Welcome to our latest 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 Stacy Lettie, Director of Legal Operations at Adtalem Global Education. Stacy talks about how the combination of being a self-described data and technology geek as well as an established legal career helped her towards her position at Adtalem. Pieter and Stacy go over:

• Stacy's career journey to date
• Key responsibilities in her role as Director of Legal Operations
• Key challenges and lessons learned in all her different roles
• The two best places to look to save millions of dollars for your legal department

Pieter Gunst

Good day, everyone. My name is Pieter Gunst. I'm delighted to be here today to shine the spotlight on Stacy Lettie, the Director of Legal Operations at Adtalem Global Education. I'm very excited to be here. Stacy is a no nonsense legal ops professional with a really extensive background, so thank you so much, Stacy, for joining us here today.

Stacy Lettie

Is my pleasure. Excited to be here.

Pieter Gunst

So we're going to talk about a variety of topics, but I really want to learn first about your journey towards becoming the Director of Legal Ops at Adtalem. I know it's been very varied and I would love to hear from you what that story has been.

Stacy Lettie

So like a lot of legal ops people, I did not start here. I was a practicing attorney, an in-house attorney for about 23 years, but always really had a passion for things like efficiencies and process and technology. I'm a self-described data and technology geek, and about 15 years ago I heard about this thing called legal operations and started to look into it and just decided to take a leap and stop practicing law. Spent a few years consulting and doing various contract jobs within different parts of the industry so I could learn more about legal operations before finally settling into this role of Director of Legal Operations. So, I sort of came up as legal operations was starting to grow and was in the right place at the right time. [I’m] super happy and lucky to be where I am at.

Pieter Gunst

Do you recall when you first started to hear this come up? It was still pretty early, you know, on the trajectory of legal operations, so I'm curious if you recall where that signal started? 

Stacy Lettie

Yeah, I went to a networking thing in New York City, and there was going to be a speaker on something about processes and contracts. I can't remember what it was, but gosh, this is probably back in like 2007 / 2008 - it was a long time ago and there were all of these people there (all being, maybe 20 people there), and they were all talking about this thing called legal operations. And I just looked at someone, I said, “Wait a second, you do that as a job?!” Like this is actually something I can do. And so I started to look into it a little bit and stumbled upon Mary and the group in New York City who were starting this CLOC thing, and I was one of the fortunate attendees at that very, very first CLOC meeting in New York City a million, it seems like a million years ago, but I think it's only about ten, right?

Pieter Gunst

And now we're here today and legal operations might still not be the most mature profession of professions by a far stretch. But tell me a bit on that journey then and now, today at Adtalem, what are the key responsibilities? What's on your mind day to day when you come into the office or the remote office these days? 

Stacy Lettie

Yeah. So there are really obvious things like paying bills and managing a budget and, of course, technology and what that role is. But there's a lot of really subtle things that I think as you progress in your career in legal operations, you realize that that is, also key to what you do. It’s a very varied job.

I think understanding processes and efficiencies and workload management and workflow management within the department is just as important, because if you nail all those things, they are the foundation for how you build a really well-run, efficient legal department that works really, really smart. And I think that you, as a legal operations director, even more, I think, than the general counsel, you should be developing this holistic view of your department. So, you're looking from the top down. And really understanding how everything from; staffing balance and vendor management and budget management and procurement management and contract management - how that's all working together and how they affect each other, because they all connect. There is nothing on that CLOC circle that isn't interconnected and when you adjust one thing, it changes another.

I think being the person that has that holistic view of everything that's going into how this legal department runs, and being able to advise your General Counsel or your CLO is critical to how you work day to day.

Pieter Gunst

I love this dichotomy of the General Counsel as this outward-facing “what are all the threats that the world is sending to us”, and then legal ops; inward-facing is the operation running in a way that can catch all of this and throw it back to where it came from as needed, which is very interesting.

Stacy Lettie

Somebody once said to me, “What is legal operations?” And I said, “Legal operations is the business of running the law department. It's not the actual law, it's the business of it”. 

Pieter Gunst

Well, as a trained legal professional myself, I know that these are sometimes very hard characters. So, I think sometimes that means probably a lot of people hurting. I mean, it's a joke about lawyers, but generally that's hard. What are some of the key challenges that you're coming along in your legal operations role? Are those mostly people-based?

Stacy Lettie

Now, I think that some of them are people-based, but I think a lot of them are things that we have no control over. So, you know, right now I think we're all facing this issue of every company in the world is tightening their budgets, because we're anticipating what's going on around us in the economy. So that, of course, trickles down. It usually trickles down, first, to departments like legal, that aren't considered revenue-generating. So we really have the challenge of, “Okay, we have all of these strategic objectives or goals that we've set for ourselves in our department for the year. How do we do that when someone's cutting our budgets?” 

I think one of the other challenges is just the change management aspect of this job is enormously challenging. No matter what we're doing, whether it's, putting out new outside counsel guidelines, or creating an intake process from the department - no matter what we're doing, the majority of what we do is change management. We have to go to people who have been doing something the same way over and over and over, maybe for years, and we have to go to them and A) convince them to change and B) train them to change and C) keep on top of them to make sure they're continuing to do it the new way about sliding back to the old way. And, when you have a department of 50, 60, 70 people, that becomes a full-time job just managing the change management of the job.

Pieter Gunst

Jokingly, in one of our previous conversations, we spoke about “How to save a million bucks with Stacy Lettie” as a tagline for this episode. I was thinking about it over the weekend; at a certain scale of organization, you really can lose a lot of money very fast by not streamlining something or not giving a lot of attention to something else.

And I'm wondering, you know, that this idea of there's a lot of belt tightening going on right now - that's just real. We hear a lot from legal departments. Indeed, they're under increased pressure. And so I think this question is more important now than ever, but it also applies generally: When you come into an organization at the early stages, even if it's mature or young, what are some of the things where you can leverage what you have, where you can show some quick wins, and maybe actually if you're lucky, save a million bucks?

Stacy Lettie

I'm going to give you two examples. And the second one is how I saved a million bucks for real. But the first thing that I think you need - there's two places where you can look for money savings, quick wins. One is looking at your vendor contracts that are evergreen and by vendor contracts, I don't necessarily mean your firms, I really mean things like look to see whether your yearly subscriptions are being managed or whether they're just re-upping every year and someone's just writing a check because they don't know any better. So making sure that your procurement department has a really good handle on what's out there that's auto-renewing every year and someone's just writing a check. In some larger companies, you could be sending checks out for half a million dollars a year and no one's ever using the software, and it's sitting on the shelf. I’ve actually seen that happen on more than one occasion. So that's usually one of the first places I go. 

The second place I go, which I think is probably the most common and the easiest for new legal operations people to digest and to actually put into action is looking at your billing guidelines and your billing system (if there is one), to see what you're paying for that you don't need to pay for. 

I always give this example of coming into my current job and looking at our billing guidelines and taking a look and spot-auditing some of our larger outside counsel bills. What I was finding was two things were going on: #1: we had this wonderful billing system that we were paying a lot of money for, and it wasn't flagging some of the places in our outside counsel guidelines that we say, right up front, “we're not paying for those things”. So one of the first things I did was I went through and spot-checked some of our larger bills and did some searches on some of these key items. I went back to my vendor and I said, “Listen, I don't know how, but I need to flag these things, and some of them I want to auto-adjust down to zero, some of them I want to auto-adjust down to a different rate”. And I really went through with a fine-tooth comb and went through and set up my system in a way that matched my outside counsel guidelines. For example, this is the easiest example to do: we have vendors that we do - because we're all virtual we do a lot of teleconferencing. What I was finding was that a lot of times, they were slipping these teleconference charges into our line item bills and our outside counsel guidelines say clearly “We don't pay for that”. So I was able to take that line, that particular charge and set up my systems to when it comes in and auto-adjusted down to zero. I don't have to review it. My reviewer doesn't have to change it. It happens automatically. We do the same thing with color copies. We only pay $0.10 a copy so everything gets auto-adjusted down. So that was one way that I did that. 

I also went through and again, spot-checking some of the larger bills that came in, I found that we were paying for a lot of duplicate attorney fees;, two attorneys attending a meeting or an attorney charging us for something like uploading a document to a website that they're not supposed to be charging us for. So I flagged that as well. And then I set up a report in my billing system to give to me every month to see what the total of these charges were; all the things that got rejected or sent back or auto-adjusted down. What I found was after about six months of really closely overseeing this, and anything that got flagged I reviewed before it went through our reviewers, we saved about $680,000 in the first six months. In the first year, we saved $1.5 million. And that is just stuff that we shouldn't be paying for. So that's how I saved $2 million.

Pieter Gunst

That's so good. And, I think kind of fascinating to see how process improvements that, yes, they touch a lot of systems, there's a lot of legacy behavior and people and relationships, but that you were actually successful in year one, right? And moving that needle is just kind of fantastic and a beautiful example of where it makes a very measurable difference.

Stacy Lettie

And I also want to say that if you are a person who is in a new department that doesn't have a legal billing system yet, this is also a great example of why you need one, and this is a great way to build your business case. Everything that I just said, you could do using in an Excel spreadsheet, you're reviewing the bills anyway. Make yourself an Excel spreadsheet that shows all of the line items that you sent back to your billing partners. Keep track of these things and be reviewing the bills line by line. 

I have a policy in my department that anything that comes in over $5,000 (sometimes over ten, depending on the firm but in the beginning it was over $5,000), I reviewed every bill before it went to the attorney. Not because I don't trust them, but because I wanted to see what was contained in there. And if you can keep track of those things and start sending them back and keep track of what you're sending, you can really easily, in a couple of months, probably prove that you've saved enough over time. And if you had a billing system that was doing this automatically, it would pay for itself over time.

Pieter Gunst

What a fantastic thing to bring to a GC or a CEO in any company. I know I would be delighted. Stacy, thank you so much for spending some time with us here today. Really delightful to learn a bit about your journey so far and this topic. I think it maybe lends itself to a future deeper conversation. That's certainly something that we could talk for an hour about.

What I'll say is that billing guidelines is a piece that's been regularly shared in our community. And so we'll link in YouTube or wherever people are watching this right now to that material so they can also take a look at how that's being applied in some of the larger in-house departments and what these rules are. But I think I'd love to get back to you maybe for an hour sometime and talk about that, because that was very, very interesting.

For now, I really thank you for spending your time with us today. This is super insightful.

Stacy Lettie

My pleasure.

Pieter Gunst

Thank you so much, Stacy.

Stacy Lettie

Thank you.

–

Do you work in-house and are you interested in sharing your career journey and experiences with the community? Apply here to be featured in a Community Spotlight. 

Are you a legal operations professional or considering entering the field? Join Legal.io to discover legal operations jobs, resources and more.