A Program For Building the Legal Operations Function

Law departments require a variety of operational services in areas such as outside counsel management, intellectual property operations and electronic discovery. Many law departments are now focusing on building a centralized, comprehensive legal operations function to manage those services. While in-house counsel are experts at legal work, a law department is responsible for activities that are not optimally managed by counsel with day-to-day legal responsibilities. Those activities rely on a process-oriented approach with well-defined objectives and typically require significant technology.

There are a few standard steps to building an excellent legal operations function. They include developing three to five-year strategic objectives with stakeholder buy-in, conducting needs assessments and developing funding, staffing and technological requirements. Recommendations are then formulated, using tools such as data analytics and general and industry benchmarking. Timely and cost-effective implementation by multi-disciplinary program or project teams is required. Defensible, stakeholder-accepted legal department and specific operational area performance indicators are developed, including use of relevant metrics, data analytics and similar tools.

Legal departments should be setting clear objectives, and developing detailed strategies to achieve them. Rigorous use of data analytics and the use of metrics to measure progress serve a dual purpose. Tracking and reporting guarantee that key objectives are being met, and they can be used to demonstrate the value of the legal department to senior management, board members and investors.