Welcome to Operationally Speaking, where we get to know the legal operations professionals behind some of the most prominent corporate law departments in the world. These are the individuals changing in-house practice as we know it through innovations in process and technology.

Daniel Hegwood began working at AppNexus Inc., an advertising technology company, five years ago. After about a year at the startup, he found that the New York-based company’s in-house attorneys faced a vexing challenge not so unusual for law departments: While they should have been working on sophisticated legal matters, they were using up a lot of their time on operational tasks.