Welcome to our next episode of Legal.io Community Spotlight, a series in which we highlight the careers and experiences of some of the most impressive legal and legal operations professionals working in-house.

In this episode, we explore the career journey of Kim Perry, Legal Operations Principal at Blackbaud. Kim highlights she started her career as a legal secretary and paralegal in BigLaw before moving in-house at Blackbaud in 2016. She's gone on to head efforts like legal spend management, entity management, and even atypical legal ops tasks such as board management. Pieter and Kim cover:

• Kim's career journey to date
• Key responsibilities in her role as Legal Operations Principal
• Key challenges and lessons learned in all her responsibilities
• The value of data-driven proof of ROI within a legal department

Pieter Gunst

Hi, everyone. My name is Pieter Gunst. I'm the CEO of Legal.io and I'm delighted to be here today with Kim Perry, Legal Operations Principal at Blackbaud. She's been there for 15+ years, and I'm very excited to talk with her about her journey in legal operations. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kim.

Kim Perry

Oh, thanks. Thanks for having me. Very excited to be here.

Pieter Gunst

So let's dive right in. We're highlighting the amazing journeys of legal operations professionals. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey becoming the Legal Operations Principal at Blackbaud and what led you there?

Kim Perry

Sure. Absolutely. My journey is probably not unlike some other folks in the legal ops profession. So, not unique. My background comes from working in law firms; big and small, as a legal secretary / paralegal. 

When I moved back to my hometown, Charleston, [South Carolina] 15 years ago, I came in-house at Blackbaud. Actually not on the legal side at that time, just sort of getting my foot in the door, but that's a whole different story. Around 2016, I stumbled across an article in the ACC Docket, I think it was by Reece Arrowsmith, the Head of Legal Ops at Campbell Soup, that talked about legal operations. And this was a whole new thing for me. It opened up a whole new horizon for me to aim towards with my career. I thought I was at the top, and I pretty much had done all I could do as far as being a legal secretary or paralegal. And then there's all this new stuff to learn and grow in a new direction for me to go in. So that's sort of my path. Since 2016, really working under the title Legal Operations and developing my career in that path.

Pieter Gunst

Yeah, that's amazing. And can you tell me a bit more about the key responsibilities that inform your day to day work in this current role then?

Kim Perry

Yeah, so it's kind of a big job and I'm a one-person shop. It's anything from management of the law department budget which includes legal invoicing; paying invoices to outside counsel - so spend management, things like that. Managing our IP portfolio. We're a large tech company, so we have a nice portfolio of trademarks and a few patents. Entity management - we're a global company, we have international subsidiaries and I manage their regulatory filings and things like that. Knowledge management, of course, is [a] typical thing that falls under the bandwidth of legal operations depending on the time of the year. So for instance, it's the beginning of the year, so I'm working on our professional insurance renewals, which is directors and officers, insurance errors and omissions, cybersecurity, all those kinds of things.

And so I project manage the renewals process, renewing our professional memberships in things like the ACC, our corporate membership for all of our team members, or PLI so that the attorneys can get their CLEs in things like that. We have this great partnership with one of our outside law firms for a DEI internship with a first year law student [and] I oversee that partnership and that internship. We have another extern program that we work with - The Charleston School of Law - on a semester basis. We bring only second or third year law students in for that one. So that's kind of day to day typical legal ops things.

Pieter Gunst

It's very exciting to hear about these internship programs in particular. I think you're seeing different paths open up into the profession. Right. And you’re talking about you're starting more as a legal secretary and then getting involved on the operational side. And then at the same time, you're a one-person organization within the organization. I figure you also have some responsibilities that are maybe not within the typical key areas of legal ops as a result of that.

Kim Perry

Right. Yes. So my position does include some responsibilities that I consider atypical to legal ops in that I don't see them in a lot of job descriptions. If I'm looking at other opportunities. A couple of those include; board management. I am the main contact for our board of directors. I manage all the materials for our board meetings, I manage the directors and officers questionnaires, I draft consents, I draft minutes, the peer surveys, all [those] kinds of things. And then I also work in corporate governance, sort of a quasi-assistant secretary to our GC who is the corporate secretary. So assisting with the proxy filing, I draft all of the annual meeting materials. 

Going back to board management; I'm responsible for onboarding any new directors that roll on to our board, pay their fees and expenses and things like that. All of [those] sort of things, which I consider to be a little bit atypical for a legal ops professional.

Pieter Gunst

Yeah, you clearly touched so many aspects of the organization and also when you've been with an organization for over a decade and know the ins and outs, it's such a crucial function from what you describe. Now, it seems like managing all of these workstreams would be one of the key challenges in a role like that. But I want to ask, what's the key challenge that you encountered along the way and what did you learn from it?

Kim Perry

Yeah, there are a lot of challenges. But as I was thinking about this question, I think what comes to mind, first and foremost, is a challenge that I'm sure most Legal Ops or Heads of Legal Ops face. And that is the challenge that most in-house ops leaders deal with the fact that the law department is a cost center and not a revenue generator. This creates some challenges in figuring out how to show the law department’s ROI. It's really thinking about running the law department as if it's a business in and of itself. I learned that you need data and you need to know how to use the data properly. The right data.

For instance, the data point of how many outside law firms we worked with in the past year probably isn't a valuable bit of information for upper management. They couldn’t care less about that. But showing that we decided to engage with this specific law firm on this bit of work helped us save thousands of dollars based solely on the billable hourly rate that's charged by this specific law firm - that might be a bit of useful information for management and could could go to show that the law department is a steward of the resources and is is interested in controlling spend and showing our ally and our importance and our contributions to the organization as a whole.

Pieter Gunst

Yeah. I think it's a very interesting discussion, especially at a time where many teams are drafting their OKRs or analyzing them and, ‘How do we convert our work into a provable value?’ Cost savings, things like turnaround time on commercial teams. It's quite a challenge to turn that into something measurable and also to measure the right things, because there's a million data points in this noise. 

That's super fascinating, and one thing that also stood out, in your particular experience, that would be interesting to touch on here, is that it's no secret that the company was the victim of a cybersecurity incident. Right. I think that happens more and more frequently. And I think it's really affecting legal departments and organizations of all sizes.

You played a key role in crisis management at a time like that. Can you tell us a bit about that experience and what that meant for, I’m sure, your day to day being completely thrown out?

Kim Perry

Yes. Yeah. It absolutely did. It sort of took over our lives for a period of time. You find that you are managing this big monster and trying to do your day job off the side of your desk. So it takes a little bit of figuring out. My role was assisting in the project management of this and specifically focused on the financial side of this security incident. Managing budgets, the insurance claim, (because this was an insurance and a claim), managing the claims process, being the point of contact for all of our underwriters as well as the main contact with our brokers, things like that. Making sure that invoices were either reimbursed to us or paid directly to a firm. Making sure that we have budgets and forecasts, and that all of these expenses are accounted for properly in our corporate finance team. Working very closely with a bunch of different people in a different way, I think.

Pieter Gunst

Yeah. What, what an amazing and critical project to have worked through. I think it’s really impressive and it speaks to the trust the organization puts in your work, of course. And your knowledge of this overall context, they were able to shepherd that to something more successful.

Kim Perry

Yes.

Pieter Gunst

Thank you so much for giving us an overview of your journey. Really enjoyed it; learning it from a high level and also seeing some of these concrete examples. And I'm just so grateful for you sharing some of your experiences and lessons along the way with others who are trying to look at role models and find their way into legal operations themselves. Thank you so much for connecting and sharing this with the community.

Kim Perry

Oh, it's been my pleasure. Thank you so much.

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