Building an Effective Cybersecurity Assessment for Outside Counsel & Vendors

Robin Snasdell is Managing Director at Consilio. Chris Dale, of the eDisclosure Information Project, interviewed him recently, and asked him to explain what contract management is and why companies would go to Consilio for help with it.

Robin Snasdell says that companies engaged in some kind of contract management technology implementation look for opportunities to do more with the technology and get more value from its use.

There are big opportunities to take legacy contracts and move them into the technology, to extract data and metadata from them and use the resulting information to enhance the business.

An example might be an M&A transaction where a company, whether buyer or seller, is trying to understand what data exists within the company’s contracts, perhaps as part of due diligence exercise.

This is most obviously a search for risk buried within the contracts, but it is also an opportunity to seek out hidden value and opportunities which are being missed. One part of the business might not know, for example, that beneficial terms may have been negotiated by another department.

As a result, the company may be able to develop new templates and new clause libraries while perhaps finding others which they would rather not use and would like to be rid of across all their contracts. There is a continuing value in this after the initial exercise as the company is enabled to monitor and audit the use of particular contract terms.

Consilio uses a mixture of technology and human review. The technology may, for example, be set to look for certain clauses but it may be necessary to use human eyes and skills to decide what to do about them.

Robin Snasdell emphasizes that Consilio has an existing eDiscovery infrastructure with technical locations around the world and a significant review capacity which can be applied as necessary. In addition, Consilio is well known for its ability to handle a very wide range of languages.

Karen Hornbeck has over 15 years of technical and legal process consulting experience, and specializes in law department technology implementations, Information Governance, Data Privacy, and Information Security Solutions for heavily litigated and regulated clients. Her primary focus is on the development of forward-thinking programs to assist clients in identifying their high-value/high-risk information and understanding the related privacy and security considerations.

Mary Anne Jay currently serves as the Manager of Legal Business Services for ConocoPhillips. In that role, she is responsible for the financial, budgeting, human resources and facilities functions for the legal department as well as managing special projects for the General Counsel. Her financial role includes monitoring and negotiating billing rates with outside counsel.

Mary Anne graduated with a BBA in Accounting from the University of Houston, is a Certified Public Accountant and spent the first half o fher career in a variety of financial roles in public accounting, real estate and banking. She entered the legal arena in 1993 and served as Chief Financial Officer for Bracewell and Locke Lord, and as Director of Administrationfor Gardere Wynne & Sewell. She joined ConocoPhillips in 2012.