Beyond the Delivery of Legal Services: Legal Ops

Beyond the delivery of legal services, I have always been fascinated by the Business of Law, those who have read my book on challenging Traditional Law firm business models will understand my views on this.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be focusing on understanding Legal Operations, what is, its history, why it is important and outcomes every law firm needs to be looking at.

For todays article I will deal with the following:

- Understanding Legal Operations

- And core competencies of an efficient and effective Legal Operations function by CLOC (Corporate Legal Operations Consortium)

Understanding Legal Operations

Legal Operations is a multidisciplinary profession that includes backgrounds like finance, marketing, data analytics, learning and development, and engineering. These professionals work with leadership to identify strategic investments that build capacity for the organization. Because of this multidisciplinary approach, it allows for a law firm to be able to manage risks, monitor compliance, incorporate new technological solutions or efficiently use current technology to deliver more value to their clients and accelerate their business case.

Core competencies of a functional Legal Operations Team

There are 3 phases which encompass these:

1. Foundational Level

2. Advanced Level

3. Mature Level

Foundational Level

Financial Management:

Financial management can be defined as those business activities undertaken with the goal of maximizing shareholder wealth, utilizing the principles of the time value of money, leverage, diversification, and an investment’s expected rate of return versus its risk.

Vendor Management

Vendor management is a term that describes the processes organizations use to manage their suppliers, who are also known as vendors. Vendor management includes activities such as selecting vendors, negotiating contracts, controlling costs, reducing vendor-related risks and ensuring service delivery.

Cross-functional Alignment

Cross-alignment, also termed cross-functional collaboration, is what happens when people from different teams or functions in an organization join forces to work on a common goal or project

Technology and Process Support

Technology and Process Support refers to the methodology in which the balance of process, and technology drives action: Pit deals with an organization using processes (and often, technology) to streamline and improve these processes and how to support the organisation’s activities.

Advanced Level

Service Delivery and Alternative Support Models

This source refers to the use of alternative Service Delivery Models to meet increasing challenges, reduce cost and improve performance. This makes sense in a legal industry where the market constantly wants and expects more from limited human capital such as traditional lawyers.

Organizational Design, Support and Management

By organisational design, one refers to the design process which provides a comprehensive and holistic approach to organizational improvement that touches all aspects of organizational life, so you can achieve:

? Excellent customer service

? Increased profitability

? Reduced operating costs

? Improved efficiency and cycle time

? A culture of committed and engaged employees

? A clear strategy for managing and growing your business

Communications

Client communication is one business area which can highlight your practice’s reputation and presence in the legal industry. Both internal and external communication processes factor into how businesses and legal organisation successfully share ideas and information, and in doing so can leverage the efficiency of the entire business.

Data Analytics

Legal analytics is the process of incorporating data into your decision making on topics affecting law firms and lawyers, like matter forecasting, legal strategy, and resource management. When used appropriately, legal analytics provides a competitive advantage by providing unparalleled transparency and insight into in-house counsel members, departments, and decision-makers.

Mature Level

Litigation Support and IP Management

Litigation support has been defined as “the process of providing consultation and support services to attorneys or others in regard to current and pending cases.”

Intellectual property management (IP) is a system that manages intangible creations of the human intellect and primarily encompasses copyrights, patents, and trademarks. It also includes other types of rights, including publicity rights, and rights against unfair competition.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management is the efficient handling of information and resources within a commercial organization.

Information Governance and Records Keeping

Information governance, or IG, is the overall strategy for information at an organization. Information governance balances the risk that information presents with the value that information provides.

Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is an organizational management activity that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations, ensure that employees and other stakeholders are working toward common goals, establish agreement around intended outcomes/results, and assess and adjust the organization’s direction in response to a changing environment. It is a disciplined effort that produces fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, who it serves, what it does, and why it does it, with a focus on the future. Effective strategic planning articulates not only where an organization is going and the actions needed to make progress, but also how it will know if it is successful.

Understanding these core competencies is key in a legal operations team, it must also be kept in mind that each legal organisation sets it's own metrix in determining what success will look like for them.

In the coming articles, I will handle a new topic on the topic of legal operations why it's necessary, what is benefits are, etc Yours in Legal Tech

www.leahmolatseli.com