberty Mutual about, I guess it was four years ago. I think we did four of them. And more contexts, the design challenge was essentially a hackathon for a law school students at Suffolk, but no real hacking. It was more around trying to come up with a great idea. In a day. They worked on teams of three to five people. We would walk them through some design thinking exercises. Most law students haven’t had a lot of design thinking exposure, although the ones at Suffolk are getting more and more of it. And so it was a competition slash educational event because we would talk to them about why we were doing certain things and then we would give them an exercise and they would be essentially using the exercises to refine and harden their ideas or develop their ideas as the day went along.

Jeff Marple:

The day would end, culminate, in a quick sort of five minute pitch and judges would hear the pitch and then decide on which one was the best idea, most fully formed, and who presented the best, et cetera. We had multiple dimensions for winning and losing. It started as a fun enrichment thing. It turned into, by the time we left, a fully sponsored event with some serious prize money that was being handed out to the winners. And yeah, last year we went virtual, as did the rest of the world in all things like this. So glad we did. We were debating whether or not in the spring. The spring of 2020 was a pretty dark time. And we were trying to decide whether we should do it or whether we should cancel it. And then Bob and I both sort of looked at each other and said we wouldn’t really be innovation professionals if we didn’t try to innovate and use this new constraint as a way to advance the design challenge. And I think we did.

Jeff Marple:

We went from in the past, we’d had Suffolk and one other school, Northeastern University from Boston, participate. We had seven schools last year, even a school from Canada. We had schools from Texas, Michigan, Las Vegas, Nevada, excuse me. It was UNLV. So the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. And, yeah, you assisted with helping, and by assisted, I mean told us what to do to move our content from in-person, analog to digital, so to speak. And boy, it really went well. I was just so pleased by how well it went. It definitely improved some things. In-person events are awesome and we’re all craving them, but this was a truly, I thought, just a fantastic event. And from what I understand, it’s going to happen again this year. Liberty is going to do it again with Suffolk. I can’t wait to hear how that goes. Hope they continue to carry that torch. It was such a fun event. I’ve met a ton of law students along the way, some of which are now in the industry. I’m getting to sort of even work with some of them. So it’s really kind of cool. What a great time that’s been.

Jeff Marple:

As far as moving that into the work that I’m doing, if you’ve got to teach something like design thinking, and we actually we modified it, as you know, Douglas, to contain a lot of the things that we learned from Sprint. If you’ve got to teach that, you’ve got to know it, and if you know it, then you start using that stuff in your daily work. So we build a lot of things here. We try to build them really, really fast, but we don’t want to build stuff that fails. So we do a ton of prototyping at KP Labs for our clients just to make sure that what they’re asking for will work and what can we learn by pushing things out in the world and then pivoting on it?

Jeff Marple:

And so I guess that’s what I’ve taken from it. I mean, I took a lot of the tactical things from it as well. How to host virtual meetings, how to host interactive virtual meetings, how do you use technologies like Mural and, oh God, what’s the name, I’m sorry, I always forget about it. What’s the name of the amazing scheduling, the agenda?

Douglas Ferguson:

Oh, SessionLab. You and I spent a lot of time in SessionLab together.

Jeff Marple:

SessionLab is like my secret favorite software, I think. Anybody out there that’s listening to this, if you haven’t, I’m sure you guys already, you’re like, “Yeah, Jeff, we do this stuff all the time.” But if you don’t know SessionLab, you need to know SessionLab. SessionLab is amazing. SessionLab, and I learned this from you, Douglas, agendas more than anything drive almost everything that comes out of an event. Understanding that agenda, because an agenda holds so many things. It’s multidimensional. It’s a list of things that occur. And that’s it, it’s just a list of things that occur, but it’s so much, it’s all the content, it’s the outline for all the content. It’s the beginnings and the ends, it’s the starts and finishes, of everything. And all of that can play into, how many teams should we have, how long should they have to pitch their ideas? How many judges do we need to have? When do the judges need to be there? It drives everything that happens. So sorry, I’m rambling. But SessionLab made that job so much easier.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah. It’s really fascinating how, we had to drive this home in our facilitation training all the time, because people classically get agendas mixed up with just list of topics they want to cover, versus thinking about agendas from the perspective of what’s the journey we want to take people on.

Jeff Marple:

It’s So important. I always started later than I need to, and you always would force me to, like that’s how you would break ground is on the agenda. And if you’re listening, do your agenda first, literally, it’s like a prototype for the event, the agenda is almost.

Douglas Ferguson:

That’s right. Exactly. That’s exactly what it is. And even if you start off with something messy and gross and it’s just all wrong, that’s perfect.

Jeff Marple:

It’s okay. Now you’re editing. You’ve gone from blank page to editing and it gives you like a project plan to work on things. It lines up everything. So agenda first.

Douglas Ferguson:

I love it. I love it. So I want to come back to something that you said earlier, and it’s fascinating to me when people have some sense of service in their career early on, or at some point in their career. And I think it tends to give you a different lens on the economics of business. I just wanted to get your thoughts on, because this is the first time I knew that you started as a CSR, changing passwords and burning disks and stuff for Liberty Mutual. Does that sentiment resonate with you, this notion that that was formative as far as recognizing some of the dynamics at play and some of the struggles that services and products create for users?

Jeff Marple:

I’ll take it a step further, Douglas. I don’t know if you know this too, but the 10 years prior to my life as a, I’m holding quotes, as a professional at Liberty Mutual, I was a bartender and waiter, which is also very much customer focused. And the type of work that I do, where I’m really trying to get the user to smile, you got to be an advocate for that person, whoever that person is, whoever that user slash customer is. And if you’re waiting on tables or you’re a customer service representative, then you are the advocate for that customer back to the organization that you represent and vice versa. And that’s what, a lot of times, what good software is doing anyways, is being that advocate. It’s an automated advocate. So I’m incredibly biased. My mom taught hospitality at the University of New Hampshire as well. So, very much had a, hospitality management, not just being nice, but like a hoteling school.

Jeff Marple:

So understanding, treating, customers like they are a customer, like a paying customer, and trying to deliver value to them, I mean, that’s the whole game. You’re giving us money, we’re giving you value for your money. That’s the whole thing. And if you can’t see it from their eyes, you’re going to have a hard time understanding what’s valuable to them.

Douglas Ferguson:

Yeah, I think quite often in larger organizations, there are people that are placed in roles where they’re disconnected from that value chain. And I think that’s part of the challenge some organizations face. And that’s where I think facilitation of some of these conversations can help spread awareness for that. And likewise, very similarly, I think when companies get too focused on profits or too focused on some quarterly goals or shareholder value, they can lose sight of the value that’s being distributed to employees. And likewise, we need to support them, and we need to point these tools inward as well. And so I think, it’s just all about service.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. It is. Totally. And that’s the way we look at our, currently, where I’m at right now at KP Labs, we think about this lot. We think about who our customers are going to be. We can’t take every customer that wants to hire us. So we really have to think about where we’re going to get the most value. And it’s not necessarily the size of the customer, that plays into it, but what we’re looking for is deep, long, relationships. So we’re not looking for a quick score or a quarterly return, as you were saying, Douglas. We’re looking for a way to ingratiate ourselves into that organization and vice versa and really develop a partnership over time by doing great work and delivering great service and value.

Douglas Ferguson:

Excellent. And, I think, what a great way to end today, and something for facilitators to think about, this notion of what is the value that’s being exchanged amongst participants and how can we elevate that exchange in our dialogues and in our conversations? So I want to hand it over to you, Jeff, just to give you an opportunity to leave our listeners with a final thought.

Jeff Marple:

Yeah. So I’ll just key off of what you were saying there. You should always be thinking about how are you positioned to deliver unique value to the transaction you’re working on? And I don’t even necessarily mean like the organization you work for, but you personally, because there’s something special about you that’s different than anybody else. So how do you leverage whatever it is that makes your fingerprint, your unique snowflake-ness, how can you take that and enhance the value of whatever you’re working on? Because there’s the requirements, there’s what has to be done, but then how do you add even more value to that transaction? How do you bring a few extra smiles to that meeting? How do you pull out a little more information from the folks in the room? How do you do whatever it is that you’re trying to do, but how do you do that just a little bit better or a little bit differently, where people will remember that? That’s something you should be thinking about whatever kind of work you’re doing. And if you can harness that, if you understand yourself enough to understand what you can then deliver, you’re going to be successful, I think.

Douglas Ferguson:

Jeff, it’s been a pleasure chatting and thanks for joining me today.

Jeff Marple:

Douglas, always a good time talking to you, man. Thanks so much for having me on. Looking forward to talking to you again soon.

Douglas Ferguson:

Thanks for joining me for another episode of Control The Room. Don’t forget to subscribe to receive updates when new episodes are released. If you want more, head over to our blog, where I post weekly articles and resources about working better together, voltagecontrol.com.

The post Episode 59: Advocate For Your Customer appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space.

Dera Nevin became a lawyer by way of graphic design. Perhaps not the typical path to law and a surprise even to her. After fifteen years of working in commercial graphic design, Dera decided to sell her business and go to law school. “I broke up my life, stopped doing contract freelance graphic design work, and elected to go to law school, mostly for fun. I ended up liking it, but it wasn’t part of the plan. If you had asked me even two or three years before what I would be doing, my answer wouldn’t have been law school.”

Dera Nevin became the first e-discovery lawyer at a law firm in Canada.

Early in her law career, Dera was one of the few litigators who relied heavily on technology, specifically litigation support technology, which evolved into the field known as e-discovery. Eventually, she became the first e-discovery lawyer at a law firm in Canada. “There were very few people in this particular market who understood technology and business, and who understood what lawyers were doing, and could combine those things.”

Legal Technology

While many envision a lawyer’s office full of paperwork, files, and an old fax machine, Nevin knew technology could amplify what lawyers do and make their jobs easier. “For the past ten years, I’ve moved out of traditional practice. I’ve been helping to modify practice for the digital world, and have been helping lawyers introduce technology or new workflows into their practice. I help lawyers evolve their practice. I can understand net-new legal advice, and I can help lawyers modify their existing practices for greater profitability, efficiency, or effectiveness.”

“I help lawyers introduce technology or new workflows into their practice.”

She’s been described as “innovation counsel.” She sits between technology, business, and practice, and helps people understand opportunities to do things a bit differently.

Room For Improvement

When it comes to innovation, there is always someone out there not making the most of it. Dera sees this in two main areas:

Associating Innovation With Creativity

She says: “If you’re not trying to solve a specific question, or if you don’t have any rigor or discipline around creation, testing, and delivery, you’re unlikely to meet a marketplace need. You’re unlikely to delight customers enough such that they want to spend their time and energy on your product as opposed to what they’re already doing.”

Associating Innovation With Technology

“Technology is always the biggest destroyer of value in the innovation process. Technology requires a significant investment to make something new, and to make it work. It’s among the more risky innovation levers that you can draw. What I see is a lot of people buying technology and then not deploying it. People aren’t using the available modalities within the existing technology they have. You’re just layering more stuff, which is not always effective in generating net-new value.”

What is Cognitive Aikido?

Dera knows she has a lot to offer law firms in terms of innovation, but she also knows that others have experiences she may not. That is why she practices what she calls Cognitive Aikido. “I can put myself, empathetically, in the situation of the person that I’m talking to, but I know that I don’t carry any of the risk associated with that activity. It’s not my name or my reputation on the line when any of this happens. It allows me to ask questions differently than somebody who can’t relate to that moment of stress. Because I can ask questions differently, and because I’ve been trained as a litigator on how to ask questions, I can get them to come to the insight.Often, they come to insights that I can’t come to because I don’t have their personal experience.”

“That’s a form of aikido because I’ve transferred my enthusiasm about the change to them.”

“Because they’ve come to those insights on their own, but through the questions, I’ve asked, it leads to more impact, greater insight, greater propensity for action, and greater collaboration. That’s a form of aikido because I’ve transferred my enthusiasm about the change to them. They’ve sharpened it, they’ve owned it, and since they’re in charge of the business, they can now tell me what to do. They can direct me, which is the most powerful way because you’ve got a stakeholder who’s engaged in the change. Then they’re using my skill set in executing on that change to make it happen.”

How She Defines Innovation

Dera sees the innovation in the outcome — one that makes an impact on a buying or operating decision. She takes a more business-operational approach to measuring change. “There are several ways to do this, but often I look to net-new revenue, or expenses reduced, or additional assets. It can also be measured in customer satisfaction, through retention or referral, or lowering the cost of goods or the cost of new customer acquisition. It can also be measured in net-new products or business lines.”

Before trying to design a successful innovation program, she feels you have to look at the market you are trying to disrupt. “The organizations I work with are generally conservative and risk-averse. There is a low tolerance for failure, a high degree of security involved, and tight reporting lines for all activity… I prefer to have tight relationships with FP&A, risk, and a sponsor to a business line. I find easy wins — things to take away to make people’s lives easier — to get credibility without spending a lot of money.”

Dera’s Innovation Silver Bullet: Credibility, trust, and communication. But mostly: there’s nothing better than a great team of collaborators.

Failure or Revamp

One of Dera’s favorite stories of innovation is when a client felt a program was failing and they were thinking about killing it. Through surveys, they discovered that the program wasn’t the issue; the issue was operating hours that weren’t easily accessible to customers. Dera shared: “We changed the on-ramps and created a 1–800 line that could be accessed before and after the work hours, and eventually developed an on-line Q&A feature. Business jumped a lot just by making those small changes.”

This is an excellent example of how a small change can make a significant impact. Through discovery, you can find out more to be better informed before making big decisions.

My Favorite Technology

Dera feels technology is all around us, but often we fail to see it in the purest forms. “People often ask me what my favorite technology is, and I often just hold up a Post-it note or a piece of paper.”

“The most powerful technology is the technology that disappears. My mug. My marker. All of this is technology. It just may not be computer-based technology. We forget that we do things in a certain way because of existing, pervasive technology.”

“The most powerful technology is the technology that disappears.”

“A lot of what I do when I’m innovating is creating scenarios: ‘What if I were suddenly transported to a world where no paper existed? How would my life change?’ Then we start to think: ‘What if we couldn’t use paper anymore because no more trees existed? That would lead to a host of other problems, but let’s work with that.’ Often we’ll come up with some creative ideas about how we can remove paper from one process, and improve it.”

Dera thinks that jumping immediately to technology solutions can often miss the point. It can be less expensive to start from a simpler perspective before jumping into the costly technologies as the answer.

Risk-Averse and Safe Experimenting

Dera works in a field with clients that have a very low tolerance for failure because of what is at stake. “Lawyers’ inputs are remarkably omnivorous and diverse. Lawyers are remarkably creative people. They have to be because their job is foundationally creative. But, lawyers are conservative in their output, because their clients have a low risk of failure. The consequence of a lawyer ‘failing’ are immense. People go to jail. People lose patents. That’s why lawyers have a low tolerance for failure in output.”

“If somebody had asked me to experiment on the eve of trial, I would’ve told them where to go. When I’m about to go to trial and my client may go to jail, it’s not the time to experiment. I’m going to go with what I know is most likely to work.”

“I create safety cladding around experimentation.”

Dera finds the context and moment where experimentation is safe. “A lot of time, I focus on creating a feeling of safety around lawyers so that they can take a structured risk. A lot of the time, I’m designing proof of concepts so that two things are running in alignment. If the new thing doesn’t work, they can immediately go into their safety harnesses. I create safety cladding around experimentation.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Practicing Cognitive Aikido appeared first on Voltage Control.

Jackie Hutter is innovating in the legal space by pushing the boundaries of her profession to meet the needs of modern businesses. She’s claimed the license plate “UNLAWYR” because her approach to patents and intellectual property (IP) protection is unusual in her field. “The vast majority of my peers, unfortunately, don’t get what I do, or more significantly, why what they’re doing may not serve their clients.”

Jackie has observed that most lawyers think innovation means making changes to their existing law firm business models. “What they don’t realize is that their customers are increasingly dissatisfied with these longstanding legal service frameworks and are starting to look for alternatives.”

As Jackie started down the path of IP strategy, she also spent time as a startup entrepreneur for a few years; during that time, she lived and breathed Lean Startup, and now brings that mindset to her IP efforts. She describes the legal field as one where professionals are incentivized to be the expert. “If I admit as an expert that I need to change, then I may be seen as having given bad advice in the past. Then I haven’t been doing my job well. Lawyers are not typically learning individuals, because it’s hard to admit the need to improve.” She believes this environment is largely why legal tools have failed to keep pace with the needs of innovators.

“I grew up in Miami in the ‘bad old days’ with a father who saw it all as an FBI agent. Being from a place where either the weather or the people were trying to kill you gave me an evolve-or-die approach to the world.”

That evolution involved addressing the mismatch between the value innovators are providing to the world and how IP attorneys approach protecting that value. “Innovators are changing things to cause a meaningful shift. Nonetheless, they end up hiring lawyers who have not changed the way they generate IP protection. For my clients, patent protection may make the difference between success or failure. But for IP attorneys, all IP may be equal in that they will get paid the same whether they succeed or fail. There often is no accountability in my business.”

In the realm of IP protection, Jackie believes innovation is putting protections in place that make it cheaper to go through a company than around it. From the vantage point of Jackie’s responsibility as an IP Strategist, a critical feature in achieving the most appropriate IP protection is having the IP person in the room from day one. “I tell clients if you’re in the innovation business and call your IP person to tell them what you’ve accomplished already, you’re too late.”

More than a patent attorney

When I asked Jackie about the difference between her work and that of a patent attorney, she described it like this: “Patent attorneys do things. They’re very tactical. They ask: What did you invent? I am a strategist, and the hallmark of strategy is figuring out where you want to be at the end of the process and working backward.”

“I am a strategist and the hallmark of strategy is figuring out where you want to be at the end of the process and working backward.”

Jackie limits her client base to companies that can demonstrate they have a customer, and they know how to monetize their customer. “I have seen so many smaller companies spend money and effort in generating patent protection that doesn’t align with a validated business model, which means the patent is worthless.. If a patent doesn’t cover something people will pay for, it doesn’t matter how much your lawyer charged you for it.”

Jackie’s process includes leveraging her skills as a patent attorney in parallel with her IP strategy work. “When I onboard a new client, I want to understand whether patents matter in this environment or not.” She analyzes the incumbent companies getting patents in the same space, but the primary focus is not whether or not her client infringes on those patents. With all the patents that exist in many emerging technology areas, it could often be too hard to know for sure.

Instead, she coaches her clients to move forward with their work to solve pressing needs, meanwhile filing essential patents on their customer solutions, and not on merely a specific technology offering. “It leads to lots of optionality in the future because we’re thinking about where technology might go, not just filing on what we’ve already invented.”

Patents that consider the future state

Jackie’s clients are looking for something different because they are different. They’re innovators. “They need to look for somebody who looks at IP differently because the only person guaranteed to make money on a patent is a patent attorney. 95% or more patents don’t make money for a business.”

When filing patents, Jackie thinks beyond what the solution covers now and includes areas where the technology might go in the future. “You never patent for yourself; you patent for who you want to value those patents. And like you don’t dress for the job you have, you dress for the job you want. You patent for the exit value you want.”

“You patent for the exit value you want.”

For startups trying to compete with well-established companies, there’s always a risk that they might be sued or shut down for infringing on some existing patent on a shelf. But the reward can outweigh the risk, particularly for those startups that are solving problems that established companies can’t solve themselves.

Jackie’s startup clients file broad patents on solutions that they’ll likely never enforce in court themselves. Rather, her clients’ patents are viewed as currency for sale or trade. “Patents are a seat at the table that you might not have otherwise had and serve as a virtue signal that you have a little technology.” The right patents demonstrate to well-funded incumbent companies that a startup team knows the value of their offering. “When somebody partners with us or buys us for some huge multiple, they now have a package of patents that allow them to own the market relative to their competitors.”

“The right patents demonstrate to well-funded incumbent companies that a startup team knows the value of their offering.”

Technology enables the customer outcome

Jackie’s innovation silver bullet involves elevating the business team over the technologists in the beginning conversations and making sure the IP strategist is looped in early.

“When you get two technical people together, it’s a mind-meld. Everybody’s happy and comfortable. But this is not about being comfortable. This is about having the right amount of friction to end up with the right result. We’re focused on the customer who’s going to write a check for what you’re doing and why. The technology should only enable that outcome, not be the outcome that is patented.”

Three questions for IP strategy

When it comes to IP strategy, Jackie says there are three crucial questions:

1. Should you get a patent?
2. What should I patent?
3. Who should you hire based on the answers to #1 & #2?

Whether or not you should get a patent largely depends upon what your business is, what your goals are, and what your resources are today. What should be patented becomes more critical for smaller companies like startups where there’s one chance to get it right. Nailing the proper patent can make or break their opportunity for an exit.

In describing who companies should hire for their patents, Jackie uses the metaphor of an architect and a contractor. “Most patent attorneys are contractors. They’ll build what you tell them to build. If you want something that’s going to generate value over the long-term, or a particular desired outcome, you’re going to hire an architect.”

“If you want something that’s going to generate value over the long-term, or a particular desired outcome, you’re going to hire an architect.”

Patent trolls

There’s one school of thought that patents can get in the way of early-stage ventures through patent-trolling. This phenomenon can create distaste for some start-up founders to even think about patents. However, Jackie believes the actual impact of patent-trolling is more minor than it’s presented. “Patent trolls were part of the narrative that companies like Google and the like wanted to make so that their lobbyists could go to Congress and get the rules changed. Recent analysis has shown that they were effective because litigation by non-practicing entities — or ‘trolls’ as they are often called — has decreased in the past few years.”

Jackie encourages her clients to be aware of patents that exist, but not to let worries over infringement prevent them from executing on innovative solutions.

Jackie encourages her clients to be aware of patents that exist, but not to let worries over hypothetical infringement paralyze them into inaction that can prevent innovative solutions from making it to consumers. “I would never tell a client not to do an infringement search. But when somebody says they’re worried about the patents out there first and foremost, I say ‘You could do nothing, or you could act like an entrepreneur and take the risk.’ If you are creating value to a consumer in the marketplace, you’re going to find a way to be rewarded.”

If you want to read my other articles about innovation experts and practitioners, please check them all out here.

The post Patents and IP Strategy are Tools For Innovation appeared first on Voltage Control.

I co-hosted a session at the CLOC 2019 conference (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium) where we showed a group of lawyers how Design Sprints can help them in more ways than they realized.

I spoke with the help of Jeff Marple, Innovation Director — Corporate Legal at Liberty Mutual, at the CLOC 2019 conference, which gathers legal operations professionals and other corporate legal industry players to optimize the legal service delivery models needed to support the needs of small, medium and large legal departments.

Our challenge was to break down the Design Sprint process into a 50-minute session that would allow them to walk away with some new ideas and solutions for approaching problems.

“Liberty Mutual and Voltage Control organized one of the most interesting and impactful session at recent national gathering of legal ops leaders. The session was unique in the way it engaged participants and facilitated creative problem solving. The session has helped me think about innovative ways to involve in-house legal teams in improvement opportunities.”

— Jason Winmill, Partner, Argopoint

We wanted to give the attendees a set of tools they could use and implement once they were back in their offices. We needed them to walk away with ways they could better achieve Leading Metrics and KPI’s.

For readers not versed in the concept, design thinking is a method long used by the tech industry to quickly identify a goal for a team, solicit a large quantity of ideas about the goal, empathize with and gain insights from key stakeholders, and systematically vet the ideas in a “trust-tree”, no judgement environment.

— Kevin Bielawski, Director of Legal Project Management & Strategic Pricing, Husch Blackwell

We began the talk by explaining what a Design Sprint is so everyone understood how it works, why it works, and what it can do for them. We then dove into the activities to show them what they each accomplish.

Because we were short on time, we came up with an activity that got everyone involved and talking, brainstorming ideas and solutions. We want everyone to have a voice and the customized activity we designed showed them how a Sprint worked. We called it 1–2–4–8-ALL, based on this Liberating Structure.

What important Legal Operations challenge should we focus on today?

Often, I like to pose a question to a team to get them thinking. We started by asking this to the room: “What important Legal Operations challenge should we focus on today?”

Because I don’t come from a legal background, I wanted the specific problem we focused on in the session to come from the participants. Each attendee came up with a short list of responses by thinking about the challenges they face every day. This was the “1” in our 1–2–4–8-ALL model.

Working together

The next step was to pair into groups of two. At this point, we asked the two-person groups to share their lists, vet the ideas, and agree on the one challenge they felt was most important. We gave them ample time to work through their thoughts and talk through them. This was the 2 in our 1–2–4–8-ALL model.

Once the groups of two were able to whittle their lists down to one challenge, we paired each into groups of four and asked them to repeat the same process. By this time, the group of four now had two ideas to choose from. I saw so much excitement once we started getting into bigger groups because they were sharing some important insights.

Once the team of four had chosen one idea, we brought them together in groups of eight. Once they had completed this task and had come up with one challenge, we had a final list of 8 total challenges to work with, which the teams presented to us while I wrote them out on a flip chart.

“This was hands down my favorite and, for me, the most valuable session of the conference. I love interactive learning. Rather than simply describe what happens in a Design Sprint, the presenters had us participate in an actual sprint where we identified a problem and began working on a solution.“

— Leslie F. Brown, Director of Legal Process Innovation, Greenberg Traurig, LLP

The Big Ideas

Now that we had our eight challenges, it was time to get them thinking even more. We asked everyone to vote on their top challenge and then to come up with one idea that would address it.

Once everyone had their original concept written down, the time came to let the entire group pass judgment. We asked them to get up and move around the room and exchange their card with someone else. The result was that every person ended up with a card that was different from their own.

“I recently attended the 2019 CLOC Vegas Institute where the rapid nature of sprints encourages teams to think quickly and that all ideas are welcome. Sprints also eliminate hand-wringing and lengthy debates. Attending the session provided the first-hand experience to see if I would be able to use the concept with our Legal Department. The answer is Yes!”
 — Cathy Davis, AVP, Legal Operations, University of Phoenix

5 Rounds to Score

To find the best ideas in the group, we asked each person to stand up and read their idea to the group and give it a score from 1–5 with five being the highest.

After each round, we allowed the group to exchange their idea card with someone else once again, read the ideas out loud and score it from 1–5. This gave every idea the chance to earn 25 points to rank as the best of the best. While we did not end up with any 25 point ideas, but we had a 23, several 22s and a couple of 21s.

“It was a fun challenge to come up with a solution for lawyers to quantify their value to the broader organization. I think about this issue a lot, because we’re seeing a dramatic shift in the legal landscape, where in-house legal professionals are being seen as innovation leaders and are increasingly advocating for the adoption of technologies such as AI.” — Kelsea Carlson, Product Counsel, Text IQ

“Some really great ideas came out of this session and I’m not at all surprised that focusing on metrics/KPIs for reporting on the law department was the lead challenge or problem for the Sprint. Unfortunately, it’s no longer sufficient in any organization, or in any function, to declare that the work we do is really special and unique and can’t be measured. “— JoAnne Wakeford, Chief Client Officer, Nextlaw In-House Solutions

We were curious to see what words and themes surfaced when looking at all of the ideas generated, so we created a word cloud. I found it interesting how many focused on being actionable and measurable.

At the end of our session, a group of lawyers who knew almost nothing about Design Sprints left with a list of ideas that could potentially solve a problem for them and with the skills needed to use the process in the future.

“Lawyers are super-smart, but as expertise-focused professionals, they often operate like ‘lone wolves’: collaboration, consensus-building, and design-thinking are often absent from their training and from their daily work environment. They’re good at picking apart ideas, but often horrible about ideating, or looking for ways to change and improve their game. That’s a critical skill set for lawyers to not only learn but exercise if they’re going to prepare themselves for practice in the future.”

— Susan Hackett, CEO, Legal Executive Leadership

The post How to Get a Room Full of Lawyers to Think Differently. appeared first on Voltage Control.