The Legal Operations Manager: What is It?
A legal operations manager is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day activities of a law firm or legal department and developing and optimizing standard operating procedures for maximum performance and efficiency. He or she is responsible for coordinating all law firm specific projects from inception and planning through to execution, implementation, and completion. He or she leads process improvements, risk management, resource management, performance management, business intelligence, and legal procurement functions for the organization .
In addition, a legal operations manager is responsible for ensuring administrative processes are running smoothly for all internal and external stakeholders, and serving as the liaison between the legal department and outside counsel, working with both to ensure that legal needs are being met and researched and that all vendors and resources are operating at an optimum level. He or she monitors and analyzes performance metrics are met and identifying opportunities for cost-savings and cost-reduction whenever possible.
In organizations where law firms have developed a dedicated legal operations manager role function, it has helped drive significant improvements in nearly all areas of law firm operations. This is a key driver of change for modern-day corporate law departments.
Essential Skills for Legal Operations Managers
The skills that you require as a legal operations manager can easily be divided into both concrete and abstract categories. For example, you will need to be fully versed in the technology your team is using as well as be an excellent communicator. However, you will also need to bring an overall understanding of both your company’s business sector and the legal sector as a whole to your role.
If you would like to have a career as a legal operations manager, then you need to develop the following skills:
Project Management
As a legal operations manager, you are going to have to juggle many different projects at once. Therefore, you need to be able to go from project to project without losing track of progress on any of them. You may need to use legal project management software to manage the projects, but you certainly should have an understanding of how legal project management works as a whole.
Financial Acumen
An understanding of financial concepts is necessary if you want to work as a legal operations manager. You have to grasp how money flows through your organization, understand how to handle budgets, and be aware of strategies to cut costs without sacrificing quality.
Organizational Skills
As a legal operations manager, you have to be incredibly organized. Not only do you have to keep track of your own work, but you need to keep track of all of the work with the various projects you are managing. Organizing and documenting materials is a must. If you are not an organized person, then you are not going to be successful in this kind of job.
Communication
Communication skills are critical for a legal operations manager to have. Not only will you have to communicate with many different departments throughout your company, but you will also need to communicate with clients. It is key that you are able to explain technical legal issues in a way that is clear and concise.
Compromise
You are going to be dealing with many different people who have many different priorities. Sometimes, you need to be able to compromise with people in order to keep moving ahead. While you shouldn’t neglect your own priorities, you also should be able to think strategically about how to get what you want while helping to deliver what others need.
Problem Solving
Without a doubt, there are going to be many different problems that you will have to solve on a day-to-day basis when you’re a legal operations manager. You need to be able to look at a problem logically, diagnose what the problem is, and then create a solution. Fortunately, many of these problems can be solved by using software which can help you to analyze data and legal issues.
Typical Day and Responsibilities
The responsibilities and daily tasks of a legal operations manager align with the five foundational pillars outlined in the CLOC model. A legal operations manager is increasingly responsible for assisting with the strategic planning of their organization’s legal operations. This strategic planning process involves determining areas for improved efficiencies and supporting the development of a shared understanding of goals and objectives across the legal team and within the larger organization. Also important is the role of the legal operations manager in the strategic sourcing of outside counsel, as well as the development and negotiation of efficient and contemporary alternative fee arrangements.
Process improvement efforts, which are also an important area of focus for a legal operations manager, can include the development and implementation of legal services requests for proposals (RFPs), capture plans, resource allocation plans, budgeting plans, business plans, and staffing plans. The optimization of internal and external resources is another key area of focus, as a legal operations manager is often expected to develop strong relationships with internal "customers" of the legal function to understand how they connect with the services offered by the legal team. Deep understanding of these connections are helpful in maximizing the available internal resources and determining where outside resources could be leveraged.
Day-to-day tasks typically include project management; vendor/consultant management; matter or docket management; legal department coaching; legal technology development or training; data collection and reporting; process mapping; budget tracking; risk and controls development and tracking; contract management; and legal billing guideline development, monitoring, and enforcement.
The Role of Technology in Legal Operations
The advancement of technology continues to impact law firms around the world and has more recently begun to impact the role of a legal operations manager. One of the primary roles an operational manager plays is to support legal departments with the necessary tools to ensure the firm is running as efficiently and profitably as possible.
Technology will help you identify inefficiencies, automate processes, and facilitate communication across departments. The increased availability of legal tech tools has made it easier than ever for law firms to adopt legal technology to assist in their operations.
Some of the common tools include APIs (application programming interface), that can connect disparate technologies, enabling them to pass data back and forth. Providing lawyers with an array of operational tools at their disposal within a single application can streamline processes and minimize the impact on productivity. It also helps unify operational processes and standardize best practices. Common tools include contract management software and e-discovery platforms.
For any project to succeed, there must be a thorough understanding of the project goals and outcomes. Technology can be an important part of supporting these essential activities. Without access to the latest technological advances, lawyers are unable to provide the best level of service to their clients.
Career Trajectory and Scope of a Legal Operations Manager
A legal operations manager is often essential to an efficient and effective legal function. It’s also likely to be a foundational job that opens the door to additional opportunities within a legal department or even an entirely new career path. One possible direction is moving into senior management, as more departments look for financially and operationally savvy leaders who can keep the team aligned with the larger corporate strategy. (This is the specific skill set Deloitte discovered among the previous generation of chief counsel surveyed, which is now being sought in a new generation of chief counsel.)
Another track is continuing to refine the data and organizational skills required to support the development of alternative fee arrangements or a desire for increased cost transparency. Almost a quarter of chief legal officers surveyed by Deloitte said they are looking to operate via the alternative fee model. Those people who understand how to effectively support AFAs and other alternative pricing from a process and infrastructure perspective will be in demand , both from inside their department as well as from other departments. Budgeting and monitoring are two key areas where a manager with sophisticated programmatic know-how will be able to make a difference as well as grow the expertise of the department.
Finally, many companies have created horizontal positions across departments that focus on end-to-end problems. Pioneered by customer-facing positions like chief customer officer, these horizontal roles leverage deep domain expertise to knock down barriers and find solutions that consider the entire scope of a given challenge. Manufacturing companies were the first to recognize this talent, but consumer companies soon followed. The same team that manages legal forms will not have the perspective to solve the bigger picture problem of managing the company’s overall documents. These horizontal roles will continue to emerge at companies seeking highly efficient legal departments.
Challenges of the Legal Operations Manager
The role of a legal operations manager comes with its fair share of challenges. While a legal operations manager can help to improve the entire process of how a law firm or an in-house legal team works, implementing changes can be difficult. It is also not always easy to get all the necessary stakeholders on board with any changes that are proposed.
Such is the balancing act when it comes to the work of a legal operations manager, who is expected to take their team into the future while also remedying any past issues with the way in which the department or firm has conducted its business. When it comes to legal operations management, one of the biggest obstacles to take on is the inertia of doing things the same way every day. Getting people to become onboard with new processes can be difficult, especially when they have functioned the same way for some time. However, this is not impossible. When it comes to doing things differently, education is the key. Take the time to explain to your team and other stakeholders why you have recommended any change and how it is going to be beneficial to the whole department.
Another major challenge for a legal operations manager is getting stakeholders to understand the role of legal operations in the first place. Legal operations is a new field, and because of that not everyone knows exactly what legal operations even means. Taking the time to educate stakeholders about the legal operations process, how it can help them and why it is worth having a dedicated legal operations professional in your department to oversee it is a worthwhile investment. Taking the time to explain these things to your stakeholders on a regular basis will make it clear to each person why they should be on board with your recommendations for change and improvement.
After educating stakeholders about the benefits of legal operations, the next step is to streamline functions and processes in order to save money. The initial investments in legal operations will help to pay for themselves over time as you identify inefficiencies and eliminate them from your operations. As you do this, you will be able to bring down costs and cut out waste from your department’s process, which only goes to save money in the long run.
Assembling a Top Legal Operations Team
A competent legal operations team can translate a legal operations manager’s vision into day-to-day strategy and implementation. While the size and structure of a legal operations team will vary from organization to organization, the following roles can help complement a legal operations manager’s vision:
Process Development Specialists: Process development specialists take charge of collecting information on processes and workflows and crafting them into repeatable processes. For example, if a legal operations manager has identified an invoice review process that needs to be standardized across all practice areas to ensure consistent invoice scrutiny, a process development specialist can assist with:
Analysis: This type of role aids the legal operations manager in assessing the viability of a change initiative. In the previous example, they can research the top 5 outside counsel invoice practices across all practice areas to create a standard practice for invoice review. This role also has the added benefit of potentially revealing alternative, possibly better, practices. This role may also be given responsibility to present the assessment results to management and seek approval and/or funding for the proposed change initiative.
Project Managers: Project managers help implement a vision by effectively managing people and project deliverables and providing project timeline forecasts and updates . They are especially important in large-scale initiatives that affect and require the collaboration of many people and departments. For example, in the previous example, the legal operations manager might have decided to obtain outside help (using a software tool for invoice review) to standardize practices and automate some of the invoice review processes. It takes a dedicated person focused on this new project to keep everyone on task and ensure the project stays on time and within budget.
Communications Specialists: This role is responsible for creating a communication strategy used to inform and educate a variety of stakeholder groups on the change initiative. Whether a manager is implementing a new data reporting process, changing contract management software, or creating a new outside counsel invoice review process, the communication strategy is important for…
CIO/CTO: This role encompasses the technical aspects of the role. Chief Information Officers or Chief Technology Officers oversee the network, or the back-end hardware and software that supports all the technology initiatives. This person can also provide valuable research insights into the technology tools that may be used as part of the change initiative. In the example provided above, the legal operations manager may or may not decide to use a software tool to create a standard invoice review practice. The CIO/CTO can be instrumental in providing insights into the technology landscape.