What Is Legal Operations? How Do I Manage My Firm's Ops?

Legal operations, or legal ops, is the culmination of all business activities, systems, and processes that help optimize a firm or an in-house legal team. With a focus on practice operations, legal ops includes everything from financial management to business intelligence to employee training and development. 

The key to legal operations is its data-driven approach. Rather than relying on manual experience for decision-making, legal department operations teams use technology to uncover insights that will make for a smoother operation and allow attorneys to prioritize tasks that contribute to winning cases. 

Curious how your firm can better manage legal operations? Let’s take a closer look at the key functions of legal ops and how to implement the right solutions. 

Understanding Core Legal Operations Functions

Legal ops can include any business-related function that a legal team sees fit. For some firms, legal ops focuses on clerical work relating to case management, while other practices prioritize business growth. 

“Our legal ops range from case management software and intake workflows to deadline calculation and medical records processing,” says Matthew A. Dolman, personal injury attorney at Dolman Law. “By keeping this structure lean, we make sure that lawyers do lawyering, not admin.” 

Most legal operations teams follow the industry-standard core competencies set by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), a nonprofit for legal operations professionals. 

Here are the 12 primary functions of legal operations teams, as outlined by CLOC. 

1. Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is the process of collecting, organizing, and analyzing business data to make more informed decisions. For law firms, this data could highlight average case value, client acquisition costs, or time spent on drafting documents. Legal ops will use technology to analyze all data and identify patterns, trends, or inefficiencies that the legal team can use to improve everything from case management to marketing. 

2. Financial Management

Legal ops can also partner with the finance department to help create budgets, manage spending, handle billing, and analyze resources. Compared to the finance department, legal ops can provide an insider perspective into the legal team’s spending patterns which can help identify cost-saving opportunities. 

3. Firm and Vendor Management

Before hiring outside counsel or outsourcing legal services, legal ops will perform due diligence to strategically select which vendors to work with. The goal of this function is to identify top talent, strengthen the firm’s vendor relationships, handle contract management, and provide smoother onboarding. 

4. Information Governance

Information governance helps mitigate risk for the company. In this function, legal ops creates policies that protect client and firm data. This process typically includes setting up guidelines around how to securely store, organize, and share information within the legal team. 

5. Knowledge Management

Legal ops is also responsible for creating internal knowledge hubs that are accessible to the entire department. These hubs can include anything from onboarding guidelines to legal templates to company policies. Knowledge management is critical for creating a central repository of information that anyone on the team can access. It’s also essential to maintain internal information in the event of personnel changes. 

6. Organization Optimization and Health

This function focuses on maintaining a strong company culture. Legal ops professionals will often create programs that improve the hiring process, provide career development opportunities, and offer incentives meant to keep the team motivated and retained for the long term. 

7. Practice Operations

According to Statista, the top legal ops goal for in-house legal departments is increased efficiency and reduced costs. That’s where practice operations come in. This responsibility involves taking a look at the policies, processes, and roles that could be more efficient. This typically involves conducting an audit on the firm’s current practices around everything from case management to client communications. 

Practice operations also considers which tools that could help free up the legal team’s time. According to a report by Thomson Reuters, AI tools can help free up to four hours of time per week for legal professionals. This is the type of data legal ops will consider when optimizing their practice operations. 

8. Project and Program Management

Whether the legal team is launching a special project or there’s a new company-wide initiative, legal ops is in charge of handling the process so it all goes smoothly. The team will often leverage their established systems and tools to ensure the new project or program is facilitated efficiently. 

9. Service Delivery Models

Aligning with vendor management, this function focuses on structuring and distributing resources to service providers to optimize efficiency. For example, one major project can be broken down into smaller projects and distributed to multiple vendors in an effort to cut down on costs and produce a more effective outcome. 

10. Strategic Planning

Strategic planning focuses on creating short and long-term goals for the legal department. Legal ops will help plan and maintain goals that meet the firm’s needs or align with organizational initiatives. 

11. Technology

Technology plays a major role in legal operations, especially for saving time, lowering costs, and streamlining manual processes. The legal ops team will lead technology initiatives by implementing tools like legal software to automate processes, digitize tasks, and scale the firm’s operations. 

“We are heavy on technology,” says Kimberly DeCarrera, Fractional General Counsel, CFO, and Law Firm Adviser at Springboard Legal. “A practice or case management system is key! In larger cases, there are just too many documents and moving parts to keep organized.”

Today, technology for legal ops heavily involves AI-powered tools. One reason to prioritize AI technology within your legal team? Law students are already using AI and will expect to use it when they join a firm, which means AI-driven law firms attract top talent.

12. Training and Development

Legal ops also takes on the essential responsibilities of providing training and career development opportunities for the team. Whether training new hires or facilitating skill-building programs, legal ops aids in employee retention through this function. 

Legal Ops Progression

The key functions of legal ops have long been critical components of a successful legal department, but there wasn’t always a dedicated team involved. Attorneys used to take on the responsibilities of running a practice themselves, on top of their main duties like case work and client management. 

The introduction of legal ops professionals and systems helped legal teams become more proactive and efficient, allowing attorneys to focus on their legal priorities while business operations run smoothly in the background. 

Technology has undoubtedly accelerated legal ops. Business intelligence software provides deeper insights that help legal teams make more strategic decisions, while AI has helped increase efficiency and save valuable time.

Implementing Legal Operations in Your Firm

Whether you want to establish a strong legal ops presence at your firm or you’re looking to level up your current team, follow these steps to implement legal operations software and systems in your department or firm. 

1. Audit Your Existing Practices 

Before you can implement new processes or hire a legal ops team, you need to identify your firm’s needs.

Take a look at your current practices and systems. Which of the core competencies can you improve? 

If you’re already using legal software for case management, billing, or project management, for instance, analyze the data within each platform. You may find that your legal department doesn’t have a knowledge base to reference practice policies, or that your team is spending too much time on non-billable tasks like paperwork. 

Make note of everything that could use improvement and create goals for your legal ops team. 

2. Identify Your Priorities

Now that you’ve done an audit, consider what the most pressing needs are for your practice. Do you need support with vendor management? Maybe you want to prioritize practice operations or business intelligence.

Collaborate with the team to get insight into which priorities are best for the business. Everyone will have a different perspective on which processes to prioritize, so getting insights from attorneys, legal assistants, and even finance will help paint the full picture. 

 Knowing which areas you want to focus on will help you with the hiring process and implementing new tools and systems. 

It’s also a good idea to determine the specific KPIs you’ll use to measure your success once your legal ops process is set up. These should be specific and measurable. For example, ROI on a new tool or time and cost savings after implementing a new process. 

3. Understand the Different Legal Ops Roles 

There are several legal ops roles, including: 

• Legal assistants: This role supports the law firm with administrative and clerical tasks, such as scheduling meetings, organizing documents, and handling office communications. 
• Paralegals: Similar to a legal assistant, paralegals have a specialized legal education that allows them to support tasks including case preparation, drafting legal documents, and trial assistance.
• Legal operations managers: This role oversees all legal operations. They may also manage a team, which could include legal assistants and paralegals. 

Depending on your firm’s size and needs, you may need to hire multiple roles. Small practices or legal departments can get by with hiring an individual legal ops manager to oversee everything. 

It’s also important to consider bringing in people from non-legal backgrounds. Business optimization is the main component of legal ops, so it may make sense to hire professionals with experience in finance, data analytics, or business consulting. 

4. Implement Systems and Tools 

Once you’ve onboarded a legal ops team or professional, you can start implementing new systems and tools for your practice. 

The legal ops team will likely take the lead in choosing which core competencies to prioritize, as well as how they want to approach improving them. 

When managing the legal operations team, keep your initial priorities in mind. Make sure everyone is aligned with the goals of the firm or company, while still meeting the goals you set out to achieve with your legal ops functions. 

5. Review and Evaluate 

After your legal ops system and tools have been operating for about three months (presumably a quarter), it’s time to review what’s working and what’s not. 

Revisit the KPIs you initially set up and analyze your recent results to see if they align. For example, what have been the time and cost savings of using tools for non-billable work? 

Continue to review your legal ops, whether monthly or quarterly, to ensure your team is meeting its goals.

Benefits of Legal Operations Management

The biggest benefit to establishing strong legal operations within your organization is that it helps free up valuable time. When you set up tools and systems that automate long, tedious processes, your attorneys can focus on the most important parts of their jobs — winning cases. 

Technology has not only made legal operations more efficient, but it also provides data-driven insights that can be used to your advantage. If you’re running the legal department within a larger organization, you can use business intelligence to demonstrate your team’s success. 

Proving value and ROI to internal and external stakeholders is key to a successful legal department as it can set your team up for more projects, recruiting top talent, and more budget allocation.

Challenges to Legal Operations Management

Legal operations is not without its challenges. Without the right goals or tools, you limit what your legal ops can achieve. 

Make sure to identify the top priorities for your legal ops team. Which core competencies do you want to focus on? Choose no more than three to start with. Trying to improve too many core functions at once can be overwhelming and counterproductive, as your team’s resources and attention will be spread too thin. 

Another challenge is choosing the right tools to help you reach your goals. Technology is one of the core functions in the CLOC legal ops framework, which underscores how important it is to implement software that makes your job easier. 

The systems and tools you use should solve your problems, not make them more difficult. The last thing you want is to spend valuable time trying to learn a new tool. Make sure your legal ops team is tech-savvy so they can easily set up new tools and put them to work right away. 

Take Your Operations to the Next Level

Technology is key to taking your legal ops up a notch. To help you choose the right legal software for your needs, here are a few tools we recommend for streamlining your legal team’s workflow: 

• Rev
  
  • Rev’s legal transcription offering helps lawyers record depositions and create accurate transcriptions, saving significant time spent on notetaking. Legal teams can also cut down on the time-consuming task of combing through piles of evidence with Rev Insights, a multi-file analysis feature which allows you to analyze and search through all of your evidence in one AI-powered workspace. 

• Clio
  
  • Legal ops teams can use this legal management platform to oversee everything from client communications and billing to case management. 

• MyCase
  
  • Another legal case management software, MyCase helps legal professionals streamline client communications and case management responsibilities, like invoicing, appointment scheduling, and document organization.

• SimpleLegal
  
  • This legal operations software includes reporting and analytics capabilities that help legal teams collect data around billing, vendor management, and task management.

• Toggl
  
  • Tracking is essential for understanding how much time your team spends on billable vs. non-billable hours. Toggl conveniently integrates with other tools like Google Calendar and QuickBooks, making tracking and billing a breeze.  

Leveraging Efficient Legal Ops Solutions

Legal ops optimizes the business and practice of law, which includes implementing tools that make attorneys' jobs easier. Using tools for everything from evidence management to transcription to case management helps your team deliver faster, more efficient outcomes. Learn more about how Rev Insights helps legal professionals save crucial time managing multimedia evidence.

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