Legal operations consulting
The efficient delivery of legal services and management of an in-house function
Legal operations consulting applies business principles and new ways of working to help you optimise the delivery of legal services to your organisation. The greater efficiencies achieved enable GCs and in-house teams to go beyond managing legal risk and become a business partner, supporting the wider objectives of the business.
Key business principles
Most legal departments will be at different levels of maturity – excelling in some areas but not others. The first step is to identify where you are currently and, more importantly, where you want to get to. A tailored roadmap can then be developed to get you there.
Our Legal Operations Maturity Pyramid – inspired by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – illustrates the various stages of maturity for in-house legal departments.
Each of the components of the pyramid represents a key building block in your journey to becoming a strategic business partner.
By managing your function like a business, such as providing KPIs to your business teams so they know at all times the progress on legal advice they have asked of you, you deliver more value.
In practice, this means:
- Setting up an operating framework to support the growth of your business and related demand on the legal team (such as: triage of demand, risk matrix for intake, allocation of work internally/externally, use of legal tech and use of legal project management methodology)
- Providing transparency and vision to the business on how you are running your function, for instance developing appropriate KPIs to articulate the cost of legal to a business unit
- Delivering efficiency gains and demonstrating the value that your function – and its key law firm partners and vendors – are delivering, such as process mapping for key legal tasks and workflow to ensure speedy completion of contracting
Our offerings
Strategic legal consulting
Advice on how your function(s) can support the wider objectives of your business (the top of the pyramid)
Legal operations advisory
Advice on the management of your legal operations function(s) (the middle of the pyramid)
Legal operations delivery
Assistance in the delivery of your projects which require legal operations resources (the bottom of the pyramid)
The benefits of legal operations |
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More efficiency You can achieve more with less by leveraging new methodologies, process and tools |
Better insight Manage your function(s) more effectively by sharing information across your business more easily and transparently than before |
Effective technology Ensure you have the right people, processes and structures in place for new technology |
While the stature of in-house legal teams at financial institutions has increased post crisis, Barclays in particular under Hoyt has been widely considered as having one of the more forward-thinking and innovative legal departments. [….]. The most obvious manifestation of this was the banking giant’s final panel review in mid-2018 ahead of a long-planned phasing out of formal reviews by 2021. Alongside Hoyt, operations leaders Stéphanie Hamon (now at Norton Rose Fulbright), […] led on Barclays’ reshaping, generating savings believed to run into the tens of millions of pounds.
Legal Business, 22 July 2020
I very much appreciated working with Stéphanie and her team. It was refreshing and encouraging to have someone with first-hand experience who understood the challenges and was able to provide concrete steps on how to advance and address topics. I particularly appreciated her ability to interface between legal and the business as well as her ability to articulate legal value and vision to business stakeholders.
A Regional GC of a global financial institution
Roundtables and LOC Surgery
Our Roundtable series will be starting up again on 7th March 2024. LOC Surgery, hosted by Stephanie Hamon, Head of Legal Operations Consulting, provides in-house legal counsel and GCs an opportunity to discuss common problems in relation to the monthly topic in groups, and explore solutions with our legal operations professionals who will be on hand to offer expert advice and top tips.
Watch this space for details on the upcoming topics, and if you are interested in joining please get in touch. In the meantime, browse resources from previous sessions below.
