Gary Tully.

Welcome to Operationally Speaking, where we get to know the legal operations professionals behind some of the most prominent corporate law departments in the world. These are the individuals changing in-house practice as we know it through innovations in process and technology.

Gary Tully is looking for ways to keep growing and improving the legal function as head of legal operations at Gilead Sciences Inc., whether that's through new technology or streamlining workflow. But he's also trying to make it easier for others to handle technology-related challenges, as evidenced by a cybersecurity project he is undertaking with the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium.

Tully is a veteran of Qualcomm Inc., where he built the legal ops function. He moved to Foster City, California-based Gilead three years ago to start up this function there.

Tully recently spoke with Corporate Counsel about the growth of legal operations, his day-to-day challenges, his project to help with law firm data security and more. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Corporate Counsel: How did you become involved in legal operations?

Gary Tully: After meeting the new general counsel at Qualcomm, he invited me to start the legal operations role. We did some pretty cool things at Qualcomm over the eight years that I was there. I had an opportunity to do a deep dive into e-discovery. But also I had an opportunity to do a lot of broad legal operations functions; installing IP systems, e-billing systems, contract management systems. I also introduced electronic signatures to the company.

I was very happy at Qualcomm, but thought it would be the next step to move over to Gilead. I had the opportunity to start a legal operations department. I had already done it once, but I thought it was a nice fit. Because of the support of the leadership team, we have been very successful in developing a legal operations role in a very short period of time. It's been less than three years, and we've rolled out worldwide, a new e-billing system, a new contract management system. I've hired five direct reports and built out the legal operations team.

What are some of the challenges in starting a legal operations function?

The change management aspects of starting a legal operations department are tremendously challenging. Primarily because the skill sets that are taught in law schools are not operational. I know that's changing, but I'd say that currently concepts of legal operations are not things that are taught and lawyers are not necessarily picking it up at their law firms.

What I've found in starting a legal operations department is that there is a lot of education that needs to be done about what legal operations is and what services it provides.

You said that it took roughly three years to get the legal ops function at Gilead up and running. Would you say you got it going more quickly than other companies do?

We started e-billing first. Within the first year we had it rolled out and replacing our old system. Then we expanded it to other geographies and an affiliate. So it's a never-ending story in that space. I took a strategy of hiring people as it went along and I think that prolonged the process even further. I think if I had hired a team—and then executed—we would have been able to execute faster.

The pool of qualified legal operations people is very shallow. So it took me a while to find the right people to build my team. But the fact that we rolled out two enterprise-wide legal systems in such a short period of time is incredible. We established legal operations very quickly. We got it to a point of maturity fairly quickly.

What technology are you utilizing at Gilead from an operations standpoint?

One of the cool technologies that I think doesn't get a lot of press is workflow technology. We see this in titles like ThinkSmart and Onit. When I think about the purpose of legal operations, it's to deliver legal services efficiently and effectively. … And legal operations professionals are aligned with identifying redundant processes and recommending improvements. Workflow technology is a way to automate those processes, reduce redundancy and execute quickly.

Artificial intelligence is a tool that I think can help analyze data faster. We use it to analyze contracts and extract metadata.

Invoice hygiene, doing a first pass review to look at the narratives versus the UTBMS code—I'm very interested to see how that would work.

Can you discuss your initiative with the CLOC to help companies evaluate data breach readiness at their law firms?

Law firms are the recipients of some very sensitive corporate information. And because they tend to have multiple clients, they become a very attractive cache of information for an ill-intended individual or state. We see these big corporate breaches that are pretty important to individuals but I think what is important to companies is where they put their data. We put our most sensitive data in law firms, then they become the honey to the bees.

There are some really good folks at law firms working to address this problem. We've got many of them incorporated in the CLOC initiative and I certainly have an appreciation for what those folks are doing to protect their clients' data. Through this initiative, I've also found that they're very appreciative of our efforts to make this work for both sides.

What are your opinions of UnitedLex and providers like it, and the idea of companies outsourcing legal operations functions and large chunks of legal departments?

The commoditization of a legal department—I don't find too many attorneys who think that's a great idea, but I can see where there are some commodity transactional type activities that I see UnitedLex and others talking about.

The managed services that I've used and the ones we use here at Gilead, I find that the companies that we hire don't have a great appreciation of our business. Not for any lack of intelligence, it's just that they are not a part of the company, therefore they cannot understand the culture and the nuance. That takes a little bit of time to learn. That experience matters when delivering that service. So I structure all of my managed services with a managed service lead. I ask the lead in my department who manages that team to make sure that those processes are done in ways that support Gilead's business.

I think that's the best of both worlds. I can see the attractiveness in outsourcing a legal department or sections of the legal department to a managed service. It certainly makes sense in some functions. I think that service providers, specifically UnitedLex, have taken advantage of the opportunities that exist with their current clients. Those clients have been in transition and/or been challenged in their business model where UnitedLex's value proposition makes a lot of sense. It doesn't make sense for every company, it just has to be the right match.

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