Legal operations is a relatively new field that focuses on optimizing and streamlining the operations and processes of legal departments within organisations.
The emergence of legal operations reflects a growing recognition that legal departments need to operate more like businesses, with a focus on efficiency, data-driven decision-making, and strategic planning.
Legal operations encompasses a range of responsibilities, such as project management, financial management, vendor management, data analytics, and technology implementation. With such a broad remit, it can be challenging to know where to start.
In this article we discuss the importance of mapping the existing landscape as a first step and explore some projects legal teams might choose to focus on as an early priority when getting started with legal operations.
Legal operations is a relatively new field that focuses on optimizing and streamlining the operations and processes of legal departments within organisations.
The emergence of legal operations reflects a growing recognition that legal departments need to operate more like businesses, with a focus on efficiency, data-driven decision-making, and strategic planning.
Legal operations encompasses a range of responsibilities, such as project management, financial management, vendor management, data analytics, and technology implementation. With such a broad remit, it can be challenging to know where to start.
In this article we discuss the importance of mapping the existing landscape as a first step and explore some projects legal teams might choose to focus on as an early priority when getting started with legal operations.
While there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer, it is always important to map the current landscape.
This begins with identifying the mission, vision, values, and key objectives of the business. This will help to ensure that any legal operations projects are properly aligned and well-placed to secure buy-in at the most senior levels.
It’s also important to understand how the legal team currently interacts with internal clients and identify any challenges and pain points.
There will also be environmental factors to take into account e.g. any technology currently used, budgetary constraints, and existing projects that might compete for resources.
With that context in place, potential legal operations projects can be prioritised based on likely cost, impact and anticipated delivery speed.
While the ideal roadmap for legal operations will vary for each organization, some projects are more common than others in the initial stages of the journey. With that in mind, here are a few examples of the sorts of projects in-house legal teams often look at as an early priority, as a source of inspiration for your own planning and evaluation.
There are two main reasons that in-house legal teams should consider focussing on workflow management as an early priority when looking to improve operations.
First, an inefficient (or even non-existent) workflow management process is often one of the largest drains on a legal department’s time and resources.
At every stage – whether that’s intake and triage, allocation and collaboration, or tracking and reporting – lawyers find themselves battling overly manual processes, siloed systems and data sources and gaps/crossed-wires in communications.
All of this reduces the team’s capacity to invest time in identifying and progressing legal operations projects.
Second, without a clear picture of the team’s current workflows, it is difficult to accurately identify where the pain points are and which changes/projects would produce the best ROI.
A workflow management system is a vital step in being able to capture and understand the data needed to build out a wider legal operations roadmap. For further reading on this, please see our related blog post: 5 questions to help become a data-driven in-house legal team.
To find out more: Learn how Tabled can help with workflow management.
When embarking on a journey to improve legal operations, a valid place to start is to explore whether there are any ‘quick wins’.
Finding projects which can produce a real, tangible change, relatively quickly and without requiring a huge investment of time or money can help to build trust and demonstrate the value of engaging with legal operations projects to the team and wider organisation.
With a lot of legal work focussing on the production of documents, looking for opportunities to automate this process can be a great place to start.
For a first/early project, it will typically best to steer away from huge/complex suites of documentation requiring dynamic clause libraries and the like and look for relatively straightforward, higher-volume documents which can be automated to help the lawyers save time or even support outsourcing the production of first drafts to the business itself.
To find out more: Learn how Tabled can help with document automation
Further reading:
What is contract automation and what are the benefits?
Done correctly, creating self-service legal knowledge resources for the business can deliver a genuine ‘win-win’ outcome.
The legal team have (typically relatively low-value, repetitive) work taken off of their plates and have more time to focus the higher-value, more strategic work which they are more interested in and makes better use of their time.
The business users are empowered to get what they need more quickly and without having to go through legal every time.
A classic example is the FAQ. Many in-house lawyers report spending an actually quite large percentage of their time responding to the same/similar – often fairly straightforward – queries over and over again.
Reinventing the wheel each time is frustrating for the lawyers and internal clients may find themselves waiting longer than they might expect for a response.
For simple queries, traditional/static knowledge resources such as a maintained bank of FAQs and reference documents such as playbooks and policy guides will often be all that’s needed.
However, it’s also possible to automate the process of responding to more complex queries that have a few moving parts. This requires technology which can take internal clients through the a sequence of related questions in a user-friendly way and direct them to the appropriate answer, resource, or next step.
No-code technology means that in-house legal teams can design these workflows themselves, without needing any technical knowledge.
To find out more: Learn how Tabled can help with the creation of self-service workflows
Further reading: Self-service technology: 3 ‘win-win’ use cases for in-house legal teams
For teams that make frequent use of outside counsel, external legal spend is one of the most visible metrics to the wider business.
As a result, finding ways to reduce – or at least better understand and justify – external legal spend is often one of the first tasks that someone working to improve legal operations might be faced with.
At a practical level, this might involve seeking to renegotiate hourly rates, redistributing work in a way that secures volume discounts or ‘value-add’ services from law firms or even creating/reviewing a formal panel to create competitive tension.
There is also technology such as legal spend analytics and legal e-billing software which can assist with reviewing invoices and controlling spend.
However, it’s not all about hourly rates and invoices.
Optimising legal operations also plays a role in ensuring the business obtains the best ROI on its external legal spend. This is about streamlining the way that external law firms are engaged (from making/tracking quotes to instructions); supporting more efficient collaboration with them and helping the business to capture and organise related data and outputs with as painlessly as possible.
Further reading: Panel Management: the prize is in the process
Finally, it’s also worth bearing in mind that the more that optimizing legal operations frees up internal capacity through projects such as those outlined earlier in this article, the more potential there will be to keep more work in-house and avoid paying an external law firm in the first place.
Further reading: Six ways to reduce outside legal spend (no matter the hourly rates)
The Legalops Café is a growing community hosted by Tabled for in-house lawyers and legal operations professionals to network and share insights.
Every month, we host a free online meetup for our members to come together for an hour to explore a topic of interest to the community.
To help kickstart the discussion, we start by hearing from one or more guest speakers, before moving on to Q&A and open group discussion.
We also run polls and host breakout rooms to share learnings between the group and help our members to connect and build relationships with their peers.
Tabled is a legal operations platform that brings together in-house legal teams, their internal clients/stakeholders and outside counsel.
This connected approach means in-house legal teams can manage all their work from one digital workspace which is optimised to suit their needs, for maximum efficiency and visibility.
We have supported in-house legal teams of all shapes and sizes to with their legal operations, providing technology; insights; and implementation/adoption support, to deliver quick, tangible wins to their teams and businesses while also laying down the systems and processes to support a more data-driven approach to longer-term planning and strategy.
If we can help – whether with our technology or with any insights we’ve picked up along the way – we’d be delighted to support.
Please feel free to book a call to learn more about Tabled – or just for an informal chat. If you’d like to see the platform in action please sign up for a demo using the form below.