Four years before the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium was founded and nine years before the Association of Corporate Counsel created a legal operations arm, Joanne Irwin was asked to help find a contract management system.

It was 2006, and Irwin was a procurement compliance manager at office supplies retailer Staples Inc. based in Framingham, Massachusetts. Working on the contract management system made the legal department at Staples realize it needed someone to manage new systems that were being put in place, and this broadened her role.

"Legal operations was not as widespread and not as common as it is today," Irwin, now a product manager at LexisNexis, said in an interview with Corporate Counsel. She joined LexisNexis in 2013.

"I was effectively the [chief operating officer] of the legal department," Irwin said.

It was largely a one-woman legal operations function at Staples in the time that Irwin served as the company's director of legal operations. Toward the end of her time at Staples, she explained, legal administrators in the company who had more than just administrative responsibilities ended up working under Irwin.

This was during a time when there was still doubt cast on the idea of having one person dedicated to legal operations. However, Irwin said she received support from the top during her 10 years in the legal department from general counsels Jack VanWoerkom, Kristin Campbell and Michael Williams.

"I was lucky to work for three GCs at Staples who valued legal operations and helped to build the role," she said.

Irwin explained that when she joined the legal department at Staples, LexisNexis' CounselLink had been implemented as the legal department's e-billing system. Eventually, the department went out to bid to explore other products in the legal space which included e-billing and matter management and in 2010 LexisNexis came back to demo an updated CounselLink. She said she had previously become a power user of CounselLink and helped in the demonstrations.

"It was clearly the better product," Irwin recalled. "I was doing demos with [the consultant] in the room to our colleagues in Australia."

The consultant was impressed with Irwin's ability to use CounselLink and said that LexisNexis was hiring consultants. Initially, Irwin thought she didn't want to become a consultant. However, after speaking to colleagues she decided she wanted the next challenge and initially interviewed with a LexisNexis competitor to become a consultant.

"I decided that I was more comfortable with CounselLink," she explained on her decision to work with LexisNexis.

For five years she served as a senior business consultant for LexisNexis' CounselLink and in 2018 was made product manager and in 2019 was made senior product manager.

Irwin said she has seen a number of changes in legal operations over the years. When she started, matter management was just a buzz phrase and few legal departments have implemented those systems.

Going into 2020, Irwin said she expects more legal operations functions will take advantage of enterprise legal management systems.

"You're able to see beyond what you are farming out to law firms," Irwin said. "You're able to track efficiencies so that GCs have data to back up their saving opportunities."

Correction: The original story published had a few inaccuracies. Framingham was misspelled. It was written Irwin had joined LexisNexis in 2010. She started in 2013. Irwin was the director of legal operations at Staples, not the director of legal processes and systems. LexisNexis' CounselLink is clarified as an e-billing system. Irwin worked on contract management systems, not project management systems.