Choosing the Best CLM: Brandon Tatum & Legal Disrupters

Navigating the Melody of Contracts: How to choose the right CLM Solution for you

In this episode of Summize’s ‘In Conversation With...’ series, Brandon Tatum, music/entertainment executive and international legal counsel, joins us. Brandon has had a successful career working within large law firm practice groups, within in-house legal departments, and as private outside counsel for several high-profile traditional and Web3 music and entertainment companies across the globe.

Brandon has also experienced first-hand the challenges surrounding contracts and the benefits implementing a CLM solution can bring to an organisation. In this episode, Brandon will share how to cut above the noise and choose the right CLM solution for you and his top tips to ensure a successful CLM implementation.

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Jonny Jessop:

Hello and welcome to the first episode of Summize's In Conversation With series. So today we are joined by Brandon Tatum, a music and entertainment executive and international legal counsel. Now, Brandon has had a successful career working within large law firm practice groups, also within in-house legal departments, and also as a private outside counsel for several high profile traditional and Web3 music and entertainment companies across the globe. Brandon's also experienced firsthand the challenges surrounding contracts, and the benefits that implementing a CLM solution can bring to an organization. Now, today in this episode, Brandon is going to be sharing with us how to cut above all of that noise and choose the right CLM solution for you. And I'm hoping Brandon, you've got some top tips to ensure a successful CLM implementation.

Brandon Tatum:

I hope so too, let's go.

Johnny:

Let's go. Okay, so obviously we've spoken a little bit, but just for the audience, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself, what your background's been, and how did you get to where you are today?

Brandon Tatum:

Yeah, so as a lawyer practicing for 15 years in the entertainment industry, particularly music, it came from a love of music originally being an artist since the age of eight, a recording artist. And growing up and learning how many of my favorite music artists were not being treated well by the music industry, anybody from Michael Jackson, to Prince, to TLC, to any artist you can name really. I wanted to learn the business and the law behind the industry, that's why I went to law school here in Los Angeles at USC, and with a focus in entertainment law. And then I moved to London over in your parts and did an LLM in international intellectual property law at the London School of Economics and Political Science. And then I started practicing, at first at a large law firm, and then at a small record company. And then I bounced around a bit and ended up actually moving to Japan and entering into the Japanese and the Korean music industries very heavily. So that's a whole different story and exploration.

Jonny Jessop:

I see, there's so many different areas I think we can talk to you about today. So, I mean, if we focus on the in-house side of things within the various businesses you've worked within, I think when people look at CLM and when people talk to us at Summize, it's very much around challenges and headaches people have as working as part of an in-house legal team. So, what are the main challenges and headaches that you've seen throughout your career journey?

Brandon Tatum:

For in-house work primary challenges for me have been, I guess number one would be the sort of strict cost sensitivity that businesses have towards the legal department. You're expected to perform the legal services and organize the legal function as inexpensively as possible, and a lot of times you don't have the resources in-house to achieve that. So, it's a challenge to keep the cost low. Of course, law firms every year are bumping up their rates, and they're paying their junior associates more, and more, and more money, so they need to make more money. And so that cycle makes it difficult to utilize outside counsel to keep your costs down, you need to move more work in house. So that's a challenge.

Managing the workload is another challenge, because you're supporting often large organizations with many departments, and cross-functional teams, and a variety of legal issues, where you may be working and supporting a few elements of the business. For example, you may be working with the procurement team, the IT team, somebody else may be working more on regulatory compliance and intellectual property matters, and somebody else is doing litigation. So, there's a lot that has to be done. Sometimes it has crossover, and sometimes it can get difficult when multiple parts of the company have big projects moving through and you have to kind of manage that workload, it's a real challenge. And others.

Jonny Jessop:

So, in terms of collaborating with the rest of the business in different areas, it sounds like somewhat there's a lot of pressure to do more with less. But what kind of steps did you take throughout your career in enabling collaboration and sharing the load if possible?

Brandon Tatum:

Yeah, you definitely want to avoid reinventing the wheel on things. You need to have templates, forms, sort of processes and procedures that are understood, and that work well for the company, and that are repeatable that you can educate people on, and then they can run with it. You need the business to be able to do a lot more on their own before legal has to step in to help out, that's what I found is the key to managing workload.

Jonny Jessop:

Did you have much kind of resistance from the business when you were putting in place those kinds of steps? Because I mean, the easiest thing for them is just to send stuff through to lawyers, right?

Brandon Tatum:

Yeah. Initially you get resistance, but at a certain point there's no more that you can get out of the legal team. And so things start to get backlogged, and then when it's taking a longer time to turn around projects, the business is like, "What's taking so long?" And it's like, "You could have gotten this done probably on your own if you were willing to do it." And so, then the light bulb goes off and they think, okay, well, let's see how far I can push this ball up the hill before handing it off to legal to put it over.

Jonny Jessop:

Okay. Well, the first top tip definitely from you then is enabling those. I mean, are they mainly commercial people, ops people, or anybody within the business?

Brandon Tatum:

Yeah, commercial people for sure, procurement teams, operations. I would say even finance, at a certain point you need to have them carry a certain load that shouldn't really be on the legal team. It's interesting the number of things that get placed on legal, a lot of times becoming more business partners rather than legal partners in a lot of cases. And so, a lot of strategy that happens, at least in my experience, I've been put in early on strategy, which is purely business.

Or early business development efforts where you're involved early on structuring deals, that sort of stuff is great, but at the same time, the business should be able to carry that stuff on their own. So, let's say you're the head of business development and you want to do a new deal with some major strategic partner, you should be able to get that deal proposal to a certain level on your own before you bring it to legal and ask them to weigh in on it. So, it's a challenge, and every organization's different. But I find that in the music industry in particular there's a lot of weight placed on the legal team beyond just contracts and typical legal work.

Jonny Jessop:

I see. But in order to make sure that you've got the strategic stuff. I presume a lot of what you've done and in different roles would be to automate as much of the high-volume, low-level stuff as possible. What kind of techniques have you used for that?

Brandon Tatum:

So, I worked as director of business and legal affairs at SoundCloud, it's one of the major DSPs, digital service providers in the music business. And one of the things I did was create a contract clause library where people would be able to find different types of clauses that they want to use in some standard agreements, accepted variations. It was a contract clause library and a contract playbook for our different core agreements. So, it was a matrix of exactly what type of alternative clauses we could accept. And if you wanted to go outside of that, then you needed to come to legal. But if you're staying within that, here's the clause, it's in the matrix, plug it in and run with it, it's already approved. So that was a key time saver.

Jonny Jessop:

Absolutely. I mean, we occasionally do speak to businesses that have a fully formed playbook, however, it's still so kind of new within the industry. But I mean, how was the adoption of that within SoundCloud? Did everybody approach it with open arms, or was it quite difficult to implement? What tips would you have?

Brandon Tatum:

It was received very, very well, because once you explain to the business... There's a training, of course, I did the training on the playbook. And so, you would take an example of a real contract that's been redlined and negotiated, and then the playbook. And just for them to be able to see the alternatives right there and say, "Hey, this can be plugged in." And they can literally copy and paste, it made them feel empowered. And so that was very well received actually. It only became a little bit difficult when we had contracts that weren't completely standard, then they were once again, "What do we do here?" But it worked for the standard agreements very well.

Jonny Jessop:

And did it reduce the workload on your side?

Brandon Tatum:

Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we did not have to make standard edits. It's like, "Why am I doing this again, and again and again?" Even for myself, having that playbook, if I did have to make standard edits, it's already there. I'm not rewriting it. Again, no reinvention of the wheel, it's a complete waste of time.

Jonny Jessop:

Absolutely. And then I suppose the next step of this, which is why obviously you came across Summize in the first place, was moving that into CLM and looking at software for that purpose once you have a playbook like that. So, I mean, what was the jump for you from creating something internally to going out and looking for software?

Brandon Tatum:

At least at SoundCloud, we had certain solutions in place like HubSpot, and to some extent Google Drive, Slack, and it was just too disjointed. And the thing that tipped the scale for me was I was receiving contract requests from every direction you can imagine. So, I would receive it over HubSpot, I would receive it from text messages on my phone.

Jonny Jessop:

Text messages?

Brandon Tatum:

Yes, it became unreasonable. And so, you can't keep up with all of those different sources of requests, something's going to slip through the cracks very quickly. So that's what pushed me ultimately to say, "Hey." And then the other thing was missing key contract dates, was a big thing that was like, "Oh, this is a problem. We need to make sure we're not missing these things anymore." And that pushed me to say, "Hey guys, we need to consider a real contract solution, a management solution, and do so quickly."

Jonny Jessop:

Of course. I mean, you've got two completely differing ends of the contract lifecycle there, both are causing you a headache. I can't believe you were getting review requests as text messages. I mean, I can imagine it'd be impossible to stay up to date with what's actually important and what you're doing. I remember researching a survey saying that around the quality of life for lawyers, and lawyers with the second most stressed profession after doctors. And it's stuff like that I imagine, you're in your day-to-day evening and you're getting a text message through with a work request. Is that something you experienced?

Brandon Tatum:

Absolutely. And then it's hard to keep up with versions, people sending it from different... I don't know which source you sent, or which version you got to check, sometimes they're sending on Slack. There's no consistency, so sometimes it's an email, sometimes it's just a Google Drive link that's been shared out to you, and they've made edits in Google Drive when all your edits are in Microsoft Word, it's a complete nightmare. And your job is to get this stuff right, and to limit risk, and make sure everything is buttoned up. So, it's very stressful.

Jonny Jessop:

Wow. So how did you then work out what your requirements are? I mean, a lot of businesses are shopping for CLM solutions now, but I know they find that requirements gathering process quite difficult. What did you do?

Brandon Tatum:

So, I created a matrix, because it gives you a real sense of what's happening if you define your columns and your roles correctly. So, for me, it was first looking at each stage of the contract lifecycle, and deciding what exactly is happening in each of our teams when it comes to this contract lifecycle. All the way from contract requests to the authoring, and negotiation, and redlining, to reporting, summarizing, renewing, all the way through. And analyzing, literally writing out exactly what I see in the business is happening, what is legal doing? What is the business side doing? Where are the gaps? And then the second sheet on that spreadsheet was purely for the business and legal affairs team. And it was a graded scale, one to five basically, which element of the contract life cycle is most important to you and what you're doing and the business that you're supporting.

And so, people voted one through five, what's most important, and that helped narrow down which solution seems to fit what we're saying that we need here, where the gaps are, and what the business and the legal team think are most important. And then it's just looking at contract management systems, and first looking obviously at all of their promotional marketing materials about what they claim they can do. And then actually doing a proof of concept with the vendor, and having them walk through the product, sometimes multiple times before feeling comfortable. And for me, it was super important to always have business team members join those proof-of-concept meetings, and high-level people who really need to use and have buy-in to this solution. So that was the process that I took.

Jonny Jessop:

Yeah, that was going to be my next question, so who did you involve? But you mentioned the business team, who specifically? Did you have a representative from each department or several? What did that look like?

Brandon Tatum:

So, I would invite the people in the departments, the key people, for example, for the A&R team or for the marketing team and have their chief whoever joins. Not necessarily C-level, but whoever was the person managing that team, I would have them join and actually look at the solution, give their feedback on the spot live, ask questions, and then follow up with them afterwards to discuss their feelings about it. And once they saw multiple solutions they started to get a sense of, okay, this is what's out there, we see the benefits of this, this is great because they have integrations with Slack, and they have integrations with HubSpot already. We're already used to using those, so this isn't too much of a departure, we actually think this is feasible to integrate into what we're already doing. So that sort of process with those people.

Jonny Jessop:

How easy was it getting their focus on it though? Because I mean, obviously for legal, contracts are a huge part of their world, sometimes commercial and operations people as well, but always to a lesser extent. How did you get them to, I suppose, care as much as you did?

Brandon Tatum:

The first step was the contract playbook, that was kind getting them used to the idea of this contracting thing is important, and it's a process that can be improved upon. And then after that it was like, "Well, guys..." At the time we had a rapidly increasing influx of artists and contracts to do, so they saw the volume and they knew it was heavy. And so, again, as the time of the response time got slower due to the added workload, they're like, "How can we speed this up again?" And so that really was it.

Jonny Jessop:

So, they had that experience of a slow process affecting them, and I suppose it's just a case of referencing back saying, "This is the thing we're trying to fix, everyone."

Brandon Tatum:

Yeah, exactly.

Jonny Jessop:

Understood. Okay, so that's finding a CLM, it sounds like you were very analytical in detailing out your requirements in a matrix, and that makes a lot of sense. So, once you chose your vendor, what was the next step? So how would you recommend implementing a CLM? Because it's very easy choosing a software product, but what are the steps to make that implementation successful?

Brandon Tatum:

First is definitely internal buy-in from those people that we were discussing, as well as all the way up to the C-suite, that was the first step. So I actually prepared that matrix in order to get the C-level team on board, because they're the ones who have to sign off on the spend obviously, and it's important to be able to show them that there will be a return on this investment. Otherwise, they're like, "Why are we spending this money? Where are the savings? Please explain exactly what we're getting out of this." And so, you have to find a way to quantify as much as possible the return on the investment. And so that was a key step, getting that internal buy-in by identifying who's important to making this decision, and then building the business case around it, which is that ROI as well. Yeah, so support from the actual vendor was a very key factor for us, and for me personally it always has been. You're dealing with a bunch of people who may have never used a CLM before, they're going to need support, what does the support look like? How available are you? How much of this are we actually doing on our own? When you're in the system, and you're setting up templates, and learning how to mark up an agreement, and send it to a counterparty, and these sorts of things, how much support are we going to get? And then typically rolled out in phased approach. So not going right away and saying, "We're going to get everybody in the company to be a user instantly." It's more like, "Okay, nope. Let's start it with smaller teams." Maybe it's legal and the commercial team or the procurement team, see how that goes. And then you expand it, roll it out further to the rest of the business over time. I think it's the best implementation.

And then before even doing that, you have to actually find where all your agreements are currently being stored, which may be on people's hard drives, which may be in Google's cloud drive. Wherever it is, gather all that information, because those are the contracts you need. And then you're going to have to actually to some extent perform some manual work that maybe the vendor will help you with, but you're going to need to do things like pull out those contract dates. Unless there's an artificial intelligence system that can accurately capture that stuff, you're going to have to pull it out, and you're still going to have to review it, even if there is AI. So, all of that, it's an administrative process, that you have to have the business agree to give you the time to actually perform those administrative manual tasks, because it takes away from the other work that you're doing in the meantime. So that has to be seen as valuable enough to allow their key legal people to take time to actually do that.

Jonny Jessop:

Yeah, I think that is absolutely key, and I completely agree with you. And I think you said, "Having the business agree to give you the time." And from our experience with CLM implementations, that's absolutely key. Also, I mean, we had somebody on the podcast last week, and the gathering of contracts is always a much bigger job than you think, because there's a lot of them stored in email inbox folders, and across Outlook, and various different iterations of a storage system. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, if there was one thing that you did that you wish you hadn't done, what would you change?

Brandon Tatum:

In implementation?

Jonny Jessop:

Yeah.

Brandon Tatum:

Or selection? Implementation wise, what wouldn't I have done? I wouldn't have failed to create a mirror, I believe in mirroring your CLM solution as much as possible, in terms of the storage aspect of it. So, to me, once you have the CLM solution, your previous solution, whatever that was, probably was Google Drive, or Asana, or something, it shouldn't just go away, or HubSpot, you should be able to have a mirror of that no matter what. Just because of potential data portability concerns, I just think it's good to have a backup, and I probably would've pushed for that more. And going forward, I will push for that sort of thing.

Jonny Jessop:

So, an archive that reflects your CLM completely?

Brandon Tatum:

Yeah.

Jonny Jessop:

No, that's a really good point and good advice I think. Are there other things you can do to prepare? So obviously we've got to get the business involved, get your contracts. What about the more kind of process workflows? Did you write any workflow maps for how requests come in?

Brandon Tatum:

So that was part of that initial contract management matrix that I was talking about, was a workflow explaining exactly how requests come in, what happens to the contract from that point. Who does it come from? Who does it go to? What happens to it, all the way to the stage of when we store it and need somebody to be able to search and retrieve it?

Jonny Jessop:

I see. And it was all part of this matrix, which I imagine was very useful for the CLM vendors to see as well, because it does help them understand whether it's the right solution as well.

Brandon Tatum:

And for the business to see. They're like, "Oh, wow. Yes, these are clearly identified gaps in our process, we need to plug the hole."

Jonny Jessop:

Absolutely, it keeps everyone on the same page. So, you've got your project team, you've got all of your requirements and workflows mapped, you found all the contracts from whence they were before, and then you are creating a mirror in the CLM solution of your previous archives, so you've got backup facilities. I think those are key things to have in place before starting a software implementation journey, and always help. That's brilliant, there's so much there around CLM. But you've also had an incredibly interesting career, so the real juicy bits, I mean, you've just announced a sabbatical, so what led to that decision?

Brandon Tatum:

After 15 years of just nonstop work, and a lot of times it being very, very busy traveling, and just a lot of effort, I decided that instead of jumping right into more work in another role after leaving my previous company, that I would take a break. Just a break and think about where I want to be over the next five years, and exactly how I'm going to get there. And so reprioritizing... Or not even reprioritizing, but reexamining what my priorities are, and possibly reprioritizing once I do that. And then spend time with family, we have some newborns in the family, spend time with family.

Jonny Jessop:

Well, congratulations.

Brandon Tatum:

Thank you. Some sick, elderly family members, and just remember what's most important in life, because once you're on this career ladder, it can literally take over. And it's actually not the most important thing in life at all, so rebalancing was the whole purpose of this sabbatical. And I'm about to come off of it, but it was a good stretch for me to reconsider my priorities for sure.

Jonny Jessop:

Of course, and your career has taken you around the world. I'd be interested to know, obviously 15 years of work, but it's been in different areas, we spoke about Japan briefly earlier. How has it been working in the music industry in these different regions? And how do they differ? And what have you learned from those processes and roles?

Brandon Tatum:

It's definitely different business standards and different cultural standards as well that you have to take into consideration, particularly when you're doing a lot of international business. Because K-pop, the Korean music industry has gone global, it's massive, it's going everywhere, including all over the Western Hemisphere. And it can't do that really without partnerships in the Western music industries, in the US and Latin America, et cetera, Europe. But the different business standards and cultural standards always peek their head out, it's like, "We don't do it like that." "Well, we do." "We don't want to do it like that." "Well, we must do it like this." And so where do you find a balance with these different standards is one of the key elements. Of course, Korea being a relatively small music market, it's about 10% of the size of the Japanese music market, which Japan has the second-biggest music industry in the world behind the US, they were forced.

Korea was forced to look abroad for growth in their industry, and they've done very successful with that. Japan, big domestic industry, never felt the need to really go abroad to grow their revenues and sustain the industry. Until more recently, as their industry and population has been declining slowly, they're now starting to look abroad too. And so now it's dealing with the Japanese culture and the Japanese business standards, which people have some idea about what that's like, but you don't really know unless you worked in Japan. I worked for one of the big four Japanese law firms, I did my MBA in Japan, I know Japanese business standards and the environment, and it's very different. And so, if you're not used to operating and working with those folks, it can be very difficult to understand what's happening.

Jonny Jessop:

Have you taken a lot of those? I imagine it made you kind of more flexible in negotiation, and as a lawyer it probably improved and gave you a lot more tools in your toolbox when you're taking them into work in the US. How did it change you really?

Brandon Tatum:

Yeah, America is very individualistic, and so Japan is quite the opposite. Japan is about the group, the community, the society. There's a concept called the wa, which means social harmony. And in Japan, basically Japanese people do whatever they can to not disturb the wa, which is the social harmony. And that means that the individual desires and wants are often suppressed compared to what is better for the greater good. And it couldn't be more different than in the US, which is very individualistic. And so for me, living and working in Japan as an American it forced me to reconsider how my individual goals, even in my career as a professional, maybe that's not completely the right approach. I believe in meritocracy; I believe that superstars should be treated like superstars if you're a superstar. In Japan there's not so much of that, which is kind of a problem.

But at the same time, you get the value of actually coming together, having group consensus and working together. You could see it when we were dealing with COVID, the pandemic, Americans, "I'm not going to shelter in place. I don't want to do this. I don't want to wear a mask. Me, me, me, me, me." No concern for all the other people they're harming, the healthcare workers, we lost millions of people as a result. But in Japan if you get sick, you put on a mask to protect other people. So even before the pandemic, most of the people wearing masks were wearing them because they didn't want to get other people sick, not because they were scared of getting sick from other people. And that different approach is just a complete 180 from American mindset, and I learned a lot from that. And I think it changed the way I think about lawyering as well to a certain extent, because it's more about finding compromises that works for everybody, instead of fighting so hard for your side, your position, et cetera. So that was probably what I learned the most from it.

Jonny Jessop:

Yeah, that's really fascinating and interesting. You mentioned the COVID example, I think that's something that I think it's really clear with the difference in culture. But I'm glad it's made you... It seems like you feel better as a lawyer, and potentially better as a person as well for that experience. So, I mean, there's just one question really. I mean, obviously you're coming to the end of the sabbatical, what's the next step of your journey?

Brandon Tatum:

Yeah, it's going to be in music for sure. I do have some things on the table that I'm currently negotiating, so it will be announced soon. People keep up with me on LinkedIn, you'll definitely find out soon enough. But yeah, it'll be in music. My passion is bridging divides between cultures through music, and so that was a big part of why I moved to Japan in the first place for five plus years and worked in the Korean music industry a lot. And I still have that same passion, so it'll probably be towards that goal, supporting artists, supporting creators, bridging cultural divides through music.

Jonny Jessop:

Wow, that's exciting. Well, I'll be following you on LinkedIn. I'd encourage anybody listening to also follow Brandon on LinkedIn and enjoy the next steps of his journey alongside him. All just left to say for me is just a massive thank you. Brandon, you've been brilliant, loved having you on the podcast. And for everyone listening, I really hope you enjoyed that, and that you join us again next time for our next interview. So, thank you very much.

Brandon Tatum:

Thanks so much, Jonny, appreciate it.