- 15 min read
- NIA BALBO
Introduction
Long ago, in the land of in-house legal teams, lawyers drowned in tedious administrative work. They spent their days combing through contract data by hand, bouncing between various systems to find a contract’s status, and stressfully staring at the pile of tasks on their desks that never seemed to get smaller.
All the while, they spent thousands of dollars (that’s a guesstimate since there was no way or time to track those hours) paying external counsel to handle the strategic tasks that they would rather focus on.
Then, one bright morning, the legal operations function was born and swooped in to save the day.
In this blog, we’ll take you through the legal operations function, the challenges they face, and how their role ties into your everyday contracting processes.
Defining Legal Operations: What is it?
Legal operations (legal ops) refers to a group of professionals who apply business and technical practices to the delivery of legal services. This enables legal departments to serve clients more effectively and allows lawyers to focus on providing legal advice.
As the in-house legal function evolved since its own beginning, so did the responsibilities of legal ops teams.
The History of Legal Ops
Legal Ops has a much shorter story to tell than the general legal function. Each milestone aligns with the changing priorities of the enterprises they serve.
- A Focus on Risk Management — Pre-1990, legal ops teams spent most of their time managing external counsel. They had few cost restrictions and stuck to simpler issues.
- A Shift to Strategic Insights — From 1990 to the mid-2000s, these teams took on more complex, regulated, and international issues. They still leaned on external counsel, albeit with some limits to cost.
- Becoming a Trusted Partner — By 2019, legal ops professionals began strategically using automation and tech solutions to lower costs and drive efficiency while managing complicated legal and business issues.
- Established as Innovators — Today, legal ops teams are agents of change who create a culture of positive, ongoing improvement within legal functions.
If you want to build a legal ops function that drives efficiency and creates that culture of positive change, you need to hire people with the right skills.
The Skillset Needed for Legal Ops
Legal ops teams include more than just lawyers. In fact, some legal operations functions don’t even employ anyone with a law degree.
Instead, they include people skilled in:
- Strategic Planning
- Data Analytics
- Vendor Management
- Financial Planning
- Risk Management
- Technology Adoption
With so much expertise on one team, you might not be surprised to learn how many different tasks a legal ops team can go through in a single day.
A Day in the Life of the Legal Operations Team
If you just looked at their title, you might assume a legal operations professional spends their time performing paralegal work or building Legal’s tech stack.
You might be right in some cases. But no two legal operations departments are the same. Their day-to-day tasks vary and depend on their enterprise’s unique business goals.
Common Responsibilities of a Legal Ops Teams
Legal ops has evolved from handling strictly contract administration tasks to having more strategic responsibilities across the enterprise. Today, the legal operations role handles a number of tasks that boost efficiency and streamline processes.
On any given day, your legal ops team delivers on:
- Process Development and Project Management
- Data Analytics
- Technical and Process Support
- Vendor Management
- Financial Management
If you ask CLOC — the most famous legal operations community — there are 12 core functions that legal operations teams can work within to achieve operational excellence.
And what do all those responsibilities add up to?
More time for in-house lawyers to focus on the legal tasks they were hired for.
When they operate within so many disciplines, it’s no surprise that legal operations teams hit a few pain points along the way.
The Challenges Faced by Legal Ops
Like any enterprise role, legal ops teams face their share of frustrations. This is especially the case when it comes to contract management tasks.
1. Scattered Contracts
Too often, enterprises store contracts in various, disconnected systems and drives. This leaves legal ops teams lacking full visibility into your contract portfolio. Without that visibility, they’re unable to monitor contract obligations, track terms, or get answers to questions that affect how the business runs.
2. Inaccessible Contract Data
Let’s say you store all of your contracts on a single drive. Manually pulling out the data points and terms you need to track is still exceedingly difficult. It can take hours to open contracts individually, Control + F the terms you’re looking for, and carry that information over to a spreadsheet.
Even if your legal ops team manages to search for every variation of a clause name, all it takes is one missed term to cost your business thousands of dollars in preventable expenses.
3. Process Bottlenecks
You would be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t received or had to send an email with some variation of “just checking to see where this is at.”
Between manual contract authoring, review, and negotiation requests, it’s so easy for the legal department to get bogged down with dozens of tasks. That’s not even accounting for the high volume of contract requests that come in at certain times of the year.
Without the technology and processes to streamline operations, these bottlenecks result in missed sales opportunities and poor business relationships as time goes on.
The Connection Between Legal Ops and Contracting
As in-house legal teams take on more responsibilities, your legal ops team has the opportunity to improve tasks across enterprise contracting processes.
Contract Compliance
Instead of performing contract compliance audits ad hoc whenever Legal finds the time, legal ops teams set up processes that ensure all contracts across your portfolio include the proper clauses to meet regulatory standards.
Cost Savings
Your legal ops team can leverage contract analytics to determine how lawyers are spending their time and how heavily the teams rely on external counsel. From there, they can identify areas for cost savings across the entire legal organization.
Data Integrity
Rather than leave your legal team to manually search through contracts, legal operations uncovers contracting trends that they can use to improve processes and inform business decisions.
Contract Process Efficiency
To avoid having every contracting task end up on Legal’s desk, your legal ops team can automate steps and set up self-service contracting workflows to reduce bottlenecks and speed up tasks with fewer errors.
Sales Velocity
By leveraging technology solutions to track every step of the contract lifecycle, legal operations empowers the enterprise to efficiently execute contracts and hit revenue targets faster.
Vendor Management
You can use the workflows and dashboard that legal ops sets up to automatically measure vendor performance and improve supplier relationships while maintaining strong contract value.
Using Contract AI to Improve Legal Operations
A huge part of a legal ops team’s success is the investment in technology that enhances their roles.
Integrating contract AI into your processes empowers Legal Ops teams to:
- Work Within a Single Source of Truth — Connect your CLM to core business platforms, centralize your contracts, and extract and monitor key terms and obligations.
- Automate Contracting Workflows — Establish customized workflows that meet your team’s unique needs using a no-code interface.
- Track Contract Obligations — Eliminate the need for manual obligation tracking, automatically ensure compliance, and monitor contract performance.
- Access Deep Contract Insights — Conversationally search your portfolio and access risk-related contract intelligence and operational trends.
- Enable Self-Service Contracting — Build legal-approved contract clause and template libraries that empower non-legal teams to author first drafts and co-edit contracts within the CLM platform.
Keep Your Legal Ops Function on Track With CLM
It’s clear that the legal ops function continues to make a positive difference for in-house legal teams. They stand to have an even greater impact by using the right CLM solution to support their efforts.
With Sirion, you can set up a central hub for all your contracts, gain invaluable contract insights, and automate processes based on your own processes. That all adds up to faster, more efficient ways to meet deadlines, handle higher contract request volume, and get timely answers to important business questions.
See why Sirion is the world’s leading AI-native CLM platform and start transforming your legal operations processes today.
Additional Resources
14 Contract Negotiation Strategies and Techniques
How to Find the Right and Best CLM for Your Org
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