Mike Russell. Photo credit: Camilo R. Richards Jr.

In 2014, Mike Russell was offered a golden opportunity: the chance to build a legal operations function from scratch at a major global manufacturing company. A former software engineer and IT director, as well as a recognized legal tech expert, Russell was working in operations for the legal department at Liberty Mutual when he got an offer from Ingersoll-Rand plc to join the company as lean leader for legal operations.

Ingersoll-Rand, which is based in Ireland but has its U.S. headquarters in Davidson, North Carolina, already had a lean manufacturing mindset, according to Russell, but it needed help getting its law department moving in the right direction.

In a recent conversation with Corporate Counsel, the veteran ops leader and strategist described the process of building a legal ops function and spoke about artificial intelligence and his day-to-day work at Ingersoll-Rand. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Corporate Counsel: What were some of the challenges you faced when coming to Ingersoll-Rand to build the legal ops function?

Mike Russell: Well, certainly budget and resources are always one of the largest constraints. Anytime you're a part of a corporate overhead function your entire existence is about controlling and managing spend and getting all of the work done with as little external expense as possible. Particularly coming from Liberty Mutual, which had lots of resources [for the legal ops function]. Even in a large corporate environment at Ingersoll-Rand that doesn't necessarily translate across industries when you move to a role like mine.

The most challenging part was around resources and the combination of money and people to do the work. But you get to wear lots of hats and kind of plug in to different areas and be more on the front lines of the interface with the law firms; really become that voice of the client that the law firms are starting to listen to and expect. I think that's what leads to better law firm relationships and better management of the legal spend.

What does an average day look like for you?

It depends on where we are in the year with budgets and other large projects. Presently, we're right in the middle of the heavy lifting for our e-billing and matter management system. So certainly the project management side of that is probably a third to a fourth of the day on any given day. In general, I would say that the monitoring of metrics is important. We have very regular meetings to review and reflect on, both leading and trailing metrics.

Our particular corporate history has a lot of asbestos and other environmental-type litigation so we have a pretty massive portfolio of work that needs oversight in that department. I do spend quite a bit of my time working with the litigation team in general and specifically on the environmental and asbestos side of litigation to help manage and to always be looking for opportunities for process improvement.

There is always the ad hoc requests that will pop up along the way and consume more time than is expected. But other times you can really get involved in some nice cross-functional work. You meet and work with folks from other areas of the company that you normally wouldn't have had to meet through the normal course of legal business. But because the ops role has cross-functional exposure, you get to experience different things.

What kind of technology do you find helpful in running legal ops?

Certainly the most important thing is being able to get your hands around your data and your information, so having a solid foundation of the electronic billing, matter management, connections to your corporate financial systems of record, that's kind of the bare minimum to be able to really do anything.

And then having a suite of analytics, business intelligence-type tools, whether it's built into your matter management and e-billing or external, either way, both of those go a long way. Then being able to translate all of that to traditional written reports, these tend to be very “trailing metric.” What did we do last month or last quarter? That's nice. But we're really much more interested in looking around the corner and seeing what's coming up, how are we doing now? What does this year to date look like versus last year at this time? And that's where the more sophisticated tools come in.

What are, in your opinion, the most practical applications for artificial intelligence in legal ops?

The way we see the most practical applications right now tend to be big data analytics. For example, lawsuits—based on who is suing us and where and for what reason, based on past outcome, there is some capability there to predict the likelihood of the cost or complexity. Other areas would be comparing documents. We do a lot of document processing and document review. You can save a lot of money on individual contract attorneys looking at documents when you've got a piece of technology that can take a sample set and go out and find other documents that fit the characteristic of that sample set and really reduce the amount of documents that have to be individually looked at.

Is there any downside to AI in legal ops?

For the limited use that we've seen, not really. The danger that the lawyers are always concerned about is putting incomplete amounts of legal advice in the hands of somebody that doesn't exactly know what to do with it. So any use of those tools is highly vetted and controlled as to what the output can look like.

One recent industry event that drew a lot of attention was the massive deal inked between UnitedLex and DXC Technology last year. Do you see the trend of outsourcing legal operations, and legal departments, to companies such as UnitedLex continuing?

They've successfully executed two of those agreements within the past six months or so. There is no doubt the entire industry is watching very, very closely. It will be interesting to see what comes.

I think there is a general sense that the spend will continue to go in that direction as long as the cost is low. The flip side, I would say, is that as departments and companies are more complex in the way their operations run, you're only going to become an expert in so many things with so many clients.

They may find there is a point where it doesn't make sense to completely outsource the entirety of a function, but perhaps maintain a tighter-knit internal team that, just as we do now with outside counsel, selectively outsources various components of that work. It's really the idea of deconstructing the legal value chain. You still need somebody to manage it. So I think that is the biggest open question: How much of that oversight are GCs and management willing to let go of?