Annual Meeting 2020

How do you prepare an organization for the unexpected? During this year’s Annual Meeting, 3M General Counsel Ivan Fong gave helpful insights on how an organization can prepare for the worst.

Key Takeaways:

First, leadership is key in times of crisis, and in-house counsel should be at the forefront. Leading through a crisis should be a core competency for in-house counsel. Second, organizations should realize that “by failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” While there is no uniform cookbook for crisis management, there needs to be a tailored approach, one that that is appropriate for the organization. Those plans need to identify best and worst case scenarios. And those plans, whatever they may be, must be tested.  As Ivan put it, “practice, practice, practice!”  

In his experience before 3M, and as general counsel of the US Department of Homeland Security, Ivan learned that "black swan events" are the ones that cause the most harm purely because they are so unexpected. To protect against this, leadership teams must develop and test their contingency plans to discover those factors, however small, that will affect their outcomes.

Third, leadership teams need understand the three P’s: Priorities, People, and Pivoting. Leadership teams must identify their priorities, protect their people, and pivot when necessary. Priorities need to be clearly defined and communicated to everybody in the organization — a simple and quick message will suffice. As Ivan put it, “A simple message beats a complex message any day of the week." People are also just as important; organizations should take care to take care of their human capital before, during, and after any crises. This includes making sure their talent is comprised of the right people. The fable of the fox and hedgehog is illuminative here. While the fox may know many things, the hedgehog knows one BIG thing. Organizations, to be successful in crises, need to have both kinds of employees. Doing so will pay dividends — both figuratively and literally.  

Finally, firms should not be afraid to pivot from adverse events. They need to respond positively and productively to adverse occurrences. Ivan’s own experiences at 3M clearly demonstrate this. 3M, in response to the pandemic, needed to ramped up its respirator production. Yet 3M, prior to the pandemic, had no preexisting plan to fight respirator fraud. In response to the crisis, the company quickly marshaled 80 members of its legal team to help address issues of fraud and set up a a global hotline to facilitate in the reporting of fraudulent respirators on the market.  

To quote the great philosopher Mike Tyson, “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Companies can lessen that pain through effective leadership, planning, prioritizing (both its strategic objectives and its people), and pivoting. 

-Jonathan Huie

During this year’s Annual Meeting, Dr. Lily Brown, assistant professor of Psychology in Psychiatry and Director at the Center for the Treatment and Study of Anxiety at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, presented on finding peace in a burned out world. 

According to Dr. Brown, when we think about burnout, we often think about people who are striving to succeed, those who have a hard time setting boundaries and saying no, and perhaps those who take on more to be of service to others or to support their own career goals. Studies have shown that there are gender differences when it comes to anxiety, for example, women often are at a higher risk for anxiety and burn out. 

Burnout may occur when one has too many tasks to complete and feels overwhelmed. People who struggle with burn out (lawyers are often in this group!) also often struggle with perfectionism. These two, in tandem, create a vicious cycle of procrastination, where anxiety breeds avoidance, which further reinforces the former.  

Equally important in contributing to burn out is worrying. Often people find themselves in a psychological place of constantly trying to predict when the next shoe will drop. Dr. Brown referred to these as “worry cycles.” People trapped in this vicious cycle may think that if they don’t worry, they will miss something. Lawyers typically do this. The issue is that worrying is counter productive. People worry, thinking that they are problem solving, but this is distinctly different from actual problem solving. Worrying breeds more anxiety, while problem solving actually lowers anxiety.  

Often there are predictors of increased anxiety. Take COVID for example, the following are predictors of increased anxiety: 1) social media exposure; 2) general exposure to media; 3) focusing on COVID can all increase anxiety. 

Yet there are also factors that point to lower cases of anxiety. Again, taking the COVID stressor, the following are predictors for decreased anxiety: 1) social support; 2) organizational support from their work; 3) hygiene in the organization (availability of PPE and sanitizer, for example); and 4) emotional regulation.*

Emotional regulation, which refers to the capacity to regulate one’s emotional experience in specific circumstances, is strong a predictor for lower anxiety. The following are tips to help with emotional regulation and to escape worry cycles. 

What to Do About It?  

Understanding: understand that every emotion is composed of three components: 

1. Cognition: things we tell ourselves about our emotional experience
2. Behavior: behavioral urges or choices
3. Physiology: what we experience in our bodies

Understand that these three components interrelate to one another. That is, each one has an effect on the other. For example, a person is working in a high stress environment and there’s family stress while working from home. This person may be having thoughts about not being able to handle his/her workload. He or she may then be tempted to avoid working on a particular project. More avoidance (behavior) will increase anxiety (feeling) which may have an effect on the body (physiologically). In short, the way we think about affects our behavior, which in turn affects physiology.

Redirect attention [worry cycles]: 

Focus on the present moment when feeling anxious. Consider the 4x4 breathing exercise: 1) take an inhale to the count of four; 2) hold your breath to the count of four; 3) exhale to the count of four; hold again to the count of four; repeat four times. Consider having your feet flat, hands up on lap to make yourself more open. 

Create space between urge and behavior [emotional regulation]:

Every urge (to avoid, send a nasty email, etc.) reaches a peak and eventually subsides. If we can give ourselves space and time to let the urge happen and let it ride, the urge will eventually correct itself. By taking this approach, we will make ourselves more resilient going forward and are likely to have fewer of those urges in the future.  

-Jonathan Huie

Legal departments, whatever their size, can benefit from a systemic and thoughtful approach to finding and applying technology solutions. Dana Huppert, vice president and head of Legal Operations at PineBridge Investments, and Brian Meyer, partner, co-chief operating officer and general counsel at Fir Tree Partners, gave a helpful roadmap for how legal departments can approach identify, selecting, and deploying technology resources.

It is important to identify: 1) the time drains within an organization, 2) know the costs and ROI of the firm’s current technologies and available options, 3) invest in the right resources vis a vis to strategic vision; and 4) deploy properly. 

1. Assess the Problem 

In order to figure out what, if anything, needs to change in an organization, legal departments should take time to determine low value tasks and process bottlenecks, as well as those that are ripe for automation. In Brian’s organization, for example, he was able to identify those challenges that were both administrative and time consuming, or legal operations that were both ad hoc and subjective, which meant that the firm could not adequately capture key information drivers. To diagnose this problem, companies may consider a time study, which as Dana explained is where the legal department tracks their use of time and assigns a value to the time spent. In her organization’s case, this study found low value repetitive tasks where a technological replacement was appropriate. Additionally, this data was used to prepare a business case for a legal operations person who could help develop more efficient approaches. 

Crucial questions to answer at this stage include:
•    What legal functions can we make more efficient?
•    Are our existing functions and technology adequate?

2. Identify the Resource

Once bottlenecks are identified, decisions need to be made about what exact resource is necessary. This can come in the form of internal reallocation, external hires, or a temporary consultant for certain problems. In other areas, such as e-billing, resource and financial management, and knowledge management, a technology solution may be appropriate, as in the case of Brian’s firm. At Dana’s organization, the time study served as the business case for any new technology to be selected. Often when interactive with vendors, it helps to have a solid strategy (see below). Where there is a clear strategy and requirements of a technology platform, vendors may self-select in responding to RFPs, further saving the legal department’s time. 

Critically, if a technology is appropriate, organizations should understand what are the crucial needs they have for the platform versus what they want. 

3. Prepare the Strategy

Firms should take care in determining their strategy and may do so analyzing current technology and their returns on investment. Ripe for change are those that are high dollar, but low return platforms. Additionally, leadership should identify the main pain points for key stakeholders and figure out what solutions and how those selected may address concerns. Dana identified and summarized those concerns, and created a pictorial chart that helped leadership understand issues and how technology could help address those. For Brian’s organization, they started with the ACC Maturity Model for the Operation of Legal Departments chart, which is a tool to asses and benchmark the maturity of legal operations They then took that maturity model, repurposed it, and determined where they were and where they wanted to go. Brian cautioned that not everything may be replaceable with technology. 

Firms should choose those options that best for their strategic vision.

Organizations should answer the following questions:

•    Where do we want to go? Determine those goals and desired outcomes.

•    How will we get there?   

4. Deploy

Implementing the strategy requires buy-in from multiple sources, including executives and stakeholders who will ultimately use the resources being deployed. It is crucial to both involve and continuously communicate with stakeholders during the roll-out process. Additionally, seamless training guides that provide information at users’ fingertips and collecting post-deployment feedback is also necessary to success. Lastly, legal departments should measure the results against KPIs to see if any modifications are necessary.  

This roadmap may be applicable to any legal department, regardless of size. Both Dana and Brian and their respective firms have realized savings by taking this approach.  

-Jonathan Huie