In this Q&A with The Texas Lawbook, Heather Randall discusses the traits she seeks in outside counsel, what outside counsel need to know when working with her and more.
Texas Lawbook: How is AI changing your business and how you and your legal team operate?
Heather Randall: Legal also owns the RFP process. We have now automated the RFP response creation and content library management. The legal department also onboarded a CLM tool with built-in AI that can do initial contract review, summarization and collaboration. We are starting to see significant reduction in turnaround times, increased accuracy, reduced manual drafting and external counsel review costs, and increased legal team productivity and capacity.
Lawbook: What do you look for in hiring outside counsel?
Randall: Aggressiveness. I usually hire outside counsel for litigation when I do. I am not a fan of long-drawn-out litigation. A quicker resolution is always better for the company. This takes an outside counsel that understands what the best result is for the company and to apply pressure or employ strategies to direct the litigation to a quicker resolution, rather than just follow a scheduling order. I like outside counsel who is creative and thinks outside of the box on ways to resolve the matter, rather than using the same old litigation playbook.
Lawbook: What does outside counsel need to know about working with you?
Randall: I like aggressive lawyers and lawyers who provide regular updates.
Lawbook: What are your pet peeves about outside counsel?
Randall: Non-responsiveness. I like regular status updates — weekly if a lot is going on. I usually ask because my executive management team wants to know. If I must ask a couple of times to get updates, I get very frustrated, because I do not have updates when I am asked. Overstaffing would be my second, especially in more corporate transaction work — hard to watch five-plus lawyers on a Zoom call and then adding the cost up in your head while the call is going on. No one-hour standard call should be $10,000 plus.
Lawbook: What question am I not asking that I should be asking?
Randall: I have an 18-year-old senior boy, so I am in the whirlwind of college applications! I also have a 16-year-old girl who is starting her recruiting year for lacrosse. Things are busy in the Randall house, and I watch my emails regularly for updates and hope for good news.
Click here to read the Lawbook profile of Heather Randall.