Microsoft Corp.'s legal department has a longer history with alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) than many, a history that's left the team with insights on what works and what doesn't.

This week, the Redmond, Washington-based company celebrated 10 years with ALSP Integreon. It's an anniversary that prompted Microsoft director of legal operations Tom Orrison to reflect on the lessons, successes and struggles of working with ALSPs. While he was not director of legal ops when Microsoft began working with ALSPs, starting the role in Feb. 2018, he's been with the company for nearly 15 years and learned from his predecessors.

Corporate Counsel spoke with Orrison about his team's experience with ALSPs and advice for those starting out. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Corporate Counsel: What have you learned from your initial working relationships with ALSPs?

Tom Orrison: Make sure you really do partner with your alternative legal service provider. Make sure you bring them in, educate them about your business, let them know what you care about and paint a very clear picture of what success looks like. Then monitor and track that.

CC: How do you monitor that?

TO: We typically have technology to track individual items. We track service-level agreements, types of requests. And we have key performance indicators that we try to meet every month.

If things aren't going well, we have an early line of sight, so we can address those issues and course correct. We have very open and honest discussions about how to fix it. We try not to frame those problems as, “Hey provider, do better.” It's more, 'What's the problem? And can we do something to help?”

CC: Are there still some challenges when it comes to in-house counsel using ALSPs?

TO: I've worked with attorneys for my entire professional career, over 20 years. They're trained to be risk-averse.

Make sure they're comfortable that what you're doing is relatively low-risk compared to other legal work. If you can get them in a position where they understand that there are higher-value tasks they could be focused on if we took some of the tasks off their plate, that helps.

Make sure you pull the attorneys in, that they understand what is going on with continual status reports, updates, that they get to meet the team. Those things do help smooth things out and make them work better.

CC: Do you communicate with your colleagues who manage other ALSPs?

TO: We have some partner teams that work within Microsoft but also use Integreon for other services. We meet with them on a monthly basis. If there are any issues, or if we're spotting trends, we're definitely open to talking about those.

We have a much larger legal operations meeting on a quarterly basis, where we pull in all the teams and talk about how things are going with internal and external partners. And we try to share best practices and learn from each other. If I'm embarking on a new endeavor, I'll typically ask if anyone's done something similar, and I'll take their playbook and run with it instead of trying to recreate it from scratch.

CC: “Sharing the playbook” is something I heard about a lot at the CLOC [Corporate Legal Operations Consortium] institute last month. Do you collaborate with legal ops professionals from other companies?

TO: Microsoft is one of the forerunners in sharing what we're doing. We do have a core belief that if we share our success stories, our unsuccessful stories and the lessons we've learned, we get more back in return. It's proven true over time.

My manager Jason Barnwell [assistant general counsel of legal business, operations and strategy] has a podcast where he talks about these things. It's not to tell people how great we are. It's to tell people, these are the things we're doing, the struggles we've had, the lessons we've learned. And we're getting more back in return, because the community is really engaged. We learn a ton.

CC: On the subject of internal versus external, how do you decide what work should stay in-house and what should go to an ALSP?

TO: We look for areas where there's lower risk, higher value, repetitive workloads, things like standard procurement contracts.

Typically when I look at some of the new technology, like [artificial intelligence], some of the third parties have exposure to much more variation in data types, which makes it more powerful. There are certain things that if we tried to tackle alone, we wouldn't get the economies of scale that we would if we partnered with a third party.

Lastly, we ask ourselves: is this a core competency, or something that we need to be able to know how to do very, very well? There are certain things that are high value that providers could probably do better, but it's a skill we really want to learn how to do and want to own, so we'll invest the time to tackle that.

CC: Anything else you'd like to add?

TO: We always talk about lessons learned and what not to do. Don't get complacent. Complacency is usually a result of things working really well, but when you get complacent, things change around you and you don't notice them and then you are behind. So we learned that the hard way.

Don't run from change. Expect it and embrace it. It's just a rule we have. Another thing is don't talk more than you listen or do.

And don't expect your partners to understand your business unless you devote the time to educate them. That's probably the biggest lesson I've learned. Don't just throw it over the fence and expect they're going to get it. Pull them in, teach them what you're up to, show them what you care about. That really is a path to success.