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I recently spoke on the Reinventing Professionals podcast with Ari Kaplan about meaningful contract management. The podcast is designed to offer ideas, guidance, and perspectives on how to effectively navigate a perpetually shifting professional landscape, and it has a unique focus on the legal industry and the technology that is driving its evolution. In my prior article, I discussed the growing contract management space and what it can offer you.

What should you consider before implementing a contract management solution?

While an organization may have a number of things to consider before switching over, I recommend focusing on end-to-end solutions, collaboration features, and actionable outcomes.

• End to end, easy to implement solution. One of the important things to consider is whether you’re getting an end-to-end solution. Is it a SaaS-based, out-of-the-box solution that you can implement relatively quickly and easily? This is especially important to consider for small and medium-size organizations or those organizations that are strapped for resources.
• Meaningful, real-time, simultaneous collaboration. Another question an organization should consider is the ability to collaborate in real time. Can a platform allow you to work simultaneously with your colleagues, or do you have to take turns and work sequentially? It’s a very important factor to consider because you gain a lot of efficiencies when you work simultaneously. That is where you can really work together and create better relationships and transparency.
• Actionable outcomes. The last thing to look for is whether your contract management solution allows you to create an actionable outcome. Does your solution leverage the data that is collected from your contract activities? Does it help you create better contracts? Does it flag information for you?

What resistance to implementing a contract management solution do you anticipate?

Contract management solutions are technology. They change the way you manage people and processes in your department. And I joke that everybody wants a change, yet everybody is afraid of it.

• Pain points. I recommend starting with pain points related to the contract. What are the frustrations?
• Have a plan. Once you begin to understand the pain points and can articulate why you need a contract management solution, it’s very important to meet with everyone involved and together come up with an implementation plan that works for everyone. You really want people in your department to be excited about the solution.
• Roadshow to bring everyone along. Finally, once you implement a solution, it’s very important to actually show it off and increase its visibility and adoption. 

In the end, you really would like everyone to learn and use the technology. Remember that people who implemented your contract management solution tend to be a little bit more tech savvy. It is up to them to bring everybody else on along for the ride.

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Olga V. Mack is the CEO of Parley Pro, a next-generation contract management company that has pioneered online negotiation technology. Olga embraces legal innovation and had dedicated her career to improving and shaping the future of law. She is convinced that the legal profession will emerge even stronger, more resilient, and more inclusive than before by embracing technology. Olga is also an award-winning general counsel, operations professional, startup advisor, public speaker, adjunct professor, and entrepreneur. Olga founded the Women Serve on Boards movement that advocates for women to participate on corporate boards of Fortune 500 companies. Olga also co-founded SunLaw, an organization dedicated to preparing women in-house attorneys to become general counsels and legal leaders, and WISE to help female law firm partners become rainmakers. She authored Get on Board: Earning Your Ticket to a Corporate Board Seat and Fundamentals of Smart Contract Security. You can email Olga at olga@olgamack.com or follow her on Twitter @olgavmack. 

Bound by tradition and precedent, lawyers are notoriously slow to adopt new technologies. Yet the fundamental transformation of the practice of law– whether through automation or tech-enabled collaboration– is inevitable. In addition to the challenge of implementing the new technologies themselves, a broad sort of cultural shift is required within firms. No longer can “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” or “we’ve always done it that way” hold sway in strategic decision-making.

The change management process provides an effective model for managing the ins and outs, the expected and unexpected, that come with adopting legal technology that can transform your practice. Through it, you can place your practice at the forefront of innovations that are redefining how attorneys practice law.

Download your free copy of SimpleLaw’s new white paper on leveraging change management principles.  Learn how your practice can:

• Create a Sense of Urgency
• Build a Coalition
• Form a Vision
• Eliminate Obstacles
• Create Short-Term Wins
• And much more

By requesting this report you are opting in to receive communications from SimpleLaw and Above the Law. 

It’s that time of year again! We at Above the Law are putting together our third annual list of the best outside law firms, according to the people who know best – you, the in-house counsel who hire them. We know you know which firms are the most efficient, cost-effective, and reliable, and which firms are….maybe not so much, and we want you to share that info with us (please)!

Take our very brief survey and tell us which outside firms you use and why you like working with them (or maybe why you don’t).

Back in 2017, University of Minnesota Law professor Edward Adams was indicted for allegedly embezzling millions of dollars from investors. The original indictment alleged that over the course of eight years the professor took $4.38 million from investors in Apollo Diamond, Inc., and made payments of over $2.54 million to his own law firm.

However, Adams struck a deal with the U.S. Attorney’s Office that included the government dropping some of he most serious counts the professor faced. Instead, Adams pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor offense in October, for lying to the IRS. Now, he’s been sentenced.

Judge Donovan Frank on the District Court for the District of Minnesota sentenced Adams to two years of probation and $5,000 in fines. He also must do 200 hours of community service with Southern Minnesota Regional Legal Services or Volunteer Lawyers Network. The sentence is harsher than the one year of probation prosecutors recommended in their sentencing memo, and the six months of probation with no fines that the defense sought, but Judge Frank thought it was warranted. As reported by the Minnesota Star Tribune:

“You clearly knew more than most that what you were doing was illegal and unethical,” said Frank.

Adams released a statement after his sentencing:

“I promise you I will never find myself in this situation again,” he said.

I have always maintained my innocence as to the original charges that were brought against me, and I am grateful that all of them have been dismissed,” Adams said in a statement after the sentencing.

According to a law school spokesperson, they still haven’t decided if Adams will return to the classroom. The professor has been on leave — paid, to the tune of $170,820 a year — while his legal battle was resolved.

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Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, and host of The Jabot podcast. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter (@Kathryn1).

Sure, Goldman Sachs has been involved in the occasional insider-trading scandal. And, yes, it’s been known to hire the occasional bigamist and educational fabulist who—OK—may have worked with all sorts of other Goldmanites to separate Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund from $6.5 billion. And yes, the whole place has got Trump administration stink all over it. But David Solomon is trying, you guys. He’s loosening (and then removing) the tie, opening up, hanging out with the cool kids, and trying to make 200 West a little less white and bald.

This is a big week for Alan Dershowitz and the rest of the Donald Trump impeachment trial defense team to explain to the country how Nicole Brown’s real killers were secretly withholding Ukraine military aid. But Dershowitz has already achieved his greatest accomplishment — bringing Jon Lovitz back to SNL to allow everyone over 40 to say: “Remember that pathological liar sketch? That was funny… the first time.”

Acting! Genius!

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

It should come as no surprise that cloud computing has taken the consumer and business world by storm over the past decade. From Platform-as-a-Service offerings for businesses (Office 365 anyone?) to the availability of Software-as-a-Service to the consumer (such as Dropbox and Evernote, to name a few), the leveraging of these capabilities on the internet is transforming the way we use the internet. That said, it is also transforming the way personal data must be protected against unauthorized access and use. Data (especially personal information) on the cloud is getting rained on by hackers, and protecting against such security breaches requires a strong digital umbrella.

Again, this comes with the digital territory. As microprocessor speeds have increased, so has memory density and speed. With the increase in performance, however, came a decrease in costs relative to performance, creating powerful new architectures leveraged by technology companies (such as cloud computing) to provide easily accessible and highly useful applications to the masses. This perfect storm of performance, access, and capability is helping fuel internet hacking as well. Many saw this coming — an MIT Technology review article from 2009 rightly predicted that as security migrated to the cloud (by necessity), so would the attacks follow (by design).   In essence, the same architectures that are fueling the expansion and acceptance of the cloud are also turbocharging technologies used by hackers. From distributed denial of service attacks to sophisticated ransomware, bad actors are definitely leveraging the cloud. In fact, malware once limited to sophisticated programmers is becoming more easily accessible to those less technically proficient but equally ill-intentioned — one can now, for example, rent “ransomware-in-a-box.” Go figure.

Needless to say, that is causing information security professionals to rethink their approach to cybersecurity, especially those companies that managed service providers (MSPs) and the companies providing data security services to them. That is no more evident than the recent CloudHopper attacks — a hacking “campaign” that was far more extensive than thought. That far-reaching cyberespionage campaign was launched by a hacking group referred to as APT10 (and reportedly tied to Chinese intelligence services). According to TrendMicro, the campaign has affected “organizations in North America, Europe, South America, and Asia — and most recently managed service providers (MSPs) in: United Kingdom (U.K.), United States (U.S.), Japan, Canada, Brazil, France, Switzerland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, South Africa, India, Thailand, South Korea, and Australia.”  How?  The hack inserted itself through phishing emails and then used various tools and techniques to “hop” across the MSP network infrastructure to access and steal valuable data across the entire network. Worse, this occurred over a span of years before being detected.

At a time when the move by more companies (and clients) to cloud platforms seems almost inevitable, your company (or clients) need to adapt their information security needs to this new level of threat. More importantly, your company (or clients) need to not only be aware of this attack vector but be prepared to adapt to this ever-evolving threat landscape. It’s more than just good technological practice — it is becoming essential to limiting legal liability. As I have written before here and here, implementation of a network architecture that does not reasonably address data security exposes a company to not only loss of its own valuable IP and other data assets, but may expose it to fines and third-party claims for data breach. It’s a daunting task, but not insurmountable. Here are a few considerations to think about to help mitigate the risk:

• Balance Efficient Operation With Security Optimization. Provisioning a system for a client and configuring it to work efficiently may be good from a performance perspective, but terrible from a security one. This is even more important when third-party infrastructure is integrated in the platform. Unfortunately, there can be a tension between IT, corporate, and legal when it comes to implementation. When push comes to shove, it is essential for IT and legal/administrative to work together to achieve that balance so that acceptable performance  can be matched to acceptable business and legal risk.
• Network Segmentation Is A Good Thing. The CloudHopper attacks are instructive here — proper segmentation of networks would have helped limit privileges and “stop the hop” along that attack vector in its tracks. By segmenting sensitive information into other virtual servers and further compartmentalizing it, you will make is far more difficult for hackers to get to that information in the first place. Limiting lateral access across the platform services also helps contain potential data security liability.
• Data Encryption Is Your Friend … For Now. It should be self-evident that data encryption provides an extra level of protection that should always be considered when using cloud services. Where available, using it absolutely helps limit data risk exposure and legal liability. Unfortunately, encryption may not always be available for the application or viable from a use/performance perspective. Moreover, the inevitable dawn of quantum computing will limit the viability of current encryption mechanisms because the raw computing power makes brute force hacking of encryption keys within a reasonable time frame possible. If data encryption is available and possible, by all means use it!

I’ve said it before, so I will say it again — the fact that your company (or client) is going to be hit by a cyberattack is not a matter of if, but when. Any information security program is difficult enough for internal networks — cloud computing requires even more diligence and planning to help alleviate potential risk in this evolving threat landscape. So take the time to consider the foregoing carefully, otherwise the digital umbrella simply won’t cover as much as you think, and what’s worse, your company (or client) will pay for it.

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Tom Kulik is an Intellectual Property & Information Technology Partner at the Dallas-based law firm of Scheef & Stone, LLP. In private practice for over 20 years, Tom is a sought-after technology lawyer who uses his industry experience as a former computer systems engineer to creatively counsel and help his clients navigate the complexities of law and technology in their business. News outlets reach out to Tom for his insight, and he has been quoted by national media organizations. Get in touch with Tom on Twitter (@LegalIntangibls) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/technologylawyer), or contact him directly at tom.kulik@solidcounsel.com.

NPR reporter Mary Louise Kelly had an interview with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to discuss Iran and Ukraine which made a lot of sense because she was talking to the guy who ostensibly understands American foreign policy and in the last few weeks he nearly started a cataclysmic war with the former while we all learned that all the President’s stooges were trying to assassinate our ambassador to the latter. Any reporter conducting a foreign policy interview that doesn’t touch those countries should be fired immediately.

Except, Pompeo didn’t want to talk about Ukraine, probably because between accepting the interview and the time he sat down with Kelly more evidence came out about the administration’s bumbling efforts and he realized every interview he gave would just be another landmine of potentially damning misstatements. So he told Kelly that he wouldn’t talk about Ukraine, a fact which she reported because she’s a reporter and that’s what reporters do.

Pompeo decided to use State Department letterhead to complain about the reporter because a public tantrum is exactly the dignified use of the office that the Founders intended:

The last dig refers to the most bizarre act of a sitting United States Secretary of State. Apparently in an effort to lash out at Kelly for asking him about his job, he had aides bring him a map without country names and dared Kelly to find Ukraine on the map. Because Kelly has an advanced degree in European Studies from FUCKING CAMBRIDGE, she pointed to Ukraine and Pompeo got even more angry. He now seems to be implying that he thinks she failed to correctly point to Ukraine which terrifyingly suggests that — given the credentials of the two parties involved — the Secretary of State of the United States thinks Bangladesh rests on the Black Sea.

Putting aside how dumb it is to try to best a European Studies expert on European geography, isn’t Ukraine one of the easiest countries to identify? Even the dullest tool in the shed knows the breadbasket of Europe has to be by Russia which is the biggest country on the map already. Everyone’s played Risk and had to jealously guard that 5 Army Europe bonus. Pompeo is, despite all appearances, a lawyer yet he apparently missed the “don’t ask questions you don’t already know the answer to” lesson because this was a downright atrocious flex.

How this story becomes fodder for law firm gossip is that Kelly is married to Williams & Connolly partner Nick Boyle, and Williams & Connolly is the firm where Mike Pompeo worked until 1997. Boyle didn’t overlap with Pompeo, joining the firm in 2001 after Pompeo bolted from legal practice. But it’s safe to say Pompeo isn’t making any friends at his old firm.

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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Over the past decade, digital technologies have revolutionized nearly every industry, transforming client relationships, business processes, and individual work functions. This digital transformation has been particularly acute in the world of legal operations. As illustrated in the Annual Law Department Operations Survey, the number one challenge for legal operations professionals is improving business processes in the era of digital transformation.

Legal operations has grown in strategic importance by embracing digital transformation to bring efficiency and innovation to corporate legal processes. One critical area of focus should be information management – enabling users to save, search, and work effectively with the volume of documents, emails, and messages that flow through the legal department. It’s clear from the relatively low effectiveness scores for document management revealed in the survey that traditional products are not meeting the needs of contemporary legal departments. 

Modern document management is the next step in the evolution of work product solutions for legal departments. It delivers an intuitive, consumer-like experience that empowers professionals to work more productively while enabling legal departments to be more efficient, agile, and responsive to the changing business environment. 

This approach is based on adding value in four key areas:

• Value to the user: The core objective is to empower the user by delivering a dramatically better experience. It should mirror consumer applications like Amazon and Google, with intuitive features that work the way users want to work and require minimal training. Modern document management starts with a clean, modern interface, accessible on any device including personal computers, phones, or tablets.
• Value to the information: Modern document management is more than a file repository; it adds smart features and capabilities to enhance the value of information. For example, it anticipates user actions, with smart document previews, suggested filing locations, and personalized search that delivers more accurate results by remembering what you search for most often. It integrates with the tools that legal professionals use including matter management, contract management, and workflow software.
• Value to the organization: Improving the individual user experience while enhancing the value of information delivers profound benefits at the organizational level. Modern document management helps legal organizations become more efficient and productive while delivering better outcomes. Cloud delivery models enhance organizational agility with rapid deployment, automated updates, and the flexibility to add new functionality as needed.
• Comprehensive security: Legal organizations have stringent requirements for securing documents from both internal and external threats. Modern document management delivers comprehensive security, built on established industry best practices, to protect information assets. These protections are augmented by comprehensive governance, security and risk mitigation features including need-to-know security, and ethical walls, to govern information access.

The Swiss may not take money laundering or tax evasion as seriously as some other countries, but insider-trading is another matter, as Kashya Hildebrand will tell you. Now, they don’t take it quite as seriously as the U.S. takes all the things of which John Stumpf stands accused, but someone’s gonna be operating a ski lift or making Ricola or delivering pizza or whatever else it is that Swiss people barred from involvement in banking do to keep themselves busy.

Finma said the former CEO made unlawful profits over several years from trades through his wife’s accounts at other banks, based on sensitive market information. It is confiscating 730,000 Swiss francs and said the CEO can’t be a manager for four years or work as a securities dealer for six years.

Supervisory law was “repeatedly and systematically violated” by the CEO, it said.

The trades also broke internal rules at his bank, the regulator said.

Switzerland Bans Unnamed Former Bank CEO Over Insider Trading [WSJ]