The Importance of Legal Operations Professionals on In-House Legal Teams

As a former practicing lawyer and someone who has founded several legal technology companies, I can’t say enough about the importance and value of legal operations professionals.

Legal operations, or “legal ops” to use the industry vernacular, are like Alfred if the in-house lawyer is Batman. Or if the in-house legal team is James Bond, then legal ops is like Q.

You get the idea. They are the ones responsible for the processes and technology — the unsung heroes behind the scenes, working to create more efficiencies and better outcomes.

To put it simply, a good legal operations team represents a cost-savings. It takes some time for them to have a measurable impact because so much of their role involves ushering in changes, but some of those changes can have a huge upside for the organization.

A brief background of legal operations

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) defines legal ops as:

"A set of business processes, activities, and professionals that enable legal departments to serve their clients more effectively by applying business and technical practices to the delivery of legal services. Legal Operations provides strategic planning, financial management, project management, and technology portfolio investment expertise that allows legal professionals to focus on providing legal advice.”

While legal ops has been around much longer, it has become a more popular function at companies in the last decade. This is mostly in response to the success of other operations teams like sales ops, revenue ops, marketing ops, and more.

Understanding the true value of legal operations

In the technology sector especially, we are seeing a lot of layoffs of legal operations people. Every company’s situation is different, but my high-level view is that eliminating legal operations headcount represents a short-sighted approach to cost management.

Legal ops can be very helpful in helping companies, and especially in-house legal teams, to understand processes and make lawyers work more efficiently. They can deliver value that wasn’t achievable before implementing technology.

For example, legal professionals might be too tied up in legal work to spend the time to map their processes and organize their stored knowledge. Legal ops can invest time in making that happen and leverage technology to help automate it.

When it comes to sourcing that technology from vendors, legal ops can shortlist the vendors that are worth consideration and think through how that technology can work with their existing tech and various stakeholders.

With everything that we are seeing now around LLMs (large language models) and AI, legal ops can help companies stay abreast of the changes. They can understand the use cases that might help the legal department become more efficient and a strategic partner to the rest of the organization.

In other words, legal ops is a critical role that can transform a legal department or even an entire company. They don’t always get the recognition they deserve.

The legal operations challenge

One other way that legal operations professionals have an impact is through change management. Selecting a technology vendor is the easy part. Implementing that technology into the lives of the legal team can be its own massive undertaking.

Unfortunately, with most legal technology, that’s exactly the case.

At Recital, we have always been aware of this reality, and we have good news for legal ops pros and legal teams. Recital requires no lengthy implementation period. Legal teams can start getting value and accelerating their contract negotiations right away.

Our challenge to legal ops and legal professionals is this: Try Recital and see if it doesn’t improve your contract negotiations immediately. No months-long implementation, no costly change management. You get value on your very first day.