Misha De Larkin says her psychology degrees came in handy when she worked directly in legal operations because she had to manage a lot of different personalities.
Given her experience, she recommends professionals interested in moving into legal ops develop strong relationship building skills.
Those attributes are often harder for experienced ops leaders to teach on-the-job than training someone on how to configure an e-billing or contract lifecycle management (CLM) system, said De Larkin, senior director for IT legal operations at Flex.
Along those lines, NetDocuments General Counsel Matthew Hemmert says legal operations professionals need to possess an incredibly high EQ, or emotional intelligence.
This will help them succeed at change management, which is crucial for ops teams when assisting their in-house legal departments with altering the way they do business.
“If you can't get buy-in from the individuals in the legal organization and the others who are going to interact with whatever we're changing or adopting, it's not going to have a high success rate,” Hemmert said.
Elizabeth Lugones, COO at the UpLevel Ops consulting firm, says demonstrating inquisitiveness and strong listening skills are also important in a legal ops position because in-house attorneys often are apprehensive about updating their processes or the technology they use.
Attempting to overcome such resistance requires asking questions to understand where colleagues’ issues are coming from and then using the information gathered to address the voiced concerns.
The three experienced legal professionals spoke during a Sept. 27 panel focused on a recent report about legal operations from Above the Law and NetDocuments. The webinar was moderated by legal tech journalist Bob Ambrogi, an Above the Law columnist and LawSites author.
The new report features responses from legal operations professionals and in-house counsel who were surveyed about ops, including the size of their teams, earlier this year.
Those surveyed also vouched for the value of soft skills, including people management experience, interpersonal/relationship-building, curiosity and a “get it done now” attitude.
Hard skills
Other areas of expertise that panelists and survey respondents said are useful while working in legal operations included project management experience, technical acumen and an understanding of law firm billing systems.
The ability to use different types of technology was also cited as a helpful skill to possess, with more than 60% of operations professionals’ primary responsibilities including technology enablement and adoption.
In the tech realm, contract management experience was the top area where legal operations professionals are involved at 75%.
“Many also have significant roles in document management (63%), e-billing (63%), e-signature (58%), collaboration (58%) and workflow tools (58%),” the report said.
Hemmert said he is encouraged to see more law schools teaching legal technology, which will better prepare graduates to potentially pursue careers in legal ops.
Adjacent roles
Meanwhile, De Larkin shared that technology experience gained from legal ops work can also open doors to adjacent careers.
She didn’t think she would end up working directly in IT, but has found she can add a lot of value there in helping implement legal policies at Flex.
“There are opportunities to not just manage projects and support legal from the other side of the fence, but also there are compliance needs [and] there are legal needs where IT is your partner for implementing,” De Larkin said. “But if they don't understand what a policy means or how to implement it across tools, then you're still going to have challenges. So having some legal ops folks in the IT organization has actually created a better environment between the two and benefited the company overall.”
Lugones said technology skills possessed by in-house legal professionals who have experience in legal ops can translate well to working for legal tech companies.
“There's a lot of legal technology companies out there that are recognizing that they have a gap in professionals that understand the pain and the struggles that in-house [departments] have, so they're looking for people who have been in-house to be part of those conversations either from an implementation standpoint or part of the sales cycle,” she said.
Both she and Hemmert said law firms, in response to the needs of clients, have started to show more interest in hiring professionals with legal operations skills as well.
“They also are figuring out how to deliver their legal services in a more efficient and effective and transparent sort of way,” Lugones said. “I think there's more growth there to come.”
