The corporate legal operations department has seen a major boom in the recent years.
Lawyers, therefore, tend to get distracted as they have to keep a tab over all the related fields like communication, hiring, implementing new tools, etc.
Legal operations include efficiency and effectiveness.
The core topic of reasoning being how legal departments can best deploy their lawyers and legal resources to advance company goals and to safeguard it from risk?
They help in in-house counsel cost control, performance improvement, and having a better quality of life.
Though the size of each department differs and the budget and regulatory pressures are bigger, every business can gain real value from implementing legal operations initiatives.
What is the importance or advantages of having legal operations?
- Alignment between the legal department and company strategy: Legal team plays a very important role in the strategic decision making of the company and help a company in achieving its goals. Legal operations thus help in ensuring that the company lawyers are spending their time in achieving the right aims.
- More cohesive teams: With an increase in the number of law departments, there is a drop in the centralized corporate location, leading to a disconnect between the departments. This creates communication challenges, redundant work and a general chaos. Legal operations can provide a central communication hub, that will help in maintaining speed and efficiency
- Smart Staffing: Any legal firm should ensure that there is appropriate staffing. Legal operations help in monitoring matters and workload, thus also ensuring that tasks are assigned and distributed in smarter ways, whether within the department, with law firms or with alternate providers.
- Cost Control: For any firm, “total legal spend” is the determining factor which provided the key performance indicator. Most of the time it would be difficult to determine these answers. In such cases, the operations (legal) provide you with answers to key benchmark in real time.
- Framework for experiments: Any new ideas put forth, needs to be tested. Good data always enables the quality testing process and legal operations help in ensuring that your innovations deliver sustainable change that adds value to the firm.
- Faster, meaningful and better reporting: Legal departments must have the capability to track their resource allocation, risk management and contribution to corporate strategy. When the time comes in justifying the department’s existence, the right legal operations system allows doing that with ease. This also helps in reporting to your business clients and there is less time spent compared to traditional reporting.
- More time: Lawyers, after operations, are able to focus more on core tasks and present real-time snapshots of the department’s workload and deadlines. As all related things are saved in one place, there is no need or headache of searching through emails or other portals for information gathering.
Hence, there is no doubt that the operations of legal are the growing force in the competitive landscape for law firms to keep and expand their relationships. They also help legal department leaders maximize and derive significant value from their legal teams through optimized operations.