A legal operations team can boost the efficiency and productivity of in-house legal departments, one reason for the growing popularity of this professional function at large and medium-sized companies.
But what if your legal department is small? How might you embark on such a journey to realize some of the advantages legal ops can provide, from automating some administrative duties to technology planning?
General counsel and other senior executives are receptive to workflow investments, especially when they can see a higher return on the lawyers’ time, said Jen Lenander, director of legal operations at Elastic, an enterprise search software company. She spoke at a panel discussion on legal operations for small law departments earlier this month at the annual meeting of the Association of Corporate Counsel.
“How do I automate so you’re not spending 30 hours reviewing a contract?” Lenander said. “How do we use your brain for the most high-value activities?”
One good place to begin is by formulating a maturity model to assess a baseline for the department’s performance and its technological strengths and gaps.
A deliberate approach on scoring your department, in collaboration with input from other teams, will help develop a cogent model, said Vicki Brandt, senior program manager for legal operations at Texas Roadhouse, the Kentucky-based restaurant chain.
“A maturity model is important for a department to show what is meeting efficiency metrics,” said Paul Liu, general counsel of PacketFabric, a networking company.
This exercise is also helpful for clarifying roles and responsibilities within the department, Brandt said.The maturity model is also a critical aspect of devising a technology roadmap for helping to automate more of the teams’ work, she said.
A GC seeking growth also should measure the large volume of data a legal department generates, whether it’s contract-processing times, changes to outside counsel spending or metrics on a lawyer’s productivity. “Don’t start new every quarter or every year,” Lenander said.
Regardless of which metrics matter in your organization, tracking them is critical for building a compelling case to senior management for additional tools or headcount, according to the panel.
“Once you get your key performance indicators and your data points set, you’re going to start to see trendlines,” Lenander said. At that point, “what is the story you need to tell?” she said. “Who is your audience?”
That audience will also want to see the impact, value and return on investment from a particular addition, whether that is a new automation tool or additional headcount.
“Your GC, your CEO want to see data,” Lenander said. Requesting additional staff is nearly impossible without data but “it’s really hard for a GC or a CEO to say no when you have hard data saying you need that headcount.”
Added Brandt: “Numbers are powerful and that’s how we prove our value.”
Legal professionals also must be careful in procuring a new operational tool once it’s approved.
The sheer number of vendors with various e-billing, contract management and other solutions is daunting, but “don’t buy a tool and try to fit your process into the tool,” Lenander said. “Take your process and make sure a tool will fit to that, in what you need to do.
“I will die on the hill for process and requirements,” she said, noting that many legal tools are “the bright and shiny thing. You see it and you want it and then you try to fit your process into it. And it’s so cool, the tool can do this and this. But do you really need that?”
In many cases, the work process cannot and should not be adapted to a tool’s strengths, she said. The software must be selected to accommodate the department’s workflow — and be ready to adjust if the tool isn’t working.
“If you are halfway through an implementation and it’s not going well, stop — stop,” Lenander said. “Don’t throw bad money after bad money. If you have to rip it out and pivot, then pivot.”
Another option before committing to a particular software tool is to request the use of a “sandbox” version for a few weeks before any agreements are signed, she said. Many vendors have demonstration versions or testing environments for prospective customers and these trials can help uncover how well your work processes and requirements mesh with the tool.