Jon Olson0:00
I'm Jon Olson. I'm the senior vice president and general counsel of Blackbaud. I've been here since 2008 and I am in charge of all the legal function within Blackbaud, as well as all the real estate function. I learned about Prosodas probably about four years ago from Joe Colucci, and he thought that it would be a very valuable tool for the law department. At first, he was touting it as something that we'd want to have all of our law firms use, and I think there'd be a great value to that, but I was thinking there might be a tremendous value even within the law department because here in our law department, we do a lot of drafting and a lot of negotiation of contracts, and we're heavy users of software solutions such as Microsoft Word and Excel. So there's a tremendous value for people to be very proficient and adapted in them. And the reality is, no one ever gets training on those. There's no training, as far as I'm aware. They come with the software itself. And then on top of that, I can guarantee you there's no training on those sorts of technologies from law school. So I thought it'd be a worthwhile thing to try. In our department, we have about nine attorneys in the department, so it's a perfect size for something like that. And so we brought it in. First, we did the diagnostic tests, and the diagnostic test was very eye-opening because even people who thought they were very, very adept at those technologies found out they had meaningful gaps. And then went through the training modules, and I think every single person found that there was something to be learned and benefited from it. From a solution perspective, it's an excellent solution. As I mentioned earlier, every single person in the department who used it found they learned some kernel, some more than others of course, but everybody found something that made their day easier and made it just a little easier, a little less frustrating to use those software applications. And I think it saves time. And from my own perspective, I'm not quite the power user of Word and Excel that my team is, but I still learned quite a bit. I found it to be a tremendous time-saving benefit.
It's not an expensive proposition, so it certainly wasn't money or budget. I think in this case, as with so many things in today's world, it was finding the time for my team to take the time out of their day, which is usually pretty booked and pretty busy as it is, to focus on something that's going to improve them in the long run. But that's always the case, right? Sometimes the day-to-day stuff pushes out the strategic things that you'd like to do. But I think when we mandated it for everybody and made sure that people gave it the focus, I think people found the value in it pretty quickly. So time is really what it is. It's a process, right? It takes a little bit of time, but it's well worth going down that path.
The biggest issue I think for us was creating greater efficiency. That's the primary thing. We're very document intensive in the law department, as you might imagine. Documents from mergers and acquisitions, documents from commercial transactions. We probably put more written output than any other department in the company—other than perhaps marketing, maybe they have a different sort of output—but in terms of documents that are heavily dependent on understanding how the word processing system is used, it's definitely the law department. And so it ends up for us both saving time, which is a benefit, and also avoiding mistakes. Because a lot of times, particularly in some of the more nuanced areas of the Microsoft Word application, there are lots of ways you can have things that are missed numbered or missed referenced or missed cross-referenced. And so the shortcuts, the hacks, the little tricks, just the general training that LTA provides allows us to just be more efficient with our time and be more accurate.
Well, first of all, they stand up in the competition by being primarily the only organization that I know that's doing this at all. Now I suspect there are some other organizations that do some embryonic training for Word and Excel and Adobe, but none of them are geared towards the needs of law departments, law firms, and the legal industry. So in that respect, they're head and shoulders above anyone else.
