What is legal operations?
To quote Vanessa Saffold, Manager of Global Legal Operations at LiveRamp, in an episode of Cockpit Counsel, “Legal ops is the wheels that make the legal department turn.”
Legal operations enables collaboration between the legal team and the rest of the organization by introducing processes and technology to streamline legal work.
In addition to protecting the business, legal teams everywhere are being asked to contribute to the bottom line and provide insights that enable strategic decision-making. While lawyers accomplish legal work, legal ops teams implement the systems for smoother legal service delivery.
Why is legal operations important?
Legal ops is a huge driving force of operational efficiency and tech adoption in the in-house legal department. Because of your work, tedious and time-consuming tasks take lawyers a fraction of time and allow them to improve their accuracy.
In part due to legal ops’ work, the legal department is successfully rehabbing their reputation as a bottleneck by mapping out strategic goals, enabling quicker sales cycles, and using data to measure business impact.
Legal ops core competencies
Legal ops has been around for a while, but it started gaining steam in the last decade or so as more companies built out a legal ops function. The goal of legal operations has shifted from one that focused primarily on risk management to one that solves complex business problems.
Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) is an organization of legal professionals that defines the standards of the legal ops function. CLOC established the “Core 12” competencies: the functional areas that legal ops teams need to master to develop a mature legal ops function.
The CLOC Core 12 are:
Business intelligence: Your team’s ability to track and monitor the right data to make better business decisions.
Financial management: How well your team manages your budget and connects spend to business results.
Firm and vendor management: Building strategic relationships with external vendors and service providers that deliver value.
Information governance: Putting policies and processes in place for storing, sharing, and deleting information in order to reduce risk.
Knowledge management: Documenting and retaining business best practices to scale knowledge across the organization.
Organization optimization and health: Assembling a highly skilled team, uniting them under a shared vision, and supporting them through effective people management.
Practice operations: Freeing up lawyers’ time to focus on strategic work by onboarding people and tools to address operational needs.
Project/program management: Using effective change management and project management to successfully launch new initiatives.
Service delivery models: Breaking down large projects into smaller parts and being more intentional and deliberate about the vendors you use to execute.
Strategic planning: Setting goals and defining a long-term vision for the team, rather than approaching your responsibilities ad hoc.
Technology: Evaluating and onboarding technology to improve legal workflows, automate manual tasks, and improve accuracy.
Training and development: Enabling your team’s growth and upskilling through training and certifications.
What does legal operations do?
Simply put, the goal of legal operations is to increase productivity and efficiency in the legal department and drive value for the entire business. Legal ops takes advantage of sophisticated legal technology to automate time-consuming legal tasks and support cross-functional collaboration.
The specific tasks that legal ops does depend on your business’ needs, but here are some examples of what legal operations does for the business (and how to use technology to do it).
Enable better collaboration with legal
Legal teams that work in a silo and/or depend on manual processes probably also struggle to collaborate efficiently with other business units. Using legal technology, legal ops opens up the lines of communication between legal and the rest of the business. This helps them build workflows that improve visibility and timely execution of tasks.
Automate tiresome tasks
A lot of legal’s work involves researching, writing, and editing. These tasks take forever, and keep lawyers in the weeds when a more strategic approach is needed. One of legal ops’ first orders of business is to understand what lawyers spend their time on and what kind of support they need to do their jobs. Knowing this, legal ops can evaluate and onboard legal technology that automates the important but intensive tasks.
Use contract data to improve performance
Without technology, legal teams are left to collect data manually, usually by combing through emails, scrolling through multiple Slack channels, and poring over spreadsheets. As legal ops introduces technology to the team, legal is better equipped to track data inside your contracts. This allows you to understand the health of your customer base, risks within your agreements, and overall team performance.
What types of legal operations software do teams use?
Legal operations software — also called enterprise legal management — is the suite of tools legal teams use to increase efficiency within the legal function.
These tools empower lawyers and legal ops to tackle your growing to-do lists efficiently, increase transparency across the business, and track outcomes.
Here are four examples of legal operations software that help you achieve your goals:
Legal project management
Managing intake and following through on tasks is critical to legal teams’ success. Legal project management tools help legal teams to collect the right information during intake, centralize requests from all corners of the business, and organize and assign tasks based on availability and urgency. This helps you work faster and prove your reliability to the business.
Contract lifecycle management
Contract lifecycle management (CLM) automates the contract process and streamlines workflows to execute contracts faster. Plus, CLM like LinkSquares comes equipped with AI contract analytics and a legal metrics dashboard to help your team measure success.
eSignature
Manual signatures waste paper and waste legal’s time. With eSignature, legal teams can collect signatures faster using a digitally-native solution that is easily accessible to all contract stakeholders.
Takeaways
Legal operations helps legal become an in-house superstar. As the function responsible for oiling the wheels of legal productivity, legal ops helps reduce costs, lower risks, and improve collaboration using powerful technology and seamless processes.
Legal ops uses enterprise legal management software to automate legal workflows, collect important business metrics, and track spend to manage legal’s budget. With various tools like project management software, CLM, and eSignature, legal ops enables high performance for the legal team as well as the wider business.
From New Hire to High Performer:
The Legal Operations Manager’s Guide to the First 90 Days