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From New Hire to High Performer: The Legal Operations Manager’s Guide to the First 90 Days

This guide will help you plan your first 90 days on the job as a legal ops manager. We’ll take you through setting an agenda and give you the tools to create a game plan that will set you up for success. We’ll also cover topics like working with other teams, proactive planning, and evaluating existing processes so you can make the most of your new role.

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FROM NEW HIRE TO HIGH PERFORMER: The Legal Operations Manager’s Guide to the First 90 Days
For new legal ops managers, the first 90 days set the tone for the rest of your time at the organization. It can be overwhelming to try to hit the ground running in a new environment, and without a game plan for the first few months, new managers can unintentionally implement solutions that don’t address the gaps in a company’s legal operations. Whether you’re building out a legal ops function from scratch or inheriting an existing team, here are some key milestones to help guide a legal ops manager’s first 90 days.
First, Build Relationships Across the Organization Before you start identifying process inefficiencies or recommending tech tools for productivity, new legal ops managers should prioritize building relationships with company leadership, other departments, and the legal team. Vanessa Saffold, Manager of Global Legal Operations at LiveRamp, says legal ops is “a liaison for the rest of the organization [and] builds relationships with other teams so they can help us accomplish things that help the legal department work.” Fostering connections early on will help you see issues from your collaborators’ points of view and understand your role as problem solver at a wider scale. Start by identifying your key stakeholders and internal clients — the teams, functions, and individual people who you’ll be working closely with. Who Are Your Key Stakeholders & Internal Clients? Key stakeholders have some level of involvement or investment in your processes and process outcomes. Depending on the goals, focus areas, and industry verticals of the business, stakeholders can be anyone from customers and employees to vendors and investors. For example, legal ops at businesses with key outcomes tied to M&A activity work closely with investors, finance, and the C-suite, whereas at companies that rank data compliance as a primary concern, legal ops’ key stakeholders are IT/security, product, and procurement.
Generally, many of legal ops’ major stakeholders are internal clients like legal, sales, IT, and executive leadership. Here are some ways legal ops can work with them. In-House Legal Legal ops’ primary responsibility is making the legal department more efficient – meaning one of your first tasks as a new legal ops manager is to get to know your legal team inside and out. LinkSquares CLO Tim Parilla advises legal leaders: “In your first 90 days, you need to understand the team, as it’s just as — if not more — critical than getting to know the business, because the team will help you understand the business.” Knowing how the legal team works and how they serve the businesses is essential to finding solutions that work for them. Talk to the existing legal team to understand what gaps need to be filled and how they think you as a legal ops manager can help address them. Executive Leadership Executive leadership is more focused on the bigger picture and strategy than day-to-day tactics. Having access to key performance and process metrics empowers executive leadership to make data-driven decisions that drive the business forward. Early on in their tenure, legal ops managers should figure out what data is important to the leadership team and how to report metrics in a way that helps them take action.
Sales Sales will almost always be one of legal ops’ key stakeholders, because a deal cannot close without a contract. Together, the two teams have to collaborate to create a contracting process that enables both security and speed. In the first 90 days, talk to both sales leadership and sales reps to learn what the current contracting process is, what gaps they see or where they experience frustration and view legal as a bottleneck, and determine if and how software can help automate inefficient areas. IT/Security Technology is one of CLOC’s core competencies for legal ops, which includes acquiring software and other tools that help increase legal efficiency. As the keeper of the proverbial keys for tech tools organization-wide, IT is an important collaborator for legal ops initiatives. Additionally, IT teams implement a lot of the data privacy and security protocol that legal teams need to maintain regulatory compliance. Work closely with your IT department when considering new software, and start the conversation on how you can collaborate together early. Avoid any conflicts with your organization’s current tech stack and — most importantly — any potential compliance issues.
Why You Need a Brand — And How to Build One As you get the lay of the land from your teammates, stakeholders, and internal clients, begin to cultivate your internal reputation and build your brand. According to Danielle Sheer, CLO at Commvault, a key question to ask yourself during this process is “What do I want to be known for?” Establishing your brand will help your collaborators understand what they can expect when working with you as well as how you solve problems and enable successful outcomes. When building your brand, think about the specific actions that will help teammates in both their day-to-day work and long-term initiatives, and ways you can build trust among them along the way. Your brand will evolve as your role matures, but at its heart, it’s all about how you make your collaborators’ lives easier. Talking through problems holistically helps you not only to identify problems and possible solutions, but also to help them achieve their goals.
Identifying Problems Based on conversations with your legal team, key stakeholders, and internal clients, you’ll be able to identify gaps and bottlenecks within existing processes. Warning: Do not solve everyone’s problems piecemeal. This can result in disjointed solutions that end up making problems worse. In your first 90 days, it’s important to zoom out so you can see overarching trends and implement strategies that have a wide-ranging impact.
Review the Work Done So Far If you are inheriting an existing legal ops function, it’s crucial that new legal ops managers become familiar with the work that has been done up until this point. For example, what processes have been implemented so far? What problems were they intended to solve? How effective have those processes been in achieving set outcomes? If your company doesn’t have strong knowledge management systems in place, two good ways to get the answers to these questions are by conducting process audits and asking your collaborators what they need. Conducting Process Audits Process audits are investigations of the inner workings and ultimate effectiveness of business processes. As a touchpoint for all business functions, legal’s processes are a strong indicator of an organization’s health and success. In your first 90 days, legal ops managers should conduct a deep dive into all internal processes that require legal’s input and participation. Pick apart and examine workflows between departments, especially the contract process. Ask questions such as: • How does the legal team handle intake requests? • What (and how many) tools does your team use to execute a contract? • How long does it take? • Which parts of the process are manual and need to be automated? Determine a time frame for conducting audits, and be sure to measure your findings so you analyze the effectiveness of the process and implement data-driven solutions.
Asking Collaborators What They Need While building relationships with different individuals and business functions across the organization, ask them point-blank what they need. As Vanessa Saffold points out in an episode of Cockpit Counsel, sometimes your internal clients and stakeholders already have a solution in mind. Saffold does this when working with in-house attorneys. “I schedule one-on-one’s and I like to ask questions, like, ‘What do you spend your time doing? What do you wish you were doing that you didn’t do? What do you think the department needs?’ And I start asking those probing questions to get into their brain and into their day-to-day so that I can find out how I can create efficiency for them.” Often, this conversation leads to them revealing their own potential solutions, and as a legal ops manager, your job is to implement them. “When you make the changes they’ve provided,” says Dee Venello, Legal Ops Manager at Commvault, “then they start to trust you.”
Creating a Plan to Address Issues Define Success Determine what success looks like to you. These goals should always ladder back up to company initiatives, but it’s important to go into any new project knowing what your indicators of success are. Create SMART goals and establish KPIs that will help you track and execute against your goals. Create a Plan After determining goals and success metrics, map out a plan that will help you address your process issues. Prioritize your initiatives by effort and impact to find a balance between long-term gains and quick wins. This also helps you more effectively allocate your resources. Be sure to get buy-in from key stakeholders when creating the plan. Execute, Execute, Execute! After getting buy-in on the strategy, start turning your plans into actions and hit the ground running. For example, work with IT and procurement on implementing technology like CLM that enables cross-functional collaboration and improves visibility into the contract process. As your business scales and functions mature, continue to optimize your processes towards greater efficiency. After reviewing the work done so far, start building a strategy to implement efficient processes that benefit your team and stakeholders. It’s too easy to get bogged down with tactical solutions that miss the forest for the trees. Create a plan that addresses the issues within the context of current company goals and KPIs. Define Success Determine what success looks like to you. These goals should always ladder back up to company initiatives, but it’s important to go into any new project knowing what your indicators of success are. Create SMART goals and establish KPIs that will help you track and execute against your goals. Create a Plan After determining goals and success metrics, map out a plan that will help you address your process issues. Prioritize your initiatives by effort and impact to find a balance between long-term gains and quick wins. This also helps you more effectively allocate your resources. Be sure to get buy-in from key stakeholders when creating the plan. Execute, Execute, Execute! After getting buy-in on the strategy, start turning your plans into actions and hit the ground running. For example, work with IT and procurement on implementing technology like CLM that enables cross-functional collaboration and improves visibility into the contract process. As your business scales and functions mature, continue to optimize your processes towards greater efficiency.
Getting the Tech You Need Technology empowers teams to streamline and execute their processes by automating workflows, centralizing storage, and creating audit trails for contracts and other important documents. “Incorporate your tools into your processes so that you’re not driven by the tools, you’re driving the tools,” says Saffold. CLM is an essential tool in legal ops’ tech stack as it supplements some of the most important yet time-consuming tasks on legal’s to-do list and enables seamless collaboration across teams. Within the first 90 days, new legal ops managers should evaluate potential legal tech solutions that can help legal teams drive business forward. Here are a few criteria to consider: Cloud-based Cloud-based technology is a must for modern departments. Unlike on-prem solutions, cloud-based software is accessible from anywhere and updates automatically, ensuring that all users have access to the same data at any given time. This increases flexibility and improves collaboration — especially for remote and decentralized teams. Integration-friendly The number of SaaS applications a company uses has increased from 8 in 2015 to 130 in 2022, making integrations an essential feature of CLM and other legal technology. Integration-friendly CLM software breaks down legal silos by connecting various data sources from tools across the business. This improves visibility and data accuracy and reduces the need to toggle back and forth between tools.
Data-centered Modern legal departments need data-centered solutions. Legal tech software must not only capture contract data, but also enable legal teams to analyze that data and present it to company leadership, who then use it to make high-stakes business decisions. Data-friendly software also gives legal teams the ability to prove their value, advocate for budget, and make improvements to internal processes. High ROI and Low TTV In an economic downturn, it’s important that businesses invest in solutions that provide a high return on investment (ROI) with a low time-to-value (TTV). When evaluating solutions, compare the cost of the solution to current and historical spend on contracts and other legal matters. Ask prospective providers questions about how quickly tools will help your team realize value, and feel empowered to seek out other solutions if they can’t provide an answer. What’s the point of adopting new tech if you can’t reap the benefits for months or years?
Takeaways The first 90 days as a legal ops manager is absolutely critical to the long-term success of your legal ops function. During that time, immerse yourself into the business by getting to know your new teammates and understanding process gaps and bottlenecks from several perspectives. This sets a solid foundation for introducing efficiencies into the legal department and adopting tools that help them reach their goals. CLM software helps new legal ops managers establish and execute processes that set them up for success. See how LinkSquares can help you make an impact within your first quarter. Request a demo today.
From New Hire to High Performer: The Legal Operations Manager’s Guide to the First 90 Days