SOP Management in 2026: The Evolving Role of Analytics and Technology

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Annie: Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's webinar, "SOP Management in 2026, The Evolving Role of Analytics and Technology." My name is Annie Triboletti. I will be your moderator kicking things off today.

So joining us today is Paul Matthews. Paul is a director of product management focusing on representation services. So with that, I'd like to welcome Paul.

Paul: Thank you very much, Annie. So I want to thank everyone for joining us today. We certainly know your time is valuable. But we also know that if you're here today, challenges around the service of process management and more importantly some strategies for addressing those challenges has the potential to provide real value. So without further delay, let's go ahead and get into it. I'm going to start by quickly running through our agenda, and then we'll dive right in.

So we're going to start today's session by describing some of the most frequent and common challenges that we see organizations experiencing relative to the management of SOP. We'll also discuss some high-level strategies for tackling those challenges. I'll share some insights from your peers out on the front lines of SOP intake and management from our recent SOP Insight Report. We'll spend some time talking about the power of data as a foundation for healthy processes and practices around SOP management. It wouldn't be a webinar without some AI talking points. So we'll be sharing some of the ways that we see artificial intelligence influencing the service of process ecosystem. And then, finally, we'll close today's session with some real world examples of putting those strategies in place. And we'll save some time at the end to give you a chance to submit some of your own questions on these topics. So with no further ado, let's go ahead and get into it.

So for more than 20 years, I've had the opportunity to work with organizations of all sizes and shapes, helping them design workflows and configure technology to address the range of problems and challenges that are encountered with high or even moderate SOP volumes. And while the specific problem set or priority for solving those problems can differ from organization to organization, there are absolutely some challenges that are common nearly across the board. So let's start by running through some of those common issues, and that'll help us establish sort of a general context for some of the specific topics we'll dive into deeper as we go through today's session.

So one of the things that we see a lot of organizations struggling with is that their service of process doesn't just come through one single pipeline. It comes in across multiple channels. So in a perfect world, all the organization's SOP would be delivered through a single channel of your choosing. But in the actual world, SOP arrives through your registered agent. It can come through your corporate office, through retail and satellite locations. It can come in by email and maybe through a half dozen of other modes and methods, again, not necessarily of your choosing, but things that you have to contend with.

So many organizations have not cracked a methodology that brings these all together under a single tracking system. And this distributed or scattered approach can be a source of not only ongoing complexity, but a source of risk that ultimately we think is avoidable. And we'll talk through some of the strategies that we think can be applied to that.

One of the other areas that we see organizations struggling with is just moving things around and getting them to the people that need to handle them. So as the size of your organization grows, so too does the likelihood that different types of service of process need to be handled by different people. For example, in most companies, the person managing defensive litigation is not the same person that's handling wage garnishments and maybe even subpoenas. So in larger, more complex organizations, even those general categories may be carved up by business unit, by region, by subject matter. And what we encounter in most instances that a small number of subject matter experts, sometimes just a single person are responsible for reviewing each incoming SOP document and determining where it needs to go. These manual approaches, they often suffer from single points of failure. They can cause delays or inconsistencies, and this often becomes a critical pain point as organizations find themselves needing to scale to higher SOP volumes.

Another thing that we see customers commonly dealing with is that they have sort of a lack of useful data. So when data collection related to service of process is insufficient, when it's inconsistent, or when it's just kind of unintentional, meaning there's not really an intentional approach to how you're managing it, capturing it can become a burden, and that data capture can be time consuming but doesn't necessarily pay value back into your process. So it's at best informational, but it never truly becomes the source of insight, which is really what you want your data to do. So further, we also see messy data practices around service of process will absolutely prevent your organization from optimal usage of AI and other tools that can provide automation or the opportunity for broader analysis.

One of the things that, again, we see a lot of organizations contending with and this tends to be an increasingly severe pressure point is that they're dealing with outmoded technology. So we often encounter customers whose SOP processes are far too dependent on sort of general purpose tools, so things like Excel and Outlook. And they simply aren't effective or even appropriate for tracking potentially high-risk documents, such as service of process, especially when we think of things like defensive litigation. In other cases, we have organizations that may actually have a robust tool, an enterprise legal management platform, or a matter management solution, but it's disconnected from their SOP intake workflow. And so that very expensive and sophisticated software investment that they've made is at the mercy of inconsistently applied manual data entry, and sometimes they don't even move the document images into those tools just because of the effort. So we find that these manual processes just fall short of giving you the opportunity to fully leverage the technology that you've invested in.

So again, those are some of the common problems we see. What we're going to look at next is just some general approaches that can be applied for each of those situations and things that we've seen work in the world with our customers. So one of the great things about common problems is that there are usually a set of best practices that exist, and those can serve as effective antidotes to a lot of these issues.

So again, going back to the idea of multiple intake channels, so rather than continuing to manage multiple parallel but independent workflows, the thing that is most effective here is establishing a workflow that funnels all of these different work streams into a common repository. So again, as early in the process as you can get away with, getting everything to start moving in the same direction to an agreed upon common source of truth, like that is really going to be the only and best way to really have a full look at everything that you're responsible for relative to service of process, making sure it gets where it's supposed to go, and making sure the people who need to handle it have access to it without delay.

When we think about the challenge of manual SOP routing, again, that dependence on those subject matter experts, as long as your rules engine lives in the head of those subject matter experts, you're constantly going to be walking a tightrope, where failures and delays are not only possible but likely. So what you really need to do is look for a technology solution that can leverage the data you're capturing about each service of process document to drive automated routing and assignment. Ideally that is something that is happening in real time as documents come in, without delay, without logjams in your process. And what this will do is this will help bring consistency to the process and eliminate the delays that were caused just waiting for a single person or a small group of people to take action on something. So again, you want to kind of make sure that whatever your workflow is, that it's continuous and that it's not dependent on someone manually moving something around.

As we talk about the data that you're capturing, it's important that you at some point take a step back and start to be thoughtful about the data that you actually need to support the various objectives you're trying to accomplish. What would be useful to drive automation of delivery and assignment of documents? What would you want to know to better understand the patterns and trends related to SOP volume and helping you identify how those trends correlate to opportunities for risk reduction and mitigation? If you have too little data, you'll lose the opportunity to realize efficiency and gain those insights from looking at trends and the ongoing shape of your data. If you collect too much data, you're going to, again, create sort of those logjams, and you're going to invite gaps in your data. So again, if you ask people to do too much, eventually you are going to find that they are finding ways around capturing all the data that's been asked for, your data is going to get kind of watered down and generalized, and you're going to lose the specificity in that data that is actually going to help you run your business better.

And then when we talk about technology, I mentioned before very commonly we see people using and kind of defaulting to using tools like Excel and Outlook and other kind of tools that are already readily at hand. And that's understandable. People want to use tools that they're familiar with, especially if they don't have to have any additional investment to get to those tools. But then you're going to inevitably leave yourself kind of settling for bad process. And to make those tools work, you're also going to be inviting a lot of manual effort to kind of bridge the gaps.

There are solutions available that will help shape your process and support your organizational needs. And the best of those solutions will be highly configurable. They'll be flexible enough to grow and change as your organization evolves, putting you in a position to address not only the challenges you have today, but the challenges that you may encounter in the future as the shape and needs of your organization change.

So when you're choosing a technology, you have to make sure you understand how that technology is supported. You want to make sure that you understand if you're buying something off the shelf, that you're going to be responsible for doing all the work to configure. Or if you're able to find a tool that kind of leverages the best practices and techniques that have been used to develop software, but also a team that stands behind that to properly support it. If you can find the best combination of those things, you're going to see that your world becomes much easier to manage, gets much easier for you to see the landscape that you're responsible for managing, and things will stop falling between the cracks. When someone asks where something is, that is going to be an easy answer to get to because you're using tools that have been purpose-built for what you're trying to manage.

So while we do our best to document, consolidate, and understand feedback from each new engagement with new and existing customers, it's also really useful for us to sometimes take a step back and cast a wider net to validate that the problems that we are seeing as pervasive align with the general sentiment of the industries and teams that our solutions support. So with that in mind, CSC recently surveyed more than 250 legal professionals that hold senior roles within their organization, from sectors including technology, manufacturing, financial services, and insurance. And we wanted to better understand where they see the most significant challenges and opportunities with how they're managing their service of process today. So with that in mind, let's take a few minutes to review some of the key observations from their responses. This is part of our Insight Report, which summarizes the findings from this survey. But again, we're going to talk about some of those high-level findings today.

So more than 56% of respondents cited SOP volume as a concern. So that's not surprising. Rising volumes of service of process are putting pressure on teams across all industries. It stresses their workflows. It really helps them understand where they have gaps in technology. And again, this seems to be a trend that is common to all sectors. So SOP volume is up across the board, and that has been a near constant trend over the last 10 years, which tells us that this is not a one-time spike. This is going to be an ongoing problem. All signs point to SOP volumes continuing to grow. So this will continue to be something that challenges different organizations in different ways.

Some of the drivers of that volume growth will differ from industry to industry. But there are several factors that are driving those broader trends, and some of them are specific to changes in technology and regulation. So among other things, the continued expansion of smart devices and artificial intelligence, those are bringing renewed focus on the use and misuse of personal data and data privacy. This is an especially important area for organizations operating in the consumer technology space. They probably feel this challenge most directly.

Similarly, we're seeing an overall trend towards things like deregulation or the limiting of the authority of regulatory agencies, and so the impact that that has is that has created more uncertainty in the spaces affected by those regulatory agencies, and it's pushing more and more of those disputes from those regulatory bodies into civil litigation. So that's driving sort of an upward trend in just defensive litigation across a range of business sectors.

We are also seeing, and this has been a trend that has continued over the last several years, we're seeing an increase in class action matters. And sort of a parallel to that, we're seeing an increase in mass arbitration, so where a common set of complaining parties are using the arbitration process that was once sort of a protection for providers of consumer services and products now sort of has been kind of weaponized by plaintiff firms against those same firms. And those plaintiff firms are using technology to really exert more pressure on corporate defendants. And again, that's both in the class action space and the mass arbitration space.

And then, one of the other things that is absolutely contributing to a rise in litigation is that there are an increasing number of what we would describe as nuclear verdicts. So that is these huge dollar amount verdicts in favor of plaintiffs. And when those happen, those encourage other plaintiffs to file. They encourage plaintiff's attorneys to seek out plaintiffs who have similar fact patterns. And we're also seeing that sort of feed into a trend towards third-party litigation funding. So that's actually making it possible for some plaintiffs, who previously wouldn't have been able to pursue complex litigation because of the high cost associated with it, now there's potentially a way past that through this third-party litigation funding. And so, again, all of those things are kind of contributing to increased volumes in the litigation space.

When we talk about service of process, it's not all about litigation. Depending on your organization, especially if you have a lot of employees and especially hourly employees, there are other things that you're going to see, like an increase in wage garnishments. And then, we also see wage garnishments as well as other categories, like bankruptcy and foreclosure, those are also rising in volume, and that's typically as a product of ongoing economic instability, so things like inflation and rising consumer debt levels. All of that is, again, providing more fuel for those rising volumes.

And again, if you are an organization that receives a significant amount of SOP volume, and significant can mean different things to different organizations, but if you feel the pressure of that volume, again that is not likely to go away. So these are things that you have to contend with, and you have to be thoughtful about and you have to plan for.

Let's jump to the next finding. So 54% of respondents found it is difficult to source skilled staff experienced in managing SOP. So as we unpack this one, we find that there are a couple of different, though certainly related levers that are making staffing more difficult.

So first and this will be a surprise to almost no one on the call, most corporate law departments are having to make do with less. So when people leave, often you're expected to keep up with all of your responsibilities, but without a resource backfill being a guarantee. And depending on your industry and your organization, you may be expected to find a way to make up for that lost capacity with technology or finding less expensive staffing replacements, and that usually means less experienced and less expert staffing replacements.

So the other problem is sort of the shifting landscape of what type of expertise you need. So with the increased demand for things like specialized knowledge related to data privacy, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, the market really hasn't adjusted yet to equipping more lawyers and paralegals with that knowledge and expertise. So when you need to go find staff either to backfill someone who's left or to deal with just sort of these rising volume increases, there isn't necessarily a ready labor pool situated to answer that demand in the shape that you need them to operate. And again, let's not forget the last slide. You're having to solve that problem in the context of those rising volumes. So more work to do, harder to find people to do it. So again, that's something that over half of our respondents suggested was a real concern of theirs.

So this is a big number. So 76% of respondents said they're spending "too much" or "excessive" time managing their SOP. So if everyone's getting busier and there are not enough qualified people to do the work you have, what factor could essentially throw gasoline on that fire? How about spending too much time on the work that should be routine and relatively administrative? But that's exactly what's happening. So we still talk to customers every day that tell us they are struggling to manage their SOP volume, and then they tell us that they're falling back into things like tracking it using email and spreadsheets, or that their litigation is well managed and that's in a proper matter management or enterprise legal management system. But everything else, subpoenas, garnishments, and every other type of legal request, those are just kind of tracked casually or in less formal tools.

And so those manual and varied methodologies are reaching their breaking point. So again, that pressure of added volume is just exposing these choices to not have a proper tool or to not use proper tools really doesn't set you up for success. And again, like as we go through each of these findings, like there's a real connective tissue to all of it. So again, rising volumes, less people to do it. The tools are insufficient. Like this starts to really add up.

As we get to the next finding here, again, over 60% of respondents called data accuracy a thing that was a major hurdle for their in-house teams. So given some of the pressures listed on the prior slides, most organizations are looking to do more with automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and even just using their data to drive planning and decision-making. But they're finding that they have data gaps and inconsistencies because they aren't using proper tools. They weren't thoughtful about how they were capturing their data. They didn't enforce data accuracy and management practices. And so, as a result of that, they are finding it difficult to leverage the data they have because it wasn't thoughtfully organized. So they didn't do the foundational work to put themselves in a position to leverage that data. And so, again, that is a common problem but something that surely has to be addressed.

And then, finally, with all of that, they're also having to deal with new regulatory concerns and new areas of risk. So cybersecurity is a top concern as well. So as data privacy and security are becoming a chief concern for almost half of the folks that responded, business organizations are capturing and tracking more and more data about their business, their employees, their customers. Even small and medium-sized businesses are managing hundreds of terabytes of data. In some organizations, we all have to learn new words to describe increasingly large sets of data, petabytes and yottabytes and things like that. But there's just this huge amount of data that's being captured, and almost without exception the companies are realizing that they now have some pretty intense obligations to protect and control access to that data.

And then, with our friend AI, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment, with AI in the mix, bad actors have never been better equipped to launch faster and more sophisticated attacks on that data. So legal professionals who are responsible for risk strategy and mitigation, there's a lot to be worried about relative to protecting the data that you're now collecting to run your business. So managing your data responsibly and with tools that were built for that challenge, that is not just a best practice anymore, but it's almost literally the least you can do.

So we're going to start thinking about the challenges facing organizations managing significant SOP volume, and we're going to start to see that the most common thread is their data. So as we begin to think about the places that our customers tell us that automation is useful and important, it very often lines up with the part of their process where things slow down, just so someone can execute a repetitive step. So in other words, someone is following a well-established and well-understood rule. Data drives that, right? So if your data is collected correctly, and then it's structured and it's predictable, then that is going to give you the fuel you need to automate those rules. So instead of that living in someone's head, it can live in a rules engine that just runs. And again, that's what you want.

Data is also critical to developing risk controls. So finding sources of risk, especially the type that you can actually get out ahead of, it's all about recognition of the patterns that give rise to that risk. Right? So your data, if it's the right data, is where you're going to find those patterns, and you're going to be able to find them ideally before the actual risk has sort of translated into being an actual problem. So again, good data lets you do that kind of thing.

Overall line of sight. If you can't see something, you can't really know that it's behaving as expected. So people are surprised all the time at things that get lost in the shuffle, or when they suddenly find themselves buried by the things that need their attention. Being able to count and track and manage the universe of things that you're responsible for is sometimes the only and certainly the best defense against those avoidable surprises or even just getting overwhelmed, right? So being able to see the playing field is just of critical importance. And when we say you can see it, it's almost always I have the data to tell me what's happening out there.

And then, finally, like your data is the source of insight, right? So once your data is in shape and it's in a place you can access it, you can really start to put it to work. So it can help you explain where you've been. It can tell you where you're going. And it can also help you see when the shape of your world is changing. So where did all this new volume come from? What's causing it? Is it preventable? Can you be better prepared for it? All of that, all of those answers, it lives in your data, again, if your data is properly organized and properly planned for. So just like a good way to think about this is everything is going to be a surprise if you're in a dark room and your eyes are closed, right? So let your data shine a bright light everywhere, and then that's going to help you see what you should be seeing.

Okay, so I think it is possibly illegal to gather more than three business professionals in a place these days and not actually discuss AI. And so to honor that responsibility, we're going to talk a little bit about the role that data plays in successful AI adoption. And hopefully, this will sound familiar to you and overlay with some of the things that you're thinking about.

So admittedly, this graphic is a little heavy-handed, and that is intentional. So no matter your organization's current or future plans regarding AI, the successful execution of those plans and more importantly the successful realization of your organizational goals, it will be contingent on the content and quality of your data. So failure to be intentional and intelligent about the data you collect, where it lives, and how you maintain it, it will absolutely impact your ability to leverage the incredible opportunity that AI can represent.

Most organizations will spin up endless proofs of concept or pilots for how they can use AI for driving efficiency, enhancing decision-making, doing large-scale data analysis and prediction. And almost all of those efforts will die on the vine. There's a huge percentage of pilots that are spun up just never get off the ground. And people are quick to blame that on the technology or on the implementation shortfalls. But overwhelmingly, these initiatives fail due to a lack of adoption and a failure to build confidence in the value of that product or feature. And the end users and evaluators of those features don't find the output of AI in these contexts to be accurate enough. It doesn't align with what their expectations are, and so eventually they just say, "I don't trust this. I don't want to use it."

So when we ask why that is, like why does that happen, so there's a better than average chance that their data, the data that they're using to drive that process wasn't prepared to support that initiative. Their data is incomplete. Their data is disconnected. This can be an organization level problem. It can be a problem within individual business units. Each business area is a microcosm that can either support or detract from the overall data management apparatus that your organization uses.

And so if you are someone who is being tasked with making AI work or just someone who is interested in making AI work within your team, within your organization, you need to get out at the front and lead. And the charge that you specifically need to lead is being a data vanguard. You need to be the one that is out there saying that we need to start today making our data better equipped to support where we want to get to. If you don't start that and you just sit back and wait for others to do that, everyone is going to be sitting back and waiting. Your data is never going to be in the shape it needs to be. The degree to which AI can help and influence efficiency and insight in your organization is going to be limited. So it's definitely a garbage in, garbage out process. So you've got to start the process of not feeding garbage into those workflows. That's the most critical factor in successful AI projects within any organization for any purpose.

All right. So that concludes the AI portion of our presentation. Again, I feel like we always have to cover that.

But as we as we get closer to the end here, one of the things we do at CSC is our goal is to not only be a service provider that meets the basic requirements for being a registered agent, but we also look to provide our customers with meaningful access to best practices that fit their organization, based on our decades of working with organizations of all sizes and across all industries. We take a consultative approach that starts during our new customer onboarding, but it's also offered as an ongoing resource during the life of the relationship with CSC. So next up, what we're going to do is we're going to run through a couple of case studies that are a result of that process.

I'll also mention that by attending today's call, you are all qualified to receive a complimentary 30-minute SOP consultation, so sort of a practical application of what I'm going to show you. And during that session, we'll get a high-level sense of your current SOP workflow and any challenges you're experiencing and try to point you towards some quick wins, some things we know have worked for people in a similar position. So I'm going to run through those, and we've got two of them.

So the first one, we met with a customer that is a large U.S.-based insurance company. They get more than 75,000 SOP documents annually. And that volume is nearly a perfect split between subpoenas and litigation. They handle their litigation in-house, at least the initial assessment of it, and then they outsource at least the initial handling of their subpoenas. So as much as possible, they've got a third party that's collecting the responsive records, preparing them for that response.

So they have well-established and efficient processes for handling SOP as it comes through CSC as their registered agent, but they were struggling with how to manage and track SOP coming in through other sources, so their branch locations, corporate headquarters, and getting a ton of electronic requests. So these items were being handled mostly by email and tracked in spreadsheets. So again, similar to things I've mentioned earlier in the presentation. As a result of this, they were seeing frequent delays getting documents into the hands of the teams that were responsible for handling them. And so those delays in getting them to the right team were causing delays in getting the responses in within the required response period. So they were either missing those deadlines, or they were having to hustle on every item that came across to try to meet what was suddenly a very extremely tight turnaround time.

They also mentioned that they were having concerns with how those other channels weren't easily accounted for. So they had like good reporting, but there was a chunk of volume that wasn't accounted for in that reporting. So they were trying to fix that.

So as I mentioned earlier, our experience tells us that the best way to address a problem like this is to find the earliest point in the process where you can start to push everything into the same funnel. This then allows you to leverage that carefully engineered workflow across not just most of your SOP volume but the entirety of your SOP volume.

So we set them up with access to what we call our direct SOP intake portal. So this allows any individual with a corporate email address in their organization to submit documents as soon as they're received. So no username or passwords required. The interface was built to be intuitive. So it's essentially you drag a file into a big rectangle, and that drops it into this workflow. So like I mentioned earlier, a nice, clean, simple process that anyone can follow without training. They just have to be able to recognize that this is a thing that goes in that process, and they can quickly act on it. So as a result of that, they now have line of sight to all their SOP, and they have substantially reduced the delays and missed response dates that they had. So again, this was a pretty simple problem for us to diagnose, a problem we've encountered before, and one that we have tools that we could help them leverage to solve that particular challenge.

And then, as we get to our second case study, this was a large financial institution. They were receiving approximately 60,000 SOP documents annually. So again, another high volume customer. About half of those were account garnishments. So if you don't know, those are incredibly time sensitive. And the other half of their volume was evenly split between subpoenas and litigation.

This customer has very complex routing for where things go in their organization, and that routing was dependent on a small number of subject matter experts. They were sending all their SOP to essentially a triage team, which then manually assigned them to the various teams throughout their organization. And they did that based on a set of rules that largely lived in their heads.

So in the span of two months, one member of their triage team retired, and another was out on long-term medical leave. So suddenly the capacity of that team was reduced down to 50% of its prior capacity. And those happened to be two of the most experienced people on that team. So suddenly they had a huge bottleneck at their routing step. So everything was backing up, waiting for the two remaining team members to review and route documents. And to make things worse, they were operating on a first-in, first-out basis, which meant that their highly time-sensitive account garnishments were just mixed into the pile and waiting. So they were missing deadlines, and it was having a real financial impact on the organization.

So here there was an obvious opportunity and a need to move to a more technology-driven mechanism to get everything moving to the teams that needed to work each of these documents. So we recommended starting simply. Let's help them get the account garnishments and any other time-sensitive documents to the front of the line. And then, in parallel to that, we started to work with them to develop a set of rules that could automatically route the majority of documents to their intended targets within the organization.

So from the outset, we always explain that our goal is not necessarily to automate routing of 100% of your documents. What we try to do is see if we can get to 90%. Usually that is actually a lot easier than it may sound. But like getting to 90% and then what we're doing is we're getting most of the documents through the process. We're lightening the load of that triage team. And the triage team is now focusing on the 10% of documents that actually require their specialized organizational knowledge.

So in the end, we actually ended up close to 95% automation, and they've never looked back in this process. The triage team is back to full capacity. That capacity is being spent on higher-value activities than just moving things through a process and playing traffic cop. So we we're able to deliver that time back to them and build in more resiliency to their process.