Accelerating Business Velocity: Legal Ops in Focus with Mike Haven

Transcript

Candice Reed 00:00

So today we’re going to talk about the business of law.

Mike Haven 00:04

I felt that the legal industry needed improvement in a lot of ways.

Alex Su 00:08

What’s changed in legal ops and why do you think it grew so much over the past 10 years?

Mike Haven 00:12

Community and collaboration would be the two biggest drivers.

Candice Reed 00:16

How do you balance being a business enabler with avoiding risk?

Mike Haven 00:22

What really makes the difference is the human side of it.

Candice Reed 00:27

This is Leveraging Latitude: Cultivating a Full Life in the Law. Please join us on our journey as we discover how to leverage the hard work of becoming a lawyer to achieving success and leading a rich and fulfilling life in the law.

Candice Reed 00:41

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the Leveraging Latitude podcast. We are happy to have you with us today. I am joined by my co-host, Alex Su. And Alex, I think you’re going to introduce our guest for us today.

Alex Su 00:56

That’s right, Candice, and welcome back, everyone. I’m so excited about today’s guest. It’s Mike Haven from Intel where he’s the Senior Director, Associate General Counsel and Head of Global Legal Operations. But what you may know Mike from is that he used to be the president of CLOC, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, and both of those roles are recent for him, but he spent over two decades in law and legal operations. He was formerly a partner at K&L Gates. He had worked at NetApp and Gap, and he is a recently published author of “GenO: The Rise of Legal Operations,” which was released in August 2024. Welcome, Mike.

Mike Haven 01:39

Thank you so much. It’s great to be here back with you, Alex, and with you, Candice.

Candice Reed 01:44

It’s great to have you. Thank you for joining us today. So today we’re going to talk about the business of law, not just the practice, but the business of law and the not so new emerging field of legal operations. I know that you have spent several years in this space and we’re looking forward to hearing how you got to where you are from practicing attorney to head of legal ops. Would you mind giving us your story, telling us your story? What drew you to the practice of law first and then tell us about your transition over to the business of law.

Mike Haven 02:23

Well, it’s a long story, so I’ll try to keep it as quick as I can, but it really goes back to my childhood. One moment that I often speak of was when I was in eighth grade and I traveled to Washington, D.C. to watch my father argue a case before the United States Supreme Court. And it was a case that became a seminal case in a particular area and is one that those of us who went to law school studied in law school, pretty much all of us, the Asahi v. Superior Court case, is a personal jurisdiction case. And I watched my dad get absolutely grilled by Sandra Day O’Connor, who ended up writing the opinion, and I decided that that was the career for me. But that was in eighth grade. And as you know, children change their minds a lot before they settle on a career. So I wasn’t totally sure that’s what I was going to do.

Mike Haven 03:32

And after college, I moved up to Lake Tahoe and was a ski bum for a little while. Just got a whole bunch of skiing in and it was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life. But while I was there, I just really figured out what I wanted to do with my life. And sure enough, I went back to… I think it’s in my blood. I’m going to go to law school. So I applied to one law school. It was the law school in my hometown where I could work at my dad’s firm while I went to school. And because I was working at my dad’s firm, I was thrown into the fire. I was trying cases to verdict at a very early stage in my career, and loved practicing law, loved what I was doing. Ended up moving to the Bay Area because my wife got her a dream job at Stanford University. And so we packed up and I left my dad’s firm and ended up as one of the early attorneys in the Palo Alto office at K&L Gates where I eventually made partner.

Mike Haven 04:46

And so the career was going great. I had a really good practice. I felt that the legal industry needed improvement in a lot of ways, and there was something driving me to get involved in changing some things that I thought were wrong about the practice. And at the same time, I was really interested in going in-house because I wanted to be closer to the business. There was just a lot of business stuff going on inside of me that wasn’t being satisfied in just a law practice. So I ended up going in-house and finding a way to both do what I was comfortable with, which was manage litigation, and at the same time learn a lot about legal operations. And I fell in love with the legal operations work and what it was actually doing for the industry even as early as back in 2013.

Mike Haven 05:49

So when the opportunity came to build and run my own program at Gap, I jumped on it and went over there and that was an amazing experience. And then I moved on to Intel and that’s where I’m now. And through all of that, I was heavily involved in CLOC, which is a big part of the reason for why legal operations is where it is today. And being involved in CLOC allowed me to really help influence the evolution of the profession along with many other great people.

Alex Su 06:33

And you got in really early, relatively early, in legal ops, and so you’ve seen it grow and change. And I’m curious to hear from you, Mike, what’s changed in legal ops and why do you think it grew so much over the past 10 years?

Mike Haven 06:44

Well, I think those questions are one and the same. What’s changed is that it’s grown so much and it’s been adopted by a large percentage of organizations out there. And there are established programs now where CLOs and other C-staff people want to see operational structure in legal organizations and that being an important pillar of the organization itself. That has changed. And then of course, the technology’s gotten better and we’ve gotten better at how we’re doing legal operations across the whole spectrum.

Mike Haven 07:29

So that’s all changed, but why has it changed so quickly? I think community and collaboration would be the two biggest drivers. We are in a very special community, and it’s a rare community, tight-knit community that collaborates and shares really well together. And that spirit of collaboration and community has been like a snowball effect for driving progress and evolution in this space. And so it’s happened I think much more quickly because of that than you might see in other industries where people are working more in silos to drive progress rather than collaboratively. And you’ve seen that on so many levels. Of course, CLOC is the best example of it. CLOC started at all. And then you’ve seen a lot of other little communities pop up throughout, and those all help too. People getting together driving progress is helpful. So I’ve always been a big fan of all these communities. Let’s do this. We’re all in this for the same reason. We’re trying to drive progress in legal, but they’ve all been extremely helpful. Then, we’ve taken it to another level recently with The Sense Collective, which is a group of organizations that have banded together to help each other drive progress with generative AI. That’s just taking collaboration to another level. So it’s yet another example of why this space has progressed so quickly.

Alex Su 09:20

I love that, and I think that that level of collaboration and information sharing is really… I haven’t really seen very many places with that level of cooperation. And I don’t know, Candice, I don’t know if you’ve been involved in the legal ops community and seen some of the stuff coming out of CLOC and these other organizations, but I’ve just been really impressed by how much people are willing to work with each other and share ideas.

Candice Reed 09:45

It definitely seems like the legal ops community is a little different than the more traditional legal community, though it is part of that bigger whole. And so many of you who are leaders in the legal ops space were former practicing attorneys like you, Mike. But whereas oftentimes we talk about a siloed approach in the practice of law, the legal ops community really does seem to rely on that collaboration that you mentioned, working together, sharing resources. I know when I was in-house and I was doing some compliance work, there was a ton of group emails that was just coming out of that community where people were saying, “Hey, I tried this vendor or this product, this service. It worked really well. Or I have this question. Have any of you dealt with it before?” And so there was a lot of sharing unlike a more traditional siloed approach in the practice of law.

Mike Haven 10:54

Yeah, I agree. It’s rare and it’s special. People have that spirit of collaboration and sharing. It’s ingrained in our culture as an industry. And we’re starting to see that slowly permeate into other sectors of the legal industry and, of course, with other elements of the industry like service providers and technology providers getting together and actually breaking the threat of competition and breaking through the threat of competition and doing what they can do to actually lift all boats. It’s been pretty cool to see.

Candice Reed 11:46

Mike, you have said before that you feel like the legal function, particularly in-house, must be a business enabler. Can you tell us what you mean by being a business enabler and how do you balance being a business enabler with avoiding risk?

Mike Haven 12:07

I think the two go hand in hand, right? I mean, I think part of enabling the business is removing or mitigating risk that gets in the way of what they’re doing, but doing that in a way that doesn’t really impede the speed of business. I always think about things in terms of business velocity, because the faster you get the sale done and the money in the door, the more money the company makes. So driving deal velocity and decreasing sales cycle times is one really good example of how legal operations can directly mitigate risk and enable the business at the same time. But I think when it comes to risk, I think it’s how you look at the risk that’s really important. I think sometimes lawyers historically have over-indexed on certain risks relative to certain types of agreements perhaps.

Mike Haven 13:27

If you look at risk a different way and you can categorize certain buckets of agreements in a lower risk, lower complexity category, you can maybe drive more automation for those types of agreements and make business go faster for those types of agreements. For example, we’ve done an amazing job at that at Intel, our contracts team, and particularly with the NDAs. That’s a very well-oiled machine. Generally a lower risk, lower complexity type of category of agreement that really shouldn’t be hanging up the business. It’s risk that needs to be mitigated, and so it needs to get done, but it needs to get done quickly and efficiently and not chew up much cycle time. So being able to mitigate that risk and make those things happen automatically, almost instantly in a vast majority of cases enables the business as well.

Candice Reed 14:36

When you talk about the legal function or the legal ops team focusing on increasing the business velocity, decreasing sales cycle, is it all about technology or is it also about something else?

Mike Haven 14:59

Oh, it’s always about people primarily because people do that work or traditionally have done that work. And so even if you’re taking technology and using it to support people to make their jobs easier or lighten their load, it’s impacting people. There’s always going to be a people impact when you’re leveraging technology or making any changes or enhancements to process that people have traditionally led. It’s always going to be a people problem first, and then you get the people comfortable and capable with the technology and get them to understand how much it really helps them and makes actually their jobs more fun generally and better. But it’s that journey of getting from change to adoption that is the real challenge.

Alex Su 16:14

Mike, I want to ask you a question about that, specifically about the people element of all this. Because in my admittedly anecdotal experience, it seems like the legal ops folks are really more in tune with the business. Very often, they are passing down initiatives to the lawyers essentially who, as you say, over-index on the risk. What kind of tactical advice would you give a relatively new legal ops manager or director or VP on how to speak to the lawyer’s need to over-manage all of the risk? What have you seen work really well in conveying that message?

Mike Haven 16:53

It is really about empathy and asking questions and listening to them explain how they feel about the risk of a particular type of agreement. You can ask just curious questions to really get them to explain their point of view on it and then try to understand their point of view and maybe make a counterpoint that makes sense to help explain your point of view on it that’s not in an intrusive or insulting or offensive way. The best way though is to have that conversation and then get them to realize themselves, hey, wait a minute, maybe this of agreements is something that we could bite off and automate. And so just to have that conversation until a light bulb goes off in their head and they realize, “Oh, wait a second, it’s not like I love reading these agreements. It’s not like I want to keep doing that. Could a machine do that for me? That’d be cool.” And then all of a sudden, boom, it’s their idea. And you’re like, yeah, I think we could probably make that happen for you. That’s the best tactic if you can pull it off.

Candice Reed 18:23

I love how you’re talking about legal operations, which I think for many of us seems to be grounded in budgets, processes, technology. And I hear you talking about how legal ops is most successful when there’s relationships, collaboration, empathy, curious questioning. I mean, these are all very relational skills and components. I don’t know that I necessarily attributed to the success of legal ops. But as you’re talking, I appreciate how you approach it, and it makes me wonder if this isn’t why one of the reasons at least the field has grown exponentially over the last 10 to 20 years because it really does seem like you are finding success on the human level as incorporating some of the harder technology processes, budgets, all of the things that we might talk about as more non-human things.

Mike Haven 19:41

The hard competencies, the financial management, the technology, the outside counsel management, those sorts of hard competencies are table stakes for a good legal ops leader and team. What really makes the difference is the human side of it. What really elevates the role is exactly what you’re talking about, Candice, and that’s what we call power skills. And Prashant and I write about that in our book. There’s a couple of chapters dedicated to the power skills that are critical to be successful in this profession. And you nailed it, Candice. That’s exactly right. It’s so important and it’s what differentiates a good legal ops professional from a great one, if you ask me.

Candice Reed 20:37

I also just want to point out how you have changed the narrative or at least the term from soft skills to power skills, because I think that really is where the power is.

Mike Haven 20:48

Somebody else did that, I think, but we’ve certainly adopted that. I don’t take credit for making that change, but it’s a way better way to look at that.

Candice Reed 21:01

Take credit for using that terminology, right? And that’s part of changing the culture is using the new terminology and giving voice to a different way of viewing those types of skills. Just this morning, I was in a meeting where we talked about soft skills and whether that was too touchy-feely of a subject for lawyers. My response and stance on it sounds similar to yours, Mike, where I was like, no, never. That’s the secret sauce.

Mike Haven 21:38

Absolutely right. Yeah, and nothing to be ashamed of. We should be focused more on them if you ask me because they’re so important.

Alex Su 21:48

Mike, we’ve been talking a lot about people, and one thing I really wanted to ask you about is a key stakeholder person or maybe department when it comes to legal, and that’s the finance team or the CFO. Something I’ve noticed over the past maybe year or two, there seems to be an increased emphasis on this, but I’m sure it’s always been. And I guess the theme is how do you demonstrate the ROI of a legal team? How do you advocate to get more resources specifically from finance? And so I know this is something you’ve spoken on and dealt with in your professional career. So what advice would you give to legal teams when it comes to approaching the CFO or finance?

Mike Haven 22:28

First of all, we try to measure everything that we can that helps us make progress or helps us demonstrate value. And it might seem strange to spend time capturing, curating, visualizing, and delivering metrics that demonstrate the value of the work you and your team are doing. It’s almost like you’re just bragging. You’re patting yourself on the back, whatever. But it’s critically important. And part of that is that this is still a relatively new space. And C-suite leaders are still getting familiar with a different way of working in the legal organization and a different way of running the legal organization and the value that it delivers. Keep in mind that for most companies, legal is still a cost center. It is still a cost for the company. In many organizations, it’s not a revenue generator. They want to see progress in terms of delivering legal services more efficiently and continuing to support everything the company needs without breaking the bank. And so having those metrics available to show what value you are delivering across different areas. We talked a little bit about deal velocity. That’s just one example of ways you can show direct impact in terms of the value you’re delivering for the company.

Mike Haven 24:23

But another thing is, and I think this is what you were referencing, Alex, is that there’s something in legal organizations that I call incremental business demand. And what it is is at the beginning of a year, you plan a budget. And to do so, you anticipate certain demands from the business, typically things that have already been coming in, things that your organization is used to working on. And that all differs depending on the business that you’re working for. But throughout every year, more things will come in than you anticipated or you planned for. Even if you have a buffer, oftentimes there’s incremental business demand that exceeds what you planned for in your budget. And you don’t typically, at least, I don’t typically go back to finance or the CFO in a fiscal year and say, “Can I get more budget for this year?” If there’s some huge thing that’s a massive emergency, that may be different. But general incremental business demand must simply be absorbed by the organization. You have to figure out a way to absorb that business demand. And that usually means being more efficient on something else or cutting something else or changing a priority or whatever it is, but you absorb it.

Mike Haven 26:03

And what’s really important to do when you’re doing that is to let the CFO, let the finance team know how much…First of all, you measure the incremental business demand that’s coming in so that you can share how much incremental business demand came in, and then show that you absorbed it, show how responsible you were doing more with the same amount of money or same resources that you had before, and establish credibility with the office that you are running a tight ship, you are running an efficient business. And then if that incremental business demand is going to be something that continues year over year and you still need to fit in whatever it was you delayed or changed in order to absorb that business demand, then you can come back to the CFO and make a really good case and say, “Look, this is what came in. This is what we’re going to have year over year. We still need to do this. If we don’t do this, this is the risk to the business,” and tie everything you’re doing to the risk of what will happen if you don’t do it, essentially. It’s hard to speak in these generalities, but I think you get the point. It’s about demonstrating responsibility, absorbing incremental business demand, and making a case after you’ve established that credibility.

Alex Su 27:45

What I really like about this framing, Mike, is that yes, there’s incremental demand, but you’ve also got to prove to your stakeholders, the CFO, that you know what to do with extra budget. And that’s why I like idea of having KPIs or metrics. And by the way, this is something I’ve written about before on LinkedIn, and I will tell you that many GCs and CLOs are not a fan of having KPIs attached to the department. And one of the big questions that comes up is, well, what is that KPI? What’s an example of a KPI? You could do something like contract volume process, but that might be reliant on how much the business generates. And so again, it’s out of the control of the legal team. Or maybe you don’t want to be optimizing only for volume because then you’re going to be not really assessing the risks. And so I’m curious, in your experience with CLOC or at any of your roles, what are some high-level examples of KPIs that you’ve seen work really well in measuring the output of a legal department?

Mike Haven 28:46

I mean, it really depends on the business, Alex. You have to think about what’s important to that particular business. Not all legal teams are focused on the same KPIs. Some teams are really focused on mergers and acquisitions. That’s one of the key things in their organization. Others are really focused on patents, innovation and intellectual property. Others have big litigation problems. And so what I do is I tie KPIs specifically to the priorities of the business and what legal is doing to serve the business. I think that the best KPIs… I mean, you can talk about all the generic ones, the finance ones for example. How are you doing managing the budget that they give you? How are you doing on resolving disputes? How are you doing on all of the board work that needs to be done? There’s so many different things that happen. Listing a few generic KPIs I don’t think is as helpful as really thinking about what are the specific needs of your business and how does legal serve those needs, and what are the key indicators of your success in serving those particular needs.

Alex Su 30:32

It’s a great way of thinking about it. How do you tie it back to the top company priorities? Because you can imagine an early stage startup that is processing a high volume of contracts, that’s going to be more important to them. But if you’re talking about maybe a larger technology company, and I’m just thinking of Airbnb as an example because I happen to know their story. They were offering something that wasn’t quite a hotel, wasn’t quite an apartment, but there were so much gray area when it came to their business and the legal and regulatory environment. That business being measured by contracts processed, that would not be meaningful to the business versus something more objective-based.

Candice Reed 31:12

As we mentioned earlier, there are a number of former practicing attorneys who are in the legal ops space. There are a number of professionals who have either finance or maybe project management as their primary profession prior to going into the legal ops space. For someone listening to this conversation who is intrigued by the business of law or maybe like you sees some things that they would like to change or thinks that they would be effective at changing for the better, how do they transition from practicing law or maybe even doing something else within the legal space into a legal ops position?

Mike Haven 32:06

One of the beautiful things about legal ops is it requires so many different skill sets, at least a general understanding of so many different skill sets that nobody comes into the profession with all of them. You probably come in with one or two strengths. To your point, maybe you come in from the finance side, maybe you come in from law, maybe you come in from tech, maybe come in from procurement. There’s a lot of different entry points. In terms of how you get in, apply for a job and convince somebody that you have a growth mindset and you can learn everything else. That honestly is what’s most important is that you’re somebody who’s curious, who has a growth mindset, who’s always learning, who’s willing to understand what you don’t know, and go out and bolster your capacity in that particular area with an expert who can support you either internally or externally.

Mike Haven 33:26

So there’s really no magic formula for getting into legal ops at this point. It’s been fun watching the profession blossom into a group of people who do this from… We all came from something else at one point, because there just wasn’t a pool of legal ops professionals to choose from. And we’re starting to see more and more of that now. People are in it, but there’s still a lot of people coming from other areas and finding a home in this profession.

Alex Su 34:00

As we’re close to time here, I just wanted to see if there’s any advice you would give to whether it’s a CLO or a general counsel or some head of legal who may not have heard about legal ops before, who doesn’t know what that’s all about. What advice would you give to them about legal ops or about the business of law that you think they’d benefit from given that they’ve never heard of legal ops?

Mike Haven 34:27

There’s a whole nother world out there, I would say to that person. And that world is slowly or maybe more and more rapidly taking over. And that’s a world that involves automation of processes using really advanced, cool technology, and agents that will be part of your legal staff. Whether you like it or not, it’s coming, AI agents as essentially additional employees on your staff, and people who work with those agents to make legal services more efficient and more effective and to positively impact the business. And it’s a really cool space. We’re starting to see more and more CLOs get interested in it. I would just suggest that they check it out.

Alex Su 35:51

I love that. Such a positive message to end on. And also for those of you who don’t know, Mike has recently published “GenO: The Rise of Legal Operations.” I mentioned that earlier on the podcast. Check it out. We’re going to add a link to it in the show notes, so you’ll be able to find it there. Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. I feel like I’ve learned a lot just from this short conversation. Thank you for joining us on the podcast.

Candice Reed 36:20

Thank you, Mike.

Mike Haven 36:22

You’re most welcome. It’s been a real pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Tim Haley 36:25

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