Ginette Glover on connecting people, systems and information – and finding the patterns that make simplification, automation and continuous improvement possible.
Legal work rarely begins and ends within the legal team alone.
A seemingly straightforward request can involve finance, sales, insurance, procurement, IT and other parts of the organisation. Behind it may sit multiple systems, approval points, data requirements and hand-offs – as well as people who carry a deep, often undocumented understanding of how the pieces fit together.
For legal operations professionals, this creates a particular challenge. Improving how legal works often means looking beyond the boundaries of the legal function and following the work across the organisation.
In a recent episode of In-House Matters by Lawcadia, Lawcadia Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Sacha Kirk spoke with Ginette Glover, Legal Operations Coordinator at Nutrien, about what that whole-of-business view looks like in practice.
Ginette’s career has crossed business administration, data management, reporting, process improvement and automation. The settings have changed, but the thread running through her work has remained remarkably consistent: find the patterns, understand the connections and make the process work better.
“From the early days of my career I had a history of automating myself out of my jobs. I would find the patterns, find the connections, and figure out how to streamline it and connect it, and then automate my work. I find that’s a pattern through my whole career.”
That instinct now shapes the way she approaches legal operations – not as a collection of isolated tasks, but as a connected system of people, information and decisions that can be understood, simplified and continuously improved.
Legal Operations Needs a Whole-Of-Business View
One of the first differences Ginette noticed when moving into legal was the combination of privacy, precedent and formal ways of working. Those guardrails matter, but so does the extraordinary breadth of the function.
“Legal has a lot of avenues… It’s not just one part of it. It’s connected to everything.”
That connectivity changes the starting point for operational improvement. A process may technically belong to legal, but the information feeding it may originate in sales, procurement or another business function. Legal’s output may then trigger billing, reporting, insurance or technology activity elsewhere.
Looking only at the part that happens inside legal risks missing the real process. Ginette’s perspective is to trace how information moves from start to finish, identify the touchpoints between teams and make visible the dependencies that have grown around them.
This is where her enthusiasm for connection becomes evident. Her aim is to understand how a task fits into the wider organisation, then improve the flow for everyone involved.
Operational Knowledge Often Sits With Individuals
Large and complex organisations frequently use specialised applications for different functions. Each department may have its own systems, data requirements and ways of working. Those systems can perform well individually, while leaving a difficult coordination problem for the person at the beginning of the chain.
Ginette points out that senior conversations often focus on the outcomes produced by information, rather than how the information gets there in the first place.
“Not a lot of people are talking about how you get the information. So at some point there’s someone putting in the information, it’s coming from somewhere, and the person that has to put in the information or is the starting point of triggering the sharing of the information, that’s the person who needs to know that this information needs to go here and then there and here and there is no application for that person.”
That person can become a pivotal part of the organisation. Over time, an experienced administrator may learn which application to use, what information each team requires, which exceptions trigger a different pathway and which workaround keeps the process moving.
“You find that they’re running really well when you have a very good administrator who knows all of the things about all of the things. But when you have a newer person, it’s very hard to catch up and there isn’t really a lot of information because it’s constantly changing.”
This knowledge is valuable, but it also creates risk when it remains in one person’s head. Experienced employees may not realise how much implied knowledge they hold, while newer colleagues face the near-impossible task of reconstructing decisions and dependencies that were never documented.
Legal operations can help turn that individual knowledge into organisational capability: clearer pathways, shared understanding and processes that do not depend on one person remembering every connection.
Small Tasks Can Create Significant Complexity
From within one function, an additional administrative requirement can appear insignificant: add one field, update one system or tick one more box. But for the person coordinating work across several functions, however, those small requirements accumulate.
Ginette illustrates the scale of the problem with a simple review of the fields used across multiple applications.
“There’s 133 fields [across all applications], but if you put all of those fields together and look at which ones are the same, then how many fields are there? 30 fields.”
The issue is not necessarily that each requirement is unreasonable. It is that disconnected systems require the same or similar information to be entered repeatedly, while the person doing the work must remember which applications apply in which circumstances.
Whole-of-business thinking reveals this cumulative burden. It also creates an opportunity to simplify: identify repeated information, connect the touchpoints and reduce the number of times people need to interpret or re-enter the same data.
The test of an improved process is therefore broader than whether legal’s step becomes more efficient. It should also consider what that change creates upstream and downstream – and whether it genuinely reduces effort across the organisation.
Organisational Change Can Break Hidden Connections
Complexity increases as organisations evolve. Teams introduce new applications, responsibilities shift and leaders redesign processes for sound reasons within their own areas.
The difficulty is that another function may have been relying on part of the old process without the system owner knowing.
“When that umbrella department is changing what they’re doing, such as they have new management in there and they’re going to use a different app. They don’t know that over here another function is using [the old app] for this reason. And then they get a new app and they do something else and this person’s never told. And so then these connections break, all for very good reasons , but it’s hard to keep the connections going.”
When a hidden dependency breaks, people create workarounds to keep the work moving. Those workarounds can gradually become the accepted process, adding another layer of complexity to a system nobody designed from end to end.
This is why making connections visible is itself a form of risk management. A clear view of who provides information, who relies on it and what happens when something changes allows teams to improve without unintentionally disrupting another part of the business.
Continuous improvement depends on maintaining that view over time. A map of the current state is not a one-off artefact; it is a way to keep testing whether the connections still work as the organisation changes.
Understand The Current State Before Automating
When process knowledge is fragmented across people and systems, Ginette starts by getting the real process out of people’s heads. She describes this as identifying the “administrative infrastructure”: the decisions, exceptions and hand-offs that move work from beginning to end.
“So you have to, it’s painstaking, to get the administrative infrastructure down so there’s a clear roadmap of the current state of what is happening: what do you do, how does it get from start to finish.”
The work can resemble a “choose your own adventure” book. If this happens, do that. If the request is slightly different, follow another path. Documented procedures may capture the ideal route, while experienced employees instinctively navigate exceptions that have never been written down.
Once those pathways are visible, teams can remove unnecessary steps, reconnect broken hand-offs and see where repetition occurs. Only then does automation have a reliable foundation.
“And when you have that set, then you automate the patterns.”
Ginette also sees a role for AI after this groundwork has been done. Clearer processes and automated patterns create cleaner data and more consistent results, which can make AI-supported analysis more useful. The sequence is important: understand, simplify and structure the process first; then apply workflows, automation or AI to the patterns that remain.
Automation is not the destination in Ginette’s approach. It is one tool in a continuing cycle of making sense of work, improving the connections and freeing people from repetition so they can focus on higher-value activity.
Process Improvement Depends On People Being Involved
Mapping the current state requires conversation. Ginette uses questions to understand people’s situations, the problems they encounter and the implications of those problems. She speaks with people across functions and at different levels because each group sees a different part of the system.
As those perspectives come together, the connections and disconnections become clearer.
“As you ask all these questions, you start to see how they connect, where they’re disconnecting and then you can formulate: how do you bridge this all together and align them all. And then you go back with your situation, problem, implication and start talking about what’s needed. The thing about this technique is that people will come up with their own solutions and people want to do things that are their own solutions.”
This is more than a discovery technique. It brings the people doing the work into the improvement process. A small action can take on new meaning when someone understands its downstream effect – for example, how completing a field during intake could save a colleague in finance 15 minutes each day.
That understanding creates ownership. It also reduces the frustration that arises when one team sees a requirement as trivial and another experiences it as an unexplained burden.
“It’s the buy-in and it’s the feeling of being a part of something. The work that I’ve done is always about facilitating the coordination of people working together, of people understanding each other, of having a full bigger idea of what it takes to go from start to finish of something.”
Ginette’s passion for process improvement is inseparable from her belief that every person along the way adds value. Technology can reveal patterns and remove repetition, but it cannot replace the trust, context and practical knowledge that come from involving people in the change.
“Everybody wants to feel heard and valued and that what they’re doing matters.”
People want to feel heard, understand why their contribution matters and see how their work connects to the whole. When they help shape the solution, they are more likely to support it, improve it and take pride in making it work.
Communication Must Change For Different Audiences
A whole-of-business view also requires translating the same operational issue for very different audiences. Lawyers, executives, administrators and IT teams may each need a different level of detail and a different explanation of why the change matters.
Ginette is candid about the challenge.
“Some people want to talk in a really high level and you leave out a heap of details and some people want every little detail or they think you don’t what you’re talking about. And then some people, they just want to know like, how does this affect me? Only.”
The core message needs to remain consistent, but the form must change. Some stakeholders want the strategic picture. Others need to see the detailed process before they trust the recommendation. Some need a diagram to understand the connections; others will disengage if the explanation includes too much complexity.
For legal operations professionals, this adaptability is part of the work. Understanding the system is not enough; the insight must be communicated in a way that enables each stakeholder to see their place in it and make a sound decision.
Start Where You Are, Then Work Backwards And Forwards
For legal teams that recognise these challenges in their own organisations, Ginette’s advice is practical: begin with the team and environment around you. Ask what is happening, where problems occur and what those problems mean for the people doing the work. Whenever possible, ask people to show you the process rather than simply describe it.
Then work upstream. Where did the information come from? Who created it? What are they trying to achieve, and what problems do they encounter?
Once the upstream journey is clearer, move downstream. Who relies on legal’s output? What do they need, and where are the repeated touchpoints that could become stronger connections?
“It’s a lot of talking and it’s a lot of mapping it out. Start where you are, go backwards and then go forwards to make sure you’re delivering in the right direction with the right information going forward. That’s what I recommend.”
Her approach captures what legal operations can contribute well beyond the legal function. It can surface knowledge that has been hidden, show how seemingly small tasks combine into complexity, protect important connections through organisational change and create the structure needed for effective automation and AI.
Most importantly, it can bring people together around a clearer view of how work really moves.
That is the heart of Ginette’s philosophy: connect first, simplify what can be simplified, automate the patterns and keep improving – with the people doing the work involved at every step.