University Contract Shops: A Two-Part Equation
For amateur chefs like me, there is a humbling point on our learning curve when we discover that cooking for a large group is a completely different skill. For some people, it is their first attempt at a large family holiday dinner like Thanksgiving. For me, it was when I naively agreed to cook breakfast for many kids all at once at a community event. No one got hurt, but it was chaotic; we were all tripping over each other; the wait times were too long; and the food was terrible (at best). That memory is often in the back of my mind as I work on improving efficiency in high-volume contract operations. The problem was not my skills, because I’m a good cook. The problem was that there was too much going on at once. High volume cooking is not about the individual skill of being able to cook the perfect egg–it’s about cooking A LOT of perfect eggs (while flipping pancakes, while frying bacon, while buttering toast). The professional short order cook up the street at my local Waffle House diner looks like the Buddha with a spatula while serenely cooking for three times as many people. I ended up sweating, burnt, covered in flour, slipping on grease, and struggling to not use “grownup words” around the kids. Why?
The answer is that success in this type of high throughput environment (eggs or contracts) is a two-part equation: Technical skills AND processes that allow you to scale up those skills. Both are absolutely necessary, and it turns out that the processes at Waffle House are surprisingly sophisticated and meticulously engineered to eliminate obstacles for the cook. There are rules about where the waitstaff can stand, what vocabulary to use when talking to the cook, when to use it, and how to use every second of downtime (e.g., waitstaff resupplies the cook). My favorite process hack is how they encode special orders (which are disruptive) in the patterned arrangement of jelly, butter, and mustard packets on the plate. (E.g., “butter on mustard” means “extra egg”). All the cook needs to do is glance at the plate and the information is there. And the payoff for all this attention to detail is that the environment is extremely calm, extremely fast, and high quality. That is why their cook looks like a serene Buddha while cooking for a crowd and I looked like a sweaty guy who fell down a flight of stairs clutching a bag of flour. I was winging it.
High volume contract shops at universities and research hospitals are very similar to a busy kitchen, and these lessons are highly transferable. Legal skill is only half the equation for success. Like the diner example, we need to build systems around the contract negotiator that allow them to move through complex task fluidly and efficiently. There are many ways to do this and there is no one size fits all solution, but three ideas or themes clearly rise to the top.
Information: How many times does the short order cook need to interrupt his flow to ask follow-up questions or walk across the kitchen to get an egg? Never. How many times do your negotiators need to interrupt their work to chase information via very slow email exchanges about things like IRB status or the HIPAA classification of outbound study data? In a single instance, that follow-up question probably does not feel like a broken process; in the aggregate, it is extremely disruptive. There are several ways to fix it. Intake procedures are a good start; a centralized information system is even better. But ideally, from the perspective of the contract negotiator, getting information should feel more like glancing at jelly packets on a plate and less like an email exchange that could take weeks.
Task Sequencing and Tracking System: A short order cook knows when to flip the bacon because he or she never takes their eyes off the grill. They have constant continuous monitoring and feedback. Task sequencing is much harder for us because we can’t watch 40–60 contacts all at once. We need tools to help us. Designing a good tool is a subtle art, and bigger is not always better. Solutions range from purpose-built contract management software to homespun spreadsheets. But no matter the format, the negotiator needs to have some way to think critically and proactively to prioritize tasks. Even a simple aging report based on intake data is better than letting your email inbox rule your day.
Legal Policy Clarity and Playbooks: Short order cooks don’t hesitate, and neither should we. With very few exceptions, decision making while redlining should be quick and nearly automatic. Training is the starting point, but even the most experienced lawyer cannot make quick, definitive decisions if the policies on acceptable language are not crisp and simple. A clear playbook built for decision-making (not training, that’s a different document) is extremely important to maintaining fluid workflow.
For me, and I think it is true of most lawyers in this field, a career in research contracting follows this same home-cook v. pro-cook trajectory. We come to the field as legal experts thinking that the job is about the content of the documents. And it is. But we tend to stop there and treat processes as if they were unimportant or somehow not central to our work. They are. The purpose of this article is to encourage legal professionals to make that fundamental shift to pattern spotting which is the heart of process improvement. Lean Six Sigma and the A3 process are an excellent place to start. Transforming a stressful contract shop begins with changing how we think about our work and embracing the idea that process is just as important as legal expertise.