Watch Onit’s Latest Webinar: McDonald’s Corporation – Building and Executing a Legal Technology Roadmap

Onit recently co-hosted a webinar with McDonald’s and shared some valuable insights about how they built and executed a legal technology roadmap. The webinar was part of our new Lean into LegalOps online learning initiative.

The session opened with a brief review by our VP of Global Sales, Matt DenOuden, of our Business Continuity Apps and new cost savings calculators. Curtis Batterton, Legal Operations and Global Technology Manager at McDonald’s, began his discussion with his favorite quote by Ray Kroc, “None of us is as good as all of us.” Curtis felt like this resonated especially now with the current COVID-19 crisis. He then continued setting the stage by describing McDonald’s current legal technology landscape, followed by a quick review of their strategy up until the pandemic. Their strategy consisted of getting everything “working” to “building” an aspirational roadmap, surveying business and legal teams to identify their issues and wish lists and getting technology into the hands of global teams.

Curtis then offered some insight into the survey results. Three things that respondents wanted from technology were workload rebalancing, reducing workload and self-service. He continued by detailing some of the biggest challenges he is facing now; one of which is trying to keep all systems stable and available, and avoiding situations that may prevent people from doing crisis response. This unfortunately has led to other projects being put on hold as the current crisis continues. In regard to change management, Curtis noted that if it’s not crisis response, then it’s not the most important thing to do right now.

Curtis continued by explaining that long term goals still are critical such as globalizing systems, moving to paperless processes and tools and addressing workload and efficiency. But he added the key caveat that there will be a “new normal” and changes will have to be made. He also believed that legal work won’t change much, but the way the work gets done will change; such as more remote and off-site work. Curtis then explained how the crisis has been the impetus for using certain technology even more. In terms of selecting technology, he commented that it’s a fine balancing act to find a solution that every market and team can agree on using – adding that it’s just not possible to customize a solution for every different market or team. Leadership buy-in is critical before and during this process.

Curtis then explained how they had been using a platform approach to technology and he favors systems that are flexible and can respond to rapidly changing needs. He further noted that these needs are being amplified during this crisis in ways really never seen before. Curtis closed out his time with an overview of his thoughts about the future and key lessons learned, including:

• Strategies will need to be made with a focus on agility
• Technology evaluation should consider remote accessibility and flexible configurability
• Workflow and collaboration solutions developed in response to the current crisis can be built into platforms like Apptitude (Onit’s workflow automation platform)

A Q&A session filled out the remaining time on the webinar. We hope you’ll take some time to watch this highly informative webinar.