Many business leaders seeking ways to drive operational efficiency are leaning heavily on operations frameworks to define what success looks like for the business and create, implement and maintain strategies to achieve their goals. 

Ops frameworks — such as RevOps, DevOps, SalesOps and more — are gaining significant traction and becoming standard in the modern enterprise. 

Drawing inspiration from these frameworks, legal ops is an increasing focus across legal departments to increase efficiency, improve team collaboration and achieve business objectives through operations-driven methods and technology. Let’s explore how it works.

Historically, the legal function has been miscast as a cost center by business leaders — critical to business operations but not a strategic business enabler. 

Legal ops provides CLOs with a growing toolbox to demonstrate measurable impact on the business, cementing legal’s seat at the table and highlighting how a high-performing legal function is a necessary strategic partner.

Adopting a legal ops framework

Legal ops teams are the trusted advisors to CLOs in their role of the go-to advisor for the CEO and board members on laws, regulations, policies, ethics and risk. 

Implementing a legal ops framework and mindset can have a significant positive impact on the business and decision-makers efficiency and risk reduction.

Here are three key reasons why CLOs should consider implementing a legal ops framework:

1. Legal ops can rapidly increase individual and organizational bandwidth

Legal departments are almost always bandwidth-constrained.

A legal ops framework allows legal professionals to think more strategically about how to manage workloads most effectively, decide what works and what doesn’t for the team, and identify strategies and tools that drive efficiency.

2. Legal ops can advise on which tools to deploy

Most lawyers are not software experts, whereas legal ops teams are able to act as subject matter experts in terms of what is available in the legal tech marketplace. They can recommend which best-in-class software tools and applications a legal team should consider adding to its tech stack.

Given the sensitivity of their role, legal departments must make very considered decisions about what new tech to onboard. 

Prioritizing intake management in the procurement process when onboarding new tech helps legal teams assess vendor and contract risk up front and create clear requirements for approvals in order to integrate tools employees need to better do their jobs. 

They must be confident in what tools will be most effective and efficient to manage and which will best help accomplish their specific goals.

3. Legal ops is the steward of data for the legal department

Integrating a legal ops paradigm can help build a robust, data-driven narrative that validates the value of the legal department to the business. 

When legal ops teams can provide relevant data points as evidence, CEOs see for themselves that rather than being a cost center and blocker, legal can be an accelerant to sales and other business processes. 

With data in hand that quantifies how quickly a team is turning around contracts, legal documents and approvals — as well as identifying bandwidth-sucking, high-volume, low-risk work — CLOs can more easily demonstrate how their department is enabling revenue-driven initiatives while improving efficiency and balancing risk appropriately for the business. 

How legal ops drives efficiency across the business

Organizations that don’t have a legal ops framework can find themselves struggling to gain efficiencies, especially as the pace of business continues to accelerate in the AI era.

Here are some ways a legal ops framework can help:

Facilitating the creation of a standard vendor onboarding process

CLOs aren’t typically familiar with the vendor intake and onboarding process. When intake works, vendor management works. 

Intake management allows legal teams to ensure vendor relationships start and stay compliant, safely expedite purchase approval processes, and make purchase requests easy for employees while proactively collecting needed vendor and contract data. 

Legal ops brings structure to the chaos and recommends best practices for vendor intake and onboarding while simultaneously thinking strategically about specific business needs.

Providing stakeholder visibility

Legal ops teams are the tip of the spear when implementing and onboarding new software products and services and often own the process. 

They provide visibility across the organization to the appropriate stakeholders and create a structured, streamlined review process.

Arm the legal department with the right tools to streamline processes

A legal ops framework helps identify where to implement new tools that can ease workloads and discover ways to enable lawyers and other employees to focus on more strategic tasks. 

For example, uncovering tasks to automate is an important function of the legal ops team. 

Automated tasks are typically low-risk and can eliminate legal as a bottleneck within the review process.

Examples of automated tasks include:

• Risk review processes: Certain risks can be automatically identified in the contract review process and then flagged during the structured legal review cycle.
• NDA reviews: Legal ops professionals are uniquely positioned to build effective, automated workflows that identify notable and relevant information during NDA reviews.
• Templated contracts: Sales processes can be accelerated when templates developed by legal ops run through an automated system so approved contracts require no legal intervention. 

Concluding thoughts

Since CLOs are trusted advisors to business leaders and board members, they are increasingly taking on more responsibility for intake management, onboarding and implementing new software and technology.

Their job requires careful deliberation around providing the best possible experience for each employee when interfacing with the legal department. 

This is where legal ops frameworks fit in. Knowing not only what types of technology to implement, but also how to bring visibility, agility and clarity to an uncertain contract review process or vendor intake/onboarding process, is key to the role. 

Developing a legal ops framework proves to the CEO and CFO that a CLO is thinking strategically and creatively about how to scale the capabilities of the legal department and is dedicated to realizing business objectives by applying technology solutions in a pragmatic way.