The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) conducts a number of initiatives focused on pursuing solutions for key issues affecting legal departments. One of these is the Legal Project Management (LPM) initiative. Here, the initiative is discussed by several participants: Janelle Belling, managing director of Perkins Coie’s E-Discovery Services & Strategy practice; Connie Brenton, chief of staff/senior director of Legal Operations at NetApp and president and CEO of CLOC; Patrick Ellis, legal counsel, Maven and BOOK by Cadillac at General Motors; Danny Kotlowitz, in-house counsel at Telstra; and Pratik Patel, vice president of Innovation and Products at Elevate. Continue Reading

Advancing technology is enabling real process change in document review, says TCDI’s Caragh Landry.

CCBJ: Technology is changing document review. What advancements are you seeing?

Caragh Landry: Technology- assisted review, or TAR, was one of the first true attempts at using technology to change the process, but unfortunately that didn’t really take off the way I thought it would. Now, however, I have high hopes for continuous active learning, or CAL, which is the next version of TAR. CAL uses known responsive documents to train its algorithms and then lets the algorithms provision similar documents based on that training. Continue Reading

Seyfarth Shaw’s Robert Milligan and iDS’s Jim Vaughn look at discovery and digital forensics in the age of the cloud.

CCBJ: Why is cloud computing so important in discovery and digital forensics?

Jim Vaughn: Creating and storing data in the cloud is for the most part a cheaper alternative to relying on a company’s own infrastructure. It may also be a way to leverage better security, if companies consider the pros and cons of the cloud provider’s security compared to their own com­pany’s security capabilities. Continue Reading

Legal departments should consider service and methodologies, as well as the technology itself.

When corporate legal departments consider their options for enterprise legal management (ELM) systems and providers, it’s easy to focus on dazzling product demos. However, an ELM technology provider is more than just a software manufacturer. Continue Reading

When creating a vendor management process, consider these best practices.

Every company wants the best results from their legal partners, but when evaluating the performance of multiple outside law firms, it can be difficult to know where to start. Continue Reading

When I got back from CLOC last month, I was amazed at the various roles and responsibilities shouldered by legal operations staff. Still one of the fastest growing roles in legal departments, the responsibilities often assigned to these teams are varied and all over the map in terms of impact on the business, not just the legal department. Continue Reading

Given the profound changes roiling the market for corporate legal services, it can be tough to tell just what makes today’s in-house law department tick. The agenda for CLOC’s Annual Corporate Legal Operations Institute, dissected in this infographic from Corporate Counsel Business Journal, isn’t a bad place to start. Continue Reading

Today’s headlines point to why it is critical to review and strengthen company harassment programs.

In the current climate of #MeToo and the Time’s Up movement, many employers are scrambling to answer a variety of questions relating to harassment in the workplace. Chief among these are what’s changed, and what changes do we need to make now? Continue Reading

CCBJ: Your career followed an interesting and varied path to the Gates Foundation. Can you tell us about that?

Keith Matthews: Professionally, my first job out of college was as a credit analyst and later a middle-market loan officer at what is now JPMorgan Chase. With that background – and with a finance degree from college – I knew early on in my career that I wanted to focus on transactional work. Continue Reading