McDonald s Case Study

Transcription

1 McDonald s Case Study Knowledge is power. TeamConnect brings McDonald s faster, more efficient access to essential law department When Gloria Santona was named general counsel at McDonald s Corp. in 2001, she envisioned a law department where team members communicate more effectively and can rely on consistent access to the information necessary to support intelligent decisions. Contacts and other general information would be consolidated in one place and all pertinent information, even reports produced by other departments, would be easily accessible. Those responsible for a current matter could even be notified when another team member touched that matter. Information would flow freely throughout the entire department, facilitating added efficiency, better communication, betterinformed analysis and ultimately more strategic To fulfill this vision, McDonald s legal department needed one common system for the entire legal department that stored all-important data and facilitated information flow among team members. What s more, the system had to both integrate with the company s legacy systems and enable the department to create better reports. At the same time, McDonald s Information Technology department wanted the system to align with its current web-based architecture, increase accessibility via the Internet, and cost less to support. McDonald s chose Mitratech s TeamConnect Enterprise to help it achieve all these objectives Wilshire Blvd. Suite 1500 Los Angeles, CA August 1, 2005

2 MCDONALD S LEGAL DEPARTMENT In addition to her role as general counsel, Santona also personally runs Marketing and Intellectual Property, Global Compliance, and International. She also has three direct reports: Bob Switzer, Vice President, Corporate, handles corporate contracts, finance, technology, employee benefits and securities. Cathy Griffin, U.S. General Counsel, oversees all U.S.-based matters, such as partner brands, real estate and development. A team of Division General Counsel, who work hand-in-hand with the field, also report to Griffin, as does Shared Services, a team created to handle all types of real estate transactions for McDonald s 13,000 U.S. sites. Jerry Krulewich, Vice President, Litigation, is ultimately responsible for both customer and commercial suits. Legal department business, including execution of matter management initiatives, is conducted by Megan Willis, Manager of Legal Administration. Michael Stetzer, the legal department s IT liaison, is responsible for planning and helping to implement any legal department technology programs. Visibility for Law Department Management and Corporate Executives Enables Better Management and Mitigates Corporate Risk As executive vice president, general counsel and secretary, Santona oversees law department leadership, management and finance. As a member of McDonald s senior management team, she also regularly updates senior executive management and the board of directors on the status of legal activities in general, as well as any material legal developments. Her ultimate responsibility is to quantify and mitigate legal risks to McDonald s Corporation. Management reports are necessary to facilitate Santona s leadership and management role, and TeamConnect was designed to assist in that process. McDonald s can run reports based on any number of data points. This affords Santona and the entire legal team a better analytical understanding of the entire legal department s operations, enabling them to create more accurate budgets and more effective plans for all involved. Additionally, legal team members, even with limited training, can frequently get the information they need quickly with TeamConnect s search capability; they need not even run a report. BENEFITS: BETTER VISIBILITY Senior management gets better Ease of information retrieval creates efficiency, quicker analysis, and more and better questions. Granular reporting gives executives full Law department can be managed to be more effective. Management can budget more accurately and create a better staffing plan. Corporate Risk can be better understood and mitigated. By enabling easy information retrieval, both by searching and reporting, TeamConnect gives McDonald s more transparency into the company s legal management. More comprehensive data also affords a clear understanding of the company s risks and responsibilities. Automated Document Assembly Increases Efficiency At McDonald s, matter management encompasses far more than just litigation. Contracts, financings, and other law department issues are all subject to the company s legal department processes and managed via TeamConnect. BENEFITS: DOCUMENT ASSEMBLY Time and money is saved in creation of similar agreements. Standardization of agreements enables simpler relationships with all contractors. Enables efficient tracking of agreement deadlines. Ensures agreements remain standard.

3 For example, certain types of contracts have a lot in common. Technology agreements, for instance, are usually standard consulting agreements and work orders, with only a few variables. Creating these types of standard agreements with TeamConnect s document assembly tool ensures that agreements meant to be similar remain standard and enables them to be created more efficiently, saving time and money. Once contracts are completed, TeamConnect promotes compliance by advising key team members of agreement deadlines. Interdepartmental Collaboration Leads to Better Decisions Much of McDonald s operational energy goes into the management of its 13,000-plus real estate sites. This means the company must track all types of information about each and every site, including lease, payee, and tax While only some of this tracking is done by the legal department, the updated information is necessary for the law department to perform. Up-to-date information and teamwork with other departments are essential for the effective legal management of all sites. Yet, the real estate department utilizes a mainframe-based legacy system to track BENEFITS: INTERDEPARTMENTAL COLLABORATION Efficient transfer of information from legacy systems still in use. Data from legacy systems is more valuable with increased reporting capabilities. Patterns and trends can be analyzed to limit overall risk. Collaboration among members of various departments allows wiser McDonald s improved this process by creating Shared Services, a special team run by paralegal Debbie Arbet. Shared Services tracks and analyzes all real estate information so that all aspects of all real estate deals are fully transparent. When, for example, a real estate attorney is renegotiating a lease while a tax attorney is managing a payment issue on the same site, each will be aware of the other s progress. And when an attorney works with a landlord on a lease issue, he or she can see the entire history with that landlord, such as documents and notes from another attorney regarding a recent change in ownership. Shared Services allows for better information, more collaboration and, ultimately, improved Mitratech built an import module from the mainframe-based system into TeamConnect that allows all real estate data, including notice memos entered by Arbet s team, to continue to be entered on the mainframe. Each night, all new data is exported from IMS and imported into TeamConnect so the legal team can take full advantage of its tracking, collaboration and notification ability. This simple yet elegant solution allows the legal team full and current access to all types of information, without the inefficient re-keying of data. McDonald s legal department enjoys full transparency into the situation at all real estate sites and provides the framework for the kind of collaboration that produces better decisions. Additionally, TeamConnect s sophisticated reporting capabilities allow the legal department to identify patterns and trends to prevent problems and build further efficiencies. Learning from Experience The unpredictable and volatile nature of litigation makes managing a law department especially difficulty. At its core, TeamConnect is designed to provide McDonald s attorneys with quick access to necessary information about whatever matter they may be working on, along with careful tracking of dockets, calendar, case notes and budget BENEFITS: LITIGATION EXPERIENCE Trend analysis can prevent further litigation. Better strategies can be developed by studying similar matters. Historical data allows for better budgeting. Historical data allows for better staffing and outside counsel selection. Docketing and calendaring limits potential costly errors. Easy access to case information promotes quick and proper decisions.

4 A company as large as McDonald s has vast experience with all types of litigation. Whatever the issue, McDonald s legal department has likely seen it or some variation before. With TeamConnect, attorneys at McDonald s can easily research the specific history of previous matters and bring that experience to each new piece of litigation, boosting McDonald s efficiency in coping with legal issues. Having ready access to information about cases McDonald s has faced in the past empowers attorneys to make better decisions about how to handle virtually any issue. The attorney can analyze everything about previous matters: trial strategy, outside counsel, venue, cost and more. Using this information allows the McDonald s attorneys to create a better (and often more cost efficient) strategy, from selection of outside counsel to evaluation of settlement opportunities. An Improved Method of Ongoing Case Assessment The vast majority of litigation faced by McDonald s involves personal injury. Personal injury team members track and monitor many cases each year, which means they are perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of matter management and the most prolific users of TeamConnect. As such, Geneace Williams, managing counsel and team leader for personal injury, receives regular reports to allow for more effective litigation management. But good reporting is not always enough. Detailed assessment of each and every case is essential for truly effective litigation management. BENEFITS: ONGOING CASE ASSESSMENT Focus can be maintained on key matters. Law department staff can easily distinguish most important cases. Assessments are made on many factors, not just finances. Enables efficient tracking of agreement deadlines. Budgets and staffing plans can be created and adjusted based upon the value of the matter. Promotes earlier resolution. Accurate case evaluation on an early and ongoing basis provides substantial returns to the law department and the shareholders. Proper decisions can be made about which cases to settle, and when. Often cases can be resolved earlier and less expensively. Cases with a higher exposure, financial or otherwise, can remain on the radar screen of law department and corporate management for extra care and handling. At the same time, a good evaluation methodology promotes more efficient litigation, with budgets and staffing determined by the value of the matter. TeamConnect s reports and organization of data allowed McDonald s to create and implement a viable evaluation methodology that is applied constantly and consistently across all matters, allowing them to provide the proper level of focus on each matter and make better-informed decisions, from early resource allocation through settlement discussions and all the way to trial. Automatic Collaboration Across Teams Ensures Nothing is Missed As a global player in today s busy world, McDonald s must access information quickly and easily at any time of day or night. McDonald s achieves this with TeamConnect s centralized repository of all contact information for matters, law firms, attorneys and parties. As with all of TeamConnect, this repository can be accessed easily from anywhere, anytime and by any team members via the Internet. Whenever any team member enters information that touches any party in an active matter, TeamConnect sends a notification informing him about the active matter and who is handling it. A similar notification goes to the legal team member involved in the active matter. Depending on each team member s access rights, they may learn everything they need to know directly from TeamConnect. At minimum, each team member is now aware of the other and can communicate directly. This system limits redundancy, greatly increases efficiency and also improves overall department decisionmaking by providing all parties with the type of visibility normally not available at such a large law department.

5 Conclusion By using TeamConnect to support its matter management initiatives, McDonald s has made it easier for all team members to get the information they need freeing them to focus on more valuable questions, which, in turn, puts better information in the system. The result is one common system in place throughout the entire legal department that facilitates efficiency, information flow, analysis, and ultimately more effective strategic By relying on systemic matter management and partnering with Mitratech, McDonald s made their law department operations more effective and efficient. Senior law department management now has better access to reports and other information about the department. Law department operations are more cost-effective due to proper staffing, budgets and processes. Contracts and agreements can be efficiently assembled. Litigation is more effective when experience from prior matters can be applied to new ones. All team members have access to all the information they need and, in fact, are often notified about information they need to make the best possible decisions at all times. Using TeamConnect Enterprise as a platform for building their matter management system enables McDonald s to not only operate a highly effective and cost efficient law department, but also to provide its attorneys with the tools to proactively manage, measure, report on and reduce corporate risk.