CCBJ: Please discuss your in-house career journey. How do you find yourself as the GC of Agiloft?
Laura Richardson: I love answering this question because I think my story illustrates how you can have all the expectations in the world, but the best thing you can do for yourself is to follow your own path and lean into the unexpected opportunities. I’ve had an organic career path because I was open to radical change at every step.
I went to law school to become a public defender for juveniles. However, like many law school students who rack up debt, when I was offered a summer associate position with a corporate law firm. I ended up taking the biglaw track, doing all the little “gold-star” things you should do if you want to have a successful legal career. After clerking, I started my practice as a biglaw litigator but quickly realized it was not for me. After a few years
I had an unexpected opportunity to go in-house at Intel through Axiom, an early managed services provider for lawyer support and later transitioned to working directly for Intel.
It was at Intel that I discovered how much I had not learned in law school and law firms about being an effective in- house lawyer, about technology and other more business- related things that were starting to be more widely adopted in legal departments. And it should come as no surprise that the Intel legal department was wildly ahead of its time. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to work with a world-class legal operations team at Intel, which has made such a difference in my career. Gerald Wright, a Senior Legal Operations Manager at Intel, was my office neighbor and we worked together on a number of projects to improve contract processes. I often volunteered to serve as a guinea pig for legal operations because I loved seeing how even small changes can dramatically improve outcomes and velocity.
When I ended up leaving Intel to take on my first GC role, my first hire was not another lawyer, it was a legal operations manager, because I knew how critical legal operations is to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of a legal department and to aligning that department with the business it supports.
Even before hiring a legal operations manager, I knew that we needed to invest in the right tools, which included CLM. Contracts are the foundation of the business relationship; they’re critical, not just in terms of how they start a relationship or what they capture, but the contract has so much of the information that helps make sure the relationship is successful. I’ve always been focused on how you can increase your impact through technology.
After that first GC role, Mike Haven, Head of Global Legal Operations at Intel, then president of CLOC and someone I’d gotten to know through Intel, introduced me to Eric Laughlin (Agiloft’s CEO). Eric and I hit it off from the start. I think he appreciated my passion for technology, and my belief that there is no reason to continue to do the same things in the same way, which is fundamental to how I approach my life and my job. As a GC, I look all over for inspiration because the more you look outside of legal, the more you can stop being tied to the inefficiencies that have held us back from truly integrating with the wider business and the more you set free the information that we’ve tended to keep to ourselves.
Nobody is closer to the company’s contracts than legal departments. They do the negotiations, write the
agreements and, more often than not, own the actual
document once it’s fully executed. Letting go of the need
to control everything is also a great opportunity for legal
departments to demonstrate their value, share knowledge,
and improve their organization. I think legal gets a bad
rap but with help from legal operations it can become one
of the most critical providers of key business information
within any business.
As GC, how have you seen CLM impact corporate legal departments?
Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) has evolved
significantly. At first, it was understood that it was hard
to find documents, so CLM’s impact was, "How can we
figure out where our documents are and easily find the
documents that we’re looking for?” While a small company
may not have that many contracts, a big one has hundreds
of thousands, if not millions, and that is a large data pool to
search. So, the task was finding the contracts we want and
then figuring out how to expand that contract’s purview;
in other words, how do we store templates and give people
access to them?
For many legal departments, the core need grew into an idea of what CLM could be. CLM companies may have started in one area, but the best ones recognized that a contract lifecycle isn’t just signature to search. On the back end, it’s about managing renewals, accessing information and getting the data out of the contracts and into other systems of record. It’s tracking obligations. It’s understanding and being able to explain the key terms of those agreements to people outside of the legal department, who might be looking at those agreements and asking, “Well, what does this actually mean for this relationship?” You need to see and understand all the terms, standard and nonstandard.
On the front end, it’s about creating agreements, updating clauses in agreements, negotiating agreements and documenting those processes. It’s about capturing information at all phases of the life of a contract. And a cool thing now, with generative AI, is building on top of these systems so that you can do that more efficiently, automatically and with better results. It’s an exciting development to watch. While CLM isn’t new, it’s an excellent framework for super-productively using generative AI.
Can you expand on generative AI in contract management systems, and what else do you see being used today and looking ahead over the next 5 years?
While Agiloft doesn’t just sell into legal departments, the vast majority of our customer base involves 2 or more departments, like procurement and sales, I like to use legal teams as an example because they’re constantly balancing risk. Most legal teams recognize that we need generative AI, but they are also aware that there are a lot of risks associated with that nascent and evolving technology. Not just from a regulatory or data privacy perspective. It’s really about accuracy. Agiloft talks a lot about the role of the human element. Human-centric AI, or HCAI, used in a practical, pragmatic, use case-specific way appeals to a lot of legal departments who are using generative AI and struggling with how to make sure that what they’re getting is accurate and usable.
Right now, lots of AI implementations are still in pilot. People are not just buying into the hype—and there’s a ton of hype—but they are trying to understand what use cases are actually going to be useful to them. What people want are pragmatic AI solutions; something they can start using on day 1 and that leverages the information and technology they have and takes it to the next level. People worry about whether their data will be used to train a model and if there is a risk that their data will be leaked. Companies who take those concerns seriously, who build a trusted product and brand, are the ones who are able to deliver usable AI.
It would be hubris for me to predict 5 years from now because 2 or 3 years ago, I wouldn’t have predicted where we are now. The way technology is evolving and the speed at which it is changing is so incredible that I don’t know what it’s going to be. But I’m excited. I know some people are afraid about displacement of jobs, but the truth is, there’s always going to be a need for a collaborative intertwining of humanity and technology. It is both a tool and a partner, and it will be most useful and efficient if we lean into that partnership and see it as a way to extend our individual and collective impact.
Can you speak a bit more about the sensitive data aspect of using generative AI and what corporate legal and IT teams should be thinking about in terms of that data? Do you foresee any new laws governing AI?
AI regulations are coming in all the time and it’s important to be aware of them. But I wouldn’t get too attached to any because the area is evolving so rapidly. Separate yourself from the pace of regulatory change and focus on common sense principles. If you are the kind of company where you have extremely sensitive information, you’re probably going to want to work with trusted providers and avoid fringe companies that are pushing the boundaries of this nascent technology. And you’re going to want to ask hard questions of your providers and expect honest answers.
Agiloft is focused on pragmatic and trustworthy AI because we want our customers to be successful on their AI journey. That is part of our reputation: that we care deeply about the success of our customers. Part of that is making sure our customers understand how we’re using their data. As legal departments get more invested in the use of AI functionality, they should ensure they’re working with a trusted partner.
What impact will KKR’s recent majority investment in Agiloft have on the company’s future in a crowded CLM market?
We are incredibly excited about the KKR, FTV and JMI’s
investments in Agiloft-it’s a huge vote of confidence
in CLM and in Agiloft’s future. It shows we are a leader
and that some of the World’s most respected growth
investors see that and understand that we are doing
something different and it’s working. What is going to be on the horizon for us? Honestly, a lot of the same. KKR invested in us because they believe in what
we’re doing, and we don’t expect a radical shift in our
approach. That said, I’m a firm believer in constant
improvement and their investment will help us to get better. One of the best parts of being at Intel was
working with engineers and being inspired by the cycle
of continuous improvement. We look for that at Agiloft
as well, holding ourselves accountable to being better at
everything that we do. Always.
This might sound cheesy, but we talk a lot, about “EX equals CX,” employee experience equals customer experience. And we think we prove that over and over again. We are laser-focused on our employees and the employee experience and the culture that we have. We regularly hear from our customers, and even prospects that don’t end up going with us, “You have a great attitude. You are transparent. You took care of us.” That’s something we take a lot of pride in. Technology (and technology companies) can be very impersonal, and AI is inherently impersonal, so what we strive to do is keep that human element at the center of everything Agiloft does, whether it’s how we treat our employees and our customers, how we think about AI, or how we think about ourselves as a technology company. We’re not all code and algorithms. I’m excited about KKR being here because it shows that our human-centric approach is paying off.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I care a lot about building the legal department of the future. What that means to me is the right tools, the right people, and the right environment. Providing the right tools for your team is the only way that we can continue to improve the impact of a legal department and scale humanely. So I continue to invest in using our CLM internally, in education, in process improvements, in all of those little, sinewy, legal operations things that hold a legal department together, because I know it strengthens what we’re able to do, strengthens our morale and strengthens our ability to take the time that we need to recharge. We take vacations, and I’m proud of that. We make our health a priority, and our ability to recharge and live full lives is something of a KPI for my team. Also important is creating safe spaces. I am very pro high-EQ leadership that’s focused on the individuals you work with and recognizing that we all thrive in different environments and one’s job as a leader is to figure out the best way to help everyone thrive.
Published July 17, 2024.
