The Pure Storage operations team raised the company's

(L to R) Michele Ardizzone, Director Legal Marketing and Operations; Joe FitzGerald, Vice President and General Counsel; Judy Shie, Product Legal Counsel and Michael Moore, Vice President, Products and IP. Photo: Jason Doiy/ALM

patent filings by almost 25%, while staying within 0.27% of target on a several million-dollar budget. The team adopted a cooperative approach with engineers and outside counsel to optimize the disclosure-drafting process and used predictive budget modeling to support needs generated by the acquisition of a 2,000 patent and application portfolio, all while keeping the company's internal head count steady. The team's efforts earned Pure Storage the title of Most Innovative In-House Operations Team of the Year as part of The Recorder's California Leaders in Tech Law and Innovation Awards. The Recorder caught up with Pure Storage's Michael Moore and Niki Armstrong to discuss the operations team's ongoing efficiency efforts.

The Recorder: How would you characterize the mission of the legal operations team within Pure Storage?

Moore and Armstrong: Pure Storage Legal Ops partners with all practice areas of the legal team and cross-functional business units such as finance to drive strategic and operational initiatives. The team is laser focused on providing tools and services to allow us to scale efficiently but within natural cost constraints. Where possible, we automate processes to allow us to do more with less. In addition the Legal Ops team reports on key financial and operational metrics driving better department spend and faster decision-making. On top of this, Legal Ops identifies and implements improved legal department tools to streamline both new and existing practices, as well as manage the design, rollout and training for these new systems. Finally, Legal Ops develops and enforces processes and policies to manage outside counsel usage and spend. However, it's not all about spreadsheets and data! The Legal Ops team is also a key contributor to the overall Pure Legal culture, helping to plan and run critical team off-sites and events.

How do you measure the impact that your legal operations team is having on your business as a whole?

Pure Legal started focusing on a true legal operations role over the last two years. As we have scaled the legal function, we have employed more tools, outside counsel, training services, etc., and it became clear that we needed to coordinate our efforts. Internally, Pure Legal constantly strives to be the Best Legal Team on the Planet (BLTOTP), and we focus on being a true business partner and not a bottleneck. We carefully invest our budget in strategic tools, services and automation that have been absolutely critical in allowing us to scale our support in an incredibly fast-growing business without resorting to simply adding additional head count. We benchmark ourselves against industry peers and know that we are leaner than most, and yet we have the infrastructure in place to scale for the future.

What was the biggest business problem that your legal operation team faced this past year and how did you go about tackling it?

One of the key challenges (and opportunities) we have faced is how to provide efficient service to our internal clients while staying lean. This has been achieved largely through a combination of automation and making self-service resources widely available to our client base.

Historically, the Pure Legal Team focused on training—both online and live, mandatory and discretionary—to stay compliant with laws and regulations, ensure employees have a clear understanding of our Code of Conduct and other relevant policies, and minimize or avoid lawsuits. Training, however, is only the first step in a robust and healthy ethics and compliance (E&C) program. As our head count grew, we recognized the need to give our E&C program a much-needed boost.

This year, the Pure Legal Team deployed Convercent, an all-in-one ethics and compliance platform, which replaced our first ethics hotline. What's exciting is that Convercent is more than a hotline. This tool actually helps Pure identify and mitigate risk by providing insights and predictive data analytics around workplace conduct, including complaints of discrimination, harassment, retaliation and bullying; internal audit concerns; unprofessional conduct; code of conduct violations; conflicts of interest; use and disclosure of confidential information; etc. This means that we can now drill down into our companywide compliance data for root cause analysis, giving us the opportunity to discover where we can improve business performance and explore other initiatives to keep our organization as healthy, safe and compliant as possible.

In terms of budget management, Pure has also deployed the SimpleLegal billing management tool in combination with IPFolio patent database for efficient predictive management of our patent portfolio and associated spend. While these tools incur a certain level of subscription spend, the legal (and engineering, accounting, etc.) time efficiencies gained far more than make up for the tool cost, as well as providing increased client and team satisfaction. Pure Legal constantly reevaluates spend and subscriptions to identify opportunities for further savings and redeployment of resources to more effective tools. This has been recognized by our Finance team.

Pure Legal has also set up self-service portals in Salesforce, on our intranet and elsewhere to make it easier for clients to find the information they need without having to contact legal, leading to faster resolutions and leaner operation.