Legal practice, once just an administrative legal function, has grown to become an essential part of the legal teams of healthcare and life sciences companies. Legal operations professionals use data to drive decision-making, and their input is critical to managing an organization’s overall risk. MedCity News and Above the Law delve into the field through a series of interviews with practitioners.
Stephanie Corey is the CEO and co-founder of UpLevel Ops. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, the consulting firm provides a full range of legal operational support, including strategic planning and organizational design, assessments and roadmaps, technology selection and implementation, process redesign, workflow automation, Best practices and metrics, and external consultant management. Stephanie is also the co-founder of LINK, a network of legal innovators, a professional organization of experienced legal operations professionals.
Learn how Stephanie’s legal operations career has grown from her role at Hewlett Packard to an industry expert who learns to ask tough questions, such as: “Do lawyers really need to see this?”
(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
How did you get into the legal business?
Most of my career has been in-house. I come from the financial world and intend to become a stockbroker. I have an undergraduate degree in economics and an MBA, and when I started a legal practice at Hewlett Packard, I thought it would serve as an entry point into a business role for two years. I never thought I would spend my entire career with the legal team and lawyers. When I first started, I mostly helped lawyers figure out how to cut expenses. Then the characters evolved and I started to see if there was a better way to do things. I have an operations background and I try to understand what’s going on in the legal department, tie everything together, and then tell the story of the legal work so that lawyers can focus on the substantive legal work. I spent over a decade at HP and was eventually promoted to Chief of Staff.
I’ve learned to ask tough questions, including “Do lawyers need to see this?” Often the answer is no. For example, instead of spending time negotiating an NDA, you can let the attorney focus on things of higher value.
I realize my role in HP is unique and no one can really benchmark against me.That’s when I started The Corporate Legal Operations Alliance creates a supportive community.
Six years ago, I co-founded UpLevel Ops with my friend and general counsel Jon Hoak, and entering the space was a great decision and an exciting time.We have a very talented person U.S. based teams with deep in-house experience supporting UpLevel clients around the world.
What are the challenges of working in legal practice?
Get the proper resources and be taken seriously. You will often hear the term “non-lawyer”. Even subconscious mentions are always derogatory. We have to change that, so the attitude of legal professionals is to encourage scaling up. Ultimately, it will help change the way the law is practiced through automation, outsourcing, and bringing business thinking into legal practice. The only way you can meet the demands of your growing business is by operating legally because you don’t have an unlimited number of employees.
After meeting with other legal operations professionals through CLOC, I found that we were all struggling to acquire resources and address the same issues, such as fees for outside advisors, reporting, understanding what was going on with our contracts, and working with repositories of large amounts of data.
UpLevel Ops hopes to change the perception that law is a cost center and a “denial sector” where lawyers shut down any innovation. If we can rewrite the story, the laws can get the proper resources and get what they need to automate. We want to work with lawyers where, for example, we can say “help us do this in a legal and ethical way,” or enter new markets, create new products, or get revenue faster.
That’s why networking is so important.That’s why I helped get started LINK, Legal Innovators Networkand my partner, Andrew Dick. Our new community is 6 months old, but we have over 400 members. We have a monthly legal action theme-driven event called LINK-ups Soon we will start hosting in-person happy hours in cities across the country to network.
What do you think the legal department should do now?
In the past, you saw work done in-house and work outsourced to law firms. In-house lawyers are responsible for the day-to-day work, while law firms are responsible for high-end strategic work. It’s very expensive and not suitable for in-house use when all the fun work is outsourced.
General counsels need to think bigger and strategically like their peers and ask themselves, “What value can I add to the business?” For example, if a CEO says, “We want to increase revenue by X,” the legal department Need to think about how they support this. The operations team then needs to figure out how to do the job.
Legal departments need to look at what they do in-house and make strategic decisions about what they want to keep in-house and what they want to outsource. For example, instead of hiring five contract attorneys, hire a partner who does just that, focusing on recruiting, managing, and scaling. It’s not an easy problem to solve, but once you build this partnership, it’s gold. You can then free up time on the in-house attorneys board, who can pull strategic work from law firms.
I would also recommend sending high volume, low risk work to partners and only using the law firm when you really need it, it’s also a lower total cost to the legal department and makes the legal department happier to keep within this knowledge.
Finally, I recommend an evaluation of the work done by the department. Make sure the right people are working internally or externally. Look at the process, then evaluate the technology. Make sure you have technical support staff and processes. Companies don’t need all that bells and whistles, especially if you’re outsourcing. You can then leverage technology from outside companies without even requiring tools.
What are your predictions for the future of legal practice?
A renewed focus on the work being done and the proper use of partners. I think that’s critical. We are seeing more and more chief legal officers and general counsels focus on this.
We will see no more hourly billing, and technology can support this through electronic billing systems. We will also see automated workflows and self-help tools for clients to prevent lawyers from not doing work that is not worth their time. This is where automated technology and bots will allow people to find the right resources faster to help lawyers answer repetitive questions, such as pointing clients to templates or top 10 FAQs.
How do you see legal operational changes over the past 5 years?
Many legal teams are appalled at the salaries of legal operations professionals, and they’ll say, “This is what I pay a lawyer.” I’ll tell them, “Yeah, it’s because this role helps you scale.”
Characters are in high demand. I feel very optimistic, especially when I think about how busy UpLevel Ops has been over the past two or three years. The pandemic has accelerated this growth as the general counsel realizes that if they try to delay automation, they can’t delay it for long, and they realize they need other resources.
What challenges does the legal operation of the healthcare system face?
Most of our clients at UpLevel are in the healthcare sector. Surprisingly, we did not encounter specific challenges specific to healthcare.
Data privacy is always an issue, protecting private health information. If a healthcare company has any rules about keeping items in the country and not sending them abroad, the considerations will vary by industry and company.
Healthcare companies do have a lot of high volume contracts and make sure they meet their privacy obligations, but it’s all similar. The only difference is a greater focus on regulation, which we take into account when working with our partners.
