Close Ups Episode 2: Mike Russell

‍This interview is part of the Litify Close Ups series, where we get behind the title and into the mindset of the legal community’s boldest thinkers. Hosted by Litify’s CEO, Curtis Brewer, each episode features a leading voice in the legal operations community and covers career journeys, technology, trends, and how legal leaders are adapting their teams and operations to stay ahead. Subscribe to this series on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to be the first to know about future releases.

Recently, Litify CEO Curtis Brewer sat down with Mike Russell, Head of Global Legal Operations at Expedia Group, to discuss the evolution of legaltech, his approach to data-driven decision-making, and how to influence change and build firm relationships.

Can you tell us about the scope of your role and responsibilities at Expedia Group?

Five years ago, I was brought into Expedia to create the legal operations function. You can imagine what was going on in the world at that time with the pandemic, and particularly in an industry that was so hard hit. Law firms are demanding to be paid, and work needs to be managed effectively, and legal operations really plug in to bring standard processes and technology to make sure we’re resourcing it the right way. At the end of the day, we’re helping make every dollar count and ensure we’re getting the right work from the right resource at the right price.

I’m privileged to be able to work with such a talented group of folks, many of whom have been at the company almost as long as I’ve been in the legal industry. We now have a global legal team of about 130, and our legal operations group is me and two others. One person is completely dedicated to contract management, and the other is a legal project specialist who focuses on the more technical aspects that keep the department running.

You’ve covered a lot of ground in your career. What were the key points that set you down this path?

I was a childhood electronics nerd. I taught myself BASIC, C++, and COBOL at a very young age. In school, they would be teaching BASIC, but I would annoy my teachers and do the homework in Pascal. 

At age 14, I was recognized for being one of the youngest system operators of the computer bulletin board systems from back in the day, when everything was dial-up. That’s when I discovered my interest in connectivity and infrastructure, which was my first pivot into what would become the internet — we have all these devices, how can they talk to each other? 

I was fortunate enough to land a job at a software company in Silicon Valley back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. It was called Informix Software and used to compete with Oracle and Sybase, and IBM eventually bought them. I ran their tech support organization and worked on their quality assurance team, and that was my first experience with an enterprise company.

From there, it led to some work for the government, which then led to working in law firms, and after being a law firm IT director for a while, I had the chance to jump into corporate legal about 25 years ago.

From your perspective, what’s sparked your ability to be both a technologist and a change agent?

Stepping into an IT role at a law firm at a time when we were just coming out of the dictaphone era and trying to convince lawyers that they should, in fact, have a computer on a desk was a fairly novel experience. The discussions we had today about putting data in the cloud were the same ones we had then about the value of instant communication and whether email was even appropriate for client communications.

Both now and then, it’s nice to be in a position to work with forward-thinking lawyers who are interested in how much more productive this tool can make them. And that goes back to the change management skills we use and coming to the table with a focus on productivity and efficiency gains.

When it comes to AI, what areas are you most excited about transforming?

When I think about what consumes a lawyer’s time, it’s the ability to work with massive volumes of data. These are the most expensive eyeballs, so how do you make sure all the work they’re doing is to add value? If the technology can go through these vast volumes of contracts or M&A documents, the machine is more capable and accurate than most humans at going through that material, helping make those decisions, or creating summaries. A lot of the time, you’re not actually creating “new” content. For legal, most use cases start with what’s happened in the past — what’s already in the document, the emails, or wherever the data may live. 

Every time I see a lawyer saying, “Wow, I just saved six hours” or “I just saved sending this work to outside counsel, and that translates to savings,” that kind of efficiency is what gets people excited, and it certainly gets me excited. And when I see it applied within “line of business applications” — contract management or litigation support — it's all about finding the right place to use AI to make those users even more efficient.

How do you build and maintain relationships with your business stakeholders?

For anyone new to legal operations, as you progress through your career, you’ll quickly learn that you need to partner with not only the lawyers but also their business clients to fully understand the nature of what’s being asked. How do they prefer to work as a lawyer? How are they supporting and enabling the business? 

Typically, we hear stories about the sheer volume of work the business is bringing to them. How can we balance executing more rapidly with maintaining compliance and reducing risk? That’s where the legal judgment comes in for us as the non-practicing lawyers in the legal department. 

The more that we, as operations professionals, understand that, the more we can see where and how work fits into a standardized workflow. We can develop a playbook for the most efficient, normalized way to get something done, which we should be doing 80% of the time. And once 80% of the work is happening at an acceptable pace or meeting an SLA, we can focus on the 20% because there will always be exceptions or rushes.

At the same time, you’re tracking all that activity, so you’re seeing the turnaround time of a contract, from the time that it hits legal, to the time it goes back to the counterparty, or you see the time to get that patent research done and filed. You can now make that data available, so when someone says, “Here’s my next project— I’m told it’s going to be very complicated and very time-consuming.” We can figure out where it fits in the playbook. Is this in the 80% range, and do we know how to handle that? Or is this in the 20%, and it’s a specialty project, so maybe we need outside counsel or an ALSP? But you have the data to help make that decision, through the lens of how quickly we can get it done or how much it will cost.

How are you using data to drive decisions around handling a matter internally or taking it to outside counsel?

What I appreciate about having a good, capable platform for managing all of this is that it makes it easy to get at that data. The most valuable data inside any in-house legal team or law firm is all that history, so that when it comes to making those decisions, you have it available. 

Something may be in our 80% bucket, but we decide whether it’s in-house based on its complexity and the time it might take. If it’s very routine but not critical, and we already have a fractional legal talent resource or an agreement with an ALSP, why would I put that in front of an in-house resource? It’s not particularly challenging or career-building for the lawyers working on it, and they’re interested in doing the work that’s going to help evolve the business. Let’s save that work for them and give that routine, commodity work to other available resources, which are probably more global, diverse, and cost-effective. But if you don’t have a good platform, a good infrastructure in place to manage it, then it becomes chaos.

How can legal departments think more strategically about how to handle a matter rather than solely focusing on the invoice?

My opinion has been that outside counsel has their place, but in some cases, that’s really the last resort.

We know we can take the right work to outside counsel and work with them on rates and AFAs, but once we get there, it’s more about achieving the desired outcome. We want to receive an agreed-upon amount rather than nickel-and-dime charges on the invoice.

Do you have a secret sauce for building and managing successful outside counsel relationships?

First, it is a relationship business, which is a bit of a battle. Sometimes legal operations come in and can be perceived as too heavy-handed when it comes to procurement-esque decisions. 

I enjoy working with law firms, establishing a preferred panel, getting to know the panel firms and their people, and understanding the history of that relationship. I also enjoy helping the company find new resources. We’ll take something out to market, and maybe there’s a firm that’s more midsize or regional that isn’t on anybody’s radar, but they have the expertise, the people, and they’re able to do the work for that agreed-upon value.

Finding and establishing those relationships is becoming and increasingly important part of what the legal operations team can do. We’re available to act as that interface so that when the firm comes calling — maybe with a new offering or a new practice group — we’re in the best position to bring it back to the department and to learn what the firm is now bringing.

Are there any areas where it still feels challenging to make that data-driven decision?

Most of the large organizations I’ve been at were more US-focused, and now I’m in an entirely global environment. Over the past five years, I’ve learned the nuances of working with firms from all over the world that are doing every kind of unique travel and hospitality specialty law. And these aren’t the biggest or most sophisticated firms. They don’t always have internal IT, or they have very little of it, so being able to use data to help find those firms, let alone work with them, is very difficult. 

When we find someone we like, and they understand our business and do a good job, we want to hang onto them. But we may only have a project for them every three years, so we need to keep up the relationship with them, and it’s an interesting role that legal ops can play to help nurture those relationships over time. And never mind the ever-changing data privacy laws, taxation, currency, sanctions, tariffs, everything that goes on in a global economy that can affect your firm's relationships in a way you were never expecting.

How have you been successful at driving the adoption of new tools within the legal department?

The concept of the cheerleader or the champion. Paralegals are awesome collaborators in legal technology because they get excited about solutions that save them time. They’ll recognize when it’s going to save the lawyers time. So cheerleading, building that excitement, getting early adopters, all that is great. 

Sometimes I’ve tried it through stretch assignments. This is an extra project you can pick up, put on your annual review, and it’s just two hours a week that they put into this initiative that contributes to the department's success.

We’re also fortunate to have a rotational program within the company where people can move between departments and try something new for either 20% of their time or even a dedicated six months. We normally don’t see people coming in and out of the legal department, but legal operations makes that possible. We can bring in project managers, account managers, and people with a more technical development background, then sit with an end user to walk through the use case and translate those requirements.

What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

I go back to that spirit of community. I hope people see that I’ve spent a lifetime connecting people and finding good people who may not have come from the expected background for legal operations. So I’d like to be seen as that community leader, a connector of people, and somebody who listens.

‍Ready to turn your legal operations into a platform of action? Learn more about how Litify AI can help unleash your team’s full potential.