How to Become a Successful Legal Operations Manager

Legal operations is becoming one of the most important disciplines for legal departments. It incorporates many roles and encompasses all the responsibilities of a legal department that are not the law itself. Here are five essential skills every legal operations professional should have or work to improve. (1) Stakeholder management and communication: The legal operations manager is the link between the legal department and the rest of the organization, and should be able to communicate with all organizational levels and ensure that stakeholders are involved and updated. (2) Legal department budgeting.  Creating and managing the legal department’s budget is a major role for the legal operations professional. If another department is in charge of budgeting, however, legal operations will need to both develop and present the business case to that department.

(3) Legal technology knowledge. The legal operations manager should be able to roll out technology, plan and implement a long-term process and technology roadmap, and find solutions to streamline and/or automate repetitive processes. (4) Firm and vendor management. The head of legal operations should be able to administer onboarding for new vendors and measure their performance. They need to be familiar with how legal services are billed and how to negotiate more flexible and transparent pricing models. (5) Data literacy. A legal operations head needs to know how to structure, gather and analyze the relevant legal data for strategic decision-making and problem-solving and capture the data points needed to measure KPIs.