CORPORATE LAW DEPARTMENTS
How General Counsel can maximize the value of legal ops Rose D. Ors CEO of ClientSmart
Operational excellence is the disciplined approach to getting work done faster, smarter, and more efficiently. Proactive general counsel empower their legal operations team to help deconstruct and then redesign the work that should get done and by what means. These general counsel also understand that they must signal their full support for these change initiatives.
Below are six ways general counsel can enable their legal operations team in the law department’s journey towards operational excellence:
1. Sponsorship
Provide visible, active, and consistent support of both adaptive and transformational change initiatives. One powerful way to signal the importance of the legal operations role in the law department is to have the head of the legal operations team report directly to the general counsel and be a member of the department’s leadership team.
2. Culture
3. Talent model
Build a team of professionals with diverse mindsets and skills by adopting a multi-disciplinary talent model that includes, among other roles, project managers, pricing specialists, designers, technologists, digital design specialists, data engineers, and data scientists. Proactively identify what new skills and disciplines the team needs to continually innovate and improve.
4. Team pairing
Bring together different teams with diverse ways of approaching the same challenge. Like individuals, different groups bring their specializations and biases with them. A healthy exchange of rival approaches can lead to a wider lens and richer levels of creative problem-solving. Examples include pairing legal operations teams with business units like finance, procurement, or IT. It also includes pairing teams of lawyers and paralegals with legal operations.
5. Standardize and automate
Embrace what is today the most rapid and cost-effective way to scale legal support: the standardization and automation of commodity work (such as high-volume, low-risk, low-value work). Automation is a strategic lever that frees lawyers to focus on higher-value work and moves the law department closer to being digital-ready.
6. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Leverage analytics in decision-making and performance management. Work with the team to establish or revise KPIs to track department performance tied to the business’s growth goals (for example, accelerating the contract review process). Do the same to manage, track, and benchmark the operating performance of outside counsel. Combined with other metrics, KPIs provide a lucid picture of the value obtained from all legal service providers.
This article was originally published by the Thomson Reuters Institute, the Thomson Reuters thought leadership forum.
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