Legal Leaders Exchange - Podcast episode 29

Legal Leadership in the Age of AI: Lessons from DHL

In this episode of Legal Leaders Exchange, we dive into the transformative journey that DHL’s legal team has taken with their legal operations function. Our host Jennifer McIver is joined by Mark Smolik, General Counsel for DHL Supply Chain Americas, and Elaine Darr, SVP and Global Head of Digital Legal & Innovation at DHL, who tell us how their legal ops team has evolved to meet the company’s challenges, even changing the name of the function!

You’ll hear how forward-thinking leaders are transforming legal operations, leveraging AI, and fostering an environment where innovation thrives. The conversation offers valuable takeaways for legal professionals across industries seeking ways to maximize legal ops impact and meet business goals.

• Developing a legal ops business model that aligns with company goals and legal department resources
• The role of data and AI in evolving legal operations
• Building internal and external teams that yield maximum value – and ensuring those teams include the right roles with the right skills
• Understanding the relationship between the legal department budget and the company’s revenue performance
• Strategies for setting bold goals, taking manageable first steps, and creating lasting progress

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Greg Corombos

Welcome to episode 29 of Legal Leaders Exchange, where we will explore the cutting edge of legal innovation and leadership. I'm Greg Corombos, and today I'm thrilled to have Jennifer McIver from Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, alongside Mark Smolik and Elaine Darr from DHL, two trailblazers in the intersection of AI and legal operations. From groundbreaking summits to reimagining the role of legal teams, they've been at the forefront of transforming how legal departments operate. Get ready for an inspiring conversation about leadership, innovation and the future of legal operations. Jen, the floor is yours.

Jennifer McIver

Thank you, Greg and welcome to this episode of Legal Leaders Exchange. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Mark and Elaine, two trailblazers in today's fast-growing world of AI and legal. Mark and Elaine, thank you so very much for joining today.

Mark Smolik

Well, thank you for having us. We really do appreciate the opportunity.

Elaine Darr

Yes, thank you, Jennifer, excited to be here.

Jennifer McIver

Before we get going and before I rapid fire some questions, I really do want to provide some background. In June, Mark and Elaine, you hosted a truly groundbreaking innovation summit. Really, it was an event led by not by a vendor, not by an event company, but actually by you and your own legal department as well as your supporting business partners. Professionals from the legal industry were invited, able to explore how in house teams can successfully adopt and scale AI initiatives. And obviously, with DHL being the example, I think the summit really showcased how your legal team is not only embracing innovation, but actively shaping the future of legal operations. With that context in mind, what I wanted to do today is just keep the momentum going and dig a little bit deeper into how you've really driven that transformation, how you've tackled challenges, and how you've reimagined the role of legal leadership in the age of AI. So, where I'm going to go with this is, Mark, I'm going to start with you because I think it's clear, as Chief Legal Officer, that you've really taken a role as a key driver for legal operations as well as innovation. And that's not something that's always common in a lot of corporate legal departments. Quite often legal operations feels like they're beating their head against having the ability to innovate or wanting to make progress. With that being said, how have you come to be such a leader and such a person that enables innovation in the way that you do?

Mark Smolik

Well, thanks, first of all for the built-in compliment there. I really do appreciate it. And you referred to the driver of the ideas, not only behind our summit, but with regard to technology and obviously AI as well. I may have the privilege of being the driver, but much of what I have been able to accomplish comes because I have an incredibly talented team who all – what I refer to as – get it. They understand that we are not only a service provider, doing our absolute best to provide uncompromising quality legal services, regulatory, commercial, contracting and multiple other things that we do day in and day out, in supporting our business, but also understand that when it comes to running our department throughout all of the countries in which we do operate, we operate as if we were a business. We operate to a P&L. We are stewards of money. We don't make money. We have to partner with the business to make sure that the service that we deliver is not only supporting their needs, but we also have to think like the business and find ways of doing things better, faster, less expensively, sometimes people call it cheaper, in doing that. And when you put those two things together, and you continue to focus on the service delivery, that is one part of the equation. But the other is to assure that you are creating, not only truly measurable, sustainable value to the business, but you're also doing so, and when you do, you are creating perceptions in the minds of the recipient of those services of the value that you are ultimately delivering.

Now for me, the whole idea with regard to legal operations goes back 14 years ago. It was a relatively simple idea, and that is, I do get a bucket of money from the business to run this department, but I've got to make sure that every dollar, every euro I spent is spent very effectively. And at the time when I joined the organization, I didn't feel that that was the case. So, we just took a business approach. We started investing in people, in legal ops. We're going to be able to look at everything that we do behind the scenes and really find meaningful opportunities for us to continue to approve. So, the relatively simple idea of let's think differently, let's operate this department as if it was a business. Sure, it may have emanated from me, but then I surrounded myself with people like Elaine and multiple others – Tiffany Hamilton, a name that you probably have heard from the legal industry, who are really driving that change. And when you share with folks like that, incredibly talented as they are, a vision of where you want to go, and you let them execute on that vision, it really does foster an environment of creativity and entrepreneurship. And that's really what has fueled a lot of our opportunity to continue to advance this innovation and legal ops agenda. So Elaine, anything that you would add to that, that I may have missed?

Elaine Darr

No, I second all of that, that's exactly right from my perspective because you brought me in, so that was my first in-house job, when you recruited me to join DHL back in 2011. And what you just described was one of the reasons I joined your team. And why I've been on this journey with you is because from day one, I always felt like I was not only working for a really strong senior executive-level lawyer, but also a leader that was going to really peel the onion back and look at all of these things back then. And this was, how do we run it like a business? This is a P&L. How can we invest in technology and solutions? So even way back then, I could feel it coming directly into your department that we're not just going to be reactive. We're going to get ahead of legal work. We're going to get ahead of risk, and we're going to really roll up our sleeves to make sure that every dollar we spend, we're using it to the to the best ability to drive value for the business. And so, even way back in 2011 when I joined Mark's team, I could feel that energy. And like Mark said, we just kept building and building on it. And now here we are, what, 15, 16, years later, and it just keeps going.

Jennifer McIver

I find it really fascinating that you've had this mindset and this feeling and the drive since 2011 or thereabouts. And I'm curious if, Mark, as you've went through and you've built the teams out that you're working with, if that's a driving factor when you bring new counsel into your in-house legal department.

Mark Smolik

Yeah, that's one of the things that Elaine and I have really had the privilege of doing over the years. Because when I did join the company, albeit 16 years ago, we were a team of five, and we are now a team of 86. We've grown because the business has grown, and various other functions have come into the department. But when we ultimately did make a decision that we're going to have to completely undo the model that we were following where we had very, very few people on the team. That's the fixed cost of the department, and most of our legal work was being outsourced. In fact, we were spending more on outside counsel in 2009 than we are today, even though our business has more than doubled in size across the entire Americas region, and that's just because of a different way of thinking. But when we did go down this path of making that switch, beginning to invest in technology and, more importantly, in the people that were going to help us run this business, the legal ops folks, boy, I felt like I was trying to shove a square peg in a round hole. People looked at me like I was crazy. Why wouldn't you just hire a lawyer to pick up the work? I said, because the longer-term vision is, if we can make the lawyers more efficient, we will need less of them overall just to cover the same amount of work. And that has truly played itself out, and it will continue to do so, particularly as AI and other technology and some of the exciting things that Elaine and her team are working on now really begin to play themselves out.

Jennifer McIver

I think what's truly impressive with what you said there, Mark, especially with the spend growing and the budget not growing. That's what a lot of folks and a lot of legal teams are up against right now, and they're looking for AI to actually help with that, where you did a lot of that pre-AI. I mean, we're more into generative AI right now, and agentic AI, but you really did it before we even got there. So, you definitely had that building block, and that foundation, which I think a lot of legal teams are still trying to find their footing on. I find that really impressive. We've mentioned legal ops a few times. And I do want to shift a little bit to Elaine, because I thought it was really interesting, Mark, you also mentioned Tiffany. I love working with Tiffany, by the way, so shout out to her. My very first podcast, or one of my very first podcasts here at Wolters Kluwer, was actually with Tiffany, and that's when we were still talking about legal ops and her role on the legal operations team. But then I noticed very quickly after that, her role changed and is no longer legal operations. Elaine, I know that your team is called LITA, L-I-T- A, and I'm curious, what is that, and what was the milestones, or the mindset behind the shift, from calling it legal ops to LITA?

Elaine Darr

It was very purposeful, so I'm glad you picked up on it. This goes back, I would say it's a little bit before the launch of ChatGPT and generative AI. And it was really on the cusp of most legal departments knowing that there's still a lot of technology they're not taking advantage of. And then there was a large focus in the industry on data analytics, because most departments like ours that had built the building blocks over the last decade were ready to do more with just their underlying data. So, the timing was kind of perfect because I was already meeting with Mark and Tiffany and the other leaders are on our team to say, well, we're pretty mature, right? We've been saying this mantra, run legal like a business, invest in legal ops, for a number of years, but things are starting to shift. So first, with the focus on data analytics, and what do you do with all this data that now is stored, and your matter management, and your document management and your intake solutions. It was about probably a month or so before the launch of ChatGPT, we were already meeting as a legal ops team to say, how are we going to take who we are and what our brand is, and how we're positioned within the legal department, to the next level? It was perfect timing, because we started saying, what kind of skill sets do we need? What is the future of legal ops? And what we identified is there was a lot of skill sets that were coming, such as new roles, like data scientists, senior data analysts on the business side, that we were also saying the exact same thing for legal. Why would we be investing in data scientists? We're sitting on all this data, and then with the launch of ChatGPT and everybody kind of jumping on to, what do we do with the generative AI and large language models? We were having discussions like, well, now we need prompt engineers.

So what happened is, it was natural, white boarding sessions talking about how we hold ourselves out, what is our brand, how do the lawyers in the department perceive us? And how do we take legal ops to that next level? Out of that, we came up with, we need to change our name. And the reason was because if you're working with a lot of lawyers that have been around, they've either been in private practice or they've been in-house. They have, and I wouldn't say it's outdated, it just depends on the maturity of the person and where they've been, but they have an idea of what legal ops means to them. And some of them still put it in the box of the back-end office workflows, SOPs, process improvements, or maybe the administrator on a strategic system. And so we said legal operations does not even touch who we are, what we're doing, or, more importantly, some of the new people we're trying to recruit. And one of those was – at the time we positioned to Mark, and of course, he signed off, and then we got business support – was to hire our own data scientist on the team in the legal department. Well, when we were recruiting that person, Jennifer, they were not from the legal services industry.

If you go out on LinkedIn or on Indeed, and you put the traditional role profile, and you post the up and coming, I call them kids, because most of them are young and super smart and straight out of school, right? They are coming out. They have all these skills. They're data scientists. They are not going to apply for a job that says legal operations, you're working in a legal department. Because most of them do not connect with that at all. So, we came up with completely new branding, a new way to position ourselves, a new way to hold ourselves out. And then also new role profiles. And some of those profiles were things like this data scientist role, also some role profiles that touch on things like prompt engineering and being able to understand the basic AI engine of AI capabilities that are coming online. And then we change our names so we call ourselves LITA, which stands for Legal Innovation, Technology and Analytics. And that entire story is to tell you that this was all about taking legal ops within our organization to that next level to really explain what the team of professionals was doing and create that new brand with the lawyers on our team.

Jennifer McIver

I love it. Legal ops is no longer just administering the e-billing solution, or maybe coming up with rate cards. It really is getting into the actual business, and the actual transformation that you can do with technology. Again, you guys are just trailblazing. I said that earlier, and I think you really have to do that. One thing I note, and please correct me if I'm wrong, Elaine, but as you guys have went through this, it's not like you just have the ability to go out there and say, Hey, we're going to add these five new people. We're adding all these prompt engineers. I think you also looked deep into your own legal team to see where different skills laid. So that way you could pull those skills into the work that you wanted to do from a transformative level.

Elaine Darr

Absolutely. I mean, back to Mark's point, we do not add head count lightly. When we do, there is a business case analysis presented. Mark would go talk to the CFO and explain why we are asking to add head count. But all of this assessment and rebranding work was done looking at the skills and strengths of our existing team, where we want to develop people, and then, if needed, we added a new role. And it was interesting, because some of the folks that are technically on LITA are lawyers that are double-headed, because what you're starting to see is this transition where up and coming lawyers understand this is the future of the industry. And so they're saying, wait, I want to be a practicing lawyer, but I also am really interested in technology and innovation. And so they're double-headed, and they're a part of LITA as well, and they're also practicing attorneys. So, you're right. The team, which for the Americas, for Mark’s team, is about 16. Now, that is non-lawyers, it's lawyers, program administrators, data analysts, all working together. It's a whole different approach of how to leverage the strengths across the board in the team.

Jennifer McIver

Yeah, you hit exactly where I wanted you to go. And I was hoping, in the aspect that lawyers can do technology too. And we always talk about change management and how you absolutely need to bring lawyers along. And in this case, it's not just about bringing them along, it's about getting them involved and getting them to actually be part of the transformation, which I think is absolutely vital, especially as now we're looking at the growth of AI and all that it can do for the team. Which is where I want to shift a little bit on this conversation, and talk about introducing AI into your legal workflows and really, Mark or Elaine, either of you can talk to this, but I'm curious, before we get into some of the actual workflows that you're doing and the successes, what have been some of the biggest challenges that you faced over the last year, year and a half, with taking your journey in AI?

Mark Smolik

Well, I'd like to respond a little bit differently, and that is some of what was our initial challenge has proven to be one of our greatest advantages. And you refer earlier in our discussion here, Jennifer, to a lot of what we did was before AI, let alone before technology existed. There's an awful lot of where we are today, particularly when it comes to our data management, that was an unintended consequence of a project from a number of years ago. I had requested our then-head of employment claims litigation, a practice group here in North America, to merely gather all of our employment claim data over a period of five years. Now, we had a document management system at the time, but we had no way to pull all that information together, so we had an awful lot of manual effort to pull all that claim data together, and then we had the human element to interpret it, to tell us what's the story behind the data, what's our average cost of a claim, average amount of attorney fees, what's the risks that are out there?

Well, it forced us to begin to organize our data in our document management system in a different way. We had no idea what tagging or structuring meant, but we said we’ve got to be able to harness this data. It's going to grow. But it planted a seed of people beginning to think of ways of putting data into our system and extrapolating out of that system in a way that it could provide us meaningful input. So, when much of the technology today came to be, the initial idea was, imagine if we could take this data and at some point automate the extraction of it. Was a little bit of dumb luck. We had no idea that there was going to be any kind of applications, let alone AI, that was going to be able to help us interpret that data in a meaningful way. But we do not have it. We have it now, and many of the things that people would struggle with, and we surely would today struggle with, if we were beginning this journey, is when, for example, you walk through legal week in New York and you see hundreds of vendors trying to sell new tools. You have to realize that the tools are absolutely useless to you, unless you have a foundation on which those tools can interpret data in a way that provides you an intended outcome. So much of the struggle that we had many, many years ago manually, we don't have today, but we would, had we not had a good way to get our hands around our data make sure that it is centrally sourced, tagged and structured in such a way that we can now extract information from it. That's the reason that I wanted to respond to your question in a little bit of a different way. So Elaine, anything that you would add?

Elaine Darr

That was exactly on point, and we were just really well positioned to take advantage of AI, and especially the large language model when it came online. But challenges, and I think we talked about this a bit at the summit. On any solution, and whether it's pre-AI, Gen AI that Mark was alluding to, or even now with these advanced solutions, the biggest challenge in any legal team is going to be change management. I think that at this summit, Jennifer, we ended up spending a lot of time workshopping this issue, because you have to understand your audience in a legal department. And you have to understand how lawyers are built and how they observe and evaluate new solutions and technologies. And it's a bit different. It's different than working with business partners or, of course, with finance or IT. And you have to understand that. So, to me, yes, we are ready. We have great solutions. We have very high performing team, but there's always going to be a bit of a challenge on the actual implementation and the change and getting people that are really, really, really organized in how they approach their day and their habits now they get their legal work done, and saying, wait, hold on, I'm going to train you and coach you through a big change to your day. It's going to make your life much easier, but you got to hang in there a bit, and we have to shift your habits. And that's not an easy thing to do with lawyers.

Jennifer McIver

It's definitely not. And I think as you go through and you look at it, getting document management even set up, and getting the right information in, and getting attorneys to understand the value of having it in a centralized place, rather than sitting on their own computer or saved how they need to save it. I don't know how many times, I've implemented matter management a lot in my background, and it's always been interesting because “I don't need to put data in, I have it.” And I always question, well, if you need to give a status update really quick, how do you find that, how do you get that information for a litigation status report? And you spend hours and hours putting it together because you're having to search and if that person's gone, then that's even more difficult, because it's sitting in their email, or it's sitting on their hard drive. So, I think you guys really did crack the nut of having that centralized data and having the value apparent from the beginning of this, like you said, to be able to play in with the large language models.

Elaine Darr

So, I thought we should probably take a step back, just so that it would make a bit sense. Mark and I, we had been working together since I started at DHL for, what, almost 15 years. But it may seem a bit inconsistent with our commentary and our roles, if you look at our profiles, because as of May 1, I just took a completely new role in the DHL legal department, and that's on the global legal team., So it's still with Mark and the rest of their leadership team within legal but when Mark and I, and we're together, working for the Americas and for supply chain, all of the activity and solutions, and the team that we've been talking about, that was a regional team that's dedicated to supply chain within the structure of DHL. And one of the coolest things that we've been going through as a legal department as of, I think, mid-last year at the group level – this is at our headquarters in Bonn, Germany – we got a brand new CLO. And she, in her first few months, went around to all the different regions, including ours and Mark and my team, and she just kind of was getting out there doing some assessments to see who's doing what. She immediately picked up on the fact that we had really approached these things differently for the book of business that we manage. And so, a big part of my new role that just started as of May is to actually scale a lot of the things that Mark and I built the Americas to the rest of the globe. So it's pretty cool, because that just shows that, even within DHL, we have a lot of opportunity, and we have a new leader, and we're not only doing this work and this innovation and creative way of providing legal services for American supply chain, but now we're expanding it to the rest of our partners within legal and around the globe.

Jennifer McIver

I think that's a really great explanation, and it helps for the context. And I think it also helps folks from other corporations that might be listening, because it's not always so cut and dry. And sometimes you're working on the on the legal ops side of things with several different CLOs or several different GCs. And so, I think that this just brings it back into reality, Elaine, that one division can be doing it great, and then that can actually blossom and work to help expand or to help transform other divisions.

Mark Smolik

Yeah, and I'd like to add to that, because lawyers are, by nature, a bit risk adverse, cautious. Not a criticism. It's just reality, that's what we do, and that's part of the value proposition that we deliver. But when you are thinking of, how is it that I can really move the needle with regard to the operation of my department, you've got to shift your mindset from the cautious, risk adverse – my time is so tight that I don't have time to do anything else – and in some regards, force yourself to say, No, I'm going to take the time not only to invest in myself, but invest in my team, and particularly the future development of my team, to really develop a plan that's going to push the needle. And don't be afraid to do so once you take the time and figure out, or at least evaluate, what is it that would best help me move the needle in doing things more efficiently in my department. That's a huge first step. Don't be afraid of how you go about doing that. You'll surround yourself either with people on the outside, through third parties, who could provide you that service on a variable cost model, or perhaps if you're fortunate enough to bring that talent in house and put it on the fixed side of your of your budget. But don't be afraid of that first decision, particularly when it comes to, am I going to dedicate the time to do this? Who am I going to bounce these ideas off? And then ultimately, what resources do I need to execute on the idea?

Jennifer McIver

Thank you, Mark, that was so perfect. And I was going to ask maybe another question down the road about advice you would give to legal leaders who are just beginning their innovation journey, and I think you just nailed it. So that was perfect. And I appreciate that that you brought that up. I do want to take a step back, and I do want to spend some time, because you guys really are leading with AI and the use of AI, and I feel like the work that you're doing, especially your use cases, whether we're talking about moving repetitive, complex work in house with your EEOC position statements. Or whether we're talking about changing the shape of law firm engagement, centralizing data and using generative AI for work products. Or even just internally, a legal intake portal where you're automating workflow, integrated matter management with your CLM management. But I think we get where I'm going there, that you're integrating that I really want to take a step back and look at that, and especially the law firm engagement. Mark, I feel like you're really looking to see how AI could reshape the relationship between in-house teams and external counsel. And I'd love to spend a little bit of time here, at the end of our of our episode, talking about just your vision for that and how you might want to drive that forward.

Mark Smolik

I think one of the greatest things that not only our team has going forward, but many, many other legal teams, those legal leaders I've had the opportunity to speak with, have going for us is not only the team members that we have on the team, but the extended members through outside counsel. And there's a very, very strong trust relationship that we have with our external law firm partners, and they provide an incredibly valuable service. But the service that they provide is based on a financial model that, in some regards, is not just decades old, it's well over a century old. And that is, you have a need. You retain or hire outside counsel. They do the work on an hourly basis, and you get a bill. And that works when the amount of the hourly rate is one that the buyer of the services can afford. But for decades, surely, much longer than I have been a lawyer, the buy-sell relationship is a bit out of balance, because it's the seller of the services, the law firms, that dictate the terms of the sale, not the other way around.

Now, the more and more data that law departments, the buyers of the legal services, have, particularly with regard the value delivered by external counsel before it, that they can make insightful decisions about how long it takes to complete a matter or how much should be spent, for example, to prepare a particular type of motion, the more those dynamics will shift more to the buyer than the seller. But we have been very, very actively looking for ways to drive efficiencies with external counsel because of the increasing cost on an hourly basis that we incur year over year. Like in any organization, there's merit increases that we are able to pass on to members of our team. They're always single digits, except if somebody's promoted or there's a market adjustment. But yet, at the end of the year, per our billing guidelines, we will get multiple letters from law firms telling us that they are increasing their rates, 13, 14, 18, 21% across the board. And you look at it and say, I can give my people single digits, and here my law firm partners are looking at double digits in every instance. Now there's always negotiation, there's always discussions, right? But if anybody who's the buyer of legal services, really anywhere in the world. Looks at the projection of where legal fees will be on an hourly basis in 2030, you'll see that the average cost of a partner in the US is going to be well over $950 an hour. Now for us, in order to have $1 to spend, we have to have many, many multiples of that that are generated in revenue through our sales team, just for us to have that dollar. And it's a 30 to one equation. I've been very open about that. If you take that $950 times 30, not hard to do the math, you can see how much sales you have to generate just to pay that one hour. And boy, if you get 100 hours billed, you can just imagine how much in revenue has to be generated.

For us, that cultural mindset shift of we have to be very, very prudent with regard to how we spend the money, we have to understand how much we have to generate in order to have the money to spend, has really allowed us to move the needle. And it is why we are partnering as we are, particularly with regard to AI, to work with outside counsel to try to facilitate fewer and fewer hours being spent by them on our matters. Now we've got a long way to go. We've got a lot of exciting projects where we take all of the data and, based on what we know about how much historically we have been charged for certain matters, we're now beginning to set a standard with regard to what we will pay in certain matters. And it will significantly benefit us, particularly over the years to come. But one of the challenges that we see is, even with the panel firms that we have, many of them are advocating and speaking at conferences about their investment in technologies and AI or different types of platforms, but I have yet to see, in a single instance, that resonate in lower costs to us. So there may be very significant benefit to the law firm, particularly when it comes to their operating model, their financials, their margins. But no, I surely don't see it on reduction for us. So, the more and more that we can continue to rely on new ways of thinking, leveraging technology, leveraging AI, to bring down the amount of time that outside counsel has to spend on our matters, the better opportunity that we have to lower our overall total cost of legal.

Jennifer McIver

I like that, Mark. I feel like we could talk for hours on the rates. I was just working on some information out of actual rate increases, the percentage that we reported, through our clients that contribute rate data. 12%, that's actual increases. And you talked about partners getting close to $900. It's crazy. The actual blended rates for Am Law top, I think it's top 50 firms, is actually already peaking over $1,000 an hour here in 2025. I know that doesn't get to all firms. But when you just look at the rate increases compounded with the differences between the various levels, it does cost a lot of money. I mean, I looked at it, at certain points, it was 31% more spend for the exact same hours with the rate increases that happened in 2024. So I can only imagine how that hits your department.

Mark Smolik

Jennifer, for us, it's not a complaint. That is the model that is out there, right? And we're just going to find a way to work within that. We can't force change, but what we can do within our own area of responsibility is come up with a new approach so that we have lesser and lesser reliance on external counsel. Not to say they're not providing a valuable service. They are incredibly valuable services to us, but we just have to find a little bit better balance with regard to how we do what we do, not only with the work that comes out with the external counsel, to really better manage internally the overall budget that we're given to spend by the organization.

Jennifer McIver

Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, Mark. And it is a balance, and it is corporate legal departments needing to, I think, press law firms to be a little bit more innovative and to really come out and show that value. And I think you guys are doing an amazing job with the work that you're doing, to have balance. It's not one against the other, but it definitely is a way for both business models to succeed in that aspect. Our time is drawing towards the end here. Before we go, though, Elaine, I wanted to just ask you one question, or to have you provide a little bit of insight. If there was anybody that was looking to move into legal ops and they're looking for a new role, what would you have them look for?

Elaine Darr

I think that they should look for a leadership team that supports a new way of working. And if they have an opportunity to join a team and they're being interviewed, they should ask a lot of questions about, what is your vision and strategy for the legal department? What is your current legal operating model? Ask them questions about how they get support from their board on investments in data and technology and solutions. And then I would also tell anyone in legal ops, if they're interviewing and they're looking at potentially joining a team, to spend enough time with the General Counsel to really understand if that leader is somebody that is going to embrace this change and the new way of working. Because if you do not have the support at the top, it will not happen.

Jennifer McIver

I love that. I think that's great advice. And I like the idea because it's very deliberate in the questions that you're asking. And we need to be deliberate as we move forward and as we continue to grow the industry. So, thank you for that insight, Elaine, both of you. Thank you, Mark, Elaine, for sharing your insights and experiences, I think that it's clear that innovation in legal is not just about introducing or implementing new technology. It's really more about the leadership, about the vision and the willingness to rethink how we work. And I do think your journey is just a powerful example of what's possible when legal teams take the lead in driving that change. So what I would say to our listeners today as we wrap up is, if you're inspired by what you're hearing about, what Mark is saying, what Elaine has shared, consider how your own teams can start small but still think big and build that momentum, just like DHL has. So, Mark and Elaine, thank you again for being here, and I do really appreciate your time and for you sharing your insights today.

Mark Smolik

Well, thanks for the opportunity. It really is an honor.

Elaine Darr

Yes. Thank you so much for having us.

Greg Corombos

Thank you for listening to this episode of Legal Leaders Exchange. A huge thank you to Jen McIver for moderating and Mark Smolik and Elaine Darr for sharing their incredible journey and insights from the legal teams at DHL. Legal Leaders Exchange is hosted by Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, the market leading provider of enterprise legal spend and matter management and legal analytics solutions. For more information and additional guidance, please visit wolterskluwer.com or call 713-572-3282. Please join us for future podcasts on optimizing legal operations and achieving your legal and business goals.