Unlocking Impact: How GCs Can Turn Legal Operations into a Strategic Business Asset

Most legal departments are run by brilliant people who were never taught how to run a department. Their legal training is exceptional. Their ability to guide an operational infrastructure often isn’t. After nearly two decades of leading legal operations teams and serving as a chief of staff to general counsel, I’ve seen what makes the difference, and it comes down to one thing: treating the legal department like the business function it actually is.

That’s legal operations strategy. And the challenges it addresses are largely the same regardless of organization size. Consider this a field guide to the ones that matter most, written by someone who’s seen what works, and what doesn’t.

Someone has to own the business of legal

Every legal department needs someone thinking about process, data, and systems. Not occasionally. Not as a side project. As an actual job. Someone has to own it.

But ownership alone isn’t enough. How the general counsel (GC) shows up for that function determines what it’s ultimately capable of. Early in my career, a GC sat down with me to build the company’s first billing guidelines; not delegating from a distance, but genuinely engaging, sharing his perspective, and then trusting me to run with it. That investment didn’t just produce better guidelines. It showed that legal ops was a real function with real authority.

The relationship between a GC and a legal ops leader is not static. The more you put in, the more it becomes capable of giving back.

Visibility into legal spend isn’t a ‘nice to have’—It’s the price of admission

Outside counsel spend is one of the largest controllable costs in a department’s budget, and yet many teams don’t have a clear picture of where that money is going. Almost 45% of chief legal officers (CLOs) say they’re increasing outside counsel spend this year according to Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC)’s CLO Survey. That’s a lot of money moving faster through systems that, for many departments, still amount to a spreadsheet and a prayer.

Without spend visibility, cost control conversations with your firms become negotiations of instinct rather than data. ACC’s 2025 Law Department Benchmarking Report is concrete on this: Companies are consolidating outside counsel relationships, with the median number of firms declining from 14 to 10 in a single year. That doesn’t happen by accident. It happens when someone is watching the data and turning it into a point of view. If you’re still operating without a reliable system of record for legal spend, that’s the first thing to fix. Not a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) platform. Not workflows. Clean, structured data, and someone accountable for turning it into insight.

Your finance relationship is a strategic asset—treat It like one

One of the most underrated aspects of a senior legal ops role is serving as the translator between legal and finance. Finance thinks in forecasts and return on investment (ROI). Legal thinks in risk and “it depends.” When they can’t communicate effectively, legal loses every budget conversation, every technology investment ask, and every headcount discussion. According to a recent Axiom survey, 77% of GCs have experienced tension with their chief financial officer (CFO). That friction is usually not about substance, it’s about translation.

When I was serving as a legal chief of staff, it was common for teams outside legal—sales, IT, finance—to come to me before sending communications to my leader, wanting help framing their ask so it would land well. That cross-functional trust gets built when legal ops is embedded in the business, not siloed from it.

Technology won’t save you—but your sponsorship might

The average legal department uses six dedicated legal technology tools. And yet nearly half of legal professionals say they still don’t have the right tools to do their jobs efficiently. That’s not a vendor problem. That’s an adoption and alignment problem, and it almost always starts at the top.

I once sat in a meeting where a senior leader asked my team to track down a pencil sharpener so he could manually mark up printed invoices while we sat around a table full of laptops with a perfectly functional e-billing platform running. It was a small moment. But it communicated exactly where technology stood in the priority order, and the team took note. Your team always takes note.

Conversely, I once led a technology implementation at a large organization stuck in a multi-year decision cycle; competing priorities, no clear ownership, a committee that couldn’t get to yes. What broke the logjam wasn’t a better demo. It was having the authority, the rigor of process, and visible executive backing to make a call and move. My leader held the line when others pushed back, and we got unstuck. The technology went live. People used it. Value was created. That’s what GC sponsorship actually looks like: not just approval, but cover.

Whether your legal ops function is mature or still finding its footing, the path forward is the same. Start here: 

• Audit your spend visibility. If your CFO asked right now which matters are at risk of pushing your department over budget this quarter—and why, and what you’re doing about it—could you answer with confidence? If not, task your legal ops function with building clear, real-time visibility into matters, vendors, and spend trends. Without this, every decision becomes reactive. A true system of record for legal spend isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the foundation everything else is built on.

• Bring legal ops into your finance relationship. Not just budget reviews. The ongoing conversation. Your legal ops leader should be fluent in how finance thinks, what metrics they care about, and where legal’s unpredictability creates friction. That translation layer is one of the highest-value things a strong legal ops function provides.

• Ask your legal ops team for an honest technology audit. Not whether you have the right tools, whether people are actually using them, and why or why not. Adoption gaps are rarely a technology problem. They’re a leadership and change management problem, and legal ops is best positioned to diagnose them.

• Invest in your legal ops function like you mean it. Get into the details with them. Share your perspective. The relationship compounds, the more you put in, the more the function becomes capable of giving back.

Legal ops is ready. Are you?