Law School Not Required

How non-lawyers add value to legal teams.?

Lawyers are trained to do a lot of things but in my humble experience, there is a long list of things that your average lawyer naturally sucks at, or is not trained to do (and therefore sucks). If I have one career regret, it is that I didn’t realise the importance of bringing non-lawyers onto my teams earlier.?

In the bad old days, lawyers often wore an air of ivory-tower haughtiness, thinking that boring things like budgets and metrics didn’t apply to the legal team. “It will cost as much as it costs, because we can’t control the course of this litigation”. I’ve met lawyers who see no shame in declaring that they don’t “do Excel”. Imagine anyone stating with pride that they didn’t “do Word”!?

Remember that a legal team needs to function like any other business unit, with efficiency and operational rigour. Here are some things that legal leaders need to work on which are nothing to do with what they learned at law school, and may often be quite scary for a lawyer:

Lawyer's Scary List

• Collecting data (on types of legal work) and measuring service provision.?
• Financial planning & budget management,
• Legal roadmaps, headcount planning and goal-setting
• Reporting information & data in a quick-to-digest, visual format (tip: not slide after slide of bullet point lists)
• Knowledge management (way too many lawyers have thousands of unfiled emails, documents and “useful” articles sitting on their local drive that no one else can access).??
• Implementing technology and tooling?

As soon as possible (given headcount & budget restraints), legal leaders should be thinking of enhancing their teams with non-legal professionals. Let’s look at the most common types of roles that can boost a legal team.?

Corporate Secretarial Administrator

A corporate secretarial administrator need not be a qualified company secretary; they are there to support the secretarial function, and many experienced individuals do not hold formal qualifications or may be part-qualified. Arguably even one legal entity warrants this support, but once we get to a handful of entities, this work mushrooms into an unending series of minutes, resolutions, annual filings and data recording. This function comes into its own when you have repeated requests for KYC and AML compliance from customers and banks. The key competencies for this role, as for any other administrator role, is obsessive attention to detail and organisation skills. In the average legal contract, a minor typo or missed punctuation is rarely critical. In a company filing, a misspelled name, a misplaced decimal point, could unleash all kinds of horror requiring months of clean-up.?

Contracts manager

Whilst lawyers can be great at negotiating transactions, most contracts are entered into by the company on repeatable formats and templates. Many deals are low value but still need to be done right, hence it is important work. Hell, even an NDA is important work as it’s often the first hurdle before real business can commence. A contracts manager is really good at making sure each legal document follows the same playbook, and will even help draft the playbook. While we’re on the subject of playbooks, let’s just take a moment to say how critical it is to have a playbook. There is no magic in it - it can be a simple table that tracks your contracts and sets out the company’s stance on commonly negotiated clauses. Include a few fallback positions for the most contentious issues, e.g. IP, liability caps, audit rights, jurisdiction. Very few people outside the legal team will pay attention to the playbook but it is an invaluable tool for the legal team, and for external legal advisors who are called upon to support this work.?

The contracts manager will rigorously follow the rules around contracts, escalating difficult issues to the lawyers and triaging the contracts by importance/value. This process funnels the high value-high importance work to the qualified lawyers. The lawyers in your team will thank you for never having to look at an NDA again!?

Some contracts managers are legally qualified, but many are not. I’ve met many in my career who have been doing the job for 30+ years and are happy to keep negotiating contracts for the rest of their working lives because they are just so kickass at it. Needless to say, if you find a good contracts manager, treat them well and do your utmost to hold on to them!

Privacy Ops

Data privacy is an expertise that no company can ignore. If the company is big enough to have an in-house legal function, at least one of those lawyers is needed to support and advise on privacy compliance - the policies, reporting data breaches, negotiating clauses in contracts. However, as we know, privacy is a “state” that needs to be embedded throughout the organisation. Modern privacy compliance requires a comprehensive range of tools, processes and education, requiring cooperation from many parts of the organisation. A legal team should not be dealing with every subject access request or deletion request. Data mapping requires cross-functional project teams to work together regularly. Customers will send questionnaires to interrogate how the company manages data privacy. All these tasks should be undertaken by a privacy ops specialist or team, usually reporting to the legal team. Lawyers can give guidance, but a best-in-class privacy function will be largely automated with tools. Policies and certifications can be stored centrally or on an external portal. Privacy Ops has the job of managing these cross-functional projects, deploying tools, updating policies, steering the company through audits, triaging data breach incidents and dealing with any large-scale customer requests. Again, the lawyers are always there, to be deployed when the risky, the irregular, the complicated or otherwise non-BAU strikes.?

Equity Administrator

In this article, I discussed the complexities of administering stock options and how it’s a job that no one really owns until you get a good equity administrator, who needs to have a terrier-like grip on the details, so as not to drown in them. It is unusual for a private, venture-backed company to appoint a dedicated equity administrator until there are more than 500 employees, so it’s likely that this role will be conducted by another non-legal team member, such as the Corporate Secretarial administrator or a highly experienced paralegal. Whoever does it, this role should be heavily supported by the legal leader as well as the finance and people leaders. This function carries a weighty burden in that almost every task has a binary quality of either right or wrong, on time or not on time - there is no room for nuance or flexibility when it comes to granting options, recording exercises & transfers, dealing with tax filings (see Corporate Secretarial Administrator above). In the UK, it is extremely difficult to hire private company equity administrators because currently, there simply aren’t thousands of incentive stock option schemes operated by large, later-stage, venture-backed companies. Even in the US, these people are rare and hard to find. Unicorns among unicorns. The skills are not rocket-science so, in theory, anyone with the right qualities and competencies can be trained. There are now academic institutions offering certification for equity professionals and a growing number of resources provided for free on the equity management platforms that are commonly in use. Hopefully, we will soon see this skill-set come into its own and produce a pipeline of career professionals.??

Legal Ops?

I’ve saved the best for last, even though it’s probably the first, hefty, non-legal role that an in-house team should hire.??

All legal leaders do a bit of legal ops, even if they don’t realise it and are unfamiliar with the word “Legal Ops”. However, legal ops professionals have really developed into a standalone discipline in the last 10 years, with a multitude of networks and communities, in particular CLOC, which, whilst not quite a professional body, has been leading the way in defining standards and practices for Legal Ops as an industry. To go into what Legal Ops comprises is way beyond the scope of this article but I would summarise it as this: Remember the Lawyer’s Scary List above? Well a legal ops specialist or team can help you with ALL of those things and will move the legal function into a different gear. A good legal ops specialist will make all the lawyers into better lawyers, because they will have time to do more lawyering. Many of those lucky lawyers will learn what good looks like in the legal ops sphere and will go on to spawn legal functions that embrace the ideal, modern legal team state: an efficient business unit delivering high value legal support.?

Conclusion

Qualified lawyers are an expensive resource and whilst every in-house lawyer has to roll their sleeves up and be prepared to do some non-legal work for which they were not trained, smart companies realise that this is not a good use of their lawyers. It’s high time we recognised the invaluable contribution that other specialists can bring to the legal function and make room for them on our teams.

P.S. What about paralegals??

I find that the term “paralegal” lacks specificity about the actual role being conducted. Since the training path for a paralegal is varied and there are few common standards for qualifications, a paralegal could come from many different backgrounds and go on to specialise in any one of the roles above.? A senior paralegal who morphs into a brilliant Legal Ops specialist or Equity Administrator is probably going to drop the “paralegal” title in favour of a more descriptive job title.