Show notes
On this episode, we bring order to legal use cases of Microsoft Lists. We chat with Wendy Rubas (General counsel) and Janessa Nelson (Legal operations manager) from the legal organization within VillageMD – a national leader in value-based primary care. We cover a lot of ground how useful integrations between Lists, Power Platform, and SharePoint help optimize people productivity and document automation with visual analytics to improve the patient experience. Click here for this episode's companion blog post and links. Full transcript below and if you click here. People: VillageMD | Website | LinkedIn | Twitter Wendy Rubas (General Counsel) | LinkedIn Janessa Nelson (Legal Operations Manager and Training Executive Producer) | LinkedIn Mark Kashman | Twitter [co-host] Chris McNulty | Twitter [co-host] Resources: SharePoint | @SharePoint | SharePoint community blog Microsoft Lists | Resource center | Adoption | Posts within Microsoft 365 community blog Microsoft Docs - The home for Microsoft documentation for end users, developers, and IT professionals. Microsoft Tech Community Home Stay on top of Office 365 changes Events: Commsverse (Sept.15-16.2021); a Microsoft Teams Community Event) [hybrid: UK - in-person and online] Thrive Conference (Oct.19-20.2021) Microsoft Ignite (Nov.2-4.2021; digital event) - Save the date just announced Microsoft Lists workshop [available now on-demand] Follow The Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone, and discover other Microsoft podcasts: aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts. TRANSCRIPT MARK KASHMAN: Welcome to the Intrazone, a show about the Microsoft 365 intelligent internet. I'm Mark Kashman, here with my cohost, Chris, the guy who thinks about the word Syntex all day long, McNulty. CHRIS MCNULTY: Well, thanks, Mark. Those are the good days. The bad days are the ones where I think about it all night long. MARK KASHMAN: Syntexian dreams; that sounds amazing. CHRIS MCNULTY: Yeah, it's funny, I actually had an odd dream last night where I was using Syntex while riding a bike on a curvy road where there was a giant video screen for miles on the right side of me, and I could watch the documents. It was an indication I should stop looking at technology before I go to sleep. MARK KASHMAN: Yeah, it sounds like maybe also one of those wellness days, you need to take one of those wellness days. CHRIS MCNULTY: Yeah, I'll just settle for days. We're not talking about Freudian analysis of Chris's dreams today. Today, we're going to be hearing from our customer, VillageMD, about how they use Microsoft Lists, and SharePoint and Power BI to drive innovation at the customer level for a whole host of legal applications. So we'll be hearing from their lead legal counsel, Wendy Rubas, and Janessa Nelson, who's one of their legal Operations Manager. MARK KASHMAN: One of the things I wanted to just kind of go into the way-back machine, our friend of the podcast, Tejas Meta (ph), used to manage a solution called Matter Center. And it's really interesting taking some of those valuable insights in Microsoft Word at the time to help promote a lot of saving people time in – specifically in the legal community. But to see a lot about what Wendy and what Janessa and team are doing for the legal team with inside a healthcare company, it's really fascinating to see their use cases, to hear about, obviously, everything they're doing to benefit from their value of their investments in Microsoft 365. But I want to hone in on what do you know about this space. When you think of content management, you know, you must think pretty heavily on there's a lot of content management when you think about the legal community. CHRIS MCNULTY: Yeah, here's the thing about the legal community, the regulatory community, especially if you're coming from kind of a generic SharePoint perspective, a lot of the content is, I'd say, fairly square, and then it's broad and somewhat deep, but not super deep or super structured. And you have the need to be able to collaborate on all of these interestingly rich structured things, whether they're contracts or pleadings, deposition review, court orders, things like patent application, and there's just a wealth of information in there. And how those things get combined with legal research and a collaborative process where there's reuse, and need for governance, you know, fairly high expectations for security and compliance, because this is the legal world, I think it is an industry that really pushes us to the limits of what we can do and hopefully beyond. MARK KASHMAN: Yeah, and within that mix, the content is certainly a huge focus, and it has an internal notion, you know, let's finalize these documents before we share it with our clients and make them longer-term legal form documents. But how to derive and save time in the creation of those, but also how to, in parallel, track time, because we know that a lot of their world is based on billing certain hours and having that be regulated with how it's associated with their output, the documents being a lot of that output. So a lot of what I think you will hear, and what I'm excited for people in the audience to hear is how they're using the tools to kind of combine saving people time, managing time, and ultimately becoming this repository where they can see what are we creating, making it easy to access, and then over time, being able to review what have we done and – and how can we streamline even further? CHRIS MCNULTY: Yeah, you know, it's interesting for folks who kind of live outside of this area, who are thinking of SharePoint for any of the other reasons, legal, I think tends to be a trailing indicator on adoption of SharePoint technologies, because their need to do these highly bespoke integrations with what the rest of us might call project management systems, and what they would think of as matter management. So for legal processes, you have clients, and clients have multiple projects with, call it matters, and being able to integrate with all of that, plus all of these complex workflows for things like conflict checking, can they even work on something, or understanding the current status of all of these areas. The legal profession for – you know, understandably, has been thought of as a paper-based industry for centuries and centuries, and there's that great tradition of information that needs to be carried forward into it. But one thing that when we first sat down with Wendy getting ready for today, it's just fascinating what they've been able to do, hearing about it kind of from the outside, using standard off-the-shelf technologies, with things like workflows and Power BI and everything that we've done with lists of late, to really enrich that experience and lifts it beyond just having sets of documents that people can search for and work on, but being able to create this persona that really kind of steps in and helps. You know, it's interesting; I thought there was someone else they were going to have us interviewed named Sharon Pointer, and it looks like she's not going to be able to speak with us today. Do you know anything about that? MARK KASHMAN: Yeah, you know, Sharon pointer, you know, if you say it a few times fast, you start to understand who Sharon Pointer is: Sharon Pointer, Sharon Point, SharePoint, Sharon Pointer. It is a persona, and I think we'll hear a lot more about it. They even have an avatar, which we'll make sure to have in the blog, so you can see who is Sharon. But it's really interesting to hear from them their use of SharePoint, and their ability to adopt it with their broader audience, who isn't the most technical of audiences, based on what we heard from them, Sharon Pointer being somebody who helps them every day is truly that backend, I think for a way to describe it, a robo-lawyer. We don't want to give away too much, but that persona is pretty important, I think, in two ways. One, that bet that they're putting on that Microsoft 365 backend with tools like SharePoint, Microsoft Lists, leveraging the Power Platform to automate and visualize. But the other thing that they've invested a lot in is people. And when you hear from Janessa, who represents the implementation side, we know the business, they do understand the legal community and their needs, but they're not lawyers. But they're also not traditional IT. They're really there to be solution builders, knowing the legalese requirements, but also knowing the capabilities and the boundaries that they can then build on top of. And I think you'll see it's a lot of configuration and use. It's not deep customization, like Chris said. When they talk about Sharon Pointer, it's really interesting to hear why they use that name, and of course, behind that, what they're really doing. CHRIS MCNULTY: Well, SharePoint Nation, you've probably heard me waste enough time getting ready. I'm here with Mark to bring our guests in. So why don't we get right to it. And let's take a moment and bring Wendy and Janessa into our Intrazone virtual studios. [Music.] MARK KASHMAN: We have reached that point, which is the most interesting point, which is our guests on the Intrazone. We are now pleased to welcome Wendy and Janessa from VillageMD, Wendy, Janessa, welcome to the Intrazone WENDY RUBAS: Thank you so much for having us. It's a true pleasure and thrill to be here. We're listeners of Intrazone. We learn a lot from it. So it's a thrill to be here. MARK KASHMAN: You know, that's the way that I think we became aware because you had written to us and said, "Hey, I love the Intrazone, and we have a great story to tell." And I think pretty immediately, we agreed. We said, you do have a great story to tell. And usually it's a little bit more work for us to get somebody to tell their story. Very much thank you for being here. Before we jump too much into the what the story is, can you share with our listeners a little bit about yourself and your role at VillageMD? Wendy, we'll start with you. WENDY RUBAS: Thank you. Yes, I'm General Counsel at VillageMD. So that means I'm responsible for the legal risk and compliance departments. I also sort of end up owning information governance by default. I never set out to have a background, but my background, I've had to build operating systems in legal departments. This is, I think, the fourth time. I came into my role with that experience MARK KASHMAN: Janessa we have one particular question that typically is not what we start with. We actually are going to hear more about your role based on a lot of how that plays into the story of VillageMD. But just initially, so we can get a sense of who you are and what you do at VillageMD. JANESSA NELSON: My name is Janessa Nelson, and I'm the legal Operations Manager here at VillageMD. Interestingly enough, I'm not actually a lawyer. I do have a specialized master's program from Northwestern University. It's called a Master's of Science and Law. It's sort of a shortened course program where we did take some law classes from law professors at the university, but we also had business and just other sort of interdisciplinary skills, in order to have more practical applications for law and business, to be able to work sort of in this legal operations role that I'm in now. I actually have an interesting background. I studied science in undergrad. And then I went and worked in healthcare as a medical scribe for many years. And that actually taught me really valuable lessons on docket management and writing notes and whatever is written in the chart is what happened. And so, that was sort of my default going in, which actually ended up being a positive instead of a negative, especially with Wendy. So yeah, I'm very lucky to have worked at VillageMD. And, you know, I have a decent amount of career experience, but this is, you know, my first time working in in-house legal department post my master's program. So it's been three years. CHRIS MCNULTY: Yeah, Northwestern is great. They have all of these really creative interdisciplinary programs. I know Microsoft participates in one through the Kellogg School for marketing leadership, where they ship you out for three days and force feed you deep dish pizza and some learning along the way. Apart from the culinary benefits that you may have experienced along the way, I'd love to take our listeners on a little bit of a tour about who we're talking with today, from the perspective of your business. So Wendy, could you chat a little bit about what is VillageMD, and who are some of your internal users WENDY RUBAS: Happy to. VillageMD is a private company. It's a growth company. And the mission of VillageMD is to change healthcare, which is a big mission. But we support and work with primary care providers, and they're changing the way they practice so that instead of providing services, they're working on managing the health of a population. So the analogy I like to use is like you go to a mechanic, when you have a muffler, you need a muffler, and that mechanic goes, here's your muffler, and you pay, versus if the mechanic was responsible to keep all the cars on the road and keep all the cars running. And that's really the change that's happening in healthcare, and VillageMD is at the forefront of that change, a very innovative healthcare company and technology company, MARK KASHMAN: You said, Janessa, that you have obviously some specific training to understand the speak of lawyers, the speak of the healthcare industry. But from a tech perspective, could you summarize, you know, what you would see as some of the broader challenges from an IT perspective that you see within health care, obviously, from a legal perspective? JANESSA NELSON: So I mean, first and foremost, what Wendy has really installed in me is that it should be sort of user friendly, right? So, any of the applications that we're making, we're wanting to allow users to utilize it. That's how you're going to get the best information. And if you build something, and nobody uses it, great, you spent $100,000, and you're not getting anything from it, because no one will use it. So that's sort of one of the first things, there's always a give and take with that, making sure that you're providing enough information so that you have – you can report out or have actionable workflows that are going on, but also making sure that it's people feel comfortable using it, The number two thing is managing the volume and flow of work. Especially when Wendy started and I started, everything was being done via email. And that's just not sustainable as a business continues to grow and adapt and change. Working in email can be great at the start, but once you're getting 100, 200 emails a day, there's only so much that you can do to sort of keep it managed. The other thing that we found is talking between departments is always a struggle that I think every corporation has. It's definitely, you know, something that we've continued to work on, so trying to break down silos of information and make information accessible to multiple different users through one system. And that sort of also goes into another thing, which is source of truth. So you know, every department has different information. You know, if you're reporting something out, is it accurate, or does somebody else have different information? So, that's something that we've definitely been trying to work on is part of the inter-department connection is everyone has one place where…
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