Motorola Mobility, a feisty unit of electronics pioneer Motorola, was sold last year to Google for $12.5 billion. For most in-house law departments, that would have been the end of the story ? deal done, a few retained attorneys move up to the mothership, the rest are let go.
That's not quite how it happened. Indeed, 150 of the 250-member MM legal team either transferred to Google headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., or lost their jobs. One hundred survived, and were told to start packing for a move, early next year, from their longtime suburban Libertyville, Ill., headquarters to Google's flashy new regional offices at Chicago's historic Merchandise Mart.
Post-merger, MM's law department serves all operating groups within the unit, and handles commercial litigation, regulatory compliance, pre-litigation intellectual property matters (IP litigation is handled by Google's law department), and all of MM's patent operation.
Meanwhile, the MM team was encouraged to accelerate its use of technology. The team took that mandate and ran with it ? and now operates an in-house lab for creation of custom apps and other technology designed to fuel MM Legal's work and make it faster, smarter, transparent, and cheaper. Creating and using technology is a fitting assignment for the entity that 30 years ago launched a pioneer commercial (and memorably brick-sized) cell phone that evolved into the popular Razr smartphone brand using Google's Android operating system.
"If there's a company supportive of their own people doing their own thing, it's Google," explains David Kenzer, MM's vice president, law. The department's now-lean operation has already proved to be a plus, he says. "We can play around and innovate a little better because of our size within their organization." The department also has adopted Google's protocol of establishing quarterly goals that skew to individual projects. Among recent endeavors:
- A game app for mobile devices queries employees' knowledge of company-wide ethics policies. Benefit: reduced training costs.
- MM Legal's first "Innovation Challenge" (expected to become a quarterly event) that encourages everyone to pitch tech projects the department should fund in the future.
- A predictive coding study pits different vendors' products against each other, using MM's actual data.
- A global barcode-based document indexing system that will help MM locate legal documents worldwide.
Motorola Mobility's law department has long been recognized as an early adopter of legal technology. Elizabeth Jaworski, director, legal operations, is a member of ALM's LegalTech Educational Advisory Board; MM was a winner in The National Law Journal 's 2013 Chicago Legal Departments of the Year contest for technology use ( http://at.law.com/LTN1308c1).
Kenzer's boss is Scott Offer, MM's senior vice president and general counsel, who reports to MM's CEO Dennis Woodside.
The relationship between MM's legal team and Google's law department is collaborative. "We drive the boat on our vendor relationships, but we discuss those with Google ? and we are always looking for ways to optimize," says Kenzer. For example, the MM law group is in the middle of upgrading its nondisclosure agreement protocols.
Every technology move is aimed at elevating the work done by all attorneys and support staff, says Offer. The point is to get human hands off anything that can be automated and have them focus on strategy instead, he notes.
"As we look at our priorities, our objective is providing our [internal] business clients with the best service and solving their most difficult problems. You need expertise and judgment for that," he says. "We're focusing on productivity tools that give us a vehicle to provide services more efficiently."
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Source: http://www.law.com/corporatecounsel/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202613387457&rss=rss_cc
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