This week on The Geek in Review, we sit down with Jennifer McIver, Legal Ops and Industry Insights at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions. We open with Jennifer’s career detour from aspiring forensic pathologist to practicing attorney to legal tech and legal ops leader, sparked by a classic moment of lawyer frustration, a slammed office door, and a Google search for “what else can I do with my law degree.” From implementing Legal Tracker at scale, to customer success with major clients, to product and strategy work, her path lands in a role built for pattern spotting, benchmarking, and translating what legal teams are dealing with into actionable insights.

Marlene pulls the thread on what the sharpest legal ops teams are doing with their data right now. Jennifer’s answer is refreshingly practical. Visibility wins. Dashboards tied to business strategy and KPIs beat “everything everywhere all at once” reporting. She talks through why the shift to tools like Power BI matters, and why comfort with seeing the numbers is as important as the numbers themselves. You cannot become a strategic partner if the data stays trapped inside the tool, or inside the legal ops team, or inside someone’s head.

Then we get into the messy part, which is data quality and data discipline. Jennifer points out the trap legal teams fall into when they demand 87 fields on intake forms and then wonder why nobody enters anything, or why every category becomes “Other,” also known as the graveyard of analytics. Her suggestion is simple. Pick the handful of fields that tell a strong story, clean them up, and get serious about where the data lives. She also stresses the role of external benchmarks, since internal trends mean little without context from market data.

Greg asks the question on everyone’s bingo card, what is real in AI today versus what still smells like conference-stage smoke. Jennifer lands on something concrete, agentic workflows for the kind of repeatable work legal ops teams do every week. She shares how she uses an agent to turn event notes into usable internal takeaways, with human review still in the loop, and frames the near-term benefit as time back and faster cycles. She also calls out what slows adoption down inside many companies, internal security and privacy reviews, plus AI committees that sometimes lag behind the teams trying to move work forward.

Marlene shifts to pricing, panels, AFAs, and what frustrates GCs and legal ops leaders about panel performance. Jennifer describes two extremes, rigid rate programs with little conversation, and “RFP everything” process overload. Her best advice sits in the middle, talk early, staff smart, and match complexity to the right team, so cost and risk make sense. She also challenges the assumption that consolidation always produces value. Benchmarking data often shows you where you are overpaying for certain work types, even when volume discounts look good on paper.

We close with what makes a real partnership between corporate legal teams and firms, and Jennifer keeps returning to two themes, communication and transparency, with examples. When an AFA starts drifting, both sides raise their hands early, instead of waiting for invoice rejection drama. When a client invests in “law firm days” that include more than relationship partners, the firm learns the business context, the work improves, and outcomes improve. Jennifer’s crystal ball for 2026 is blunt and useful, data first, start the hard conversations now, and take a serious look at roles and skills inside legal ops, because the job is changing fast.

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[Special Thanks to ⁠Legal Technology Hub⁠ for their sponsoring this episode.]

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Email: geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com
Music: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Jerry David DeCicca⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Transcript:

Stephanie Wilkins (00:00)
Hey everyone, I want to talk about jobs for a minute. This year has been pretty much a musical chairs when it comes to jobs in legal tech. We’ve seen a lot of people moving from one position to another, coming from outside of legal tech into legal tech, from firm to firm, from firm to a startup, from in-house to established company. A lot of movement in the legal tech market. And also a question we get here at Legal Tech Hub a lot is,

How do I get into legal tech? And the only thing I can answer to that is there is no one pathway to do it. Everyone I have met has a different route of how they got here. And there’s no one definition of a legal tech job either. The market is changing so quickly. We’ve seen so many jobs or titles or roles that didn’t exist even a year ago open up. And so if you’re looking for your next job, Legal Tech Hub runs…

Legal Tech jobs. It’s that’s that’s URL legaltechjobs.com. So if you’re looking for your next legal tech job, or if you’re it’s the end of the year, a lot of people make a move after January one or if your New Year’s resolution is to get a new job of so many I’ve been there in my past. Now is your time. There’s so much opportunity out there. Go to legaltechjobs.com and you will see everybody that we are aware of that is hiring people give us their jobs that they are

looking for great candidates for, and we know there are great candidates out there looking for jobs, so we wanna help match you all up. It’s a free website, feel free to peruse it, and maybe make your New Year’s resolution come true, or if you’re just feeling like there’s something more for you out there, there probably is. So check out Legal Tech Jobs and find your next great career. That’s how we all got to where we are now. Try something new, put it out there, you never know what’ll happen. And good luck, happy job hunting.

Marlene Gebauer (01:57)
Welcome to The Geek in Review, the podcast focused on innovative and creative ideas in the legal industry. I’m Marlene Gabauer.

Greg Lambert (02:04)
and I’m Greg Lambert.

Marlene Gebauer (02:06)
This week we welcome Jennifer McIver Associate Director of Legal Operations and Industry Insights at Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions.

Greg Lambert (02:14)
That’s quite a mouthful on your business card, I’m sure.

Marlene Gebauer (02:18)
I did that pretty well. I was pretty impressed.

Greg Lambert (02:19)
Ha ha!

Jennifer McIver (02:21)
I’m impressed,

I usually shorten it. Let’s drop the associate, let’s drop the director. It’s just legal ops and industry insights.

Greg Lambert (02:27)
There we

go. So, Jennifer, not only have you got the experience there at Wolters Kluwer or with the ELM Solutions, your earlier legal ops and strategy role at places like LawVue and Thomson Reuters played a role in getting you where you are today. Do you mind just walking us through your path into legal operations and legal tech?

and what pulled you toward more of this industry insights lane of our profession.

Jennifer McIver (03:00)
Yeah, I’m definitely a path that I wasn’t expecting. It’s really far from where I was in college. I wanted to be a forensic pathologist. I was pre-med. I thought it’d be great to actually work with cadavers that couldn’t talk back. But yet here I am sitting on a podcast having a conversation, right? But really, yeah.

Greg Lambert (03:17)
I don’t know, some people might think that there’s a parallel line there.

Marlene Gebauer (03:21)
We’re not dead yet.

Jennifer McIver (03:22)
yet. But really, as we take a step back, ⁓ I was a practicing attorney. I did the billable hour thing. I was an associate. I was getting to that partnership time. honestly, it wasn’t for me. And one day I got really frustrated. And all of this came out of me walking into my office, slamming the door, and literally googling, what else can I do with my law degree? And a job came up on Indeed.com, you know, out of nowhere. And it was from Thompson Reuters. It was for implementing legal

legal tech, they wanted attorneys. I had never taught software. I had never worked in software. Our law firm was so, I don’t know, not there yet that I really didn’t even use software, right? Other than, you know, the standard Microsoft type of tools. So for me, that’s where it started. And really the pathway has just built on it. I went from implementing, I put over a hundred people on the system at Legal Tracker, and then I went to being customer success and managing the customer success team with some of the really mega top clients in our

price clients and then it moved into product. And that’s really where the transition to LawVue went. I really worked from the US side to being the strategy support as they were launching their product in the US. But as I did that, it was during COVID and during COVID, know, New Zealand was really locked down and that’s where the most of the leadership was for LawVue. And so I became the person in the US that was going to the events, having the conversations. And so really when you just grab all of them,

knowledge that I pulled in and then all of those conversations I was having when this offer, you know, in this particular role was posted by Wolters Kluwer it just seemed like a natural fit to just pull everything together.

Greg Lambert (05:01)
Any more slamming doors and Googling what I can do next?

Jennifer McIver (05:05)
I mean, we’re not going to talk about that

because I have a feeling folks are going to… No, I’m kidding. No, it’s actually been…

Marlene Gebauer (05:07)
⁓ That’s after the podcast,

Jennifer McIver (05:12)
Right, right. Yeah. No, it’s been really great. I’ve had a lot of fun and I’m learning even more. And I think that’s what’s really just, I love it is the more conversations you have and the more knowledge you gather, I feel like it just goes up exponentially. And so really that’s my role is to help facilitate those conversations, you know, internally in the industry with our clients, because that’s how we’re getting the good stuff to figure out how we can help people move forward.

Marlene Gebauer (05:41)
So I can already tell I am talking to ⁓ another data nerd. And so I am very interested in hearing your answer to this next question. Jennifer, you spent a lot of time looking at benchmarks and data from tools like LegalView and talking with legal departments about spend and matter management performance. What are the smartest legal ops teams doing with their data right now to shift from

cost center to a really a true strategic partner.

Jennifer McIver (06:10)
I have two parts to that. think first with their own data, they’re really working on visibility. And I think that’s a big piece. I mean, we’ve had ELM solutions. We’ve had e-billing contract management solutions. We’ve had all of these.

these tools that are really absorbing, right, and kind of just taking in that data. But quite often, no one’s using it. No one’s bringing it out into usable, you know, and being visible. And I think that that’s where you see the biggest shift is the folks that are getting in there and creating dashboards that aren’t just everything thrown up, but ones that are tying into their KPIs that are tying into their business strategies. And I think also really working with solution providers that are going in that same path, you know, for something, for example,

we spend a lot of time here with TimeMetrics 360 putting in our data analytics and getting into Power BI and getting everything transitioned to Power BI because that’s not only making it visible and usable, but it’s also getting comfortable now. And I think that’s the other piece that I wanted to go is I think that the teams that are doing well are the ones that are being comfortable with having the visibility of the data to see it, to use it, to talk about it. And I just want to add one more thing and that is pulling in external data. I think

think

that’s the other piece and you mentioned Marlene, know, Legal View. know, Legal View Dynamic Insights is a great example of that industry benchmark data. You can look at your own and you can know that we’ve increased, you know, law firm rates have increased, you 10%, 12%. But without looking at external data, you don’t know if that’s the right path. You don’t know if that’s expected. So I think really the teams that are doing well is they’re harnessing their own, they’re making it visible, they’re putting it into a visibility that

everybody within the organization can ingest and use and appreciate and then they’re pulling in that external data as well.

Marlene Gebauer (08:00)
aren’t they struggling with getting the right data and surfacing the right data in order to, you know, to do those types of analytics?

Jennifer McIver (08:10)
I think that’s a great, I feel like that comes into some of the other things that we were going to talk about today because I think that AI has really, really brought that out with the struggle with the data. Everybody wants those kind of easy button, know, I’m going to use AI and you realize that your data is scattered and your data isn’t the best. And that’s where I think we have great industry organizations like Legal Data Intelligence that are really educating people about having good data and how to bring that forward. And I think you can really see teams now

that are starting to do well are the ones that have taken the time to go back and to really see where is my data located? What data do I have? And a lot of times it’s not needing all of the data that you have and it’s going back and saying, let’s get this a little bit more simplistic. know, I might only need six or seven data fields to tell a really, really good story. I don’t need 87. I remember implementing clients years ago where, you you create these matter templates and you you create the intake form and

and

they wanted to require so many fields and so much data. And the text field, don’t even get me going on the text field, because that’s just a no-go anywhere. But no one entered the data, and they were wondering why. Or it was always other. By the way, never do an other category, right? ⁓

Marlene Gebauer (09:24)
The dreaded other, yes.

Greg Lambert (09:28)
general.

Jennifer McIver (09:28)
Right?

And so I think that’s where I think, Marlene, you know, it’s correct that people are struggling. And that’s where I think it was kind of got to my crystal ball question later, right? Where it’s like, you know, save it, save it. We’re done. We’re done. No crystal balls now.

Marlene Gebauer (09:37)
Save it, save it, save it. I did have another

follow up, but you’re saying that visibility is important. So are the groups that you’re working with, are they sort of now making this data more accessible to outside their departments so that different groups can use this and sort of piece it together the way they need

you know, they can actually highlight things themselves.

Jennifer McIver (10:06)
Absolutely, and I think you’re seeing a lot taking into consideration persona-based. When you’re looking at say dashboards or data, what the legal ops team needs and looks at is very different than what a GC needs to look at. And it’s very different than what maybe the finance team. And I think that’s a great example. I think a lot more of the teams are bringing in finance teams or other of their large business verticals, maybe sales organizations. You see that a lot with contracts.

in those sales organizations, you’re showing the data. I think legal has always been thought of as that black hole, right? Everything goes in, nothing comes out. We say no all the time, but data is actually showing the visibility that legal is very productive. Legal is helping the company move forward. And I think by going into the realms of different personas, that’s absolutely helping that strategic partnership.

Greg Lambert (10:58)
Before I follow up with some AI questions for you, I want to go back just a little bit and talk about your team there, Wolters Kluwer or ELM Solutions, and your clients are legal ops and in-house teams. What’s the value that they get from working with your team? What’s kind of your mission?

Jennifer McIver (11:21)
Yeah, I mean.

Yeah, the mission is to, you our mission really is to help make their legal team, know, better and it’s to help their legal team become that strategic partner within their organization. And there’s so many levels that you can do that, whether it’s spend, you know, spend control through invoice review, through making sure the work is getting done on budget, on time. It’s also, you know, again, the visibility of what matters are coming in, what matters are coming out.

and really being a partner to the rest of the organization, whether it’s us working with our clients on integrations, for example, between our solutions and other solutions to really pull that information together. But ultimately, we want to make the legal teams that strategic business partner. We don’t want that black hole, right? We don’t want that department to know. And that’s really what we’re trying to get to and make sure that it’s as automated and streamlined as possible.

Greg Lambert (12:15)
All right, now on to our obligatory AI discussion. So I know that you’ve been digging into ⁓ agentic AI when it comes to legal ops and not just about the automation part of it, but kind of looking more as AI as ⁓ kind of this teammate that can help the legal ops team.

Marlene Gebauer (12:18)
you

Greg Lambert (12:39)
negotiate rates, review the invoices, ⁓ work on the workflows. So let me ask you from your vantage point, actually real and working today versus what feels more like hype still?

Jennifer McIver (12:55)
Kind of giggle to myself as you say teammates, we have an internal joke and I kind of started it about co-pilot being my boyfriend. And that’s my real teammate now, because I think I use co-pilot so much through the day and I have these interactions. I’m remote, right? So when I’m going through, yep, that’s exactly.

Greg Lambert (13:09)
Yeah, co-pilot’s my work husband.

Marlene Gebauer (13:12)
was going to say this is going

to be the tagline. Okay.

Jennifer McIver (13:14)
It really is.

Greg Lambert (13:14)
Yeah

Jennifer McIver (13:16)
It really is. But that really does flow into the thought about teammates. think the great thing about AI right now and agentic AI even is that it is simple enough, especially if you’re using enterprise tools or if technology, your solutions are rolling it out to be able to create automations and efficiencies that I think a lot of legal teams haven’t had the resources, the monetary dollars, or even the time to do so.

an agent for simple workflows. did it for example, for every time I go to an event, I take a lot of notes and then I write up the notes, key takeaways. I have an email that I put out. I have, you know, some different things that I do internally. I have an agent now that I’m working on and I haven’t spent that a lot of time and it’s almost perfect. I can take those notes, pull the takeaways right. I still have to review it, but it’s giving me the ability to get a lot of time back in a little bit of effort. And I think that’s the big thing.

Initially, I think when AI rolled out, everybody was just like, it’s too much. I can’t do it. And I think that’s where agentic AI, I think it is real. And I think that, you know, some of the big things like it’s going to kill the billable hour, that to me is where the hype is. But I think you’re going to see that it’s going to it’s going to take off in those smaller bits more and more. And especially as the legal tools are really enabling that. We just had our Amplify user conference and we did a thing with product where we gave everybody poker chips and we

some innovative options where people could vote, you know, with poker chips. And the top one was a LegalOps AI agent studio. That was the number one. know, within T360, TimeMetrics 360, within Passport, within our tools, give us a way to create some agents on ourselves, right, to do that. And I think that that’s really what people are going to look for is those, that’s how AI is going to create quick wins that we just otherwise aren’t going to have. So I don’t know if it’s going to be a complete, let’s do the end-to-end negotiation.

My

colleague thinks so. I don’t know. I’m a little bit on the fence on that one. But I do think that you’re going to see things that you would have an assistant do, things that you would have an entry-level analyst do. I think you’re going to see those workflows really coming through with Agenda AI.

Greg Lambert (15:28)
Are you finding your clients to be much more receptive to AI than they were say a year ago?

Jennifer McIver (15:35)
I think our clients have actually been really receptive from the beginning. I think the problem or maybe the roadblock per se has been the understanding from an internal standpoint on the security issues, the privacy issues. I think the roadblocks have been internally, a lot of our clients have actual like AI boards or AI community or committees that they have to go through in order to even use AI in an existing solution. So I think that that’s really been the hesitance,

moving forward. think a lot of attorneys, which is weird because I’m one, we don’t like change, right? We don’t like doing it, but I think you’re seeing so many poor people leaning in.

Greg Lambert (16:14)
The best thing we can do to speed this up is let’s commit, let’s create a committee.

Jennifer McIver (16:19)
I

know a committee that by the way and I think somebody brought this up and my colleague actually Vince Ventralla brought this up a committee that probably doesn’t even use AI itself

Greg Lambert (16:33)
He’s probably not wrong.

Marlene Gebauer (16:35)
So a lot of your work explores panel management and AFAs and vendor relationships. And this is going to be a two-part question and I’ll probably have a follow-up. So when you talk to GCs and general legal ops leaders, in terms of law firm pricing, they sort of really looking for alternative pricing? Are they re-examining their

you know, what they think of as, as value pricing you know, or is that, is it just like, okay, give me, give me the discount off, off the billable hour. And the second part of the question is what is, is sort of frustrating them about panel performance. And, you know, that can be in relation to sort of AI use or anything else.

Jennifer McIver (17:26)
Yeah, so good questions. And I think that you have legal ops teams that are on very opposite ends of the spectrums. And I think that’s something that corporate legal teams do quite often. They go all one way or the other. So for example, we’re going to make this very process oriented. We want timekeeper rates at a certain time. You you can, you have to give them to us here. We don’t accept more than 3%. We don’t, you know, it’s very regimented and they don’t reach out to their law firms and say, Hey, let’s talk about this. And I think that’s

extreme where you’re not seeing movement and you’re seeing frustration with rate increases, but there’s no movement because there’s no communication, there’s no transparency, there’s no proactive reaching out and really trying something else. On the flip side, you have legal ops teams that are going completely opposite, right? We’re not going to do panels anymore. You know, we know that if we’re having conversations at like a matter level, that we’re going to get the best rates. We’re going to have, you know, this information. We’re going to RFP everything, by the way. That’s going to be the opposite.

side, which to me is just as process oriented. It’s almost like a CYA kind of situation almost, right? And so I feel like it’s that extremes that’s really happening at the corporate legal departments. And I don’t, I think the ones that are doing well and like law firms that are really working well with the corporate legal departments are those that are having the conversation that are bringing to the table. Look at, know, this is what we’re up against on the corporate legal side this year. You know, we have to really look at our spending and then

you

have the conversation about, you know.

do we need to have that most senior partner on everything, right? Are there certain matters that might be a little bit lower risk, higher volume that maybe we can bring in some different staffing and really do it differently to get it into a cost bracket that makes a little bit more sense, right, for the work? And I think that’s where you’re really seeing the differences and the conversations happening that are working. But as people stay regimented, there’s just that continued frustration and they’re going up.

And it’s just not going to move, right? Somebody has to take the burden to have that conversation. And I really do think that it has to be at least initially on the corporate legal department side, because I know I’ve talked to a lot of law firm folks, and you guys can definitely agree or disagree with me on this. But if a company comes to you and says, the corporate legal department says, hey, these are our programs, these are our processes, this is what we want you to follow, OK, we’ll follow them. Why do we need to come and be inventive? Or why do we need to come and be innovative and give you something different?

You know some may but I think that that’s just something that you see is if the corporate legal department doesn’t take that burden It’s not going to change

Marlene Gebauer (20:02)
Yeah. And I’m hoping that that could be a, you know, a, a combined effort. so there’s not just like one, you know, it’s not just like the firm’s responsibility. It’s not just the, the corporation’s responsibility. It’s, it’s both of them kind of coming together on that. my, my followup question was, do you find, you know, you’re, you’re, I’m, I heard you say, you know, we’re moving away from panels and

Is there any thought in terms of like, okay, we want to do this because if we consolidate the work, you know, these firms that we have doing the work are looking at this more, looking at us more holistically as opposed to kind of matter by matter and in a certain type of sector.

Jennifer McIver (20:43)
I think with panel firms, you’re seeing a lot of shifts. If you go back, you know, five, even 10 years ago, there was that initial firm consolidation kind of, I feel like, era in legal operations. And I think a lot of people realize, a lot of teams realize that they condensed too far. And what happened is, is you think that, hey, I’ve got these really great 10 firms, but they’re probably 10 really large firms that do great work, you know, across the board. They can do everything at a premium price.

And so all of the work is going there. And then you assume that you’re getting those volume discounts. You assume that you’re getting the best rates. But when you start using benchmarking tools, and that’s something that we’ve definitely been talking a lot about with folks in the industry this year through the use of Dynamic Insights, you can absolutely see that for certain types of work, you’re kind of getting hosed, excuse me for saying it, right? You’re not getting the best prices. And so it really is, when I say that people are moving away from panels,

that you see inherently in your data that 80 % of your spend probably is going to a good chunk of the same firms. So the question might not be do we formalize a panel process, but it might be how do we otherwise work with our law firms to gain the value that we’re probably already getting by sending them a decent amount of work and how do we take that deeper? How do we move past just negotiating volume discounts to actually getting more value and really looking into finding what value is? I think that’s where a lot of teams are

now is what is that value so that way we can look something a little bit different than rates.

Greg Lambert (22:18)
There was a conversation on LinkedIn this week that I chimed in on and talked about the incentives that in-house attorneys have, corporate counsel have, and that being inventive, being creative with their outside law firms is not something that’s incentivized, it’s more, you

show me a number, what was my discount. And so there’s, know, even if in fact I’ve seen law firms actually get punished for coming up with creative, know, hey, we think this may be a better way for us to work together. Do you think there’s a way to change the incentives for in-house, to be more receptive to the…

more innovative ways of delivering services and looking more maybe more at outcomes rather than you hours if you could wave a magic wand what would you do to help?

Jennifer McIver (23:23)
I think it’s that going back to defining what value is. think too many people are looking at the numbers on a spreadsheet. And I say spreadsheet because I feel like that’s what a lot of legal teams are still doing with their costs and their spend, you know? And so, and really looking at it from that kind of account and kind of raw, tangible numbers. I think if you get in and start defining value is and what partnership is, there’s a lot of other initiatives, right? That are going towards that. And I think that’s, if I raised a magic wand, right? Is to have everybody come in and talk about

what the value is and I don’t think there is a standardized what is value. When you talk to some teams it might be you know how are we growing the pipeline for you know more diverse attorneys and you know more diverse work. For others it’s how are we partnering together on technology? We know AI is going to be great. What can we do to partner? I think a lot of corporate legal departments know that for the whole you know that the company type matters right or save the company type matters they’re going to pay those premiums.

it’s really breaking it out and looking at what are the other things that we can get with our law firms and how can we partner.

Greg Lambert (24:29)
that ties in well with the, you just recently wrote the ELM insider article on the 2025 trends, which I found to be a very good read, so thank you for putting that out. You just mentioned it, where you’re shifting away from vendor management to partnerships. So.

Based on your discussions that you’ve had with these legal leaders, what really defines a good law firm partnership with

Jennifer McIver (25:04)
Yeah, think communication and transparency and in both directions, think,

Greg Lambert (25:09)
Yeah, what else?

Jennifer McIver (25:11)
I know,

I know, too blank. But let me kind of dive into that a little bit and give you an example, because I think that the specific examples are really what helps here. You know, working with a client that does probably 80 % AFAs, and it’s really interesting because you always wonder, is it risky, right? And if you enter into that new AFA, I think a lot of corporate legal departments are really hesitant to take the risk. And so in this case, they have open communication where if a matter

going. And if it just doesn’t look like that arrangement works, either party is reaching out and having that conversation. So that way you’re not getting into the invoice comes in over budget, I’m going to reject the invoice, right? You went over budget, but you’re really having that mutual conversation about is this working and how do we need to change that? So I think that’s, Greg, hopefully that gets you over, you know, when I say open communication, buzzwordy, right? It gets you into that more really taking that example and diving in.

I think the other thing is really ⁓ you see a lot more corporate legal departments spending time on educating and working with our law firms about their business. And I think that’s another area when you’re talking about getting better outcomes, you’re talking about understanding how to maybe staff matters or the risk and the, you know, the importance that a law firm maybe should put on certain types of matters by getting out there and having those sessions that gives more intuition to the law firm to really service, I think, the clients in the corporate legal

departments better. So you’re seeing a lot, I know we’re seeing a lot of our clients doing like law firm days and they’re not just bringing in that relationship partner, they’re bringing in associates that are key on their matters. They’re bringing others to really get in there and to learn about the business, to talk to the people they’ve been working with and to really continue to build that because when you go to the outcomes, right, that’s how you start getting to the better outcomes is if you have more of that knowledge. And I think again the transparency back and forth and really

being vulnerable back and forth, I think that the greatest relationships are with a law firm or coming back and they’re actually rating the in-house attorneys they’re working with. And I find that really interesting. Most don’t want to hear that, but when you hear that you’re not being responsive or you hear that you’re really, really confusing me on the scope, that’s going to actually drive better outcomes too.

Greg Lambert (27:29)
Do, on the law firm days, do the lawyers bill for their time while they’re there?

Marlene Gebauer (27:33)
Yeah.

Jennifer McIver (27:36)
And the travel time and double bill it to another client as they’re going, right? ⁓

Greg Lambert (27:40)
There we go.

Marlene Gebauer (27:41)
I’m curious to meet our

allied professionals part of those, those lawyer days.

Jennifer McIver (27:46)
That’s a great question and I’m not quite sure on that. know, I haven’t necessarily been, you know, as the tech provider, I haven’t been invited into those days, but I do know that we do have a lot of companies that are starting to put additional legal service professionals on their panels even for certain types of work, which I find really fascinating. You know, the panels I think are evolving into not just your top tier law firms, but you know, law firms for the purpose of types of work. And I think going back to our conversation about how, you know, we had that.

big push for the, know, condensing the panels and getting it down to 10, 20 law firms. You’re seeing people now expand it, but I think you’re seeing people expand it for the purpose or teams expanding it to be fit for the purpose. And that’s where other service providers are definitely coming into play.

Greg Lambert (28:32)
So before we wrap up and get to our crystal ball question, it’s really nice to be talking with someone that puts out a lot of content for people to use. But let me flip that on you. Where do you go for the content to kind of help you keep up with?

Jennifer McIver (28:52)
So I’ll admit from like an AI side, if we go to AI, I’m really spoiled. I have my own internal like AI expert, as I call it. I mentioned earlier, Vince Ventorella, he’s amazing. He keeps up with it and then I catch up with him. So I tended to do a lot of that. I’m not the best and this is me being, you know, vulnerable and transparent at keeping up with, you know, podcasts and I do listen to your guys’s by the way, but you know, keeping up with a lot of podcasts and external resources. When they look interesting me, I’m scrolling through LinkedIn, you

Greg Lambert (29:05)
you

Jennifer McIver (29:22)
I’ll see if you I’ll jump out. I’ll do it. I might join a newsletter and so I do get it that way But the majority of the time it’s from having conversations whether it’s conversations just like this whether it’s industry conversations at events Or I do have a lot of connections where we do virtual coffees, know, I keep up with a lot of folks Legal tech startups, you know, I’ll be honest I have some great frenemies as I call them, you know, and and I do keep up with them and we do have conversations, know, obviously within boundaries, but

we do have those conversations. And so for me, it’s just talking and really just pulling that together. I mean, I’ll be transparent, you know, the article that I wrote, you know, that you mentioned in ELM Insider, that was a combination of all of the notes and all of the bullet points and all of the information that I tracked throughout the entire year this year from events, from the conversations we had, and my boyfriend then got involved and, you know, we put together a little bit of a combination.

You

Greg Lambert (30:23)
That work husband helps out a lot.

Marlene Gebauer (30:26)
you

So Jennifer, I’m going to pose our crystal ball question to you. So for law firms and in-house counsel that are listening along with us, if they want to be ready for the next three to five years of AI data and legal ops transformation, what are the one or two moves that you think they should make this year or let’s say?

2026, since we only have less than a month to go. So they’re not scrambling later.

Jennifer McIver (30:57)
I think if legal ops teams, law firms, anybody wants to move forward, and I alluded to this earlier, it’s data first. It’s centralizing your data, making sure that the data you’re collecting is usable data that matters. I think that is huge. I think you’re going to see teams lag if they’re not really focusing on that. And sometimes that can be a really heavy lift, but I think that that’s really important. And then the next is just starting now with transparency and communication. Greg, I know you don’t

the buzzwords there, but I think that it absolutely is having those conversations now with law firms, with other legal service providers, with the ecosystem, you know.

being transparent with this is what we’re struggling with, this is what we need help with, whether that’s from a financial budget sense, know, a cost savings or whether that’s even from technology. think that, you know, having those conversations now, you can position yourself to have better partnerships to move forward with AI in the future. And then last but not least, I’m going to get, I’m going sneak a third in on you, Marlene. And that’s really going to be examining your expertise within your team. And I think that 2026 is really going to be the year of redefining the role within legal

operations, whether that’s on the law firm side with, you know, legal operation, innovation, knowledge management, or whether it’s on the law firm side. I think really looking at, you know, the folks that are participating and contributing and what skills do they have to bring the data together, to resource that and to really leverage AI and be passionate about it in order to move things forward. So I think you’re going to see a lot of shifts this year coming up in 2026 on the roles and how people are hiring.

Greg Lambert (32:33)
Yeah, just for the record, love transparency and communication. It’s just we’re bad, so bad at it.

Jennifer McIver (32:42)
It’s buzzwords unless you give actual, you know, it really is unless you dive into it. And I catch myself saying it a lot, but what I really mean is to dig deeper, right? And to give those examples.

Greg Lambert (32:54)
All right, well Jennifer McIver from ELM Solutions, Wolters Kluwer thank you very much for coming on and having such a great conversation with us.

Marlene Gebauer (33:02)
Thank you.

Jennifer McIver (33:03)
I loved it. Thank you guys for the great questions and so for some laughs too and for making my work husband now a knowledgeable to all.

Greg Lambert (33:12)
Ha

Marlene Gebauer (33:15)
And thanks to all of you, our listeners, for taking the time to listen to the Geek in Review podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a colleague. We’d love to hear from you on LinkedIn and Blue Sky.

Greg Lambert (33:25)
And Jennifer, for listeners who want to follow your work, what’s the best place to find you and your newsletter?

Jennifer McIver (33:33)
I absolutely think LinkedIn, whether you’re following me personally or whether you’re following ELM Solutions, the ELM Insider, those are the best place to be. And definitely respond. If you disagree with me or if you have any further questions, reach out, because I love, again, to have those conversations. That’s how we learn and that’s how we’re able to convey some change.

Marlene Gebauer (33:52)
Thank you very much, Jennifer. And as always, the music you hear is from Jerry David DeCicca Thank you very much, Jerry.

Greg Lambert (33:59)
Thanks Jerry. Bye everybody.

Marlene Gebauer (34:01)
Bye.