Ten years ago, a company that wanted help running its legal department in a more organized way hired “a legal operations person.” That title told a hiring manager most of what they needed to know. The job covered day-to-day needs, such as contracts, outside counsel spend, and basic technology support, all handled by one person under one job description.
But legal operations has matured, and it has evolved from a single generalist role into a profession with distinct disciplines, each requiring its own skill set and its own kind of hire. What used to be one job title now describes a family of roles, and a company that treats it as one role risks hiring the wrong person for the work it actually needs.
Outside counsel and financial management. This stream covers the full relationship with outside counsel. For example, it encompasses which firms to hire for which matters, how money is spent, and how the department decides between insourcing and outsourcing work. But this is about more than money. It’s about the partnership that a company builds with its law firms. It’s about translating the work into data that helps to inform future decisions about those firms. People in this lane build the data and the relationships that let a legal department negotiate from a position of knowledge instead of habit.
Contract and document management. This is where it all began, if I am honest. For most of us, “operations” used to really mean contract management. But how we create, negotiate and manage our contracts and other documents looks markedly different today. What used to be called knowledge management now looks more like document intelligence. Older tools mainly stored documents and we relied on user input to capture the metadata that made them searchable. The newer generation of tools now reads contracts and surfaces what’s inside them. Which means our contract and document professionals have an entire new set of information and data to analyze, organize and utilize.
Technology. Two distinct paths have opened here. One road leads legal operations professionals into legal tech companies themselves, whether they be Legal AI, Workflow Management, or specific to a specialized area such as contracts or spend. Or, lets face it, one of the 700-odd legal tech companies that seem to appear on an almost daily basis. These companies are (smartly) tapping into the deep experience these professionals have building and running legal operations for in-house legal departments to create and market products built for people doing that same job. Legal operations knowledge has become as invaluable to the companies building the tools as the departments buying them. And these companies recognize that having internal resources that speak the language is the force multiplier that will propel them to success.
The second path is the legal engineer, a role that gained attention as a buzzword and has been a topic of conversation and controversy of late. Legal Engineering sits at the intersection of law, technology, data, process design, and AI and is usually tasked with designing the systems that translate legal work into scalable processes and technology. A legal engineer may (among other things) be designing legal workflows that automate routine legal work, building or configuring legal technology solutions, such as contract lifecycle management (CLM), document automation, matter management, or AI tools, or translating legal requirements into technical specifications. Companies hiring for legal engineers look for candidates with data backgrounds, which has turned this into a data role that happens to sit inside a legal department. But really savvy companies recognize that there are some amazing unicorns out there who have both the legal background and data skills.
Strategy and innovation. This lane is emerging and, arguably, sits above the others and truthfully the skill runs through them all. It draws on the data from all of the systems we employ, and asks broader questions: is the department spending its time and money in the smartest way, and is technology changing how legal work gets done instead of simply sitting on top of an old outdated process? For example, that can mean building an intake system or creating a legal front door. It can also mean giving business leaders a dashboard they can use on their own to make decisions. Because business partners at these companies are starting to see legal as a function that adds value alongside managing risk, it’s becoming more important for lawyers to understand how to use data to drive decision making. A good legal operations strategist can be the team member who helps to structure a legal data intelligence program to support that.
Law firms. Corporate legal departments are not the only place where legal operations roles are becoming more varied. Law firms have begun creating senior roles, such as director of AI and Innovation, at compensation levels that draw people who have spent their careers in-house. For the first time maybe ever, I am seeing in-house lawyers moving to law firms because they can command large salaries, work with huge budgets and truthfully, in some ways we are seeing law firms outpace in-house departments in innovation. That sentence itself would have been unheard of a few years ago and deserves a closer look on its own, but it is worth mentioning here because it is yet another indicator of just how far the legal operations world has grown and the impact it has had on the entire legal ecosystem.
Organic evolution of the field into specialties is a sign of a maturing profession, but it introduces risk. Companies new to legal operations often will start a search without knowing which of these lanes they need to fill first. The result is a job description that tries to cover every stream at once, or one built around an outdated version of the role. Either way, it makes it harder to find the right person for what the team actually needs.
The fix starts before the job posting gets written. A department first needs to know what it is trying to achieve and what its goals actually are, since the lane worth hiring for depends entirely on that answer. It is always very apparent to me when reading a job posting which companies have done the analysis and answered the question “What is the problem I am solving for?” From there, the question shifts to sequencing. Few departments need every specialty at once, so the more useful question is where it makes sense to start, and which gap is costing the department the most right now. Skipping that step is what produces the scattered job descriptions that try to say “here’s everything I want this person to do” without a clear sense of what the role actually is. That kind of posting is hard to hire against and even harder for a candidate to answer honestly. And most importantly, will result in the wrong hire for the wrong job.
This scenario is a place where the CLOC community can make a difference. Leaders across the organization take calls and answer messages every day from companies that are early in building out legal operations and are not sure what to hire for. They may ask for a second read of a job description, or a sense check on whether a role is realistic for the market. That kind of guidance, drawn from people who have watched this field split into these lanes as it happened, is what a professional community is for. Tapping into the collective experience and knowledge base of those who live in this world day in and day out can make the difference between a successful Legal Operations strategy and one that fizzles out because the directives weren’t clear and the candidate couldn’t execute.
The shape of legal operations will keep changing. What stays constant is knowing that when you take the time to define what you need, and what will drive the biggest impact for your department, it will steer you to the lane you are hiring for, and having a place to ask when you are not sure, is what turns a hire into the right hire.
