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From Meh to Amazing: Transforming Legal Ops 

We’ve written about the urgency to add operations specialists to corporate legal teams. Publishing firm Legal 500 pushes GCs to “unbundle internally” – and establish a legal operations department to improve planning, technology, communication, and financial management – everything beyond actually dispensing legal advice. 

While big picture benefits are clear, it’s challenging to go from creating a Legal Operations function to strengthening it.   

This eBook highlights three principles to transform Legal Ops into a high-functioning business partner. This requires more than just being productive – but generating business value. 

Build bridges within your business. 

Communication gaps erode performance. Enterprises often experience these in two areas: financial reporting and sales cycles. But a well-tuned legal ops function bridges these divides.

Financial Reporting

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) guides legal ops professionals to pursue activities that maximize resources through sound financial management. Often, companies lack visibility or predictability in their budgeting and forecasting. This leads to material cash impacts, including shortfalls and a lack of economic context when making investment decisions.

Given its proximity to deals and contracts, Legal Ops can share critical reporting that boosts finance team effectiveness. Opportunity areas include:  

  • Streamlining invoice review
  • Allocating legal costs to business areas
  • Deriving spend insights from vendor contracts
  • Supporting budget development with centralized reporting

Legal Ops becomes an indispensable part of budgeting and financial planning by supporting activities like these.   

Sales Cycle

When Legal and Sales fall out of sync, deal pace slows. To avoid this, Legal Ops must pinpoint problem areas. This often means eliminating communication gaps by centralizing and integrating both teams’ data and systems.

Practically, this should include creating processes that move contract drafting and management workflows out of the inbox. 

LinkSquares, for example, built a Salesforce CRM integration within its contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform. This becomes a low-hanging-fruit opportunity for many to reduce the email clutter compounding poor communication. Reps benefit from automated contract status updates, and managers sharpen their ability to forecast, assess time-to-close, and predict revenues.

To support Sales (or any critical business function), Legal Ops must also understand what their colleagues need and expect. 

This doesn’t mean becoming an order taker. 

Spend time defining common sales cycle disruptors and identifying process risks. Talk to key stakeholders; come up with step-by-step procedures and workflows to improve ownership, clarity, and accountability. 

When teams don’t discuss these, sales process confusion turns to frustration. As one legal leader told us, “Communication missteps are rare when everyone knows who is doing what by when.” 

Once exposed, Legal Ops must rebuild the processes that once slowed down deals. Consider deploying tools to speed up contract creation by allowing Sales to draft or request agreements directly from their CRM. Additionally, consider pre-approved terms or contract language that sales or customer success teams can use without interacting with Legal. 

Explore self-service reporting as well. Legal Ops may streamline communications by adopting software to give business users access to custom contract reporting. For example: Does the revenue ops team need to pull reports on how many contracts renew this quarter or understand how many clients are headquartered in London? 

Automate it  – eliminate back-and-forth emails that paint the picture of other teams waiting on Legal to comb through contracts.

Step out of your (innovation) comfort zone.

Some legal ops teams never move beyond basic risk management cleanup. Thomson Reuters calls this out, suggesting that lawyers’ conservative natures may leave them “preferring the status quo.” 

Top performers go on the offensive. These all-stars look for ways to automate processes and deploy technology to evolve how business gets done. 

This might mean customized contract creation workflows or deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to report real-time across your legal portfolio. It may also include developing processes to add information into a knowledge management platform for outside counsel access. 

High-performing legal ops leaders understand the fluid nature of legal functions – particularly at high-growth companies. They prioritize tools, processes, and capabilities to proactively respond to “what ifs”. 

  • What if clients ask for something uncommon in a contract?
  • What if management needs to understand variability in client commitments for compliance? 

Anticipate dynamic requests and lean on technology – not brute force – to find answers. 

Technology creates leverage for under-resourced legal operations teams and enables the ‘wins’ that produce internal champions. When Finance, Sales, or Procurement teams need you, your influence (and resources) expand. 

One legal operations head acknowledges that the right technology solutions unlock the space to “look around and figure out what’s broken.”

Develop a data devotion.

We recently heard a top legal operations director speak on the necessity of data gathering. She shared: “You’ve got to know how your team is doing at all times – from budgets and spending to contracts, cases, and outcomes.”

The difference between an average legal operations team and an expert isn’t the ability to fix broken things. (Newsflash: most broken-things lists are endless!) Top teams assess brokenness in light of value loss. Sub-par teams don’t know the difference. 

Instead, force data-driven insights to dictate what you do. 

Critical to this is defining and monitoring key metrics within your legal department. Regardless of your industry, some of the data points to monitor include: 

  • Contract turnaround time
  • Contract volumes
  • Percent of contracts on company paper vs. third-party paper
  • Contract types (broken down by business area)
  • Average total time spent redlining agreements

Around these metrics, Legal Ops can build a high-return strategy: 

* For example, turnaround time and contract complexity will drive your plan to right-source work (e.g. - using automation/tech for low risk efforts) and make sure you maximize top lawyers’ time or redeploy expensive FTEs to other projects. Yes, it may be time to move your GC off NDA prep!

* Knowing the makeup of agreements on third-party paper helps shore up negotiating leverage – a potentially high-value legal ops project.

Similarly, by capturing the time spent on various contract generation, negotiations and deal approval steps, Legal can prove its value and make the case for additional resources – including new headcount, technology, and process improvement. 

For long-term Legal Ops success, data capture and monitoring is important to prove department ROI. One leader told us that most teams “start from zero.” That is – zero data, tracked metrics, or understanding of productivity, volumes, or spend. 

Leaders must use data to establish a baseline, gauge progress, and illuminate value creation. These practices, according to Jeff Franke, former chief of staff to the GC at Yahoo!, ultimately lead Legal to run “with efficiency and effectiveness.”

LinkSquares Can Help

LinkSquares offers Dashboards that show the status of every legal agreement in your contract repository. From drafts to redlines to executed agreements, you can know where every contract is, who is responsible for moving it to execution, and how long before the agreement is ready to impact revenue. 

Beyond a status dashboard, LinkSquares also offers a customizable reporting suite, letting you convert unstructured legal documents into actionable, structured reports and insights. If you want to become a true partner to the larger organization, you need to arm your legal team with the data -- and data-driven efficiency -- that can earn them a seat at the management table. 

If you're ready to adopt the most effective solutions for Legal Ops – and harness cutting-edge artificial intelligence to improve every aspect of your legal department -- then contact LinkSquares today.