Six months ago, Crafty Counsel released a series on Legal Ops FOMO. It focused on stripping away myths and anxieties around legal operations hype and uncovered nine ideas to consider in legal for the new ‘school term’.
Little did the participants know that a pandemic was coming. The advice they shared now serves as an excellent checklist. This applies whether you’re managing a legal ops team or not.
From day one as we go back to the office or, if you’re sticking to the home-office world for now, as the Covid-related troubleshooting work fades away and you start looking at 2021, here are some ideas on how to go about it:
1. Continue to break down barriers across functions: The pandemic should have helped with this but as Sharin Ahmed, currently legal counsel at Architas, mentions, everyone within an organisation should be working towards one vision, one goal. Crucially, there has been a shift in legal culture, she says, towards being more open to cross-function collaboration, trying to understand what others are doing in the business and what can be done to loop that into what legal is doing as well. In a legal operations role, “you need to bring in other functions, otherwise, you’re going to fail,” Ahmed says.
2. Be a more proactive business partner: There’s a big emphasis for GCs and legal ops heads to become business partners to the organisations they work for. Sherrill Taggart, who is currently FTI Consulting’s EMEA GC, points out that legal functions have a holistic view of the business since they work across the board, having an overall knowledge of what is happening in the business. This specific, up-to-date view of each function is very powerful — use it. How to know when you’ve achieved your business partner status? “When you’re asked for your opinion, not on legal matters, but on business matters, that’s when you’ve achieved your goals,” she says.
[Related content: Becoming a Business Partner, Commerciality and Becoming a Business Partner]
3. Budget is gold, but so is data: One of Keruschka Shunmugan’s work mantras is “budget is gold”. Nevertheless, she mentions that data is equally as important, so get comfortable with it. Shunmugan has created a funnel spreadsheet to match the legal function’s budget to the main business one. It is easier to ask for more money when you can show evidence of a spike in one activity within the business, particularly when it comes to hiring an FTE employee. The Liberis head of legal ops also uses data to challenge the fee arrangements with law firms, as it’s easier to track the quality of the advice her company gets and push back on fees, particularly if when they are charged hourly.
[Related content: Powering Business Decisions with Data Analytics]
4. Start forecasting your next budget: Besides being best friends with the finance director (or someone else in the finance department), the other main other skill to crack in the budget task is to forecast within the business strategy as well as with the outside world. It is very important to do a “horizon scanning, knowing what’s coming up that’s going to affect your business for the rest of the year so that you can understand where to put budget,” Flora Duguid, head of legal at MVF, says. Sharing the responsibility and planning of the budget with your team can also be a helpful step in making it more bearable.
5. Think of soft skills as core skills, especially when managing: Every law firm will offer a set of soft skills training but not many people take advantage of that, says Chris Grant of Barclay Ventures. Nevertheless, how to interact with others and how to read signals — especially when it comes with mental health — are all key things to help in the overall management of a team. Particularly within legal ops, one can get very caught up in their tasks and mandates but Grant mentions it is important, as an ops manager, to sit with lawyers from time to time and keep their concerns and frustrations in mind.
6. Prepare for a possible reduction in your legal team by upskilling the rest of the workforce: Simon Coles, interim GC at Growth Street, predicts that in a few years in-house teams will shrink proportionally to the size of a business, with only one or two senior lawyers remaining, but the overall legal capability within a business will grow. In other words, different people will report into legal who aren’t lawyers but deploy legal skills in their work.Consider giving people in other parts of the business some legal training. This approach can upskill your entire workforce.
Simplify legal concepts for the rest of the team. Coach them on legal basics. This creates a more self-sufficient team. It also helps demystify those who work in the legal function, as Shunmugan points out.
7. Broaden the horizons if you’re hiring: “Instead of trying to shoehorn legal professionals into ops roles, let’s bring in people that can do ops roles, change roles and innovation roles. They’re much better at it and they can hit the ground running,” says Grant etc. The legal industry constantly evolves. Some career paths now run adjacent to traditional law practice. Law firm experience doesn’t always help with today’s in-house roles, especially in legal ops.
If hiring isn’t an option, adopt legal ops as a mindset. Ask questions through your LinkedIn network. Innovation often appears in unexpected places.
8. Time for a cost-cutting upgrade? Consider external help if you can’t afford a transformation ops team. Hiring a consultant brings fresh ideas and new working methods. Dave Hart, transformation director at BT’s legal & compliance function, calls this “the best money you’ll ever spend.”1
One-off consultancy might seem costly at first glance. However, view it from a different perspective. Consider all the money you’ll save through the consultant’s innovative ideas. This approach often delivers substantial return on investment. Where to start your cost-cutting efforts? External legal spend is the lowest hanging fruit, Hart says.
9. Fear not. “Technology is part of the solution, but it’s not the full solution,” says Taggart. This wisdom should be engraved in stone for the legal world. It applies both to those dazzled by legal tech conferences and those fearing innovation. The legal profession hasn’t completely shifted to end-to-end tech solutions. The human component—advice and critical thinking—remains essential. No need to panic about machines taking over. Take a step back before purchasing new technology.1
Consider what your business or team truly needs first.
[Related content: Databricks Legal Team: Using Technology to Work Effectively]