When we study the history of Legal Operations, or corporate legal departments, it is clearly evident that before 1990, the field of legal operations was more focused on risk management as opposed to maximizing resources. The goal at that time was simple: reduce outside counsel costs. After this, the dawn of the ’90s – mid-2000s saw an official, more complex legal operations department that encouraged heavier use of outside counsel even though keeping costs low was still a goal. The breakthrough transformation began in the mid-2000s and then carried on to 2019.
During the last 2 decades, Legal Ops began to focus on not just reducing costs but also on breaking down each cost into finer, more granular details, and the ROI these costs delivered. By embracing technology and automation, legal ops teams could break down spend by matter type and evaluate outside firms by their past performance. Because of the strategic insights legal ops delivered, legal departments could now see the value in having a legal ops team. Whereas only larger corporations could afford a formal legal operations department / team before 2000, a formal legal operations team has become more common now, even in smaller organizations.
In many corporate surveys, experts have observed formal Legal Operations Manager job titles in legal departments with as few as five people. But some teams are even smaller. A 2020 Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) report found that almost 25% of corporate legal departments only have one legal operations professional on their “team”. Also, while 46.2% of legal departments still have no legal ops team, the same ACC report shows that the number of departments with a formal legal ops team has more than doubled (2.5x) over the past six years.
What are the key functions of a legal ops team in the digital era?
The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s (CLOC) defines a set of 12 mandatory competencies for any in-house legal department. They are popularly called the “Core 12” Competencies List. The 12 key legal operations functions are:
- Business intelligence: Collect and analyze data based on important metrics to arrive at actionable insights for more strategic decision-making.
- Financial management: Plan all estimated legal spends, create yearly and half-yearly budgets, implement, and monitor e-Billing facility for corporate legal services, manage accruals, and forecast expenses, among other things.
- Firm and vendor management: Filter out and select the right partner firms by performing due diligence, uncover opportunities, negotiate better rates, handle contract management, and as far as possible, onboard new vendors quickly.
- Information governance: Create clear, concise, and well-defined policies to lower / eliminate any potential corporate risk, to communicate those policies to employees, and to manage data security and compliance.
- Knowledge management: Create and facilitate knowledge hubs, legal templates, and prevent knowledge depletion, for example, from staff departure or role changes.
- Organization optimization and health: Build a staff hiring vision for cultural fit, encourage work-life-balance for all team members, and maintain quality reserve of legal talents.
- Practice operations: Allocate appropriate tasks to the right people with the right skillsets for better speed and efficiency.
- Program / Project Management: Manage all legal projects, workflows, and programs faster without compromising on quality.
- Service delivery models: Define, structure, and implement service provider relationships. Break down larger projects into assignable tasks. Reduce reliance on more expensive external legal assistance and law firms.
- Strategic planning: Create and implement team goals and milestones that align with the priorities of your stakeholders.
- Technology: Automate all time-consuming and repetitive tasks and to increase accuracy in data collection.
- Training and development: Create detailed training resources for new hires and facilitate career development and progression for legal ops employees.
So, to summarize….
Ideally, a good legal ops department will be able to carry out most, or all of these functions to improve logistics and processes and, ultimately, allow your corporate legal team to focus on being better lawyers for your organization.
