Legal Operations 2.0
November 9 - 10, 2019
What: A two-day, highly interactive immersion experience designed for legal operations professionals and delivered via a format that provides hands-on learning and development.
A primary benefit of this seminar is its focus on the breadth, range, and scale of legal operations efforts, as well as the multi-disciplinary nature and roles of the allied professionals participating. This seminar is particularly helpful to legal ops leaders with strong skills in a few ops areas, who would like to expand their understanding of other related disciplines; or those in ops functions that have only explored some aspects of the operations agenda to date, and are now considering expanding the range of functions for the future.
Who: Legal Operations 2.0 is designed for legal ops professionals who are leaders or rising leaders in their law department, law firm or law company operations teams. Those who are in charge of the function, or significant elements of the function, are welcome, as well as senior leaders who are rising stars in larger operations functions.
The course is open to all kinds of legal professionals – including those with law degrees and executive management responsibilities for their department, AND those with degrees or strong experience in business, technology or executive operations who are working in legal to help improve the department’s service delivery and value; we will include registrants from both corporate client and law provider environments to assure a 360-degree perspective.
How:
While the seminar will deliver substantive and demonstrable value, it will do so via the power of collaboration and conversation, not silo'ed subject matters and academic lectures.
Participants will share their ideas, concerns and experiences, and collaborate to identify trends, challenges, hurdles, and top practices experienced by legal ops leaders and teams serving the corporate client: in law departments, law firms, and law companies. We know who the best faculty for this seminar are: it’s all of you who face the issues and do the work.
Space is limited and those enrolled in the Certificate in Law and Innovation program are given priority.
Registration is limited to a small cohort.
We will limit the session size to promote interactive dialogue (if you aren’t interested in helping to carry the conversation, don’t come). And, if you don’t make it before the cut-off for this year’s seminar, we will offer it again. While we will feature top flight discussion leaders and experts to help, their primary role is to facilitate conversations between you, and help the group to distill relevant takeaways or define deliverables.
When: Saturday, November 9 - Sunday, November 10, 2019
Where: Vanderbilt Law School, Nashville, TN
Legal Operations 2.0 :: Immersion Details
November 9 - 10, 2019 :: Vanderbilt Law School
Q: Who is Legal Operations 2.0 designed for?
A: This program is perfect for those who are either relatively new to their legal ops supervisory role and have little formal experience supervising a legal ops function or team, and those who have at least moderate to advanced experience with operations skills or disciplines that are useful in a multi-disciplinary legal ops environment, and wish to rise to a supervisory role in their legal department (and for a few of our registrants, in their law firms).
The level-set for this Immersion is the belief that legal operations is core to the successful functioning of law departments and the people who enroll commit to contributing time, attention, and whatever experience they bring to engaging in a deeper learning experience throughout the Immersion.
We believe that legal operations demands an iterative, evolving, agile problem-solving and behavior change skill set, not a graduate degree in every related discipline. Our immersion requires each operations leader participating to use the course and conversation to figure out how to build a function that delivers what their clients need, enlist the hearts and minds of their stakeholders, marshal the resources required, develop a strategy and tactics that can deliver demonstrated value, and get moving. Join us!
Q: What value does Legal Operations 2.0 deliver?
A: A LOT.
The distinguishing qualities of this immersive workshop include:
- An agenda that covers a wide range of roles, practices, and concentrations, including emerging issues (emerging, at least, for your team) that you may be accountable for designing and implementing in the future;
- An interactive format that mixes short “burst” presentations on ops topics (5 minutes, generally) with open conversation between the participants (facilitated) designed to explore challenges, exchange benchmarks and success practices, identify gaps and emerging client needs, and implementation tactics and user experiences;
- A focus on developing a collaborative environment that allows law department, law company and law firm leaders to learn from each other, think about the application of their work in a cross-platform/team environment, and explore opportunities to leverage operations practices that are coordinated, shared, and mutually beneficial.
- A curriculum tool that will be used to allows registrants to curate and record their thinking about preferred practices, ideas to explore, and focal points they want to focus on when they return to their offices. We will make time for registrants to share the plans they write onsite with others there, so you’ll have the benefit of everyone’s thinking to inform your future work (and to facilitate post-seminar networking with your new cohort in addressing these challenges).
Learning Outcomes
- the need for and purposes served by legal operations as a domain
- the most important elements of legal operations
- how operations can bring order and demonstrate value to the legal department and client service relationships
- how to structure the design and deployment of legal operations
- for law firms: how to improve and expand legal operations-oriented services delivery to clients
DeliverablesRegistrants will work with each other and faculty to complete a template that allows them to record the concept, as well as capture suggested implementation practices, metrics, resources, partners or other supports they might need to implement it, and draft a 1st cut at a plan for moving that project forward. Completed “playbooks” will be shared by the participants before leaving, so that everyone in the cohort can follow up with their colleagues on their work and share their success practices. In addition, participants will receive the following:
- a full set of Immersion slides and materials
- unfettered access to legal operations professionals and the cohort over the course of the Immersion
- access to the PoLI Forum, a digital collaboration space for post-Immersion support, launching in 2020
Q: What is the cost and what is included?
A: $2200 + everything from soup to nuts is included!
Tuition for this PoLI Immersion course is $2200, with a discount offered to organizations with more than one person registering and for those enrolled in the Certificate in Law and Innovation program. Please contact Cat Moon at c.moon@vanderbilt.edu or 615-322-6591 for more information about this discount.
Immersion tuition covers all course materials and instruction, including facilitation of pre-work and post-work outside of the Immersion weekend schedule. During the Immersion, the Institute provides meals and refreshments including breakfast and lunch, and parking adjacent to the Wond'ry. For those who arrive in Nashville on Friday evening, we're hosting an informal gathering including food and beverage for the cohort, also included in tuition.
Immersion students also are invited into the PoLI Forum, an online community designed exclusively for Institute cohorts to facilitate and support their legal innovation journey.
Q: What is the schedule?
A: fun on Friday, then work work work on Saturday and Sunday.
In this Immersion, participants will collaborate cross disciplines and in full collaboration.
Our format is to offer participants a wide survey of trending ops topics, which the cohort – both at the beginning of the seminar, and as we begin each separate conversation – will create a consensus agenda for our discussions.
To create an analogy, think of the program as a series of buckets we’ve filled with relevant discussion topics: one bucket for each of the following:
- Strategy and Planning
- Establishing Standards for Customer/Client Service + Defining Professional and Performance Standards for Team Members
- Customer/Client Accountability and Function Oversight
- Workflow and Assignment of Work / Staffing
- Technology, Collaboration and Automation
- Insourcing vs. Outsourcing (Right-Sourcing)
- Data and Metrics; Reporting and Accountability
- Talent, Training, Teaming and Incenting Behavior Change
Each conversation will allow either 60 or 90 minutes of facilitated discussion time. There is no way that we can comprehensively cover the breadth of any of these topics in 60 or 90 minutes, so we’ll sieve the topics at the start of each session to create our consensus agenda.
Students will receive Immersion pre-work, an assignment to be completed before arrival at Vanderbilt.
Friday evening, April 5, 2019 | Vanderbilt Law SchoolInstitute faculty and co-facilitators host an optional, informal gathering at Vanderbilt Law School for all Immersion students. An opportunity to meet your cohort and facilitators, we highly encourage attendance. Beverages and light food will be served.
Saturday, February 2, 8:30 am - 5:00 pm | The Wond'ry at Vanderbilt
7:30 am: Light breakfast and conversation.
8:00 am: Morning Session begins. Co-facilitators will kick off the Immersion promptly at 8:00 am. The Immersion is structured as a series of modules providing foundational concepts and content followed by collaborative engagement. Brief breaks will be taken between modules.
12:00 noon: Lunch (provided)
1:15 pm: Afternoon Session begins, with brief breaks taken between modules.
6:00 pm: Conclusion of Day 1.
Sunday, February 3, 2018, 8:30 am - 4:00 pm | The Wond'ry at Vanderbilt
7:30 am: Light breakfast and conversation.
8:00 am: Morning Session begins. Brief breaks will be taken between modules.
12:00 noon: Working lunch (provided)
12:45 pm: Afternoon Session begins, with brief breaks taken between modules.
2:00 pm: Conclusion of Day 2.
Participants will receive Immersion post-work, an assignment to be completed after the Immersion experience.
Q: Who is teaching Legal Operations 2.0?
A: experienced and engaging faculty and facilitators.
Susan Hacket, JD, is the primary facilitator for this Immersion. Susan is the CEO of Legal Executive Leadership, LLC, a law practice management consultancy she founded in 2011 after serving for 22 years as the Senior Vice President and General Counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC).
Lizzie Shilliam, co-facilitator, is Chief of Staff and Legal Operations, Office of the General Counsel, Vanderbilt University.
Kimberly Bell, co-facilitator, Head of Legal Operations, Nissan.
Marc Jenkins, JD, co-facilitator, is Director of Legal Operations and Senior Counsel for Asurion.
Q: Will this Immersion count towards the Certificate in Law and Innovation?
A: YES.
The Legal Operations 2.0 Immersion course will count as one (1) credit towards earning the Certificate in Law and Innovation.
