Episode 60: Contract Lifecycle Management with Isabelle Engelhard and Elisa Ensmenger

This episode is brought to you by Precisely, to CLM platform setting a new standard for digital contracting. For more info, go to PreciselyContracts.com/LDB. Welcome to Legal Design Podcast! We are your hosts Nina Toivanen and Henna Toivanen. In this season finale, we meet with Isabel Engelhardt and Elisa Ensmanger, two in-house lawyers from WIAAERA, a media company combining studios and talent agencies. They are joining us to discuss how to design technology-led future-proof legal department and how we are ira-starred thoroughly of transformation journey with contact life-civil management. Elisa and Isabel also share with us their experiences about working as a lawyer in creative spaces with artists, social media influencers and their agents, tune in to hear more! Hi, thank you very much for having us. We're very excited to join your podcast today. I'm Isabel Engelhardt. I'm a German qualified lawyer working as an in-house legal counsel at WIAAERA since 2020 now. Alongside my traditional law studies, I also received an LLB focusing more on this in-house counseling role as well as an LLM in intellectual property law in New York City. I started my professional career as a lawyer in a boutique media law firm here in Berlin, but I quickly realized that I rather wanted to work in-house and just to be closer to the projects and get to interact more closely with the non-deleted colleagues from different kind of backgrounds and to see how they approach projects and what their needs are. So I can support them best in my legal advice. Now as a legal counsel here at WIAAERA, I do exactly that and I advise all our non-deleted departments and also management, also legal matters arising from our business portfolio. In the last past two years almost now, I have also started to focus more on legal tech and legal design and together with Elisa, I just recently or we just recently implemented our first C&M system. This process was very exciting and we are happy to talk about this today. Perfect. Welcome to the podcast and how about you Elisa? Hi to everyone listening. I'm Elisa Enzmanger. First off, thank you from my side as well for having us on the podcast. A bit about me, I'm a journalist from Germany and I work in-house at WIAAERA alongside Isabel as a legal/contract manager. I got my LLV degree with a focus on intellectual property law from Humboldt University in Berlin and my LM degree with a concentration arts sports and entertainment law from Penn State law at the Pennsylvania State University in the United States. And I've joined Isabel in 2022 and this is actually my first job out of law school and I decided to go in-house because I just wanted to be in the middle of all projects that are happening. Not just on the side lines, hearing about what's going on but to be in the know in the middle of everything. And I also have a little fun fact for you. We are at CART My Eye because Penn State's motto is "we are" so when I saw the job ad from WIAAERA I felt like this was just the perfect job mesh for a Penn State alum and I was right. That's sweet. WIAAERA in case you are wondering is where Europe's largest talent agency and a studio all combined under one roof. We actually belong to Bertelsmann and the RTL group. We have about 240 employees and we're spread out all across Europe. We have eight offices in total all across Europe but our headquarters is in Berlin and that's also where Isabel and I are based and where we're calling out of today. And yeah, what do we do Isabel? Yeah, we are actually works as a talent agency with more than 1,500 artists and creators from all verticals and across the 12 markets we operate in and we manage and develop artists. Actually, yeah, we say from a new generation because it's a combination of traditional media stars but also content creators from social media platforms and yeah, we empower our artists and creators to grow across all platforms to reach new audiences. We connect them with brand partners. We connect them with all our kind of partners to release products or such as books or doing merchandise and we have a very diverse portfolio of clients including brands and podcasters, foundations but also NGOs. And yeah, we kind of grew as a media company to offering our clients kind of a one-stop shop solution for their projects. We consult them in strategy, conception, but we also have, as I said, a production studio and we also heavily do data animals. And yeah, we help our clients to become part of a community and spread across all relevant social media platforms. Obviously, right now, the hot topic is is TikTok and Twitch, but yeah, maybe there are more to come. And yeah, we combine different expertise from storytelling to the platform expertise and just try to present our clients full service in one place. Yeah, that sounds really interesting actually. So you mentioned that you operate in different locations. Would you like to share something about your legal department? Do you have lawyers in all of the locations or is it centralized to Berlin where you both are and how many lawyers do you have at the moment? Sure. Yeah, actually, our legal department consists of three full-time legal counsels and I hear at our headquarter and also our lovely colleague Emily and our Stockholm office. But as Lisa said, we're a 100 subsidiary of Bertelsmann and the RGL group. So we also work with the support of a full team of lawyers within the group and also of course with local experts in our markets. And yeah, also our COO and viewers is also a lawyer for self. So there's also legal expertise in our management level. Yeah, that sounds great. And I mean, we are era you're doing a lot of creative work. Does this creativity or design play a role in your legal department? Yeah, for sure. It's actually, I would say design and tech or legal design and legal tech plays a major role in our daily business or daily work in our legal department because yeah, as the concept of design thinking is human centered approach. Yeah, it exactly describes how we work with all the non-legal departments in our company as well as with the clients and external parties who are involved in the projects and who will be addressed by the respective contracts or agreements which we draft and negotiate in our legal department. So, yeah, this whole concept of getting together and connect [BLANK_AUDIO] with each other, learn from each other. Especially, yeah, and this has been questioned each other during the process to fully grasp and understand the business needs and desire of the desired outcome of the involved parties. It is, yeah, as a legal counsel within a company, I think for everyone, yeah, it should be a major topic and yeah, it is definitely for us. And yeah, it's a lot of fun, actually. - I can hold on, Leigh Green. - Yeah. So what type of legal questions do you normally work with if you can give us some examples? You already did describe what does your era do, but who are your typical clients and perhaps what kind of legal needs they may have and how do these needs perhaps shape the work you do as lawyers? You mentioned TikTok, for example, as a lawyer, do you really need to know how TikTok operates? I guess you do. - Maybe Elisa, you can go ahead. - Mm-hmm. - Yes, yes, to tackle the TikTok part first, yes, you have to know how TikTok works. You don't have to be the biggest expert and on top of every trend, but it definitely helps to know what's going on and what is, I've have a grasp of what is trendy or trending right now. And that goes for pretty much every platform. It's not solely TikTok, it's just, you need to have kind of a grasp of what's trending in the world right now. Across all platforms, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, TikTok is kind of, because you know, that is kind of where it's at right now, I would say. So that is a priority to really know what's going on there but yeah, you have to know about every platform. And then how do we work and what are our clients? Like we said, to speak about TikTok and yes, by dance, that is one of our clients. We are, we are, is pretty much at the forefront of digital marketing and we deal with a lot of complex legal issues. That is because of the very diverse portfolio of clients on one hand that all have different business needs and they all require different legal approaches. But also like a big topic is, we said that we also have a studio, we also have a production team. We also have productions that have to, that have to be overseen with copyright issues and just everything you can think of, bringing production. That's maybe not the first thing you think of when, - Oh yeah. - Who hear about in-house lawyer. - Wow. - That's, - Do you find out that at the studio a lot too? - Like we had actually on the same floor - Don't publish this. - Yeah, we get some insights and it's definitely, it's such a fresh, our breath of fresh air to be with the creative people because you know the legal people, sometimes we are not the most creative from the ethical. So actually one of my favorite parts is probably getting to see the concepts and just talking to them about their ideas and everything they have in mind. And so that is a very, very fascinating part of our job here and very entertaining part. But besides this part, we also do a lot of contract drafting and negotiating and with the negotiations, there are of course there are different clients, there are big international clients, but you also have smaller clients. And that is not without, you really need to get a feel for how to deal with each client and especially because this is the first job coming out of our school. It was a very interesting learning process for me to really get that feeling how to approach a contract with a big international company and how to approach a contract with smaller companies or production companies are just more creative contextual partners. Yeah, so it's a lot of variety and it's very complex to have this as a daily task, but it's a lot of fun. When it also comes to how we deal with the legal design aspect in our daily work, yeah, it's really crucial for us to understand who is the client we are dealing with, how are their internal structures, how do they work, but also what we and the client try to achieve with the contract we're drafting and all these aspects we obviously need to combine and we really need to connect with the non-legal colleagues and project owners. And yeah, as a leader said, it really makes our work a lot of fun because we're not daily sitting just alone in our room, among lawyers. And we're actually, we're as Lisa also mentioned, we're sitting on one floor with the studio team and we get daily on a day basis. We talk about projects and how we can support them in our work. This episode is brought to you by precisely the contract management lifecycle tool, helping enterprises to scale their contracting in a sustainable way. Precisely automates every aspect of your contracting workflow so a legal professional like you will be able to focus on making better decisions and leaving the office on time. - We heard that you have recently implemented a contract lifecycle management system and I think CLM is one of the host of tables in legal tech at the moment and there are many corporations thinking of implementing one. Would you would you like to share us about this project we would really love to hear how is it in practical level? What phases did it include and what kind of team did you have working on this issue? - Sure, yeah, actually we always call it our baby. This great system which we now implemented because we're really, really happy that yeah, we were able to find the perfect solution for us actually. We started this whole process of searching, finding and implementing the system about two years ago and even though it sounds very obvious like how you would start your search for the right CLM system but it's very crucial to understand that you obviously first need to define your needs and requirements both from a legal but also from a business perspective. Yeah, including the questions who will actually use the system? How will the departments use it on a daily basis just to make sure we all know what to expect from such a system when implementing it? And this already took a while and yeah, once we looked at a few tools it was very fast clear that we found the perfect CLM system for us in precisely and yeah, and actually when you said it's often said that CLM systems are more for bigger companies or corporations instead of smaller companies. Yeah, maybe we are like when it comes to the size or the amount of employees we have at the moment we are maybe a smaller company but as mentioned due to our many clients and diverse projects we have we also have a lot of legal work and a lot of contracts we're drafting and negotiating so it just made sense for us to get such CLM system implement into our work and yeah, we were just very happy to find pretty good. And yeah, maybe at least I can tell you a bit more about how we actually implemented it then. Yes. So actually what we did was we first decided to tackle two main topics and the first topic was what do we do with all the contracts that have been drafted and negotiated already. So the archiving part of things and then the creation of the new contracts, the how the templates are going to be automated and how we're going to set up that whole thing. And we really wanted to for the archiving part of things we really wanted to set up a structure that really reflected all different areas of business that we have and that it was really easy for everyone to identify the responsible people for each contract. And that the whole contract management would be carried out most efficiently as possible. And the archiving part is actually where we started and thought we were going to this is how we're going to get a head start and do all of this. Then we actually found out that the implementation of the or the automating and templates that we have to draft new contracts that that also required some techniques that we have to acquire first because setting up a logic behind these templates to have a template in a word document. It's easy to change things because that's really easy to set up the template in the word document. It's easy to change things and you can you're pretty free but to set up a logic behind it that really takes a long time to if you if you've never done this before and for Isabelle and I both of us we have never done this before. It also is kind of a rush you get when you realize that this is working and this the logic behind it it does make sense and we also and precisely there's a thing called formulas and you know lawyers were not the most prone to or prone to numbers. Most of the lawyers I know so when we got these formulas working I think I might have shed a tear of happiness because I was so glad that things were falling into place and that that whole setup is working out and the absolute best feeling is to look into our system to look into precisely and see all the contracts that are being drafted. Based on the templates that we have automated and to see that they are that our teams are just heavily using this and currently are. For our largest teams are are using precisely that includes HR production our talent agency and the project business team that works with a bunch of different diverse projects and more to come soon and one thing that is really that really stands out with precisely is that with the whole contract life cycle. It feels extremely doesn't just feel extremely secure it is really secure legally secure and just it just we as Germans we really like our structure. So a contract automation thing is it's just our dream it's a dream country for every German so yeah. Brilliant. Yeah for us it's actually very surprising that in the. Yeah to compare it internationally that Germany is that far behind when it comes to the attack because it's actually as a leader said exactly what we love and that it makes things so much easier and just. Yeah easier to handle for for all parties involved not just from a legal perspective but also yeah our colleagues they they're very happy with it because it's very straight forward and and easy to handle and just the look and feel of the system so it's I think it's a joy on the sides. How has it changed if you if you compare though to your lawyering life before the contract life cycle management system prior to that how did you work then and now that you have implemented the system how has your your daily lawyering changed. Yeah I mean the whole implementation process already gave us the opportunity to look at all our workflows again to discuss with the non legal departments whether the implemented workflows are actually still up to date and make sense and if they're yeah workable for everyone or how we can make them even even better and more efficient. And this we then took into the implementation process and yeah I think the workflows are more straight forward now and yeah is that more efficient but also yeah legal is secure because our our colleagues now know where to find the most recent and up to date versions of of templates. They know who is responsible for a template or who drafted a contract where they might have questions about and yeah also the excess policies which you can use within the system work or the policies you can set it it makes it very clear for all departments that they can only see the templates which are really. Necessary or used within their daily work and yeah like all the contracts being drafted out of the tool can easily be reviewed internally but also externally and all these contract versions then are stored within one place. And so you can really in the end look back and see like how a contract evolved over time and and yeah deadlines can be monitored very easily and yeah all the sign contracts in the end are securely stored in one place and get compared to the work before. We also had our workflows and systems and we yeah we work fine with that but obviously this this yeah every workflow probably can can be improved and I think with this museum system it made our our work among all these departments just more effective and. Yeah did you have you received any feedback from your customers or the people who are you have been signing the contracts with. Well we've we've at least received feedback from the teams that are working with them we haven't received any complaints that is also very positive feedback actually because it was such a for such a big change of how the contracts are being drafted such a big change internally. It was very seamless transition and one that happened like externally happened without hiccups that the external parties knew that we changed how the contracts were being drafted which is also I think a compliment or I take it as a compliment at least but also we've internally we have set up a good feedback and improvement suggestion system I think. That really works for us and we are in constant communication with the different departments on where they think we should adjust things and which makes it even even easier for their daily workflow because that was also kind of that was. And the issue kind of to have to one and have the standardized process that the contract automation gives you but to also make it your own kind of to yeah to shape it in the way you wanted to work for it to have it work best for our company and I think we really achieved that and that is something that makes us really proud and also precise shout out to precisely at this point because they are. They are actually such a good support and we are in constant also in constant communication. with Precising, whenever we feel like we need some input from them, our contact for St. Victoria, she's always there and so also we've really supported throughout the whole process, which is I think a big thing because it is a big change. Yeah, I can believe it. Have you gotten any ideas based on this experience of implementing the CLM system of what other possibilities there could be in terms of legal tech in the near future, like what could be done next in in automating and digitizing legal operations, for example. I mean, we definitely see that yeah, the legal world has just started to get familiar with these concepts of legal tech and legal design and that there's still a lot of room to get involved in how to implement these steady processes and yeah, like to automate more of your of the standardized work. Yeah, the work which comes in more and more and yeah, I think especially with AI, now there's a whole new, yeah, a whole new topic, especially lawyers feel like, will this, yeah, will it be replaced? Yeah, we will replace within the in the legal market at some point and yeah, I think there's still a lot of a lot of room for this but I also think like obviously our work will not never be completely replaced. There's always room for our individual advice but actually we think like if this whole automation and legal tech can actually help lawyers to concentrate then they are work on individual very specific individual cases but all the other things that can be standardized and make made more efficient and yeah, this can just be a good mix and match for the future. Yeah, it's been great to have you with us. It's a well and Elisa, it's great to meet you guys and thanks for being part of the legal design podcast story. It's time for our final question now. We often ask people to predict future and stuff like that but now that it's spring time and there's a lot of people graduating from low schools and Finney's prime ministers, Anna-Marine had her 50 minutes in fame giving speech at New York University but now it's your turn. What tips would you give to these recent low school graduates? Sure, yeah, my advice actually would be not to expect or at least not at the moment to learn or develop the skills and legal tech and legal design already in university or in your yeah education especially here in Germany it's very still the education is very old school or traditional and so yeah I would advise get informed and involve your style for instance by joining seminars in these topics or listen to this wonderful podcast and to just try to stay up to date with this and yeah I just believe that this will shape or reshape the future of the legal market. Yes and I would just add that you should not shy away from asking for help or the input from others. Because coming out of law school you oftentimes think oh my god I have to know everything and when I start my job everybody everybody there expects me to know everything but that's really not the case so you can take a big breath and can be relieved to know that nobody expects you to know everything and as a specific advice maybe for working or starting your job in-house for a company you you have studied the law and you have probably a great gut instinct when it comes to legal decision making but you will need the input and the experience of the other departments to really get a feel for the business as well so talk talk talk communicate and network and you'll be great I'm sure. Perfect advice thank you guys for visiting us. Thank you for having us. Thank you for listening to legal design podcast. This was our episode with Isabel Engelhard and Elisa Esmanger. For more info go check out our website legaldesignpodcast.com and our social media channels on Twitter Instagram and link it in. This episode is sponsored by precisely contract lifecycle management tool. Precisely has a special offer for legal design podcast listeners go to precisely contract.com/ldp and get a free assessment of the state of your contracting and tips on how to automate your contracts.