We all know what legal ops is by now. There is sales ops, there is marketing ops, so of course, we deserve our own ops team, too. Legal ops is the engine that modernizes the legal department – with the right support, processes, and tech. They get praise from their colleagues for managing projects, taking care of the budget, managing hiring processes, securing sophisticated tech, and more. 

And rightly so.  

But what is their purpose? What is the tangible, emotional reason for pushing the needle in this often-old-fashioned game?

Having seen legal operations around the world being really impactful, I have a proposition: Legal ops make colleagues outside of the legal department fall in love with legal. Yes, love! Why? Stay with me here.  

People camp outside an Apple store, not because they get something for free – but because they are fans, not just customers. CEOs may love their sales teams. The sales teams may love their SDRs. But when was the last time you heard a sales manager say, “I can’t wait to meet with the legal department on this!” Never, right?  

Folks need us, but do they love us? Sure, we are often seen as the bottleneck preventing the business from getting things done quickly, but that is for a good reason. Review takes time. Decisions take research. Drafting is complex.  

So how do we make legal more loveable?  

Effective legal operations managers help the legal team to catch up to the speed of the business and deliver guidance more efficiently — how, when, and where it’s needed — delighting internal clients. 

In that way, legal operations is the Cupid of the legal department, helping the entire legal team to feel the love from the rest of the business. And while love is not necessarily a KPI that any legal ops managers are concerned with, a better reputation with the business leads to tangible benefits like better engagement with the legal department, better alignment with business priorities, and therefore reduced legal risk for all involved. 

So, with that in mind, let’s look at how legal operations can help the legal department feel the love from the rest of the business. 

What is legal operations to general counsel?

Let’s define the relationship between legal ops and general counsel. Legal operations has a job to improve the legal department from within, and then improve its partnership with other departments across the business. 

Traditionally, general counsel has worked as a consultant, advising the CEO and top management on all strategic matters. But the role of the modern GC has expanded.  

Today, general counsel run big units, which are tasked with servicing the entire business. They now have a two-fold role: To continue being a strategic partner and to start being an efficient legal service center. And more importantly – make these two parts work in sync.  

This is no easy task and in fact, only 52% of general counsel say that their day-to-day department work is aligned with the broader business strategy (EY Law Survey 2021). And the rest are caught up in servicing tasks (2022 In-House Legal Technology and Automation Report by the Lawyer and BRYTER).  

So how can these two parts of GC’s role be aligned and how can legal ops help? The answer is in 2 of the CLOC Core 12 functions of legal ops: Technology and Service Delivery Models.  

Scaling legal services with technology

Just like any other business area in the organization, legal needs to scale — to deliver more guidance to more business users, without sacrificing the quality of that guidance.

In the context of legal, and especially this new servicing nature of in-house counsel, there are tasks such as NDAs, employment contracts, and policy questions that will grow as the company grows. These are business-essential, but without legal ops, these tasks need to be done one by one. But as the volume grows, the one-by-one approach becomes inefficient and laborious. 

So, the role of legal ops is to bring in modern technology and digital approaches — like legal workflow automation — and to aid in the adoption of those approaches within legal. That way, they help the department to scale successfully and smoothly — and internal clients get their requests answered more quickly, and in a scalable, affordable, and low-risk way.  

When legal works quickly, the rest of the business notices — because everyone works more quickly. Removing legal as a bottleneck to other business workflows is one of the best ways legal ops can improve the reputation of the department across the business. 

Improving service delivery models by going digital

Making legal services faster will surely lead to the department being more well-liked by others. But to go from like to love, you must improve how those services are delivered. 

Let’s look at the current service delivery experience for most legal teams, from the perspective of a user in a different department: 

1. The user realizes there is a legal issue at play on their own (this is a lucky situation). 
2. The user contacts someone in the legal department. 
3. They might have contacted the wrong person, so they are manually routed to the right specialist on the legal team. 
4. The user is expecting a clear, quick answer, but often gets “It depends…” and so begins the longest step, the back and forth of clarifying questions and research. 
5. Finally, after days or even weeks, the user is provided with an answer and can proceed with their project. 

 
Of course, this process is motivated by diligence and responsibility on the part of the legal team. There is rarely a quick and clear answer to a legal question, but there are ways to scale knowledge so that similar, repetitive issues don’t have to be solved on a case-by-case basis.  

Now let’s look at a digitized service delivery experience, with legal workflow automation in play: 

1. The user takes an action on a native environment – like Salesforce, MS Teams, or SharePoint — that triggers an automated notification that a legal issue may be at play. 
2. A legal intake tool pops up in that same environment, where the user is asked clarifying questions based on conditional logic pre-defined by the legal team. 
3. Depending on the nature of the request, as these questions are answered, a risk score is automatically calculated, a contract is generated, or guidance is provided. 
4. In cases where manual intervention is needed, the case is escalated and delivered directly to the right legal expert, with all the contextual information needed to proceed. 
5. The entire interaction is automatically documented and stored in a way that can be easily accessed by the legal team. 

A modern legal service delivery model provides guidance where internal clients want it (their current native environments, including mobile devices), when they want it (on-demand), and how they want it (digitally). 

The love starts from within legal 

Sourcing love for the legal team is simple when it’s approached in the right way. It’s about giving the business what they need quickly, easily, and without tons of back-and-forth.  

When legal teams are relieved of manual work and repetitive tasks, and equipped with the right tools, they’re able to do the strategic work they went to law school for. They’re happier and empowered to be more of a strategic partner to their colleagues in other departments, rather than a barrier to fast wins.  

Author: Michael Grupp, CEO of BRYTER 
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-grupp/ 

Elevate’s mission is to help law organisations with practical ways to improve efficiency, quality, and business outcomes. Today’s legal operations teams take a strategic business approach to their work with law department teams. Lately, the challenge to do ‘more with less’ has intensified, increasing the opportunity for law department heads and legal operations teams to achieve greater efficiency through innovation. 

The findings of recent reports [1] from multiple law industry experts drive home the point. Although many law departments’ headcounts are rising, particularly for legal operations teams, law department professionals must contend with greater workloads, especially around compliance. In addition, law departments find it ever more challenging to secure and retain talent, and law department lawyers spend much of their time on non-complex, rote work and automatable tasks. Many law department leaders don’t have the ability to obtain real-time, actionable data on outside counsel activity, performance, and costs. 

To capitalise on the opportunities that will positively impact their organisations and the industry at large, general counsels’ collective goals include: 

• Ensure the highest and best use of their lawyers 
• Gain better control of legal spend (rather than simply slashing it) 
• Leverage data and AI to analyse law department and outside counsel activity and performance to achieve strategic business advantages  
• Manage and prepare for emerging data-related risks  
• Evolve legal operations’ strategic capabilities. 

Pursuing these goals occurs in the context of a law department’s level of operational maturity, as measured by the “CLOC Core 12” functional areas. Some organisations are still at the emerging stage, with a few defined legal operations processes or templates, limited use of technology, and only starting to develop formal metrics and institute reporting. Other law departments are further along, with a defined operational strategy linked to overall business goals, well-defined processes, standardised templates, basic tools, and nascent reporting capabilities. A few law departments have evolved into the highest level of maturity: they have strategies that include short – and long-term initiatives; they have created and use embedded processes, automation, simplified templates; they pursue continuous improvement through updating playbooks, refining processes, and adopting new technology; they have deployed enterprise-wide tools that leverage systems integrations to facilitate collaboration, and they use reporting and enforce metrics that incorporate business intelligence to drive optimal results. 

During this workshop and subsequent breakout sessions, our panelists and the session attendees will highlight their respective maturity stages, the challenges faced, the decision process in selecting a solution, how and what to measure for success, and the positive impact that solution has had to date. Workshop attendees will exchange their stories and lessons learned. These stories will be anonymised and available on our website.  

Increasing a law department’s functional maturity begins with understanding its goals, challenges, and needs. Those factors form the basis for a sensible, effective strategy and dictate how best to customise solutions for a given organisation to ensure an innovative path forward. Helping law departments with all of those activities is what Elevate’s consulting, services, and technology are all about. 

[1] See, for example, “Vertically integrated Legal Service” (Neville Eisenberg and Richard Susskind in The Practice – Vol. 7 Issue 4 May/June 2021); Alternative Legal Service Providers: 2021 Report (Thomson Reuters Institute, the Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown Law, and the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford); 2022 Report on the State of the Legal Market (The Center on Ethics and the Legal Profession at Georgetown University Law Center and the Thomson Reuters Institute). 

One of the most frequent (and frustrating) charges for a legal department is to find work that can “create business value” across the broader organization. With a goal that nebulous in definition and scope,  it’s easy to see how initiatives to create value are difficult to get off the ground. Even projects that seem likely to provide clear benefits across multiple teams can be delayed or left unfunded without a direct line to track revenue impact. Legal operations teams are the ideal driver for these legal-led initiatives, as they are uniquely positioned to help define, align and track cross-functional value.

Overseeing the adoption of a digital contracting process and platform, is a legal-driven initiative that will provide significant company-wide benefits. But to make a compelling business case for a digital transformation of this scale, legal operations professionals need to draw a clear line between contracts, the data that can be tracked from them, and profitability. In some cases, legal operations will need to translate existing processes into dollars and cents so they can illustrate improvement. In others, they need to track new data points in order to illustrate financial impact.

In this post, we’ll highlight a few ways that a better agreement process can directly create business value and align to larger enterprise goals. It’s part of a bigger conversation about why legal teams (and legal operations in particular) should drive contract transformation. At the core of this discussion is a law department that is empowered with data about the way contracts are searched, created, negotiated, executed and managed throughout the entire organization. As you read through, consider the data your department currently has access to and the additional data you would need to collect to make your case and how you can easily digest and report on that data.

Cost reduction

An extremely straightforward way to increase business value is to find and eliminate unnecessary cost. Every dollar of eliminated waste is a dollar of business value. With a modern contract management platform that serves as a searchable repository for storing agreements in one place, it’s easier than ever for legal operations to give the business more visibility into obligations, unwanted auto-renewals, help consolidate duplicate contracts and flag rogue cost centers.

With robust search and analytics functions built into the repository, contracting teams can also pinpoint specific contract language that leads to penalties, litigation and disputes. By highlighting these problem areas, legal operations and contracting teams can make adjustments that minimize similar costs going forward, and can also lead to reduced outside counsel spend.

Data-based workflow decisions

Digital systems do far more than just create consolidated data about the content of contracts, they track data about and uplevel the contracting process itself. Now, central contracting teams can look at the agreement process from end to end and begin collecting data about contract turnaround time, error rate, volume by geography, hours spent servicing each line of business, etc. For key questions about how dollars are spent or saved in documenting the terms of business agreements, legal contracting teams can use the workflow data generated to find a metrics-based answer.

Integration of your CLM tool and processes with other critical business systems further amplify the value of data generated from an agreement platform. Linking data from other systems—customer or vendor management, payment, compliance, HR, etc.—helps legal understand their own workflows better and uncover areas for business partners where handoffs can be simplified.

Increased speed

Time is money. The faster and simpler you make it for your business to complete contracts, the faster you can achieve desired business objectives and the faster you can generate revenue from those activities. An easy way to increase speed is to replace manual handoffs with automation. Rather than relying on a contract creator to route an agreement to the correct internal approvers, a well-designed digital system can automatically send the document to the next responsible party and alert them to their tasks in the systems where they do their work.

Integration with other systems plays a vital role in increasing the speed of contracting as well. When a sales user can pull contract data and pre-approved clauses directly from their CRM and self-service clause library, legal teams can spend less time on correcting errors during the review process. When changes and alerts can be delivered directly through Slack, teams will spend less time searching email for the latest version of an agreement. And when this time savings are scaled to hundreds of contracts per month, it’s easy to see how deals get done more quickly, directly contributing to the bottom line.

Better forecasting

Earnings forecasts have a lot of financial ripple effects through an organization. Legal teams have an opportunity to create business value by contributing to these forecasts with high-confidence data on terms contained in both completed contracts and agreements currently under negotiation. With a clear understanding of the content of those agreements, dollar value and obligations therein legal teams can create accurate predictions of both revenues and costs related to contract fulfillment, leaving far less gray area in the overall forecast.

This is just one example of how a digital contracting platform can help legal operations teams align to the larger goals of the enterprise and set up metrics to track progress. Using real-time data about the company’s contracts, the legal team can create a powerful recommendation engine to help leadership respond to the current business conditions.

Employee resource efficiency

Using traditional methods of contract management, legal team members spend far too much time on repetitive tasks that don’t take advantage of their unique skills. A modern contracting system supported by AI can eliminate much of that busywork, by reducing hours spent searching for the correct contract language, enhancing reporting, decreasing immediacy biases, and making negotiation suggestions based on predetermined risk levels. In the same way that spell check and track changes have become a routine part of contract creation and revision, intelligent contracting analytics can become ubiquitous for legal teams that manage far-reaching contract ecosystems.

With redundant work significantly reduced, legal operations professionals can help create more effective legal teams that have the ability to focus on new projects or further develop their special skills. More effective use of internal resources could also mean less reliance on outside counsel, which is a significant cost savings, as discussed above.

To learn more about how legal teams can create business value with better contracting practices, meet with us at CLOC’s Global Institute in Las Vegas May 9-12! You can visit us at Booth 401 or attend our interactive workshop on “How Simple Can Contracting Get” at 10:30am on May 11th in Monet 3 & 4. 

In the meantime, please check out our quick guide to contract management best practices.

In 2020, a worldwide pandemic forced legal operations teams to get creative, find new technology solutions for remote work and identify ways to maximize efficiency without increasing headcount or risk. Now, with the worst business impacts of the pandemic hopefully behind us, forward-thinking legal operations teams continue to build on this evolution, accelerating transformation to help their organizations grow stronger than ever. 

What trends are having the most significant impact on corporate legal operations?  

This blog post, which highlights findings from our latest whitepaper, compiles current data, metrics and trends from leading legal operations reports into one comprehensive guide. It also maps each trend to the CLOC Core 12. From bigger budgets to prioritizing diversity and inclusion, closing compliance gaps and beyond, it illustrates how legal operations will take action to solve today’s (and tomorrow’s) most pressing challenges. 

1. The Win-Win of AFAs (CLOC Core 12: Financial Management) 

Alternative fee arrangements (AFAs) have often been branded as complicated, and that’s likely due to many legal departments fearing they may pay more with an AFA than an hourly fee. However, the tide is slowly changing as the average AFA revenue across AmLaw 200 firms has consistently increased since 2018. 

However, AFAs – which offer benefits for spend management over traditional billable hours — can be incredibly advantageous for clients, legal operations teams and law firms. They provide more control over spend, more reliable billing and a greater capacity for companies to remain on budget. 

Generally, the more flexible an AFA, the more appealing it is. Utilizing spend management software to analyze current AFAs and compare vendor rates can help make enterprise-changing decisions. 

2. Championing Diversity and Inclusion (CLOC Core 12: Organization Optimization & Health) 

Not only do diversity and inclusion (D&I) initiatives contribute to more robust work quality and skyrocket a competitive edge, they simply encapsulate the right thing to do. Still, despite an American Bar Association (ABA) ‘s Model Diversity Survey determining a marked leap in diversity among in-house counsel senior leadership, only 11.5% of GCs at Fortune 1000 companies were ethnic or racial minorities. 

There is good news, though: post-pandemic, legal operations professionals cite their number-one priority as implementing a D&I program. 

Bloomberg’s 2021 Legal Operations Survey concluded that diversity is bolstered by both tracking metrics and introducing new processes, such as internal diversity training, more remote work opportunities and forward-thinking recruiting patterns. Also imperative? Holding vendors, namely law firms, responsible for the same standards of diversity and inclusion. 

Three trailblazing companies that have elevated D&I are Intel, Uber and Novartis AG. Corporate legal departments can start by asking their current law firms to complete the ABA Model Diversity Survey and combining that data with D&I information from RFPs in a centralized legal solution. 

3. Navigating Data-Driven Vendor Processes (CLOC Core 12: Firm & Vendor Management) 

According to a survey of GCs, vendor management is their top priority. This is even though CLOC’s State of the Industry Report revealed only 27% of legal department respondents formally reviewed law firm performance. In such an absence of vendor evaluation guidelines, how can return on investment (ROI) be determined? 

This is where legal technology software shines. By assisting legal operations teams in orchestrating a formal vendor performance review process, it can also track vendor metrics, billing compliance, accruals and spend totals, shifting to a data-driven strategy and the most cost-effective business resolutions. 

For an example of how a company built its own vendor management app to standardize vendor approval, automate engagement letter creation and execution and streamline the RFP process, see here.  

4. Bigger Legal Tech Budgets (CLOC Core 12: Technology) 

Corporate legal departments are projected to triple their legal technology budgets by 2025, according to Gartner’s 2021 Legal Planning & Budgeting report. Additionally, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’s (CLOC) 2021 State of the Industry Report revealed that technology implementation is increasing, a triumph in efficiency for legal operations professionals who often tend to handle as many as five different business areas. 

Not surprisingly, efficiency is the principal motivator encouraging general counsel (GC) and chief legal officers (CLOs) in $1B+ organizations to purchase new tech. With legal operations teams seeking to streamline and automate workflows, these purchases prove more than the sum of their parts. They are an integral part of “a defined and actionable legal systems roadmap,” the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) 2021 Legal Technology Report for In-House Counsel says.  

In fact, 32 percent of respondents in Deloitte’s 2021 State of Legal Operations Survey believe that procuring state-of-the-art e-signature, e-billing and contact management tools have supplied them with the ability to “provide actionable KPIs and reporting without significant manual effort,” maximizing time, energy and expenses saved. 

5. Bridging Cybersecurity and Compliance Gaps (CLOC Core 12: Information Governance) 

With data breaches on the inevitable rise and the average cost of a breach $4.24 million, it’s no wonder that 57% of the respondents in an ACC survey noted the urgency of having a “comprehensive data management strategy to ensure compliance, defensibility and security.” 

Legal operations are an essential puzzle piece in comprehensive cybersecurity. Law.com stresses that organizations collaborate with IT to conduct data security and privacy measure audits focusing on consumer protection. The American Bar Association revealed that only 43% of those surveyed use encryption, and only 39% execute multi-factor authentication. Because remote work protocols dramatically augment technical vulnerabilities and cost over $1M more per breach, investing in a secure multi-factor authentication tool is fundamental for risk management. 

6. Capturing the Power of AI (CLOC Core 12: Technology, Practice Operations)  

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer merely a visionary trick in sci-fi flicks: its tech has helped lawyers and legal operations professionals analyze data patterns and generate business insights. 

AI has proven especially vital in legal contract review software by reviewing thousands of contracts simultaneously, migrating legacy contracts and exporting data in under five seconds. Studies show that its functional aptitude for performing first-pass reviews makes even the newest users more than 51% productive and 34% efficient. 

Those percentages provide a compelling argument for AI when extrapolated across a legal department. Whereas an average company has 55 lawyers who review a total of 9,526 contracts annually, AI can propel the same legal team to process 4,906 more each year. That’s analogous to hiring 28 additional lawyers! 

Another bonus? Saving in-house counsel countless hours while circumventing the 9.2% average value “leakage.” 

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Whether it’s accelerating staff, budget or technology, each of these legal operations trends shares one element: in today’s rapidly metamorphosing world, they are becoming more critical by the day. Embracing change and advancing unrivaled growth with enterprise legal management software, contract management and transformational vendor and diversity programs will revolutionize legal operations in 2022—and long into the future. 

Read more about these trends in our latest industry white paper: Six Leading Corporate Legal Operations Trends For 2022. 

In 2020, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), updated its Core Competencies to reflect the increased scope and priorities for which today’s legal operations are responsible. CLOC also included language indicating that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) should be an essential element of the business processes and activities of legal operations professionals. 

By defining the functional areas that most legal teams oversee, CLOC CORE 12 provides vital guidelines on how a legal organization’s operations department can mature and grow across specific functional areas, depending on its priorities, objectives, opportunities, and resources. 

DEI plays an increasingly prominent role in each of the 12 CLOC Core Competencies. While corporate counsel have always had multiple expectations of their vendors, today we find DEI is being communicated and measured more frequently as a key part of vendor management programs. Furthermore, corporate legal departments are now far more likely to select firms that embrace DEI, push for more diverse staff to be assigned to their matters and have a formalized set of requirements for working with individuals and organizations that embrace DEI principles. 

This focus on DEI may seem like a recent trend, but, in fact, efforts to incorporate DEI have been ongoing across legal entities for many years.  For example, for more than a decade the enterprise legal management (ELM) software LexisNexis CounselLink® has included detailed demographics capabilities in their analytical tools to help firms and vendors measure their progress in meeting legal department DEI criteria.  

Nevertheless, the legal industry overall has been slower to adopt DEI practices and tracking than other industries. There are many reasons for this lag, ranging from professional culture and societal issues to technology aversion. The good news is that today DEI is increasingly more likely to be a central element of a legal department’s overall strategy.  

Beyond societal benefits, there are distinct business advantages to improving the diversity of a legal organization. According to research by Deloitte, highly inclusive teams outperform their peers by as much as 80%. Inclusive companies generate higher cash flow per employee, are more change-ready and innovative, and are more likely to be able to coach employees for improved performance and build leaders. McKinsey research shows that gender-diverse companies are 15% more likely to outperform their peers and ethnically diverse companies are 35% more likely to do the same. 

Nevertheless, for those organizations in the early stages of creating a DEI program, the task can seem daunting. The challenge is to determine where among the CLOC CORE 12 functions the change should begin. 

Rather than address all 12 areas at once, start with strategic planning to define concepts and goals and lock down executive support. Without executive attention and planning, DEI initiatives are unlikely to succeed. 

Start by identifying the department’s objectives for launching a DEI program, which will serve as a reference point to help keep the program launch on track and can be used to set initial benchmarks and measurable goals. Initial action items might include brainstorming to define the most relevant aspects of DEI to the department, hiring more diverse talent, and choosing to work with outside counsel who employ a minimum percentage of minority partners and meet other specified diversity standards. Ask stakeholders for their input on the benefits DEI might deliver, how DEI practices might impact legal operations, and the desired end result. 

After reviewing objectives to ensure that they align with departmental DEI priorities, the next step is to make a plan. To effectively track, manage, capture, store, and report on DEI data to evaluate the progress of your program, it will be necessary to leverage an enterprise legal management (ELM) solution with built-in DEI tools. Such software provides valuable measurement capabilities and features, including vendor profiles, vendor score cards, and diversity surveys that provide a holistic view of vendors and how they perform against the department’s DEI standards. These tools can also be used to measure the internal legal department’s progress. 

Business intelligence, one of the CLOC core competences, is another essential element of the DEI toolkit. The appropriate software will provide management dashboards that clearly convey comparisons and trends in vendor diversity. During a recent Buying Legal® webinar on DEI benchmarks for buyers of corporate legal services, speakers underscored the importance of producing data to support the organization’s DEI posture, noting that corporate law departments now regularly request diversity demographic information from their law firms, including information on gender, race, LGBTQ+, veteran status, and disability.  

Many corporate clients now set minimum standards for the in-house legal team to promote working in a diverse environment. They typically request granular detail, including metrics like the number of outside counsel hours worked by diverse timekeepers. They also monitor diversity trends of their law firms and require diverse timekeepers to be assigned mission-critical legal tasks and, if necessary, be given opportunities to develop necessary skills. Some clients offer bonuses to firms that increase diversity, while others have started to withhold a portion of their invoices if the firms do not meet their diversity requirements. 

A recent ABA article highlighted the fact that, while corporate clients now increasingly include DEI metrics during the RFP process, law firms have not yet lost significant existing business due to weak DEI results. However, at CounselLink we have witnessed a continuous movement toward DEI metrics as a deciding factor for new legal work when all other factors, such as skill sets, results, and expertise, are equal. 

In other words, diversity benchmarks will become increasingly important to legal departments’ success – and this is why a commitment to DEI must be woven throughout each of the 12 CLOC Core Competencies. 

The legal profession has historically seen itself as unique and exempt from the constraints and concerns that have dominated the business sphere. With the rise of technology and its role increasing in power and influence over how businesses run, the legal profession now is coming around to the idea of not being a cost center and the department of no to a value creator and the department of can do. 

What has aided the legal department in transforming into a business partner and value creator, in part, has been the legal operations role. Yet, many persistent myths surround legal operations, the purpose it serves, and how best to develop such a function. Like most things, a legal operations function needs a solid foundation to grow.  

It Starts with Hiring 

The foundation begins by recruiting and hiring people who can speak both the “traditional” language of legal (words) and the “traditional” language of business (numbers and data). Legal operations individuals also possess both process improvement acumen and technological know-how that they can use to evaluate and improve existing processes and assess potential new tools to put in place to facilitate better productivity and efficiency. As for the specific backgrounds of legal operations professionals, they have diverse backgrounds. Some are former consultants or finance professionals. Others may be former attorneys or paralegals. All bring a wealth of experience working with legal professionals and the ability to bridge the gap between the legal, finance, and technology worlds.  

Bridging the Business and Legal Gap 

Although not a legal operations professional myself, I have often functioned in this role in the various legal departments that I have been a part of. Given their small size and the need for me to be a cross-functional business partner and enable business growth while also protecting the company against excessive levels of risk, this meant I needed to take on a variety of CLOC’s 12 Competencies outlined in its 12 Competencies Reference Model. Of these 12 competencies, two that I took on and developed for myself were knowledge management, managing outside legal spending, and technology management and support.  

The Contract Management Conundrum 

Contract lifecycle management is one area that illustrates these two competencies coming into play. As someone who has long lived in the world of contracts, managing a small number of them doesn’t seem to be an insurmountable task. Yet, that small number can and often does increase exponentially when working for a fast-growing company. As the number of contacts grows, so does the challenge of managing them (and so does the complexity of the contracts themselves)! Practically, this means that your manual management process may require something that is less time-consuming and more efficient.  

Contract Complexities Pre and Post Award 

Legal operations individuals know that drafting and negotiating contracts is one thing and that managing them is quite another. Managing them requires the input and support of several business functions since contract obligations have far-reaching impacts. This is where having the proper processes and tools in place can make a world of difference and allow for better and more strategic contracting. Managing contracts includes not just ensuring that the right people review the agreement and its terms but also tracking key milestones and deadlines and gathering data regarding common contracting pain points and preferred fallback clauses. 

Choosing the Right Tech 

Technology can help here but finding the right technological tool can often be an overwhelming, time-consuming task in itself. This is where having a legal operations professional, or simply someone who can take on some of the duties of a legal operations role, can be immensely helpful. That person will have the experience and knowledge to navigate the contract management space and, ideally, after doing an audit of your company’s existing processes, be able to suggest ways to improve the processes and potentially integrate a new technological tool or service to help automate and expedite contract lifecycle management.  

The importance of having individuals who can bridge the knowledge and skills gap between the legal, finance, and technology worlds cannot be overstated. Businesses do not operate in a vacuum, and neither should their individual departments. Legal operations effectively serves as the glue that brings these different teams together, especially when it comes to developing the right processes and selecting the best tools to be used by the right people. 

If you are eager to learn more about this fast-growing and exciting space, please consider attending Agents of Change: Leveling up Legal Operations to Maximize Business Growth where Matt Patel, Co-Founder and COO of Malbek and two legal operations leaders will discuss legal operations best practices! 

By Jeffrey Solomon, Senior Director of Product Management, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions 

Corporate legal departments (CLDs) are becoming increasingly technology-driven, and yet most CLDs would probably not consider themselves full of technology experts. After all, who gets into the business of law to become the next Elon Musk?  

Still, there’s no doubt technology is an essential component of a successful, well-run CLD. That’s why, according to Gartner, legal departments are expected to increase their spending on legal technology threefold by 2025. Indeed, if you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance you probably have some form of legal bill review software or another type of legal operations application a click or two away.  

And while it’s great that you’re likely already using some form of technology to accomplish everyday tasks and (hopefully) make your department more efficient, there are bigger questions at hand beyond just “How can I save time on bill review?” Questions like:  

• Which technology investments will help me achieve my departmental and corporate goals? 
• Will AI or similar kinds of modern technologies help me reach my goals more quickly or more strategically? 
• If so, which solutions are most appropriate for my department today, and which should I plan for in the future? 

A technology roadmap is essential to successful legal operations 

To answer these and other questions–and to make sure you end up investing in the right technologies– you need to develop a roadmap that will help you get from whatever technology maturity stage you’re in right now to where you want to be. A technology roadmap is a long-term, multi-year plan that allows you to assess your current technology resources and align existing and future investments to both your CLD’s and the company’s goals. 

Creating a well-considered and solidly planned roadmap is essential if you want your lawyers to work more productively, intelligently, and efficiently. It will allow you to achieve three things: 

• Plan for and invest in the technologies that will add the most value to your organization in the short term and long term 
• Keep you from wasting money on “shiny objects” that will not help you achieve your business objectives or simply won’t be adopted 
• Ultimately generate greater efficiencies, better business outcomes, and help your teams work smarter and faster 

Building your technology roadmap 

How can you generate your legal technology roadmap—one that’s unique to your business, is adaptable enough to evolve as your organization’s needs change, and sets you up for current and future success? 

That’s the question at the heart of our latest whitepaper, A Practical Guide to Creating a Legal Technology Roadmap. It is a step-by-step guide to creating a technology roadmap to ensure you’re aligning your technology investments with your corporate objectives and your current reality. You’ll learn: 

• How to get started 
• Which questions to ask 
• How to analyze your department’s legal technology maturity level 

• How to prioritize technology needs for the stage you are in and the next stage in your development 
• How to get buy-in from senior leadership and the day-to-day users in your core processes 
• And more 

Download the white paper today to learn how to build a roadmap that is aligned with your CLD’s vision for the future. 

Alex Su did everything right.

He went to the right law school. Northwestern. He worked hard and became an editor of law review.

He made sure he knew what was expected of him and kept at it to land his dream job, an associate position at a swanky firm like the ones he read about growing up in Brooklyn reading John Grisham novels.

Once he arrived at Big Law, it didn’t take long for Alex to realize that the path he had chosen was not what he expected.

He thought Small Law would be better, but not only did the work seem disconnected to real value to the client, someone else always determined Alex’s value.

By the hour.

What happens when someone else decides your value?

If you don’t like it, they’ll swap you out for someone willing to do the same work better than you.

And by better, they mean cheaper and more hours.

Without exception, this kind of puppet-string fate is not true for those who carve out a reputation for themselves.

Without exception, these same people are far from perfect.

They have been hired. And fired.

They’ve auditioned and been asked to leave the stage before they play the third note.

They’ve risked everything. And failed.

But there’s one thing they all have in common: they put themselves out there in hopes of finding a few others to connect with over a shared belief, leader, or idea.

Seth Godin calls them Tribes. A favorite writer of mine, CS Lewis, expressed the feeling of finding your tribe like this: “What? You too? I thought I was the only one!”

The moment you create a tribe? A brand is born.

The moment a brand is born? You’ve stopped following someone else’s map.

It’s a hard pill to swallow when you realize that your whole life you’ve been doing everything possible to follow a map or plan perfectly, only to realize that the least valued skill in our culture is exactly that.

Have I memorized perfectly exactly what is on the test?

Am I writing this exactly the way the professor wants me to do it?

Regardless of what your partners, professors, or even parents tell you with the best of intentions, the least valued skill in our culture is the ability to follow a map made by someone else.

Why does this matter?

It’s a great time to be a little brand with a powerful product in the legal world charting your own course.

A brief history lesson helps give context to why.

Since the end of World War II, legal has mimicked business in how it creates shareholder value. The fact that legal declared itself an industry and created a system that could turn out mass-produced products with interchangeable parts has to be the ultimate nod of servitude to the behemoth corporate clients that arose from the Industrial Revolution.

But this kind of gangster algorithm, as NYU Marketing Professor and CNN+ Commentator Scott Galloway would call it, no longer works.

Why not? Two reasons.

First, fast forward to March 2020 and Anthony Klotz. Klotz is the business school professor at Texas A&M who unleashed the phrase “The Great Resignation” now heard around the world and applied to any current business problem.

I wish I could put Anthony in the Wayback Machine and change the phrase he will undoubtedly be remembered for to “The Great Awakening” to better describe the deep hunger millions of people woke up to during COVID. A hunger for purpose, for meaningful work. Basically #whatthehellamidoinghere.

Second, this Great Awakening opened our eyes to the artificial constraints of our old systems:

Geography.

Hierarchy.

Size.

And on and on.

To sum it up, The Great Awakening means with today’s technology, a little brand and a powerful product can get from unknown to known faster than ever.

Just ask Keith Gill. AKA Roaring Kitty. (It doesn’t matter if you don’t recognize his brand. His tribe knows. Then so did the crashing stock market.)

Or Alex Su.

How did he land his position as Head of Community Development at Ironclad Digital Contracts?

He did the hard work, day in and day out, not unlike Keith Gill although I don’t think Alex was still in his mom’s basement.

Gradually, Alex’s tribe began to find him.

And then Ironclad began to pursue Alex not because of who he was on paper, but how he showed up in real life.

During The Great Awakening, Alex Su started to unwittingly build his brand day in and day out by caring enough to learn to speak in the new language he saw being birthed with The Great Awakening. A language that was raw, real, and human―and straight to our social feeds when we were hungry for it most.

Risky? Yes.

Could his performances have flopped? Yes.

Did he know where it was leading? All caps NO.

The best part? Ironclad just knew they wanted him.

Come, they said. We’ll figure out those formal roles and responsibilities HR requires as we go along.

Alex and Ironclad started with a white board to create the position that honored Alex’s gifts and talents and how it intertwines with the Ironclad community.

Alex Su has joined the few that knows how it feels to make your own map.

So, as it turns out, Alex Su has a story to tell, but it isn’t the one you’ve heard about him before: Boy goes to Big Law. Leaves it for legal tech. Makes memes. You should too!

It’s risky. It’s not for those who play finite games or who need to keep score.

It’s the story of being true.

As Alex said when I had the pleasure of speaking with him, “Brand is what people say and think about you when you aren’t around.”

As it turns out, that is all that building a brand is.

Being true to you. In your own skin. Wherever life takes you.

What a relief.

To learn more about ways to build your brand, visit the Career Center at the CLOC Global Institute.

In recent years, environmental, social and governance (ESG) initiatives have become strategic imperatives for companies as they seek to build trust with employees, partners, and customers. ESG builds brand loyalty, gives a competitive advantage in the marketplace, and attracts and retains talent within an organization. A study by Unilever found that a third of all global consumers choose to buy from brands because of their ESG commitments. Accordingly, across enterprises, all departments are exploring how to best match their respective programs to support ESG initiatives. 

The legal department is often associated with enterprise-wide ESG discussions on account of the General Counsel’s role in providing advice and guidance regarding these efforts. However, beyond providing ESG legal and regulatory counsel to the enterprise, GCs must also consider how the legal department can adopt practices that align with these ESG goals. More and more GCs are turning to their Legal Department Operations practitioners (LDOs), who will play a critical role in operationalizing ESG initiatives within the Legal department. 

In a recent conversation I hosted with a diverse group of legal operations leaders, it was clear that LDOs are already putting a lot of thought into how the legal department can build programs to align themselves with these ESG initiatives. Here are just a few ideas that LDOs might consider deploying within their own departments that surfaced in that earlier conversation: 

Environmental 

While each industry’s operations carry different environmental impacts, every company (and legal department) would do well to consider how they can make their operations greener.  

Reducing waste and consumption are obvious first steps. Some LDOs have implemented some easy wins like policies that ban disposable coffee cups or issuing reusable water bottles to all legal department employees to reduce reliance on single use plastic bottles.  

Other departments are going paperless, which is especially impactful when you consider that approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away each year in the United States. Accordingly, many LDOs are reviewing manual, paper-based processes and moving to digital contract management. When contracts are managed digitally, it means no more printing out 70-page contracts to do redlines or to gather wet signatures. It’s staggering how much paper can be saved thanks to a digital document workflow.  

In addition to investigating the impact of going paperless, LDOs are looking at the environmental impact of legal department travel. The pandemic has proven that many of the meetings we thought had to happen in person—like in-person negotiations of a contract–can in fact be done virtually. LDOs should consider whether they can continue some of these practices post-pandemic—not to prevent the spread of COVID, but to keep carbon out of the atmosphere.  

Finally, legal teams are looking beyond contract processes and looking at the substance within the contracts. As LDOs help build templates and make them accessible to the legal department, they might consider creating and deploying standard contract clauses and contract playbooks that address environmental sustainability. Making such clauses available is a unique way for legal departments to contribute to an enterprise’s environmental goals. 

Social 

The “S” in ESG asks companies to think holistically about all their stakeholders—employees, suppliers, customers, shareholders, and the communities that companies work in—and explore how the company might help close the opportunity gap that has historically existed in these populations.  

To be part of the solution, LDOs should consider the legal department’s hiring practices. Reversing historical bias in hiring within the legal department is one way an LDO can make a meaningful contribution to its organization’s social goals. The CLOC competency model identifies Training & Development as a core skill; LDOs can leverage this competency to create professional development opportunities around unconscious bias training for all members of the legal department. This review of hiring practices should extend to all roles in the legal department, from in-house counsel, allied legal professionals and members of the legal department operations team.  

Alignment with these social goals can also come from how legal teams hire outside counsel. Firm & Vendor Management (also a CLOC Core 12 competency) can provide guidance as the legal department engages and hires law firms with track records of diverse hiring and promotion.  

Governance 

Finally, LDOs can play a big role in ensuring the legal team and the company as a whole are operating legally and ethically.  

Top governance concerns for today’s enterprises include issues around bribery, money laundering, cyber-security, and data privacy. While GCs will play a central role in setting the company’s direction around these laws and regulations, LDOs can assist on this front by identifying technology available to the legal department to enable appropriate governance and compliance. 

For instance, LDOs can make sure that all governance policies are easily accessible in a single, shared location (like SharePoint) and simple to read and understand. Transparency and accessibility are key to good governance; accordingly, LDOs can champion the avoidance of legalese and search out opportunities to more clearly explain the rules—so people can follow them. 

LDOs can take a more ambitious step by identifying technology that can assist in an audit of third-party agreements to ensure partners are obliged to follow company guidance on questions of governance. Contract management software can assist in centralizing all contract data in a single location, and AI trained to detect obligation language can automate discovery to turn up gaps in compliance. With past contracts analyzed, LDOs can then turn their attention to future contracts by setting up rules to ensure all relevant regulatory clauses—from privacy to anti-corruption and beyond—are appropriately included in every executed contract. 

Conclusion 

Legal is a critical voice in the organization urging management to look beyond quarterly earnings to understand how a company’s behavior impacts its long-term viability and reputation. With the help of LDOs, legal departments can help operationalize these enterprise-wide ESG initiatives through new programs and technology. This is a golden opportunity for legal teams, and especially LDOs, to step up and lead like the world depends on it.