Welcome back! We hope you've all had a wonderful season. In this first episode of 2023, we've invited Global Vice President at Sitecore, William Hart Wade, to the Inspiring Legal studio to chat about his journey from NY's legal scene to Copenhagen's ditto. William and Stine discuss Sitecore's unique approach to in-house Legal, its effects, and the ambitions for the future. Thank you for listening.
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Stine: Welcome back to this episode of Inspiring Legal, where I have the pleasure of welcoming William. William, we are delighted to have you.
William: Thanks, Stine. I really appreciate it. It's great to be on. My background, in a nutshell, maybe can be told by my accent or lack of an accent. But I'm originally from the US, but I've been in Denmark for ten plus years now. I've also lived in a number of places and have been quite mobile in my personal life and career, but have made a home now here in Denmark.
Stine: Fantastic. So for the listeners out there, William Wade has been working for Sitecore for eleven years. Recently, you launched what is called Sitecore's Legal Hub zero point one. I will be asking you so many questions, because I think this is something that people will really truly find inspiring, because you've set the goal to becoming the most innovative legal department, as I understand it. In the industry, we'll start being the most innovative legal department in the industry, and then we'll see where we can go from there. That is ambitious, but it also means that you've been thinking a lot about, I guess, how to innovate, how to work.
William: Sure. Well, the legal team is, we are twenty three people in all, including all various types of legal professionals, not just attorneys that make up our team. So we're twenty three in all, spread out globally. Take back two years ago or so, when I started, I was the second. So we've grown since then. I would say we haven't grown enough to support all the needs of the business, but that's what most in-house teams would also say, especially in the tech world. It's tough to keep up.
In terms of Sitecore, yes, so Sitecore started out as an early CMS provider. So that's content management systems, just a way to manage content on your website. The simplest example was in the early days, even dating back to the early s, if you wanted to make an edit on a website for similar content, you might have to go on every individual page and make that edit. So it's crazy how much things have advanced since then. But Sitecore started out, founder-led company by Michael Seifert.
And it was really about how can we build websites and make the process of managing content easier. And they were a big player on the scene and also got started in the Bay Area through family connections and other early investors so that when they were starting in Denmark, they were also starting almost in parallel in the US. And that shaped a lot of the early success of the company. It didn't have to make that jump from Europe to the US, that we were established there.
In fact, a lot of US customers would most likely identify Sitecore as a US company and not necessarily even understand its origins. That's a big part of the success. In terms of the product, CMS, that's old hat now. To describe our product suite and the industry we're in, you call it the digital experience world, which can mean different things, but it is a lot about how you engage with the website, how personalizing content, of course, with consent, GDPR consent, of course. All of that is privacy by design built into it. But it is about being able to send the right content to your customer, whether you're a BB or BC customer. Sitecore's customers can send the right content at the right time.
Stine: So what have been the challenges? I know a lot of the listeners and a lot of people in the community are sitting right now and really focusing on especially improving sales. We have the community report that we built together with the community. And that shows that more than any other department, sales and commercial are requiring the most resources from in-house legal teams.
I think on average, 71% of all community members said that sales were the most demanding team to support. And they were also just taking arms and legs, more or less, from the legal teams.
William: Well, it's definitely true with sales and Sitecore is no different. And our field legal team is the largest. When we think of those legal professionals, a huge chunk is set within the field. And a lot of the things that I do as well are focused on supporting our field legal team, which supports everything.
Stine: Field is the sales?
William: Field is the sales, yes. So anything commercially driven and any revenue generating contract and related. Of course, it all can be interrelated, but that's what I mean. Sales is also just a good word to use. So it's the same here that we use that. And the challenges, in large part, I really feel is how can we present information in a way that will support the sales process. And will be advantageous and a value add to our sales team, both to save resources of asking, having to answer, excuse me, the same question again and again.
How can we focus our resources, obviously, towards the customer so they will have less questions because we have been so transparent and have really tried to give them the full picture of what we're doing. Which makes the sales person's life easier, decreases deal cycles, and the length of time it takes to close a deal by doing that. But also give our own sales team ammunition to take into those discussions when a customer, legal departments from our customers, want to show their value as well.
You run into these situations where you can see that they may not have issues with your contract, but they are trying to show you the value to their organization. And we're cognizant of that. But how can we still make that process easier? And I think it goes back to engaging the customer and being transparent. That's transparent, transparent, transparent is what we want to offer.
So explain our agreement set up, understand we'll have some disagreements, but explain why we have set up language the way we have. And also, a big conversation point that came up in the middle of this is that we are really going to put all our legal agreements out there where our competitors can see them just to just copy it. And that really was 99 percent. Yes, we're going to do that. This is about the customer. It's not about our competitors or trying to hide things from them. If our competitors want to take it and run with it, I think that's also fine.
Then it just shows that we're you know, we are being that innovative and leading department. If others come after us. So. But amazingly, that was, especially within the business, they even had some questions. You know, do we want to do that? But after some end up being short conversations, all the way up through our executive leadership team, everyone said, yes, this is all about the customer and it's about transparency. So, go at it. And, you know. So, yeah, the difficulties, I think.
The initial difficulty, I would say, in trying to set something like this up is getting the support, internal support and funding to do it, even if the funding is resources of the legal team. Yeah, because it didn't require new tools for you. Didn't require new tools yet. So that's looking at the next step. But it is definitely required.
We also engaged a global law firm to give their point of view. You know, we have our internal point of view and we have attorneys scattered around the globe. But we really wanted someone to sit and say, if you're advising a client in France, in Germany, in the US, in the UK, and you saw our contract, what are you telling them? What do you think we could improve? And then taking all that internal feedback also from our sales team and issues that they perceive, fusing that all together with external feedback. To get the result that we have today.
But in order to do that, that did require having a budget and getting that budget. It's not prohibitive, but you do have to get a budget and getting those internal resources is actually one of the more challenging items. Otherwise you're taking them from somebody. You're taking them or moving me from my prior role into this role. It was about our CLO having really supported this and having our CEO, very excited, also supportive of this. And when you have that in place, then you have some room to run and deliver.
But it's very important that you know that you're given that freedom and the resources, especially when you're doing this for the first time and making that jump. You really have to set that up. It's set up to succeed, because if it's something you're supposed to be doing on the weekend or after working hours, it's just it won't get done. And in a reasonable time frame. I mean, this took us back to April to when we launched in early November. So that was... It takes time. It takes time. And we also want to do it right.
And now you have the fun of setting up all the back end processes. You know, if we have to make updates, how do those work? You know, how do you set those up? How do you set up good feedback loops so that you're updating the right things while at the same time exploring all the other possibilities that are out there? Because our ultimate goal is this idea of a smart contract, which is a good buzzword now. But what we mean by that is eventually there'll be a customer portal, even in this BB context, there'll be a customer portal where they'll go in and the transaction will all take place within this portal, including the legal documents.
And there'll be drop down menus for certain provisions that also may have consequences for price, etc. And there'll be chat boxes for questions. And there'll still be humans on site cores and, of course, leading the process. But you'll really have that one stop shop and you'll get your password and you'll be able to go in and to this part of the legal hub where the entire transactional process takes place. That's not tomorrow for, I think, anyone, but also not for us. But that's where we want to go. And this is the first step in that direction.
William: It's a great question. To get started, I think it's finding out internally who you need to buy into this vision. And then, of course, as maybe this is almost redundant for an in-house audience, but understand who you're speaking to. You're going to frame a project in a way where you're going to show the benefits to the stakeholders that you need, who support that you need.
So you're going to focus on the aspects that are going to make their lives much easier and will save them time, save them money and really focus the presentation on how it will benefit those who support you need. And you may have in your back pocket all the other things that you want to do with such a project to just benefit the legal team or to improve things in a subjective manner. But ultimately, it's about identifying those internal stakeholders who support your need and funding or whatever this form the support takes and selling it to them, selling to them a vision of how much easier their life is going to be. And I think that's the starting point in my mind.
Then I'm going to ask you another question, and that is back to the question or maybe the fact that sales just drives a lot of cost for the in-house legal teams. So I worked in-house for six years running a legal team and a privacy team compliance team, a little below people. And we too used the most resources on sales.
Closing a month, quarters and everything is just you drop everything you have more or less and you support the sales teams. And when I was sitting there, I would love just to know what are the best kind of long hanging fruits that I can implement that will just make the legal team's lives easier.
One of the things we did was create a playbook. So you're using the contract negotiations, you're getting the same feedback and you can easily optimize that process by having kind of like standard wording, good explanations, give that to sales, educate them.
William: Low hanging fruit, it can be difficult with low hanging fruit. Maybe I'm hanging fruit. I can absolutely playbooks, negotiation guidelines. We've had that in place for a while and we'll be updating those. Reminds me I got to get to that, but updating those for our new legal hub world and our updated agreements. So that's a key tool.
I find that those are mostly useful for the actual legal professionals negotiating the contracts. Sales, I think it's difficult for them to really carry that out. But that brings me to my maybe not low hanging fruit, but what has been the key element to removing a lot of that noise and difficulty on our legal team supporting sales. And that was finally establishing a deal desk. And the idea with a deal desk is it's the hub and then the spokes go out to legal, to finance, to sales, obviously, and various other orgs whose support may be needed to for a specific deal and to work on it. And it's been a year's long process of setting up a deal desk. And when our new CLO came on board, the first two things we spoke about is we're going to fight to get a deal that's set up and we're going to start in motion this idea of legal hub and smart contracts. And it was up to me to figure out how to get there.
But those are the two things that we agreed on from day one. And so getting a deal desk in place and again, what is the deal desk? You can define it differently for each company, but it's essentially someone that can take over the initially the commercial elements of a deal. Because the biggest problem in Sitecore's legal department historically was the amount of time we had to spend on the order form and all the commercial elements. And the order form, which really wasn't legal work other than the need to, of course, help express language that matched the commercial agreement between the parties.
But we were spending so much time on tax issues or product based issues that it was weighing down our resources. And so putting a deal desk in place where everyone's bought in within the sales org and they are the commercial shield. So legal doesn't need to be involved.
Stine: You have that middleman, right?
William: It's a middleman. Yeah. And then the hope and our deal desk is also still new. It was also started in January, February of this year and is now kind of fully rolled out globally. And so the next steps would be getting deal desk to also do some of the low hanging legal fruit. So we're making amendments via the order form. That is will be one of the next steps. So the legal doesn't really need to be involved unless there's an actual substantive legal matter or there's something novel that needs a little help on. But the deal desk would be reaching out to legal. It takes a lot to set that up. But I think there's opportunities even without a deal desk proper to identify some resources that can help run that part of the deal.
Stine: So you don't just have the entire deal sitting with legal and then the salesperson to say when the deal is done? That's where we don't want to be. That's not beneficial to anyone.
William: Yes, it's within the operations team and the sales team.So there's a lot of dotted lines and things going in that direction. But they're absolutely clued in to the commercial team and work closely with the sales team. And everyone is a huge fan. I mean, it makes everyone's lives easier. Also, when legal doesn't have to be speaking to arcane commercial elements that we may not understand. I think that just leads to confusion.
So establishing some sort of some setup, whether it's a fully functional deal desk or a much smaller department where commercial elements can be filtered through other persons more suited to run that part of the operation. That means that the legal department should then hopefully see mostly just legal matters and legal questions and not items that should be answered on the commercial end. Which is easier said than done in my experience. Much easier said than done.
And then on the legal side, like I said, we have Legal Hub and we have these resources and you have guidelines, then that's where you can focus on. Then, removing those repetitive questions and tasks and getting those out of the way. So legal is really only engaged if there's something novel or obviously a large contract where it's going to require that attention, regardless of how beautiful your Legal Hub may be. Yeah.
So summing up, playbooks, guidelines, legal desk, Legal Hub, a lot of work, but totally worth it. Totally worth it. Totally worth it. And to, I think, going back to the beginning, I would advise that to think out of the possible, to think about what you may want to do in even a few years time. And don't park that from the beginning. You know, go through that exercise of like, what would the perfect world look like? And then dial back to what's achievable.
Because otherwise you may not, you may not get there. You shouldn't, you can't get there eventually. And that's our hope too. And we want to set up legal insights and blogs, via the Legal Hub, engaging in legal design and how not only with the Legal Hub, but internally and how legal design can play a meaningful role in making it more engaging for visitors to the site and ultimately our customers trying to be on the cutting edge there as well. And, but that all can't be done in one fell swoop, it was important that we identified all these really cool things that we eventually want to do. Instead of just saying, well, that's not going to be possible right now. So let's not spend time discussing it.
Stine: Thank you so much, William, for sharing, especially on this topic, because it is on top of mind for so many out there, especially when you're working in house legal. Maybe one last tip from you.
William: Yeah, it's a great question. There's not a single source, but I'm very engaged with ACC, Association of Corporate Counsel. And there's a lot of benefits to networking also within certain subject matter areas, whether it's legal ops, legal design, legal design, legal design. And networking also within certain subject matter areas, whether it's legal ops or, anything else, privacy, SAS tech based contracts.
There's various groups, and I know I still haven't utilized it fully, but it's a great resource also for asking questions and getting answers from the community. So that's probably my main one. But I'm also still searching, like I said, thinking about legal design. I don't know a one stop shop to go to, to think about that. So I'm constantly searching for other communities as well, whether that could be within ACC or something separately.
But I think the community based model, which I know is very much your model, Stine, with Openli, which I think is fantastic. I'm really searching out those type of organizations or setups where you can get involved and kind of contribute as needed, but really just kind of see it as a resource of like minded professionals. I think the more of those you can be involved in, the better. And the more inspiration you get from others. The more inspiration and yeah, I don't have all the ideas. And so I rely on lots of different people and smarter people than me to help.
William: Well, I get inspiration from what you're doing, Stine. We didn't set this up. No, we didn't. I'm blushing. That's an honest answer. I think it's, you're doing a community building exercise and you're bringing up topics that are pertinent, not just for a Danish audience, but for a global audience. And those are the type of things that inspire me to try to set up my own communities or to be contributing members of these communities that I find. So there isn't a single person that I'm going to find inspiration, but I've very much been inspired by the community that you've created because it goes way beyond what even Openli just does as a business. And that's what I find inspiring, that it's reaching beyond what you do to tackle subject matter areas and to provide help.
Of course, it's great branding for the organization, but you can always tell that there's actual care and interest that goes beyond just that. And that's what I hope we can do at Sitecore with our team as well and some of the innovations that we can help establish our own communities, not just how can Sitecore sell more licenses, but how we can also be that innovative legal team and inspire and develop communities.
So I've been inspired by that. So good, good, good job.
Stine: Well, thank you for the kind words, but also for inspiring the community about how you've been working with innovating your legal team, supporting sales, and making a difference for your team.
So on that note, William, thank you so much. If people want to get inspired by you, can they follow you on LinkedIn or elsewhere?
William: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Sure.
Stine: So that's one inspiring tip from here. Follow William and see what Sitecore and how they are. See what we're up to next. Exactly. Fantastic. Well, thank you. And thank you to the listeners out there. I hope you were inspired.
William: Thanks, Stine.
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