By Alex Kelly
The growth of legal operations is transforming the corporate legal department from a guardian of stability into an agent of change. And none too soon, either. As corporate legal teams face heightened demands to work more efficiently while controlling costs, legal ops can help drive innovation and momentum in delivering value-based legal services.
Legal ops can transform how a corporate legal department operates, helping to execute the general counsel’s vision and devise team strategy. By creating data-driven insights on legal spend, streamlined matter management and wiser allocation of attorney resources, legal ops professionals elevate the efficiency and performance of the legal department, allowing C-suite leadership to view the legal department with the same rigor and financial respect as any other business department.
Even teams hiring their first legal ops professional quickly recognize the potential of legal ops to become the foundation of modern legal service delivery. In-house legal leaders polled in Bloomberg Law’s 2022 Legal Ops + Tech survey highlighted the ability to improve attorney efficiency, reduce costs and improve workflows as top concerns.
Through improved business processes, technologies and granular-level data, legal ops enables organizations to achieve maximum value on legal spend. Rather than hiring outside counsel to tackle much of the legal work, legal teams can handle more matters internally and reserve premium firms for specialized requests.
How legal ops teams leverage technology
A legal operations team leveraging the right legal technology surfaces hidden value, streamlines work processes, improves working relationships and enables lawyers to focus on legal work. Seven out of 10 in-house legal leaders polled by Bloomberg Law highlighted improving attorney efficiency as a primary concern when deciding which technology and practices to implement.
By employing a cloud-based, central system of record, legal team members, other organization members and outside vendors can share a common pathway for invoices, documents and other files without back-and-forth emails or the burden of hunting down critical siloed information. Even when globally distributed or working remotely, stakeholders can stay aligned more easily. The streamlined workflow boosts collaboration and efficiency in the legal department and across the company.
Legal ops teams can leverage artificial intelligence to reduce tedious tasks and free attorneys to address more critical matters. Legal ops teams provide insight and transparency into legal spend and build better relationships with outside counsel. Granular data points surfaced from AI invoice reviews accurately track legal spend and empower legal teams to take targeted actions that reduce unnecessary expenses in-house and with outside counsel. The insights can guide decisions on splitting time between partners and associates, handling certain matters in-house versus via external vendors, and determining how to price services.
The level of transparency around legal costs available to the in-house team and outside counsel informs the alignment of outside counsel with the in-house legal department’s expectations. Doing so creates an environment where everyone welcomes — rather than avoids — honest feedback. Legal ops analytics help legal teams identify which outside firms provide the most value.
Legal ops elevates the legal team
When armed with an AI solution, a legal ops team becomes an agent for change for the entire legal department. Automation and data-driven insights go beyond giving attorneys more time for high-level thinking. Legal ops helps move the legal team’s mindset.
Legal teams often focus too much on avoiding risk. But risk is inevitable. Instead, the goal should be to minimize and gain visibility into that risk. Use available data to make decisions based not on absolute risk avoidance but strategic awareness. A competent lawyer who only manages risk misses opportunities to deliver proactive legal services more efficiently.
The pandemic accelerated change for corporate legal teams. Expect legal operations to control legal spending, identify value and move the legal department to a more prominent seat at the corporate table.
About the author
Alex Kelly is the COO and co-founder of Brightflag, the AI-powered legal operations platform. Prior to founding Brightflag, Kelly advised financial institutions and global enterprises as a corporate lawyer within a large international law firm. Kelly is responsible for growing and enabling every corner of the Brightflag team as the company aims to fundamentally redefine how corporate legal services are procured and delivered.
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