When You’re VP of CLM, with Sofya Mikhelson of Fairview Health Services

Speaker A: Contracting people, we're very detailed, oriented, right. We are heads down, looking at the words, looking at the numbers, figuring out more on analytic mode. But if you don't question every single time, what else can we do differently? That's where you're going to be stuck.

Speaker B: I'm Hal Marcus.

Speaker C: And I'm Mei Maangwudiwe.

Speaker B: And this is Meeting of the Minds, the legal AI podcast from evisort.

Speaker C: We interview lawyers, professors and legal operations pioneers that are pushing the envelope leaders,

Speaker B: using technology to drive great business outcomes and shape the future of the profession. Mei Mei. Another month, another great interview.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, we had an excellent conversation with Sophia Mickelson. She's vice president of Contract Lifecycle Management or VP of clm. Like we said a few times in the interview of Fairview Health Services, uh, a premier nonprofit health system based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. You know, they operate over a hundred locations, were established in 1906, employ over 34,000 people, and serve about 2 million patients across Minnesota annually.

Speaker B: And I love that in talking to Sophia, we're learning about someone in a role that is not legal ops, not legal, not procurement, not supply chain management, none of those things specifically, but serving all of those things, focusing on contracting itself as its own entity for best practices, consistency, governance across the entire organization. See, Mark Ross may have been right. We're going to see the CCO before very long. Chief Contracting Officer in the C suite. And Sophia may be the first step of that.

Speaker C: Without further ado, let's kick it off.

Speaker B: Sophia Mickelson, thanks so much for joining us here on Meeting of the Mayans.

Speaker A: Happy to be here.

Speaker C: We're so excited to chat today. Sophia, uh, would love to kick off with you, just talking a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are at Fairview today.

Speaker A: So I have over 25 years of experience working on the contracting, starting from being on a small nonprofit organization, applying for grants and asking for fundings for the organization, and negotiating the contracting with the local government to get the money for the programs, then working at the government, actually at the Hennepin county here in Minnesota and working social services, progressing to working on the contracts. Now at that point, starting actually being a contract manager and negotiating the contracts with a smaller agencies and organizations in the Hennepin county that were receiving funding from the county. So often it was like federal money going to the state, state money going to the county, county money going to the nonprofits. So it was a lot of interesting work, negotiating, developing the programs, really making sure that the people in the community are served in the right way and the money are spent as they were intended to spend. And about 13 years ago I had an opportunity to come to Fairview Health Services and I came as a director of the contracting in supply chain. So start it was the uh, contracts mostly for supply and equipment. Little by little, because of my background that I know a lot of purchase services, a lot of purchase services. Contracting came to my preview and then it contracting as well. And so working over the years, we started to talk as an organization that there is a need for something different, that contracting is a very, very, very large part of organization, any organization. But in healthcare specifically, it's about supply and equipment and people on the ground who are coming into our organization, coming inside our buildings or working remotely with us, a lot of physicians and wherever you look, we do a lot of contractual relationship and it's really just working kind of like in their own worlds. So. And our organization is doing really good contracting work. But we started to question what could be next step, what can we do better, how to look at this holistically at the organization. So me and about 10 of my coworkers, like VPs of um, different divisions where the contracting work is happening, start to work together as a team. We really developed what it should be for the future. We outlined together how we see our vision for the contracting work and organization. And later on, organization had supported our vision and they have decided to go ahead and actually create a position, a division of the contract lifecycle management that was taking care of the governance of all of the contracting for the organization. And I applied and got the job and I'm very happy about it.

Speaker B: Does that role encompass more than supply chain? Is it mostly focused on the buying side? Are there other relationship aspects besides that that are relevant?

Speaker A: Actually supply chain contracting is not in this division. This division is really not just about to do the contracts. The division has like three major pillars and the number one pillar is a contracting governance. It's if you think about the overhaul of the whole organization, how our policies are aligned, are we all adhering the same rules and regulations, how we are doing, establishing a training for the full organization about contracting. And we're not talking about only people who write the contracts. We're talking people who need the contracts. How do you like, you get a job, you're somewhere a director, you come to the organization like, okay, I'm in the position to make decisions. I'm going to go ahead, negotiate this contract and say, you put my signature on it, I'm done. Well, that's not the case. There are a lot of other things that you need to think about before you could put your signature and you might not be actually an authority to sign this contract to begin with. But how do we educate leaders in our organization about contracting? What is obligations are what we need to think about, what else are? There are so many different aspects you need to think about when you work on a contract. So that's more about the contracting governance. What about the financial drive? How do we apply a really good financial management and spend management for all of the contracts uh, across the organization? What are the rules, what are the expectations, how is the monitoring is going to be of the contracts and so on. So it's enforcing compliance. It's really about a contract in governance, overall roles, responsibilities, how so? Next component is technology. So we are bringing a new technology for the clm. So my team is overseeing implementation of the technology. We are going to be a help desk for that technology. We are going to setting um, up the standards expectations for bringing all of the different systems. Right now we have so many systems where our contracts live. They're all going to live in one technology. The technology is going to be totally connected to the ERPs we're implementing as well. And that is going to be a uh, system wide contracting implementation. So we're working through this. So technology is second and the third one is a contract management. So now if you think about it, we have the governance, we have a technology management. And now all of those 10 different divisions still work in their contracts. So supply and equipment, it needs to be in the supply chain. You can't just take them out of the supply chain plop in a centralized unit and say now you're just writing the contracts. Because each contract is unique. There's each department specificity that needs to be known. Those are the professionals in a supply chain, right, who understand the supply chain. But from the overall governance they have the expectations, the rules, the regulations of how things need to be done, how they need to be processed, how they need to be analyzed and how they are going to be actually monitored.

Speaker C: This is such a massive reorganization and a different way of thinking about contracting. Which to your point touches every other piece of the company. Right. That's why so many VP's had to be involved and you had an organization that has over 30,000 employees. What was it like going through this process and what was the real impetus to take this from something that you might talk about to actually gain the organizational will to make this change.

Speaker A: I am actually extremely proud of our Organization because it wasn't just, well, a couple of leaders. You go ahead and figure it out. It was really a direction from our C suite saying, yes, this is important, yes, you're bringing up a good point. And I was not the only one bringing up these ideas and thoughts. Our IT leader came and said, hey, you know what, we need to look at the technology. Other leaders were coming saying we have language all over the map, do we have any standards? We had a lot of leaders who were already ready and interested in making a change. So when the idea was proposed to work on this, all of those leaders were interested in working together. So I think one of the main success factors were there that it's coming from supply chain that we want to take over, or it's coming from legal department and legal department is going to just tell everybody exactly what to do and how to do and when to do. Oh, even so they should, I mean that's kind of given, right? But it's not legal telling you how to run your business. It's a, uh, legal supporting what you need for your business. So from each angle we looked in the real estate, we had a real estate leader, we had a design and construction leader, we had a pharmacy contracting leader who was actually my co lead in the whole project as a project management, we had transformational office participating saying this is a transformation we're looking for. So I mean it was a big effort, it was a lot of work. It's still a lot of work. But because of their common understanding of how important it is and common understanding to transform our organization to more modern place with better technology, better analytics, being better equipped to do what we're doing today, not to do the manual work, not to waste our talents on retyping, comparing documents. There's AI for it right now, right? You can do it better. So there was a lot of interest and will. That's why it's been successful.

Speaker B: This is really intriguing me. I don't think I'd fully appreciate it till just now how broad this focus is. Because Meme and I are constantly talking about how contract data feeds the entire organization. And yet it tends to be left in the hands of one or two departments. Legal, procurement, some sales control, revenue recognition on certain customers, customer contracts. We don't see this kind of cohesive multi departmental approach quite as broad as what you've described that often. Was there resistance? Was it just sort of floated and everyone jumped in? How do you manage that sort of collaboration among those players?

Speaker A: Well, the main resistance, some resistance was there from like, well, it is my business, I know how to manage my business. I don't want someone to tell me exactly how to do everything. So I think the main core idea was that we need to work together to create what works for all of us, not to create the works that works for one of us. So the idea of how are we going to do it? That it meets standardization, but allowing that contract specificity for each division and their needs will need to be met. That is how we got over the barrier. So from the get go we had to agree what our guiding principles were and that's what helped.

Speaker C: I'm sure folks are listening to this thinking, do we need a VP of clm? I remember when we met and you explaining your role, I absolutely loved it and I loved the vision. Do you think more companies should or maybe will in the future have more of these kinds of centralized organizations for contracting and ultimately a VP of clm?

Speaker A: Well, I really hope so. I honestly can't see how it might not be because just think about any other functions and organizations. There is some main point of the contact, right? There is main. Maybe not a division, but somewhere where the people need to connect. So we have finance. Well, I know a lot of organizations have finance at each side, at each division, I'm sorry, so on. But still at the end there is a finance leader. If you think about education, you may have the education in each department division and there is the governance over the education. So this is the same. There should be one point of the contact, point of the connection for all of the divisions of the contracting. Just like we have in finance, just like we have in education that just like we have in any other aspect of our organizations.

Speaker B: We had a guest on from Deloitte Legal Services a while back who predicted the chief contracting officer CCO going to be a new thing, going to be everywhere. I find that very intriguing. We haven't seen that much of it yet, but he may be onto something. And it sounds like you're taking those first steps. Delving a little bit into how you approach what you're calling governance, this management of the contracting process. Are you seeing a big division between pre signature agreement processes and post signature analysis, performance monitoring, tracking of cost and spend and all that. Are you approaching them very differently or is it more cohesive in your view?

Speaker A: Well, we are at the beginning of our, all of the implementations. We started with the technology, we started with the uh, basic rules of engagement. But I can't see it being separate. So how do you monitor something without thinking for the next steps. So majority of the services and ah, majority of the products and so on, they are continuous. It's not that you. Okay, well you've been buying this type of implants up to this point, now you're buying this types of implants. It's still a continuous. It's always evolving. Something ending and something new starting. One technology is going away, another technology is coming in. Something that we've been using for the surgical procedures up to this point. And now there is a new technology. While that's great, let's explore this new technology. But it means that something is going away. Sometimes there are new things as well. But it uh, is a continuous. There is a reason why it's called a life cycle. It goes in a circle. And if you're not thinking at the beginning of the contract how you're going to monitor it, why even start it? I mean that's a biggest problem for the people not thinking ahead of time. That's why we want to. And we're not there yet, but we are working on providing this full life cycle. And what does it mean at the beginning? Before I even put a pen to a paper or. Well, you know, it's very outdated. Um, before I do that, if I don't think I'm going to monitor whatever I'm getting, whether it's a product, how I'm going to get it, how I'm going to distribute it, how it's going to be utilized, maybe we don't need it. I mean if you are just bringing something to organization without thinking of the utilization of the capacities, about the use and so on, then you need to think again if you're thinking about a services. So let's say I'm um, bringing consulting services. I need to understand exactly what I need from the consulting services at the end of the day and how it's going to be monitored. Otherwise the contract is not going to be complete. The contract is going to be a shell without a meaning to it.

Speaker C: That's brilliant. I love that perspective. And as you're looking to adopt these technologies and you talked about connecting CLM with ERP and vendor management tools. Are there any particular kind of features or capabilities that you're interested in maybe above others? And could you talk a little bit about the importance of connecting those? Because some folks might see CLM as a bit of a silo?

Speaker A: Well, and unfortunately the CLM been a silo for many years and now we're talking more about the integrated technology. So sure enough, you can buy technology. The CLM where you want to write a beautiful contract, but then how are you going to manage that contract? Financials on the background, Are you going to now retype and redo everything now in your ERP in order to make payments, in order to pay per milestones that you're supposed to be paying only per milestones, Are you going to by hand continue doing a rebate calculations and so on? That's why it's critical. So a contract on its own is a beautiful thing. But as I said, if you don't have an opportunity to manage that contract post implementation, managed from financial perspective, from milestones perspective, that is only halfway there. That's why it was very important to us to think ahead of time of how those two systems, ERP system and CLM system, would work together.

Speaker B: I sometimes think that rebates and volume discounts, from all the conversations I've had with procurement leaders and GCs over the years about it, it's like people enter into them with the assumption that only a tiny percentage are ever going to be enforced because no one's tracking, no one's aware they're going to be buried in the contract. So I keep wondering now, as the technology is getting better at surfacing that information and helping it be acted on and actually fulfilled, if companies are going to start saying, yeah, we're not so inclined to offer you rebates anymore.

Speaker A: Well, I'm very hopeful that new technologies, we're in implementation stage right now, would be actually tracking all of her spend against the contract that has the rebates, uh, or credits or whatever else financial incentive is tied there and telling us when we are ready to receive a rebate. Up to this point with the technology that we're currently using, that's not the case and we need to do a lot of by hand tracking and a lot of reliance on the vendors to tell us when we reach our goals and when we are ready to receive the rebates. So I'm very hopeful that what we've been promised, that the technology would be able to do it, that would actually happen.

Speaker B: Let me ask you a bit about delving deeper into the healthcare needs here, because you've been doing this now for a while and you had previously done work that was still public policy oriented, but in a very different sort of way. What are the particular needs of healthcare as pertains to contracting that you need to support in a different way from either other industries or other kinds of public policy or nonprofit focus, et cetera?

Speaker A: Well, there are a lot of things that are Very different for uh, contracting and the healthcare. And I might not be the best person actually to speak on this because when you go to thinking about a physician agreement, there's a lot of regulations, healthcare regulations that absolutely have to be reflected in many of our agreements. And not just physician agreements, data use, share of the information, HIPAA regulations. There's a lot of protections that we need to put in our contracts in order to work through this, in order for us to allow the third parties in our system, in order for third parties being in our IT systems, in order for our uh, third parties to work with the patients. Because if you are at a hospital and somebody comes in and working with your patient and your facility, just think about how many different regulations it already hits. And all of those regulations need to be reflected in our contracts, otherwise we are not in compliance and we might put our patients at risk, their data in risk and so on. So I think that's why the healthcare contracts are really complex.

Speaker C: We're talking about healthcare. But it strikes me that a lot of the roles you've worked in, from nonprofit to government to healthcare, have been very strong when it comes to community impact. Is that important for you when you're selecting a role or opportunity?

Speaker A: Uh, it is very important to me actually. For me it's extremely important to know who is at the end. You know, when I do work, I do a lot of administrative work day and night. I'm working on it, put in a lot of effort. I need to know that there is at the end somebody who is walking in our facilities. There is a person coming to the doors to the clinics or the hospitals or er, our elderly care. The people know that their data being protected, that they are being protected and that the services they would receive are very high quality. It is very important to me and I'm just really thrilled because I mean our organization just now done, um, some rebranding and we have published our new vision and mission and that just speaks to my heart. So now our vision is actually to be the most human centered health care system. I mean I could not ask for a better vision for the company I work for.

Speaker C: I love that vision as well. And yeah, it's definitely the kind of vision you want for a healthcare system. And of course by leveraging technologies, it can enable an organization to better focus on supporting the humans that are the end users. But just curious on your thoughts on the kind of broader adoption of artificial intelligence in the uh, contracting space.

Speaker A: Well, it's amazing. If you would ask me two years ago, I might not be as excited. But now I have more and more opportunities to work with the AI and to see how much time it actually saves on a document review, on the comparison and contrasting of the language, on, um, even providing the summaries. I mean it creates enormous efficiencies and in some cases it's more accurate that the human eye can catch. But I'm always very cautious about we need to use that AI to the best advantage, but not to 100% rely on AI to do our job because at the end of the day you have to check everything that's been produced by AI. But I'm very excited because it does provide enormous efficiencies.

Speaker B: So Sophia, it's great to hear you say that about the role of AI and checking on what it does using your own judgment, empowering the person. That said, it certainly does lead to a lot of concerns from people right now because so much is changing so fast. They're worrying about the implications of that. How do you manage that change and the expectations of the users and the people you're trying to collaborate with.

Speaker A: I wish I could take the credits for the implementation of the AI in our organization, but I'm not. So I just have to give a lot of credits to our organization, how it's been implemented across the board. So not speaking of the contracting specifically right now. So it was a lot of first information of uh, what a AI is and how it should be used. Then we had a lot of information on which AI is going to be appropriate to use in our organization. So you can't just go to ChatGPT and put your information in and then just go ahead and publish something in our organizational, whatever, communication. So there were a lot of ruling out from our IT information directions, trainings and support. So that benefits me now when I'm implementing clm, when we're talking about AI, people no longer shy of that. So my change management is going to be so much lighter and easier because the AI and use of AI have been already introduced over the couple of years and we have a lot of support, we have the groups where you can call in and work through of how to use the AI. So that's why it's really. I don't see it being a problematic, but it's a lot of credits to our IT and how they implement it across our organization.

Speaker C: Taking a step back a little bit, you've worked in the contracting space even before this role that's quite unique from, uh, a VPCLM perspective where it's centralized for folks who are maybe still managing a dichotomy between the supply chain and legal for managing contracts. From what you've seen, do you have any advice for maybe supply chain leaders who might be struggling to collaborate with their legal teams when it comes to managing vendor agreements?

Speaker A: You see, I'm struggling with, to answer this just because I've been very lucky to have a really amazing legal support since I worked at the Hennepin county, then I came to the Fairview. I think that's important for anybody to foster that relationship. To foster the relationship. But really identifying what the rules around the contracts are and being really respectful to the fact that the legal department really truly needs to know all of uh, the main terms, legal terms of the organization. Right. And if you outline really clearly there are also responsibilities, instead of just saying here's a contract, go ahead, review it, tell me what you think. If you can talk through and we worked a lot on develop templates. So if the illegal really developed a template for you, develop variation of the languages, what if this. Then we can maybe lighten up on this language. And that was going to be our next clause or in which situation you can drop some language. Which situation you can use that language. It's a lot of work at the beginning and we're doing some of this work right now. We're doing template rationalization. We are not like perfectly and everything is done. And I'm not talking supply chain, I'm talking across the organization. I'll give you an example. Purchase services, they're used everywhere. They're used by pharmacy, they're used for, by supply chain. They're used by any division, marketing, uh, finance, that is type of the agreement that's used everywhere. But there are supposed to be the core legal terms that could be used in all of them. So when it talks supply chain, it's a smaller group of the contracts. Work with your legal pre build them. It's going to take pressure off you because now you don't have to worry like, oh, can I accept it or not? Or can I like what am I supposed to do? It takes pressure off your legal department of constantly writing the language for you for the specific same type of agreements. But then talk about roles and responsibilities. Outline in which cases you need to be working with the legal, which cases you don't get their approval. Give them the power of a decision ahead of time so you don't have to go to them every single time. It's really about negotiating with your legal department.

Speaker B: You're getting into the area here of Playbooks for all the different types of constructs that you have. And it's a broad term but generally we'll use it as sort of an umbrella term for all of the guidance, all the parameters, all the criteria and requirements that you have. Some of that's embodied in clause libraries historically approved in fallback language. Sometimes it's just in a really long file with a whole lot of bullets to it. Sometimes it's embodied in a contract that's sort of the ideal. This is our picture perfect agreement for this kind of engagement. What we're working on is making it a lot easier and to basically rely on AI to create those standard playbooks for you so you can have lots of those for all different kinds of agreements. Is that something you see having a real impact, being able to document all of that?

Speaker A: Absolutely. And the modern technology actually is supporting, supporting all of this work. So is right now. So often you have to remember where is that language and how I should do it? Which how should I use it for my Playbook? But if you're working with your legal when you implement your clm really looking at if that then this right all of those decision trees and pre build them. That is amazing. That is just saving a lot of time for everybody. So I think the playbooks are extremely important and more complex contracts need more complex. Those kind of the information being available to you. We don't need to recreate it with the will every single time. We just need to have guidance of how to use the legal language. There is no way we're going to hire lawyers all of organizations for all of the types of the contracts. We don't need to have a lawyer negotiating how we're going to be buying masks. I mean that would be a very wasteful way of managing the resources. But we do need a lawyer who is going to say here are key points you have to have in all of your supply contracts. And that is why so Playbook is very important. I think that we're all going to be really utilizing more and more with uh, modern technologies.

Speaker B: Speaking of the guidance that you're saying you need, I'm going to follow up with one more area of innovation and see what you think of it. We which is to give you a feedback loop on a rolling basis of where you are or are not and to what degree you are or are not ascribing to the guidance that you've laid out. How many of your contracts are ultimately deviating from some of those core terms because they were negotiated out and the decision was Made, that's okay. Because, you know, if 85% of the time you're not getting what you want on a particular term and legal has said that's okay, or procurement or whoever has said that's okay, do you still want it in your playbook? Is that just holding up business? So this is the kind of feedback that we often hear the entities are looking for so that they can optimize their processes, not just lock them down. What are your thoughts on that?

Speaker A: Well, I think that is why I'm so excited about the technology. Because now how are you going to even figure out how often you deviate from your language? There is no way we are automatically creating those while you're negotiating, taking the notes on a site, we are deviated from this. But I think when we have opportunity to do that analysis on the larger scale, and I mean larger scale, not just like a specific type of the agreement, but on a larger scale, first to see how much we really stay true to our templates versus how often we negotiate on a third party's templates versus like, okay, when we are doing it on our templates, how much we deviate from our language and why. That would be really eye, uh, opener because I want to work on an 80, 20. I mean we often spend a lot of time and resources building and pre building things for 20% of time, uh, of our work. Those are the 20% where we can actually go to legal and say, hey, help us to do it for this specific contract because we're probably going to do it today and not going to touch anything like this in five years. But for the 80%, if we deviate for a specific language 80% of the time, let's go ahead and change it. Let's see what is more reasonable and what can help us again to create inefficiencies and give a different view and potential for our negotiations.

Speaker C: We often ask people, just because we do so much around using AI to, uh, analyze agreements, what do you want to know about your contracts? What are the additional data points you're always tracking? X amount of things, you always need X +1. So I'm curious, what are one or two things that you hope to track in your agreements in the future that you think might have a large, uh, impact for the business?

Speaker A: You see, that depends on which lenses you're looking at. So I'm pretty sure if you're going to talk to a person from a legal division, you're going to hear something different. And they would be absolutely correct for me is expectations and meeting those expectations.

Speaker B: So performance of the terms of the agreement.

Speaker A: Absolutely. Actually, if I would be right now, when I'm ready to look at all the contracts, I'd like to see if we have the expectations on all of our contracts, because I don't think we do.

Speaker C: That reminds me of. You recently had an interview with the Journal of Healthcare Contracting and you talked about how integration with workday, CLM and ERP will empower us to actively monitor vendor performance, track milestones and control spend with precision. So that seems like a similar tone of being able to kind of track.

Speaker A: Absolutely. That's what we're really hoping for. That's when we were doing the rfp. Those were a lot of our questions around monitoring. And that is absolutely our goal to make sure whatever we're purchasing, we know, uh, what we're purchasing, when it should be delivered and was delivered with the quality that we're expecting.

Speaker B: And we still so often hear even the basics like, and what's the renewal on this? Is it going to auto renew? What's the notification period to stop it from auto renewing? Even just having those alerts and clarity and knowing what those dates are, because they don't always even appear as a date in the four corners of the agreement. I'm amazed at how often we still hear that very basic, absolutely essential term as, uh, something that folks go, boy, if we could just know that every time consistently, that would be great.

Speaker A: Well, maybe we're just spoiled in our organization. We've had it for quite a long time. It's been an expectations of all of the contracts, having notifications, reminders about reporting that needs to be completed. And so, um, on. I can't even think of the system for contracting that does not provide that basic function.

Speaker B: Manual efforts and spreadsheets do not generally provide that function very effectively. And it's amazing how often we still hear that.

Speaker A: Well, you know, I don't want to age myself, but when I started my contracting career, I came in the office and I was handled, uh, Excel printed Excel spreadsheet. It said 99 steps of contracting. Every step I had to do, it was like check.

Speaker C: You could tell someone was told to keep it under a hundred.

Speaker A: So I know what you're saying, right. And nowadays, now, modern days, it's really hard for me to intervene that there are any large organizations that do not track. There are like automated tracks for reminders for the contracts.

Speaker B: That's because all the organizations you've worked for have had you.

Speaker A: I can't take all those credits, not just for me?

Speaker B: Oh, go ahead.

Speaker C: Well, you were just talking about what it was like when you first stepped into the contracting role. And there was a time, even though now you're a VP of clm, really, I think leading the profession in what, you know, this kind of role can look like when you were a contract manager. And I wonder if, for the contract managers listening right now, if you'd have any advice to them if they might want to replicate the success that you've had in your career.

Speaker A: Follow the rules, but think outside of the box. Think of what next step is. It's too easy in a contracting work because contracting people were very detailed, oriented, right? We are heads down, looking at the words, looking at the numbers, figuring out more on analytic mood. But if you don't question every single time, what else can we do differently, that's where you're going to be stuck. I always question, and some people like it, some don't, but that's how I am question the status quo. It doesn't mean that status quo is wrong. But technology develops so rapidly, our behaviors adjusting to technologies change so rapidly. Try to think ahead and think what if? And what else we can do.

Speaker B: Sophia, what have we not covered in what I think has been an excellent interview that we're going to regret later.

Speaker A: Maybe what I'd like to talk a little bit more about a relationship piece. So often the contracting function is perceived as being a support function, how it's supposed to be, but not as a partner. I think what's important for a, uh, contracting people to remember we are partners no matter which if it's health care, if it's government or it's a manufacturing or whatever organization you work at. We need to perceive and remember that we are huge partners of our organizations and we need to act like this and we need to build those bridges with our customers who need those contracts that we develop them for them. That is very important, this creating of the partnership, creating the understanding of the importance of this role.

Speaker C: Well, that is an incredible note to end on. Um, thank you so much and it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today, Sophia. I really appreciate your time.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker C: Meeting of the Minds the Legal AI podcast is brought to you by Eversort. To learn more about Eversort and how we can help you contract better with AI this, uh, visit evisort evisot.com youm

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Speaker C: On behalf of everyone here at evisort, thanks for tuning in. Mhm.