The Legal Ops Math
The math isn't mathing.
CLOC's State of the Industry (SOTI) Report revealed that demand for in-house legal services is increasing. Budgets and headcount are not.
Our clients are being asked do more with the same, or less.
More regulatory complexity. More cross-border transactions. More data privacy requirements. More employment issues. More contract volume. More risk management. More strategic counseling.
Same budget. Same team. Sometimes fewer people. Often with less funds to allocate to the issues.
This is where legal ops becomes essential. And, this shines a light on why outside counsel should care about legal ops and should build relationships with the client's legal ops team.
In this economic context, legal ops are:
1. Optimizing how work gets done (process)
2. Leveraging technology strategically (automation)
3. Being intentional about resource allocation (right work, right resource, right time, right cost)
Here's what that looks like in practice:
→ Intake and triage. Streamline how work comes in. Automate what you can. Delegate triage to the right person. Stop letting everything land on the GC's desk.
→ Service delivery models. Outsourcing, insourcing, right-sourcing. What work should actually stay with in-house counsel? What can go to an ALSP? What can be automated entirely?
→ Practice ops. Remove non-legal tasks from lawyers' plates. If it doesn't require a law degree, it shouldn't be done by someone with a law degree.
→ Vendor management. Your outside counsel relationships need to evolve from transactional to partnership. Be clear about what you value. Pay more for thought and strategy. Pay less for execution.
→ Knowledge management. Stop reinventing the wheel. Centralize resources. Build playbooks. Make institutional knowledge accessible.
When this is done and done well, there are real impacts on the work that is outsources to outside counsel.
And yet: there's a real opportunity for the outside counsel who see and understand this.
We, too, can rethink how legal work gets done.
We, too, can build systems that scale and leverage technology intelligently.
We, too, can create a legal team that's efficient, strategic, and sustainable.
This really excites me.
There's an opportunity to learn from and partner with our legal ops colleagues and clients and build reciprocal relationships and systems built on modern principles of efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability.
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