Microsoft’s Tom Orrison and Jason Barnwell talk scaling law departments to meet growing business demands

The latest installment of Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions’ Legal Leaders Exchange Podcast welcomes two experts from the corporate legal department at Microsoft Corporation – Tom Orrison, Director of Legal Operations, and Jason Barnwell, General Manager for Digital Transformation of Corporate, External and Legal Affairs.

In a conversation moderated by Nathan Cemenska, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions’ Director of Industry Insights and Legal Operations, Orrison and Barnwell discuss the challenges of tracking subject matter expertise across vast corporate legal departments, how metadata can help streamline that search, and the urgent business demands forecasting major cultural shifts within the legal industry. Microsoft’s corporate legal department is more than 1800 strong.

“As the business grows and becomes more complex and the regulatory environment in which we work becomes more complex, the old tricks are not going to work. We need to find a way to exponentially scale,” Orrison says during the podcast.

“The Legal Leaders Exchange Podcast was launched to deliver unparallelled insight into how today’s corporate law departments are optimizing their legal operations and driving new efficiencies,” Cemenska of Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions says. “Thank you to Tom Orrison and Jason Barnwell for providing a window into how even a company as robust as Microsoft can remain nimble in the face of legal’s ongoing digital transformation.”

Orrison leads a team at Microsoft focused on contracting, records, legal procurement, productivity solutions and support services. His responsibilities include digitially transforming the delivery of legal services while continuing to maintain the durable systems needed to support high-volume work.

Barnwell leads the innovation efforts inside Microsoft’s Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs department, helping to guide the cultural and technical investments that contribute the most value in an increasingly fast-moving and complex environment.

ELM Solutions, part of Wolters Kluwer’s Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) division, is the market-leading global provider of enterprise legal spend and matter management, contract lifecycle management and legal analytics solutions. The company provides a comprehensive suite of tools that address the growing needs of corporate legal operations departments to increase operational efficiency and reduce costs. Corporate legal and insurance claims departments trust its innovative technology and end-to-end customer experience to drive world-class business outcomes. The other legal solutions business of Wolters Kluwer GRC is CT Corporation.

Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions was named a leader in both the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Legal Spend Management 2020 Vendor Assessment and IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Matter Management 2020 Vendor Assessment. The company’s award-winning products include Passport®, one of the highest rated ELM solutions in the latest Hyperion MarketView™ Legal Market Intelligence Report and TyMetrix® 360°, the industry’s leading SaaS-based e-billing and matter management solution. CLM Matrix, meanwhile, was named a “strong performer” in The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 report. ELM Solutions’ LegalVIEW® portfolio of legal analytics solutions is based upon the industry’s largest and most comprehensive legal spend database, with more than $150 billion in invoices.

About Wolters Kluwer Governance, Risk & Compliance

Governance, Risk & Compliance is a division of Wolters Kluwer, which provides legal and banking professionals with solutions to help ensure compliance with ever-changing regulatory and legal obligations, manage risk, increase efficiency, and produce better business outcomes. GRC offers a portfolio of technology-enabled expert services and solutions focused on legal entity compliance, legal operations management, banking product compliance, and banking regulatory compliance.

Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the healthcare; tax and accounting; governance, risk and compliance; and legal and regulatory sectors. We help our customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with specialized technology and services. Wolters Kluwer reported 2021 annual revenues of €4.8 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,800 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.

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