Resource Library

An Interview with David Cambria
Legal Ops’ OG Maverick has an eye on the bright future of the industry

In today's complex business landscape, collaboration between in-house legal departments and external counsel is crucial. Law firms are an extension of a legal team and provide substantive expertise unavailable on the team and support on high-volume, high-risk matters requiring additional expertise. Read this article for key strategies that can help corporate in-house legal departments develop robust partnerships with their external counsel.

In the July issue of the ACC Observer, David Cambria shared his unique and broad perspective on legal operations' current trajectory. This column focuses on Cambria's career experience, which makes his insights worth contemplating.

In a recent article in Harvard Business Review, a team of researchers showed that 78% of transformations fail. Their analysis showed that “people are the catalysts of successful transformation.” Check out this article to find out how to move beyond working in silos, incremental improvement, and isolated innovation to achieve transformation and why it’s important to have a structured process to engage leadership in setting objectives and guiding transformational change.  

ACC and Everlaw conducted a survey of 373 in-house legal professionals in the United States to better understand the extent to which corporate legal departments are collaborating with other business units, how legal teams are collaborating with their law firms and other vendors, and how technology plays a role in enabling collaboration. The results reveal that although legal staff desire greater collaboration and there is a clear recognition of the benefits of doing so, there are impediments preventing legal teams from realizing that full potential.

Key survey insights on legal transformation initiatives with respect to litigation and internal investigations.

Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) is often caught in cross-functional turf wars. Consequently, many find that the system in place is not the hoped-for “silver bullet,” especially as unmet requirements surface across the organization. Moreover, the benefits documented in the CLM business case may always seem just beyond reach, especially as phased roll-outs stall amidst frustration and disappointment that what was pitched by the vendor turned out to be more difficult to actualize than it seemed.

Savings is not a strategy. Imagine a CEO opening an earnings call by celebrating the money the company “saved” on deal counsel and due diligence by not moving forward with an otherwise strategically vital acquisition. The stock would crater because leadership would rightly be judged as majoring in the minors.

As a line item, legal spend is a minor consideration. Rather, legal spend is better characterized as a relatively small investment that enables the business to execute on what matters.

Legal spend should be dictated by business needs. Those business needs are only escalating with the explosion in legal complexity. The increasingly law-thick environment in which businesses operate is having a profound impact on corporate top lines, bottom lines, valuations, and strategic opportunities. Trying to save money on legal is myopic—and excruciatingly common.

This Privacy Capability Maturity Model provides a detailed maturity model for all aspects of an organization’s privacy program, including its use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) using personal information.

It seeks to gauge program capability across a variety of program elements, taking a “big picture” view on an organization’s readiness to comply with these requirements.

Learn with this list of agility tips that corporate legal departments can use for both big and small projects.