Simplify for Success - Conversation with Jeff Kruse
Jeff Kruse, President of Kruse Consulting and Dispute Resolution, was on Simplify for Success, a podcast series presented by Meru Data and hosted by Priya Keshav. Jeff discussed his experience developing and implementing enterprise-wide policy for managing electronic data as a CLO of a global medical device company. He shared his thoughts around simplification and how to build a business case in a corporate environment. He also talked about how to overcome challenges around user adoption and change management.
Listen to the full podcast below:
*Views and opinions expressed by guests do not necessarily reflect the view of Meru Data.*
Transcript:
Priya Keshav
Hello everyone, welcome to our podcast around simplifying for success. Simplification requires discipline and clarity of thought. This is not often easy in today's rapid-paced work environment. We have invited a few colleagues in data and information governance space to share their strategy and approaches to simplification.
Today, we will be talking to Jeff Kruse. Jeff Kruse is the President of Cruise Consulting and Dispute Resolution, where he helps law firms and legal departments find solutions so they can practise more efficiently to improve their bottom lines. He uses Lean Six Sigma principles to streamline procedures, remove bottlenecks and to increase overall practice efficiency, he also helps firms and departments conduct or respond to requests for proposals and assist in implementation of technology solutions to automate repetitive activities and to improve profit. Before forming Cruise Legal Consulting and Dispute Resolution, Jeff was a partner at two law firms in Kansas City and he was a chief litigation officer at Boston Scientific Corporation, where he first learned the value of continuous improvement projects. While at Boston Scientific, he led teams that won two Global Platinum Value Improvement Project awards for continuous improvement, and he created the chief litigation officer’s annual value improvement process programme. He has great experiences and tips to share with us today.
Hi Jeff, thank you for joining us today.
Jeff Kruse
Hi Priya, thanks for having me.
Priya Keshav
You have had many years of experience in managing litigation projects, especially in adding technology to streamline processes. How do you build a business case for these projects? Any tips that you can share?
Jeff Kruse
Yes, I think so. And I'll set aside that I think you just called me old but that's OK, yeah, you're right.
I do have a lot of years doing this and the number one tip that offer folks when they have to go, especially in-house, people who are in companies and are suggesting some sort of improvement project or technology implementation is you need to know the language of your audience, whether it's a finance group or whether it's a legal operations group or some other like information technology. You have to be able to speak their language and I suggest, if possible, attend some of their meetings, find out what people say, other groups, other individuals do and say to get their projects approved. If you don't have that opportunity, at least chat as much as you can with folks in those departments to find out what resonates with the people to whom you'll be speaking. You need to understand what they care about and then you need to focus your presentation on that.
That's number one and I have a story if you want to hear it in a little bit, but the second advice that I have is all of those groups that I just mentioned who are potential audiences for these projects, they are data focused groups, data-focused individuals. They are trained to look at the data, look at information and follow statistics and numbers. So, know your numbers, know your statistics, gather your data, gather the data of what your current state of operation is and what your project will do to improve on it in the future, what results will be delivered and then treat it a little bit like you would be putting together a resume for your project and everybody says now in 2020 if you're going to submit a resume for a job, you have to show quantifiable results on what you've done in the past, so you need to qualify and quantify, so do the same thing for what your project will do in the future, it's not what it has done, but what it will.
Priya Keshav
Great, you know, examples of how to sort of get by-in the corporate environment. And that doesn't make you old, it just makes you more experienced. So, how do you balance, I mean, you brought up also the current era that we live in where, you know, everybody expects results yesterday and we're all expected to do more with less. So how do you show immediate results but also set expectations that some of these things, like you said, you're going to talk about what you're going to do in the project, right? But as you quantify and qualify, how do you set expectations that this will take time? Because some of these projects especially data-related projects, as we sort of implement them in a corporate environment, change management and time is key, so any tips that you can share as to what has worked well, from your experience working in-house.
Jeff Kruse
Well, again, it is gathering data to lay out what current state is, what the current process is, and how much better it's going to be in the future. One of the examples that I give to a lot of folks is when I was in-house as chief litigation officer of a medical device company, we, the company, had grown both organically and by acquisition and when you acquire other companies, you acquire their policies and their procedures, and so there wasn't one uniform procedure or process for how to govern electronic data in the company, and that became a challenge in the litigation group. And so, we set about this idea of creating a global electronics communications policy that would cover the entire company and would then retire all of the inconsistent and the mishmash of other policies that had been developed over the years by the other companies that were now part of the global company and part of the departments. The departments kept their own or their divisions kept their own policies so that's not something that delivers immediate return on investment, but it is going to take a lot of time. It's going to take a lot of effort and a lot of different groups involved with it, and so it took a long time to be able to sell that, and it took selling it too.
So you know the leaders of the information technology group, the leaders of the operations group, leaders of quality and regulatory, and all the way up, including the general counsel and the Chief Executive Officer, and each step along the way, you have to speak the language of the people to whom you are discussing and frankly, it became a lot and I didn't realise it at the time, but it became a lot like sales and marketing. In sales and marketing, now everybody talks about know your customers’ pain points, and then speak to the pain points. Well, I wasn't really speaking to their pain points, I was speaking to mine. It's painful for me as chief litigation officer to have all of these various policies and it creates issues, but we went to them with speaking the language of each group, this is what matters and this is why it's important that you, you know, allow us to utilise some of the time of some of your key employees, in fact, so that we can get all of this under control and it involved process and it's one where again, you need to learn to speak the language and find out what resonates with each of the groups along the way, and you know, if you've ever been inside a company, you know that every business unit, every function within they speak English if it's an American company. But the words might mean something slightly differently, so you have to learn the connotation and how to direct the message. To do that because some of the projects like a global electronic communication policy isn't going to have an immediate return on investment, but people are going to spend time outside of their normal jobs helping put this together. So, it really is a communications and sales marketing when it comes down to it to process.
Priya Keshav
When I've attended some sales trainings and over the years and one of the things that people is about understanding your goals, especially as a customer. If somebody is talking to a customer and also on differentiating between your business goals and your personal goals and this kind of resonates very nicely with that, because at the end of the day, we're all working because we want to get promoted or we want to get recognised and so we have a personal goal in making decisions and we also have a business goal that we have to meet as you mentioned in terms of being the head of information technology or the head of quality control. Those business goals don't quite align with being part of the chief legal officers, align with what your goals were and sometimes speaking, the language to kind of show that they are aligned in various ways, so it makes a lot of sense. And you also talked about your project itself. You know, you talked about as with acquisitions you've had so many different policies and sometimes simplifying and coming to a unified policy helps a lot, so our topic or main theme for these podcasts is about simplifying for sucess, we think that essentially there are two ways to simplify, breaking down the parts to reduce complexity or identifying a completely brand new innovative way to execute on the same task.
So, would you choose one over the other, or do you think both of them applies but in different situations, what are your thoughts on simplifying for success?
Jeff Kruse
Well, so I have a bias, but I also have one of the themes, I do a lot of consulting work with small law firms and small legal departments and my philosophy is that I follow what’s the ultimate goal of the client, obviously. My tendency, though my preference would be, in as many instances as possible, is find a technology solution so it would be innovative for that client to simplify and free up time of the people involved. But it ultimately comes down to what the ultimate goals are for the clients, and I follow a process where what is the first question that I ask and that being what is your goal? And after drilling down and finding out specifically what the goal is, is the goal to save money? Is the goal to free up time so that people can invest more time in making money? I've had a project once where it was actually to change the process and the way the law firm was doing things because the person who was responsible for certain activities was retiring and they didn't want to replace this person. So is there a way to change the process in an efficient manner so that they can operate with fewer people OK, that's fine too. But I always also ask after I ask what, why, why do you want it this way? Or why do you think that you wanted this way and I had one situation where it was a small law firm and they wanted electronic billing or at least that's what they originally brought me in for was we just want to implement electronic billing solution and they brought me in to conduct the request for proposal and help them then implement the E-billing with written processes and procedures.
It turned out what they really needed as we went along and explored the not just the "what”, but the “why” was also matter management, intake, process streamlining and a number of other things, and so we ultimately wound up going with a solution that they originally rejected because it was a broader company, the solution, it was clear was the one that they ultimately went with. It offers more than electronic billing, but when I first got there, it was all we want is electronic billing, we don't need anything else. And then I dove into it a little deeper and when I got to the what and the why it's like actually you guys are looking broader than that. You're just not seeing it because you think it's going to cost more money, and that's where the sales kind of went in. And in that instance, it was touching on pain points and discussing with them. You know, you may not be recognising it as an issue in a problem, but it really is, and here's a solution for you that's right in front of your face. So, my inclination is to go with implementing innovative technologies, but I have also had plenty of other instances where it's just simply changed the process, changed the procedure, maybe remove one or two people from the process to streamline it and you've got a much more efficient system. And in the legal world anyway, where most people are billing by the hour, if you’re external or if you're internal, you just need more time because you're swamped with everything, so taking one or two people out of a process can make things tremendously more efficient, and sometimes it just takes an extra set of eyes to see how the process can be improved.
Priya Keshav
Great thoughts. Sometimes, I also find that it depends on the culture of the company, so some people are more comfortable with tweaking a few things and breaking down the parts because something new is too scary. But I can see, you know, those are great examples of where one might be a better solution over the other.
You already shared a few examples on how to simplify, but if you had any other examples on how you have simplified, especially from a process standpoint, either removing couple of people or changing the processes resulted in a much more effective solution to some of the problems?
Jeff Kruse
Right, again going back, to when I was with the medical device company, one of the things that we did to simplify and streamline things was come up with templates for documents for brand new litigation cases against the company, and these templates will then be sent out to whoever our new counsel was because we had counsel over the country, it's wherever the lawsuit wound up being filed and that streamlined the process a lot. Because then counsel didn't have to start from scratch, start from zero and now I see that there are companies like Legal Nation and Lawyeah who are out there who are doing that in an automated way of what it was that we did, ours was manual, but it still streamlined things because it cut out. We could send the template to new counsel and they wouldn't have to bring in an associate or a paralegal to draft something because it was already drafted. All they have to do is fill in a few details and instead of billing us for hours of work, it was minutes.
And another thing that I did recently for a small legal department, it is a relatively small company that's been swept up in a mass tort, all they were was a distributor of the product and had never been involved in a huge litigation before and I helped them through an RFP process, implement a legal hold system. Previously they had been using email to send out legal holds and tracking everything on Excel spreadsheets and this was incredibly time-consuming and they only had the General Counsel, two attorneys, three paralegals and a couple of administrative assistants. So not many people and because of the breadth of the new litigation, something they've never faced before, suddenly they had one of their paralegals and one of the administrative assistants who were spending more than half their time each on just legal hold issues on a regular basis. So, helping them go through the RFP process and identify a legal hold solution and then implementing the whole solution. I think last time I had checked with them that the people were now spending, you know just a little bit of time once or twice a week on the process, instead of having to spend hours a day so that was again, a good solution, but also it fit right within my general inclination of if there's a technology solution available you should do It.
I recently heard, and by recently I mean just last week I was on a webinar and I cannot remember who the speaker was because it was a panel of speakers. But I took down the notes because one of the speakers and it was a brilliant comment. I loved what she said, she said “If it's something that you have to do three times or more, automate it”. Like at first, I thought that I'm not sure that makes a lot of sense, but as I thought about it like, yeah, it really does. If you're doing the same thing over and over again, automate it so I have a strong inclination to go toward automation, if possible.
Priya Keshav
So, you're pretty much pre-empting my questions it's like.
Jeff Kruse
I didn't mean to.
Priya Keshav
Before I am ready to ask you, but I was going to ask what role does technology play in these projects and how have you leveraged technology to solve these problems?
Jeff Kruse
You know, I mean you Priya, you know, full well how beneficial technology is dating back quite a while, before the podcast before this, I went back in time and looked at a little article from 2011. That you and Kelly Brooks and Megan Thwaites did that talked about technology, and I was interested in this because I'm like, how are ways that over the years technology has improved my life and the article and you know specifically and probably guessed. It was.
Priya Keshav
We were talking about AI before AI became super popular.
Jeff Kruse
Exactly this was this was the first generation of what I guess everybody now calls technology-assisted review. I think the article referred to it as software-assisted review because it was one of the earlyish projects on that and it was a great example of using technology to free up the time. I mean, ultimately, that's what it would do is free up the time of lawyers to do higher-value work instead of having to do first-level document review, having the technology do it and that has stuck with me and that's one of the reasons why my instinct is go with technology first if possible. But one of the things that, you know, you mentioned is that not everyone is always willing to accept technology right away so you have to be willing to fall back to the other approach to simplifying and improving, which is incremental, and changing the process. But yeah, technology has been quite beneficial, and I see that, you know, there are all sorts of companies out there that are doing things that we used to have to do in such a manual fashion that are now taking over. And in fact one of the companies that is doing actually what I have been doing as an external consultant, I have run a lot of requests for proposals for small law firms and small legal departments because the attorneys just don't have time to do it themselves, so they pay me a little bit to do it and it was through that process last year that I came across a company called ClaraLegal that actually simplifies the RFP process quite a bit.
While at one hand, it will make my life easier, it's also going to change my billing structure frankly because they take what has usually taken me days or weeks and can turn it into something that takes hours instead of lengthy periods and that's the kind of technology that I look forward to. Oh, we gotta try this first because it can cut down on the amount of time, improve the efficiency and probably improve the accuracy too.
Priya Keshav
So, what are some of the biggest challenges you face when streamlining and any tips that you can share, especially this from a corporate standpoint? You know, you mentioned a few things, which is change management. So, people are not quite used to new technology, the other thing that I remember from some of your examples was that you don't know what you want, I mean most people, and this reflects very nicely with the RFP scenario too. So, most of the time, in my experience, people write out an RFP and what they're thinking about, a tool or a process is not exactly what it is, and so being able to kind of figure out what those challenges are whether it's change management, whether it's acceptance, whether it's budgets, what are some of the challenges you have encountered, and what in your experience works best in addressing some of these challenges?
Jeff Kruse
One of the core principles I believe when it comes to projects and change management is, in the string of process, people, technology, tools, that kind of thing... I always believe people come first. And in direct response to your question, I also think that people are the biggest obstacle toward the implementation of change simply because change is hard, and people don't like change and they have to invest time and effort into learning a new system, learning a new process, figuring something out, and so one of the things that you have to do and this is, assume that you have already sold the project, it's gotten acceptance by management, and they've said go forward, you still have to get the people who are going to be involved in it to buy into the project. They have to be willing to accept the change that's going to happen, and so, you have to put on your sales out again and take your sales hat to the people who are going to be involved in whatever the processes.
For instance, when we inside the company, instituted a new legal hold system, it was going to take a lot of work for the information technology people involved with the process. It was going to take more work for the paralegals who were involved in the process and for the lawyers, and this was all going to be a change and the first thing that you have to do is sit down and explain not just what you're going to do, but why you're going to do it, and if you can explain to them how it's going to make their lives better. And I think that is a very important part of the process and it gets back to make sure you gather the data and the comparison between current state and what future state will be because if you can sell that to the folks who will, you know, invest the money, like the finance folks or the legal operations folks who will sign off on going forward the project. Then you can probably also pick pieces of that data out that will apply to the individuals to whom it's going to apply. Because if you implement a new contract management system, but everybody hates it and refuses to use it because they don't know why you implemented it in the first place and don't see how it's going to benefit them, it doesn't do you any good because they're not using it or they're resisting using it, so it's helpful to again get to that point of here's where we are now, and here's where we can be and explain how it is here where we can be, your life is going to be better and frankly, since I deal, all entirely in the legal world time, time, everything is time. So, if it's an internal legal department or folks who work with them, it's how are we going to give you more of your time to do other things and take away time from activities that you don't really love doing anyway.
And that resonates really well. If it's a law firm, then you're selling time as money because most law firms you know still tie time to either the billable hour or the number of cases they can be working on. If it's a plaintiff’s law firm, so you tie it to time and demonstrate the benefit on how it's going to, I don't like using the word save time, because there are only 24 hours in a day, certain number of days in each year, so you don't actually get to save time, but you get to rearrange time in a more beneficial fashion for the people. So and I think once you can overcome that hurdle and that burden, then you can get buy-in from, you know, the people who are going to be actually using the technology or using the changed process, even if it's just changing the procedure on the way things are done, you need to explain to them why doing it differently is doing it better?
Priya Keshav
Well, some great thoughts and great ideas and thank you for taking the time to talk to us.
Jeff Kruse
Well, it's a pleasure.
Priya Keshav
Thank you, Jeff.
