Opinion
‘ Our mission is to disrupt the legal industry ’
Hewlett Packard Enterprise ’ s strategy of focusing on recruitment at entry level and nurturing talent – rather than hiring externally for senior roles – has led to big savings , says Eduardo Ruiz
At the office of the general counsel ( OGC ) at Hewlett Packard Enterprise , we have an ambitious mission : to disrupt the industry by being the most innovative provider of in-house legal services . We pursue that mission by focusing on four main areas , which we call ‘ talent factory ’, the ‘ inside game ’, ‘ smart solutions ’ and a ‘ culture of game changers ’.
The ‘ talent factory ’ is about recognising that talent is the key ingredient for success . We aim to be talent-makers , not talenttakers . Talent-takers are not capable of developing the next generation of talent , so they fill holes by hiring externally at every level of the organisation . Our goal as talent-makers is to hire strategically and almost exclusively at entry level and ensure , through a talent management system , that we have successors ready at every level , up to executive roles . The talent factory is also about transparency – our promise to our OGC professionals is that they will always know where they are in their career , where they are heading and what they need to do to get there . We want everyone in the team to feel that they have the training , the resources , the working environment and the experiences that will make them the best at what they do .
The second transformation area is what we call the ‘ inside game ’. In other words , we aim to bring as much work as possible in-house . We believe no outside counsel is better positioned than us to bring the most value at the lowest cost . The inside game plays out across the entire organisation , but has two main components . First , we have a New Attorney Program ( NAP ) whereby we go on-campus to recruit the very best talent from the top law-schools to join our litigation , IP and M & A teams . The NAP is a five-year programme under which our new attorneys will receive the training they need but will also get directly involved in sophisticated work from day one – for example , in the area of litigation , they will interview witnesses and put together briefs , or on the M & A side they will get involved in transactions under proper supervision . We believe this is a winning proposition and our experience shows that we are able to attract excellent talent that is sufficiently open-minded to walk away from the welltrodden ‘ join a big law firm ’ path .
The second component of the ‘ inside game ’ is ‘ Agility Centres ’ – we are building centres of expertise in low cost locations where most of the repetitive , low-to-medium complexity work is done by internal resources , so everyone else can focus on high-value , highcomplexity work .
Cost savings All of this has paid off . Three years ago , 55 per cent of the OGC budget was spent on outside counsel , while 45 per cent was internal cost . Today , that has been flipped so it is the other way around . At the same time , the costs associated with certain categories of litigation have been reduced by 50 per cent , while the success rate has improved .
The third transformation area is ‘ smart solutions ’. We have made significant investment in tools and technology that allow us to be more efficient and also get much better insights into what we do . We are also asking every lawyer to record their time – like in a law firm – and by crossing and overlying the time-recording data with the information provided from the other tools , we can learn a lot of things , spanning from how much time we spend on low value deals to validating assumptions about talent productivity . So we are shifting from anecdotes and intuition-driven decisions to analytics and data-driven decisions .
Finally , our fourth transformation area is a ‘ culture of game changers ’. As Peter Drucker put it , “ culture eats strategy for breakfast ”, so we believe it is essential to instil a culture of constructive disruption , thought leadership , ethics and innovation throughout the department . We want our people to embody our core values : be faster , be better , be newer , work together . We want them to engage in pro bono activities . We want them to live our values . Only by doing so , will we succeed in our mission .
As we move forward with our strategy , we expect our relationship with law firms to continue to change for the good . In our experience , the best outside lawyers would rather partner with sophisticated and capable in-house teams than work with poorly motivated and underqualified internal teams . We will definitely continue to need the assistance and expertise of law firms , and we expect them to come hand-in-hand with us in our relentless search for excellence .
Eduardo Ruiz
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We believe it is essential to instil a culture of constructive disruption , thought leadership , ethics and innovation throughout the department .
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Eduardo Ruiz is chief of staff ,
VP & associate general counsel in the office of the general counsel at Hewlett Packard
Enterprise
www . iberianlawyer . com September / October 2016 • IBERIAN LAWYER • 23