Legal Operations

What are legal operations?

Legal operations are the day-to-day business activities conducted by a company’s internal legal department. 

Also known as legal ops, these measures are more strategy-focused and help legal teams to be more efficient. When legal ops are implemented, businesses treat the in-house legal team like its own independent legal firm within the larger organizational structure, with separate financial, technical, and business management operations that are specific to the legal department. 

This is different from legal administration, where the legal team simply handles standard administrative tasks like drafting legal documents or completing research for clients or the business.

Since there are many elements to legal ops, internal teams often turn to enterprise legal management (ELM) software to keep track of department spending, manage legal records for the company, and automate reporting, all from one centralized system.

Types of legal operations

There are many avenues that companies can take to build their legal ops. These can be narrowed down to two distinct categories:

• Business management. This aspect of legal ops treats any business task that the legal team needs to complete as if that department were its own entity or business within the company. Essentially, the legal team operates as its own small business under the wider company structure, with business management practices controlling their daily operations. Technology management, strategic organizational planning, project management, and business performance are all essential components of this side of legal ops.
• People management. Vendors and clients need effective management to create the best business results. Many legal ops tools help track the outside legal services a company uses, along with client records and internal staff documentation.

Basic elements of legal operations

Not every business needs to use all of the different elements of legal ops to the same degree, but all teams should adhere to these 12 core competencies developed by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC).

• Business intelligence. Like other strategic teams, legal ops should develop reports and insights for more informed business decisions that align with company goals.
• Organizational health. Dedicated members of the legal ops team should work with HR to hire and train the best talent. All new hires should be a good fit within the legal ops department and company culture as a whole. 
• Practice operations. Efficiency and speed are crucial on a legal ops team. The right tasks need to be assigned to the most competent team members in order to complete each project to a high standard.
• Strategic planning. Both internal and external stakeholders within the entire company need to be considered when planning new strategies. The work the legal ops team is doing must support and work toward overall company vision and goals, not just the goals within their own department.
• Information governance. The legal ops team always oversees governance and compliance throughout a business’s departments. They make sure its employees understand company-wide policies. Managing data security also falls under the purview of legal ops.
• Knowledge management. Similarly, the legal ops team should work across departments to gather and disperse any helpful knowledge that could increase efficiency within the company as a whole.
• Financial management. The legal team allocates their own budget and forecasts future expenses. This information should all be tracked and measured within legal ops software to keep accurate records.
• Vendor management. Any outside legal counsel the business uses should be recorded in vendor management sections of legal ops software. Particularly with legal matters, companies have to do their due diligence when researching prospective legal partners. 
• Program management. Managing multiple projects effectively through efficient workflows and task management is essential for meeting strategic business goals.
• Service delivery. Like program management, service delivery handles workloads to meet goals. This can include assigning tasks for projects to different people on the team or improving internal talent to become less reliant on an external legal vendor.
• Legal technology. Along with the technology the whole company uses, the legal ops team must have access to automation tools and specific legal software that helps them complete their specific job functions.
• Training and development. New hires and existing employees should have access to training and development resources that build their skills and improve the quality of work across the team.

Benefits of legal operations

There are many benefits to running the legal team like its own business through a dedicated legal ops program.

• Proving value to the business. With data management being the center of legal operations, the team’s outcomes show clear proof of their value to the company goals. This can save money long term by keeping legal counsel in-house, rather than continually outsourcing to vendors.
• Refocusing on strategic tasks. Legal ops tools offer numerous automated features, which frees up the internal legal team to work on tasks with higher priority instead of repetitive administration. 
• Building stronger connections across departments. Not everything can be completed by the legal ops team in isolation. They have to work with other departments like IT or HR to optimize their own daily tasks. This strengthens business relationships internally, while keeping everyone’s focus on the same big-picture goals.

Best practices for legal operations

The legal ops team’s work changes as the needs of the business evolve, but several best practices must always be considered, such as:

• Looking for potential improvements. Looking for ways to improve daily work organization and scalability is essential for success. Legal ops teams must continually review how they operate to discover any improvements to be made.
• Choosing the right technology. The right tools to do the job well is critical, so the legal ops team has to identify where they might be lacking in technological support.
• Dividing internal work into three main categories. Just like a business would, the legal ops team should be split into three groups – financial, services, and technology. With dedicated team members under each branch, work can be completed more efficiently.

Develop effective and secure company-wide policies and procedures with policy management software.