# Setting Up Your Legal Operations Team for Success

> Source: https://bryter.com/blog/setting-up-your-legal-operations-team-for-success/

We look at the scope of the Legal Operations team, its structure, and how you can set up your own dedicated Legal Ops function for success.

In-house Legal teams are asked to act as a strategic advisor to corporates, while becoming a service center that helps empower the entire organization. Torn between increasing workloads and limited budgets, in-house counsel has hard time meeting these demands.

Enter the Legal Operations team, a dedicated function within in-house Legal, whose goal is to enable in-house counsel do their job more efficiently, turning their expertise into readily available interactive guidance across the corporate. Below, we dive deep into the structure and dynamics of a Legal Operations team, from their strategic initiatives to day-to-day tasks, how the entire corporate benefits from Legal Ops, and finally, the most important success factors that enable Legal Operations to do its own job efficiently.

## **What does a Legal Operations team do?**

At its core, Legal Operations exists to support Legal in all areas of its work – from strategic alliances with C-suite and other business units, to sourcing legal tools and taking care of the legal spend.

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (aka CLOC) sets out 12 Legal Operations competencies that can then be further expanded into areas of work of Legal Ops teams. These competencies are:

While these competencies show the vast scope of Legal Ops’ work, they do not truly showcase the tangible value that Legal Ops has for a business.

If you want a closer look at the full value of Legal Ops, check out our [**Ultimate Guide to Legal Operations**](https://bryter.com/trends/what-is-legal-operations/). In the next section, we’ll focus on the most vital competencies and how they translate into the day-to-day activities of a Legal Ops team.

### Legal Ops and business intelligence: data-driven decisions

While most business functions have benefitted from data insights for years, in-house Legal is just now catching up and recognizing the importance of data-driven decisions. Many law departments still make little use of data and metrics, but the pressure to identify KPIs, measure them, and report on them is increasing.

To aid in this transition to data-driven legal work, Legal Operations teams must:

![](https://bryter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/legal-intake-tool-1796x1080.png)

_Through legal intake tools, such as the one built with BRYTER, Legal Operations teams can collect real-life data and then build dashboards to identify process bottlenecks and remove them._

### Role of the Legal Ops team in financial management and eBilling

[As legal budgets start to stall](https://www.ey.com/en_rs/law/general-counsel-imperative-barriers-building-blocks), in-house counsel need to make adjustments to how they use resources.

Legal Ops must play a supportive role in resource use by:

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![](https://bryter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/screenshot-2022-05-16-at-141152-1344x1080.png)

_Legal Ops teams are responsible for digitizing manual processes. For example, they might implement a contract risk assessment tool like this one built with BRYTER._

### Managing external counsel and vendors

In-house teams rely on external counsel for specific guidance, but finding, onboarding, and communicating with multiple law firms and vendors is time-consuming for the already thinly spread Legal departments.

Here, Legal Ops:

![](https://bryter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/screenshot-2022-05-16-at-143620-1920x870.png)

_Legal Operations not only unburden in-house counsel of managing vendor relations, but also builds self-service tools that let other business functions do vendor due diligence in minutes._

### Information governance for company-wide compliance

Legal Operations teams serve as a bridge that connects the Legal team with other units, ensuring company-wide compliance when it comes to proprietary information. In particular, Legal Ops teams:

Learn more about [data privacy compliance](https://bryter.com/trends/getting-started-with-data-privacy-automation/).

### Legal Operations teams provide the right legal tools

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According to the 2019 Blickstein Group Law Department Operations Survey, approximately one in every three law departments still say they don’t have the technology they need to do their job. And Legal Ops is here to change that.

When it comes to securing the right tools, Legal Operations:

In this way, Legal Operations makes [legal workflows](https://bryter.com/blog/legal-workflow-automation-transforms-legal-departments/) faster and more efficient. But more importantly, it makes the legal expertise readily available to all other units as needed, without increasing the legal workload.

## Structure of a Legal Operations team

Legal Operations is still being shaped as a dedicated function, so there is no definitive answer to how it’s structured. Still, there are some consistent structural themes. Here is a rundown of key roles within Legal Operations, typically found across corporates.

### Director of Legal Operations

Typically, the Legal Operations team is run by the Director of Legal Operations. They manage the entire Legal Ops function, working directly with either the General Counsel or C-suite. The Director of Legal Operations focuses on strategic legal ops matters, such as resource allocation, signing on new vendors and partners, employee initiatives, and any long-term strategic matters.

### Legal Operations Manager

Legal Operations Managers deal with day-to-day projects and tasks. They manage and oversee a variety of Legal Ops ongoing projects, communicating with other business units and external stakeholders. One of the key assignments of the Legal Operations Manager is to monitor and identify areas to improve existing workflows and processes.

### Legal Operations Specialist

Legal Operations Specialists juggle between various Legal Ops areas, from improving intake tools for the Legal team, to talking to other business units and creating policies that ensure employees work in compliance with relevant policies and regulations.

### Legal Operations Analyst

Legal Operations Analysts help find data and translate them to insights that Legal and other business functions can use for more efficient work. This is a highly specialized role that primarily deals with KPIs, analytics, dashboards, reporting, and providing actionable information to the rest of the team.

### Legal Engineer

A [legal engineer](https://bryter.com/blog/legal-engineer/), sometimes also called a legal technologist, is the person who actually builds digital legal solutions, products, services, and processes. They are at the nexus of legal expertise, software engineering, and client/business needs.

## Setting up your Legal Ops team for success

While the Legal Operations team brings ample benefits to both the Legal team and the entire corporate, there is some mastery needed in making sure Legal Operations actually yields results.

After all, despite it being skilled in numerous vital areas for the business, Legal Operations is not insular. **Instead, its success is measured through the success of other teams, Legal in particular. **To do so, here are three key guidelines to help set your Legal Operations team for success:

![](https://bryter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/screenshot-2022-05-16-at-140302.png)

_The core competencies of Legal Operations help precisely with the biggest obstacles General Counsel are facing, which allows for a great synergy and alignment in strategic and day-to-day tasks._

## **FAQs about Legal Operations teams**

**What is Legal Operations’ role at a company?** Legal Operations is a function within the in-house Legal department that works to improve the workflows and process of in-house Legal team, and in doing so, allow the in-house counsel to do work more efficiently. **What is Legal Operations in a law firm?** Within a law firm, Legal Operations helps partners and associates work more efficiently, by taking care of anything from automating repetitive tasks, managing contracts with clients, and tracking budgets. **What does a Legal Operations team do?** Legal Operations teams works on various operational tasks related to the work of in-house Legal department, from reporting on key metrics to contract management and eBilling, to creating organizational policies. For an in-depth look at Legal Ops work, check out our [**Ultimate Guide to Legal Operations.**](https://bryter.com/trends/what-is-legal-operations/?utm_source=googleu0026utm_medium=organic) **Why does a company need a Legal Ops team?** Legal Operations team allows in-house counsel to focus on more strategic tasks, while at the same time servicing the entire organization. By turning legal expertise into actionable legal advice that’s available around the clock, Legal Ops ensures the company is fully compliant as it scales its business.

## Benefits of a dedicated Legal Operations Team

Legal Ops may still be establishing footing in the legal industry, but its multi-faceted benefits already show. As we’ve seen, the Legal Operations team finds and extracts the right data and turns it into guidance for other departments and business functions. It also finds the right tools for the Legal team, sharing the operational “burden” with the in-house counsel, and feeding the right legal guidance to all employees.

And this is just a portion of the full power of Legal Ops team. Legal Operations teams not only help with juggling the operational aspects of the legal workload, but they help with strategic, data-driven empowerment of all other business functions. But to do this, they need the right tools themselves. **If you want to equip your Legal Ops team with the right tool stack to help your legal scale, [book a demo](https://bryter.com/get-demo/) with one of our experts today.**