Christopher Sweet always makes sure he picks up the phone. As a career legal operations adviser and now director of consulting for legal group advisers Elevate, he wants to help law firms and law departments both understand and trust one another. “You can play that central role by being that trusted adviser, to be that phone-a-friend,” he said.

After a post-9/11 tour with the National Guard, Sweet began working at former employer GlaxoSmithKline Pharmaceuticals in a project management role, growing a skillset he later took into his work at both Reed Smith and JPMorgan Chase. In the current state of legal industry, where many attorneys stay in either in-house or law firm worlds exclusively, Sweet hopes he can channel both points of view to help reduce legal spend on both ends of the spectrum.

Sweet spoke with LTN about his work and how it's guiding him on the road ahead:

LTN: Why the move to Elevate?

Christopher Sweet: There are very few people who've had law firm and law department experience. What we've aligned on is that Elevate is a law company where they're bringing on-demand legal solutions, talent, services and technology to law firms and legal departments. With that I knew I'd get an opportunity for a much broader audience, an opportunity to make a greater impact.

What are some issues you see organizations come up against in starting up legal operations practices?

In starting up legal operations, what you find is that the first area is that you want to get a good grasp of is your outside counsel spend.

With that, I'll share with you what I think is the natural progression I've observed over time. The first evolution at GSK was, “Let's get all firms off of hourly rate building, and let's not sacrifice good for perfect.” The challenge was scalability, because you only have so many people who can service over 600 lawyers, like at GSK.

Scalability is always a challenge. The evolutions at J.P. Morgan one was, let's develop some business sense and run the legal department like a business. That's where I came on to manage outside counsel engagements. The next evolution was to develop some controls and make sure we're managing law firms just like the company would manage vendors. The third evolution is to get strategic and say after we've done this for several years, are we doing the right things? Do we have the right people? Do we have the right tools?

The question really begged was how many people do we really need to hire to support in-house counsel with alternative fee arrangements, pricing and competitive selection RFPs? There's over 1,600 lawyers at J.P Morgan. With a small team, the question is scalability and skills. Can we really hire, train and retain and keep up with demand, or is this something that can be outsourced?

What is your strategy for helping organizations manage outside counsel spend?

We all have data. Law firms, they have their data. Legal departments, they have their data. It doesn't matter, throw that out. What you need to do is you just need to tell the essential stories that need to be told. In a legal department or a law firm, the stories can be precise, and that could be, “I have this type of work, how much would this normally cost, or how much would some of these discrete tasks cost,” and you would have to rely on your own internal billing data.

In a legal department, you've got to align what the company's strategic objectives are and answer those. Anyone can dig in the data to tell you the number of competitors and number of law firms or the top 10 firms, but that means nothing. What I've learned over time and has been my bread and butter has been understanding the data we have, curating that data, and you can only “curate” that data if you know what stories you need to tell.

You've got data, everyone's got data, but we know what stories need to be told. And there are variety of tools, but nobody has a silver bullet. There are no magical tools.

How have you seen law firms and legal departments work together in your work? How can legal operations folks bridge the two?

There is a big disconnect. I really believe this is like Plato's “Allegory of the Cave.” I believe it's the second generation of legal operations professionals and pricing professionals who are going to run in to significant challenges if only they have that single lens of just law firm or just legal department.

I believe there's a tremendous disconnect. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum game. We do want to be able to partner with firms to let law firms be those legal experts in their given practice areas and deliver exceptional legal services, but we want those in-house lawyers to just be experts matter managers and stewards of the business. You can play that central role by being that trusted adviser, to be that phone-a-friend.

Buzzword technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), analytics and blockchain: changing the game or mostly hype?

I won't call them hype, but I think that they're distractors. You can achieve breakthrough improvement by focusing on the fundamentals—curating data to tell important stories, strategic alignment, and automating in the right places. With AI, you're going after the shiny thing first when you haven't laid a good foundation to let your lawyers focus on the substantive legal issues instead of spending way too much time on setting up matters on reviewing bills and invoices. There are opportunities there.

You'll have people that want to look at things like AI to help with certain aspects, but to me those things are just parts of an emerging or a resurging knowledge management program inside legal departments.

I don't know if people truly understand AI beyond what some people associate with machine learning. Same with blockchain, just a buzzword. I think an internal poll wouldn't reveal a high level of responsiveness. Analytics—you can analyze until you're blue in the face and come up with all these metrics, but it takes an operations professional to distill it.

What do you think is likely to be the future of legal operations work?

General counsel are going to be hired specifically for their game plan in running the legal department like a business. That's not new, but they're going to want to know what's in your playbook, and not just say, “We're gonna manage it like a business.” It's a new generation of more senior attorneys who are going to be able to do that.

I think there may be a paradigm shift in that the legal [chief operations officer] may kind of go the way of the knowledge management officer. It might be not so much of a senior role or person that's not so dialed in, not somebody who has that legal experience, but someone who truly can orchestrate an effective and lean operational function that serves the business needs of that legal department.