David Cambria. Courtesy photo.

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.

On a daily basis, David Cambria considers the past, present and future of his legal operations function. Cambria has a big job—he's director of global compliance at Chicago-based Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's largest agricultural processors and food ingredient providers (and a Best Legal Department honoree for 2018).

Cambria spoke with Corporate Counsel about a number of topics, such as starting a legal operations function and why running ops reminds him of the classic book “A Christmas Carol.”

Corporate Counsel: How did you get started in legal operations?

David Cambria: My first foray into operations was as a consultant in the early 2000s with a company called Huron Consulting Group and they had a legal business consulting arm that really dealt with managing operational aspects of the law department for the general counsel.

From there, I was hired by one of our clients at the time, Aon, and there was a new general counsel, Cam Findlay, who saw value in bringing in legal operations. Cam went on to another general counsel role in Minnesota and I stayed back in Illinois working for Aon for another few years. And then back in 2013, Cam said he was moving back to Illinois to become the general counsel of ADM and asked me to join him again there. At ADM, there were people doing operational things, but there was not a dedicated role.

What are some of the challenges of building a legal operations function from the ground up?

The first thing is when it's not in a law department's DNA, it's oftentimes trying to articulate and explain what the actual role and function is. Oftentimes not only are the lawyers sitting there scratching their heads wondering what the ops function can and will do, but even the businesses that interact with legal don't fully appreciate or understand the role. One of your bigger challenges is explaining what the mission is: What's the value you can bring and how are we going to think about this thing called “legal” in a different way than we had in the past?

At ADM, I'd say that within the first six months we were able to bring the legal department on board. A lot of that is driven by the fact that there was a new general counsel with a new set of ideas of what he wanted to get done.

What does an average day look like for you?

A typical day I think is really almost like looking at Charles Dickens' “Christmas Carol,” where you're trying to look at Christmas past, Christmas present and Christmas future.

When I look at the past and past behaviors, I think about how I report on that and how I tell a story about what we've done. How do I take and measure the progress we're making as a department?

When I think about Christmas present, it's all about what is the issue of the day, tactically, that I really have to address and whether it's an issue within the law department or an interaction with a corporate department that I need to deal with. Maybe there is a very pressing matter and I need to get something out today from an e-discovery perspective or from a crisis perspective.

It's also about Christmas future, which is to say, where do I think this department is going to be a year from now, three years from now and five years from now? Not only as a department, but as it fits into the larger legal ecosystem and the larger legal space.

In your opinion, what are some of the top responsibilities of an ops function?

One is how do you distill this thing called the practice of law into consistent and efficient delivery of legal services to your business that align with how the business thinks about the world. It's not enough just to say, “well, here's what legally we can do,” it's more about what the company is trying to accomplish as an overall goal and how can we help enable that for you.

I think the other piece is from an organizational perspective, there is a compression of legal budgets, or at least the stagnation of legal budgets as companies continue to grow in complexity and size. While the complexity and size is growing, the budgets aren't. So we have to get smarter about how to utilize all of the resources, both financial and personal, in a way that protects from risk and, at the same time, we have to do the work that a law department has to do.

The operations function is also about: How do we operate as an organization? How do we interact with HR and finance and insurance and all of those other functions in a consistent and persistent way that really delivers upon the needs that they have?

How has the function changed industrywide since you started?

I would say that more and more companies of varying sizes are putting in place dedicated ops professionals. You are also seeing a widening of the gap of the levels of sophistication between the professionals who are doing that job. Or a widening of the gap in terms of the maturity.

So while, some legal ops professionals have very robust and mature operations, because they've been doing this a while, other organizations have an operations function because they think it's smart to do it, but are very nascent in their stages of developing and understanding what their true capabilities and true impact can be.

We've gotten wider and not yet deeper. I think maturity is still fairly lumpy from organization to organization.

Have you explored the use of artificial intelligence?

Today we do some level of artificial intelligence. We do it in the e-discovery realm, we do it in our use of information and data in our matter management systems, and we provide our lawyers with what I call “contextual analytics.” These are analytics that are given to them in the context of a decision they're making.

So all of that, in my mind, where you marry the use of a machine and the intelligence, is really what artificial intelligence is really driving toward. To that extent, yes, ADM uses artificial intelligence, other law departments are using artificial intelligence. My answer is a long way of saying “yes,” but maybe not in the way you're seeing it in the press today.