Numerous internal and external factors are redefining in-house legal departments. Legal departments are being pushed to deliver more value, more effectively, whether it’s because of mergers and acquisitions, the need to spread personnel across numerous corporate locations and continents, or other factors. A vision of the legal department as a commercial function that generates financial value for the company is replacing the idea that in-house legal teams should operate like internal law firms. The advent of the legal operations team, a business unit that often falls under the legal function and is dedicated to increasing the overall effectiveness, efficiency, and business value of the legal department, legal operations teams are involved in the business aspects of running the department, from maintaining vendor relationships with outside legal providers to incorporating technologies that can enhance how lawyers conduct their work. While such a basis is essential, the organization of legal activities is also crucial to make sure that none of the major opportunities for boosting efficiency are neglected.

Click here to read: Three trends that are shaping the future of contract management technology

Teams for legal operations often include a variety of managers, analysts, and assistants. According to an annual assessment on the state of legal operations, creating formal legal operations teams is still a nascent initiative for many businesses. Consider dividing these top-level competencies into the following three multidisciplinary areas of concentration in order to streamline and offer the greatest process improvements and efficiencies:

Innovation:

Technology offers one of the most potent options currently available to drive cost and process efficiencies, enhance work accuracy, and advance other beneficial enhancements across the company. Automation is used to speed up the time-consuming manual work of contract onboarding, review, and reporting; speed up finance approval processes; and other advances. Contract management system software analytics can be used to find trends in contracting, best practices, and insights. Their organization’s legal department collaborates with cross-disciplinary partners like IT to find, integrate, and manage technologies that improve the provision of legal services.

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Support Services:

In-house counsel is becoming more integral to business operations due to legal services. In order to achieve higher-level strategic goals, legal operations teams must concentrate on cross-functional alignment while collaborating with other business units. This component of legal operations also entails the creation and execution of roadmaps for improving the capabilities and organizational structure of the legal department in order to provide services that are most effective and satisfy the demands of the company as a whole.

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Logistics:

It’s not only about building the future legal department when it comes to legal operations. The team’s continuous existence depends on legal operations, the division in charge of all non-legal facets of the division. This covers all facets of routine operations, such as budgeting and invoice approvals in the financial realm; managing vendors, which includes conducting business reviews and negotiating fee arrangements with outside counsel; and monitoring and reporting on the legal team’s performance in relation to goals.

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