Without its legal team, no company can operate in the marketplace with a compliant product or service, so it’s not accurate for people in the broader business to think of the in-house team as a cost center, Laurie David Henric, a board member of the Global Centre for Risk and Innovation, said in a webcast.
“I hate hearing that,” Henric told LinkSquares Chief Legal Officer Tim Parilla during the webcast. “It might be the first thing people see with us, but without us there’s no revenue generated in the first place, because there is no product — compliant product. So, we are a key to the strategy and therefore are an integrated part of the business.”
Henric was an attorney at Cabinet Socojur, a French law firm, before moving in 2006 to the global hedge fund administrator Citco. Once there, she leveraged her organizational skills to transition to legal operations roles and remained in that type of work over her 16-year career at the company. In 2022 she moved to Manulife, the financial services giant, to build up the legal operations function there.
“When you’re a lawyer, even a general counsel, you’re more specialized,” she said. “But I was more into efficiencies — how to do things better, faster. That’s just who I am. That’s my character.”
At Manulife, Henric spent her first 100 days building a roadmap for transforming the company's legal operations. She asked the legal team what would make their day-to-day work easier, then looked at how the main takeaways aligned with the business goals of the company. Once she aligned the changes to the goals, she created short- and longer-term timelines.
Among other things, she wanted to get a handle on the legal intake process.
“We had zero visibility over what was coming our way, from a workflow perspective, so I worked with the team and IT to create an intake solution,” she said. “It was very basic.”
Having the system enabled her to collect what she considered a key performance indicator — the amount the legal team contributes to each project they’re asked to support.
“Sometimes this is not something you can estimate upfront but most of the time you can,” she said. “At least, you can get a range of it, and that is all we need.”
By having that metric, she said, even if it’s an estimate, she has what she needs to protect the legal team in funding negotiations.
“When the budget discussion starts [I can say] this is how much we helped generate and this is how much you’re giving us,” she said. “And now you want to decrease our budget next year by 10%? Fair enough. Where do I cut?”
By framing the discussion in that way, she’s helping the finance team see how the cuts would take value out of the business by extending deal or project timelines, among other things.
“There are plenty of other metrics, like turnaround time,” she said. “We hear all the time that [a document] is stuck with legal, but when you keep track of the lifecycle of your document — a contract, a memo — you can identify it’s not often the case. It might be, but a lot of the time [delay] is on the business side.”
Anyone who puts a premium on organization and likes efficiency is well-positioned for legal operations work, she said. But it’s also important to be a bridge-builder and a good communicator, because you need buy-in from others, both within the legal team and from outside it, to effect organizational changes.
Her latest focus has been on building a communications component to an organizational revamp, because storytelling is how legal operations can get buy-in for changes, and it also can showcase the value of what the legal team does.
“When we get a regulator to accept a new product … this is what it means in terms of revenue projection for the company,” she said. “Communicating this kind of information — successes and accomplishments — showcases us as a business partner, a strategy partner, and also [shows] that legal has done a great job and they should be acknowledged for that.”
