The first thing the legal team at Tealium plans to measure once its contract lifecycle management software is up and running is risk, a legal operations specialist said in a webcast hosted by legaltech software company LinkSquares.
Tealium is a data analytics software-as-a-service company whose business is built around the contracts it has with its users. Most of the contracts are on the company’s paper and don’t create a lot of risk, said Celina Grippo, senior manager of contracts and legal operations at Tealium. It’s the contracts on other companies’ paper that leave the company exposed if the legal team doesn’t have good visibility into them, Grippo told LinkSquares Chief Legal Officer Tim Parilla.
“You know what’s on your paper, even if it was paper from three or four years ago,” said Grippo, who joined Tealium as a contracting specialist before being given an expanded role overseeing the legal team’s operations. “On your paper, you have a standard on how you do business. Now, we want to start tracking customer paper and the risks we’ve agreed to.”
Data processing agreements are a case in point, she said. These are agreements between a company that wants to leverage the data it generates and the company it hires to collect and process that data on its behalf, which is something Tealium does.
“For DPAs that are not yours, you want to look at what is not standard,” she said. “That’s where you need to go back and look, because the nuances of specific contracts, even with your vendors, are not present in everybody’s mind.”
Even a simple notice provision, if it’s not tracked, can create big headaches, she said.
“If you decide to change the address of one of your subsidiaries, you have to pause and think and ask, is there one or two or three or 100 contracts out there where I have to send formal notice of that change?” she said. “It’s just little things like that that make you think, I need to be able to access quickly everything that is not my standard and identify where I need to reach out, send an email and take additional actions.”
Getting buy-in
The challenge for any technology is buy-in. That’s because implementation tends to be accompanied by a change in process, which lawyers are reluctant to focus on. “People are, like, ‘How much time is this going to take away from what I need to accomplish in the day?’” she said. “I get it.”
To get buy-in, she said, she tries to reinforce to lawyers the benefit to them every chance she gets and offers them one-on-one training.
“When you do group training, there’s always someone that will ask questions and someone that will not ask any questions,” she said. “If I offer them one-on-one training, the majority of time I get a yes. I don’t mind explaining things as many times as needed. Or when someone says they have a dumb question, it will be in my long-term benefit if I really make sure they know the answer.”
The alternative is to get incomplete buy-in, which works against the rationale for adopting the technology in the first place, she said. If the technology is not used in the way it was designed, the team won’t get the workflow efficiencies or the visibility into its performance it was hoping to get, or, in the case of Tealium, insight into the risks it faces from contracts on other companies’ paper.
“Laws change constantly,” she said. “We want to know all the DPAs that are out there quickly.”
