Legal operations has evolved from a function into a profession in the past decade.

The talented professionals performing this critical role within the enterprise often manage entire legal budgets, leading the selection process for, and purse strings of, all outside counsel and related spend.

They also help deploy legal technology, with these efforts all in service of general counsel who, as a result of this support, are taking their rightful place at the executive business strategy table.

Additionally, these legal ops professionals initiate and lead programs that impact the entire corporation, not just the legal department.

Contract management is a prime example of such a program. Enterprise business processes such as contract management that require enterprise business technology require stewardship from a new generation of legal operations professional – a cohort we call Generation Operations, or GenO.

These professionals are taking their rightful place at the business strategy table.

GenO is stepping up to drive commercially oriented measures such as time to revenue recognition, direct and indirect spend as a percent of revenue, and risk and compliance metrics such as degree of compliance with corporate sustainability directives.

This is accompanied by a necessary focus on documenting, optimizing and facilitating the management of business-critical processes, including the processes and technology used to manage contracts.

Due to their multi-disciplinary skill sets, rooted in process efficiency, metrics, and measurement, change management and technology fluency, these professionals are highly sought after, with ALSPs, consulting firms, software companies and GCs all vying for the best and brightest talent with the right experience.

Here are 5 key skills you need to ensure that you are ready to join GenO:

1. Collaboration and communication (in business terms) is key

Legal operations professionals are typically very good at ensuring intra-legal cross-functional alignment, as they tend to work with every part of the legal department.

Litigators can’t be more different from IP prosecutors, or commercial lawyers. Legal ops professionals have been able to successfully traverse these personalities, as well as understand their very different performance metrics.

Why not take that natural skill set and use it for the greater good of the company?

To accomplish this, legal ops requires an understanding of how to communicate in business language rather than legal efficiency and effectiveness parlance.

Yes, “enabling lawyers to practice more law” is a noble pursuit, but the chief revenue officer and chief financial officer have different motivations.

Understanding how to position initiatives such as contract management, so that key executives understand how it will accelerate time to revenue, compress sales cycles, reduce volatility in interactions with prospects and ensure SOX and overall regulatory compliance is key.

Not only understanding how to position these initiatives but having the ability to communicate simply in “primary colors and large numbers” and avoid using arcane legal phrases such as “de minimus” is becoming increasingly critical. GenO professionals have figured this out. 

2. Be flexible and emotionally intelligent

In addition to all the other duties of a legal operations professional, it’s critically important for them to have three basic skills: IQ, EQ (emotional intelligence) and AQ (adaptability quotient).

Our world is constantly in flux. We can’t have a fixed mindset; we must be flexible and pivot when necessary.

Technology, like a contract management platform can make pivoting easier by offering a single source of truth, a place where everyone in the organization can have access to contracts and agreements.

CLM systems can help legal departments be more agile by automating tedious tasks and reducing the time and resources spent on them.

Taking those tasks out of the equation makes it much easier for legal departments to switch gears as needed to respond to changing objectives and priorities.

When taking this same value proposition to the rest of the organization, these soft skills are central to your ability to navigate changes in macroeconomic conditions and the impact it has on different functional areas.

3. Be an active listener

In cross-functional teams where everyone comes from a different background with different skills sets and experiences, it’s very important that legal professionals learn not just to inform, but to listen as well.

By actively listening and seeking to understand their colleagues, legal operations professionals can build stronger relationships and establish trust, leading to more effective collaboration and a more efficient and synergetic company.

Active listening in the context of initiatives, such as contract management, demands skills where legal ops understands that while automating a contracting workflow will be beneficial to the corporation, it still represents a change in how people work.

If a professional is used to completing their work using “stone tablets and chisels”, so they can focus on their family that evening, any change, even if it makes sense, is a change in how they are used to doing their jobs.

Any change requires active listening and next of kin empathy.

4. Follow the CLOC model

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) model is a great framework to follow.

With 12 core competencies, including financial management, vendor management, and data analytics, CLOC’s framework identifies best practices and provides a guide for legal operations teams to follow.

By adopting industry-standard practices and improving efficiency, legal teams can reduce costs and align better with overall business objectives.

The CLOC model is helping legal operations professionals optimize their legal processes, enabling more lawyers to practice more law and better manage the budgetary and technical aspects of their departments.

However useful the framework is, it still needs to be complemented by a “layer” of soft skills and business understanding.

5. Embrace technology

Technically proficient legal ops pros are now worth their weight in gold.

Ten years ago, hiring a Salesforce administrator was nearly impossible. Employees who could optimize what had quickly become the system of record for companies worldwide were some of the hottest tickets in the market.

With the advent of marketing automation and account-based marketing (ABM) tools, demand generation pros have become the new corporate darlings, drawing multiple offers and soaring salaries as the market scrambles to source from a talent base that is growing but still small given these technologies have literally exploded on the scene.

Similarly, as GenO legal ops professionals find themselves implementing enterprise business technology, such as contract management, they also find that they are a rare but increasingly sought after cohort.

Understanding technology and how it works is the price of entry. However, understanding how it solves business (vs legal) problems and how to translate non-legal stakeholder needs into technology previously thought of as “legal tech”, are higher order skills.

GenO legal ops professionals find themselves being recruited aggressively and their salaries are increasing rapidly.

They are also finding that they are being hand-selected for strategic roles outside Legal, in areas such as corporate development, strategy and marketing.

Call to action

Honing the five key skills I’ve listed here will help to propel you into the next phase of your career, redefining the value of Legal and legal operations—and help your company thrive despite today’s economic uncertainty.

This IS the time for GenO: The Rise of Legal Operations.