Before legal operations had a formal name, legal teams simply tried to solve practical operational problems. Those efforts laid the foundation for what has become the structured discipline we know today.
Consider the example offered by CLOC Board Member Stacy Lettie during “Unleashing the Power of Legal Operations” at Legalweek, where she joined CLOC President and CEO Oyango Snell, fellow CLOC board member Adam Becker, and Rachel St. Peter, General Counsel & Head of Legal at Nestlé Health Science USA.
Before legal ops was a recognized function, Stacy built a Microsoft Access database that she described as her “first real toe-dip into what we’d now call a contract lifecycle management system.” That kind of experimentation was common across legal departments that needed better ways to manage contracts and track outside counsel spend. Over time, those operational fixes evolved into a strategic approach that drives how work gets done, within legal departments and across the enterprise.
The foundations of legal operations
In its earliest stages, legal operations focused on a small set of responsibilities. Much of the work centered on contract management and billing oversight. These functions helped in-house teams gain visibility into outside counsel spend and organize the growing volume of work moving through the department.
Those responsibilities remain important, but they now serve as the foundation for something more powerful: the ability to generate operational data about the flow of legal work across the organization.
That visibility allows legal teams to analyze workloads, identify inefficiencies, and make more informed decisions about how to structure work and deliver it across teams.
Creating capacity for higher-value legal work
Today, the legal operations function helps unlock capacity within the legal department. By enhancing workflows and implementing automation, it allows lawyers to spend less time on routine administrative work and more time on complex advisory matters.
This shift enables legal teams to focus on the work that requires judgment and strategic thinking. It also allows departments to scale their impact without adding more headcount.
Problem-solving first, technology second
Technology is an important part of the legal operations toolkit, but successful teams start with a clear understanding of the problems they are trying to solve. Legal departments face a rapidly expanding technology market with countless vendors offering tools designed to improve workflows. However, as Adam Becker noted during the session, it’s important to avoid getting distracted by the shiny new object. Part of the “art” of legal ops is guiding decisions about technology and defining the operational challenges before evaluating potential solutions.
The same principle applies when organizations consider building or expanding legal operations capabilities. The first step is understanding where operational challenges exist and then determining how those challenges should be addressed.
A discipline with growing power
Legal operations continues to evolve as many teams face increasing workloads, new technology, and rising expectations from the business. What began as a practical effort to track contracts and manage spend has grown into a function that helps legal departments operate more strategically.
When Stacy built that Microsoft Access database, she may not have realized that she was unleashing the power of legal operations, but that type of innovation is now shaping how legal teams rethink processes and adopt technology. As the discipline continues to expand, legal operations will play an even greater role in helping departments manage complexity and deliver value across the business.