Picture two distinct and well-intentioned legal operations teams. One succeeds, consistently and at scale, in lowering risk and ensuring compliance. It leverages legal technology of all kinds—from CLM and e-billing systems to AI-powered workflow automation—both to increase its own capacity as well as to create seamless process experiences for employees. It markets and sells itself effectively as a partner both to Legal and to the business. It measures impact. And as a result, it succeeds in helping Legal better serve the business—as it creates meaningful, regular business value for the organization.
That other legal ops team? It tends to spend all its time putting out fires, chasing follow-ups, and manually compensating for its processes’ functional limitations. It doesn’t think strategically about what it hopes to get out of the monolith technologies it invests in, how to measure impact, or where those technologies fit into their process experiences. (Does it really make sense to implement and force people to use a CLM without understanding what kinds of requests are coming in?) In this way, it perpetuates Legal’s reputation as an inhibitor of innovation, as opposed to an incubator of it. It provides less strategic support to Legal and less business value to the organization.
The core role of legal operations teams is enabling the legal team to serve the rest of the business better. But how can it do this? As is true of any other operations team, it all boils down to process. Or, more importantly, whether the people within the team and throughout the rest of the organization are following the process. Efficiency, innovation, compliance—all hinge on getting employees to follow your processes as they’re designed.
The problem is, generally, employees don’t follow legal processes as they’re designed, if at all. By some estimates at least two-thirds of employees admit to routinely skipping legal policies and procedures—and that’s just the percentage of employees willing to admit to their rogue behavior; the actual number could be much higher.
If you hope to elevate either the importance or capacity of the legal operations team within your organization—if you aspire to do the work that organizations very much need modern legal operations teams to be able to do—your first step must be aimed at reversing this trend.
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As Sagi writes, these are crucial steps for legal operations departments to take. Legal departments around the world are talking daily about the importance of finding a way to leverage AI and workflow automation to meet the demands of the modern legal department. The best place to do that—when it comes to not only providing a more valuable employee experience but up-leveling your own performance and capacity as a function—is at the process level.
Legal ops teams are in many ways ultimately products of the processes they design and deploy. You are only ever as excellent, efficient, or as valuable as the experiences you provide.
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