(Part 2) Step 1, Get to know your Legal Department

In the previous article talk about the importance of distinguishing activity from responsibility, establishing these differences relieves the Legal Department of doing activities that do not correspond to it or maybe it can help prioritize better each activity. Part of working this out is to understand better what we do and why we do it, so that we can move on to the next steps, that are still part of this step 1. The next point to define is the processes and operational maps.

After we have the activities and responsibilities defined, we need to see how we get there, and the following steps. Other departments such as logistics, development, and production, even HR have mapped their processes. These are step by step documents that guide us from the moment someone asks us something or when a request comes until we are done. The map will let us know when additional activities are triggered, when we need to go for approval, if we need to reject the request and so many other things. This mapping is an old practice for other departments, not so much for legal, and usually they are used to identify bottlenecks, repeated or unnecessary steps, gaps or risks in the operation and many other things.

In simple words these maps exist to repeat the same “successful” operation over and over again without errors, the people who implement the process will also tell you that with this you will identify possible improvements or corrections, as well as new opportunities for the business, i will also help to manage company resources and activities,? identifying the key roles of the process, and all is true. The problem is that in most cases the mapping will be kept until the next review a couple of years later, and again they will spend plenty of hours updating the process just to save it once again. I just recently had a conversation with a big company, and this was their complaint when we talked about mapping their legal processes.?

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To reach the expected results, the mapping process must be exhaustive, carefully reviewing each of the steps, establishing the paths, decisions, approvals, and every small step that is required to get from the beginning to the culmination. Small steps or steps that are not operational on many occasions are omitted because people think they are obvious or they do not matter, but this in the future may cause gaps that leave doubts. Non-operational steps such as uploading data to a system (CRM, CLM) are often omitted, but everything that has to do with the systems is more important than people think.

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Now that we have everything defined, we must remember that all this is just an assumption, the first mapping represents how we would like our process to be, this also applies if one or several mappings were made without reaching the next step. We cannot improve something on paper, we cannot make effective changes without the appropriate elements that support that change. For accuracy we will need “Data” so it is necessary to define what we are going to measure, how we will do it and, more importantly, why.