Building a Coverage Plan for Your Legal Team

For lawyers on small legal teams (which, according to ACC, are most in-house teams), having a strong sense of your team's workload is crucial.

A coverage plan is essential year-round, but it becomes even more important during the bustling summer months. When your niece’s wedding happens on a Friday in summer, you want to be able to celebrate with your family without letting your team down. This is when a coverage plan comes in handy. For December, the end-of-year slam means working straight through the busiest month of your year. Your priority is closing the year strong, hitting your SLAs, and being a true enabler of the business. 

What is a coverage plan?

A coverage plan can be useful during any time of the year, but it’s most beneficial when there’s a reasonable volume of work during a time when many lawyers are out of office. A coverage plan ensures that your team has the resources and capacity to handle all the work coming your way at the end of a fiscal period so you aren’t run ragged trying to get it all done.

A coverage plan is essential for balancing the twin priorities of a healthy work-life balance and supporting your business organization's goals. In a well-constructed plan, there’ll always be a lawyer on duty to handle legal issues during busy times of year — finalizing new campaign collateral, closing out last-minute deals, and preparing Q2 reports — while being flexible enough to allow individual lawyers time off when they need it.

Factors to consider when building a coverage plan

There are several things to consider when building a coverage plan. For example, bigger teams might require more planning, deeper data dives, or an actual presentation that is presented and must be approved by leadership. In addition, consider how your cross-functional teams work, the stage of growth your business is in, and what your legal team needs when building out your plan.

It's important to determine whether coverage will come from internal or external resources. Consider the capacity of internal teams and how to best equip them to better self-serve. Are there playbooks available for guidance? Evaluate the capabilities of external teams and provide them with the necessary tools for improved assistance. Are these same playbooks accessible for direction?

Let’s break it down some more.

How does your business work?

For revenue-focused companies, sales deals at the end of the quarter or year take up a lot of your bandwidth — so knowing your sales process is key. For example, how long is your sales cycle? How complex are the agreements? How much back and forth do you anticipate for certain deals? Knowing this allows you to build out a coverage plan that effectively predicts what your volume will be like and be able to meet the needs of your collaborators.

What is your business construct?

A mature company’s coverage plan is likely different from a growing company’s. Growing companies experience more shifts over time. A mature company might expect mild shifts in volume over time (barring a special event), while a growing company experiences more significant shifts in volume quarter over quarter, year over year. Still, even while numbers shift over time, you can still discern patterns that help you anticipate your workload and build a coverage plan to meet that. 

What are your legal team’s needs?

This all boils down to what your legal team needs to support the company’s objectives. Do you have the capacity to handle the intensity of the end of the year? Or will you need to plan for extra resources to supplement your team’s effort? 

Some in-house counsel at growing companies don’t take time off for the summer, and tend to have varying levels of availability during the year. Make sure you’re clear on your team’s end of year commitments and the kind of support they need to make it to the next year in one piece. In-house lawyers often coordinate time off around peak support times to ensure there is coverage to support the business, and may have increased availability, including after hour support, during these peak periods.

Data to inform your coverage plan

Even if you start to build your coverage plan in October, depending on the size of your company, planning coverage can start as early as July. 

Analyzing historical data brings an understanding of what your volume will be like and whether or not you have the capacity. To do this, you might start assessing H1 volume trends and how they differ from the previous year to determine the kind of coverage needed. 

At LinkSquares, this is how we know our busiest season can start as early as the second week of November. Data helps us understand historical patterns around volume, agreement types, and perspective. It translates into work that needs to be performed, which is what determines when our team needs to be available and to what degree.

Some examples of data that can inform your coverage plan include:

• Volume of contracts
• Types of agreements
• Turnaround times needed

Another point to track is how historically complex your deals have been. This helps you determine which leaders or managers need to be available.

Without legal technology, you might need to collect emails and talk to people one-on-one to track this data. But CLM and other types of legal technology can collect this data for you and enable you to quickly generate reports. 

If you’re not yet doing this, now is a great time to start. Don’t wait until you have all your data models in place. Start tracking important data now and keep iterating on it in the future.

Communicating the plan

An uncommunicated plan is virtually useless. In addition to updating tasks and approvals, be sure to share your plan with your team and your internal stakeholders so that expectations can be well set.

Also, ensure that you:

• Share the plan with business partners
• Set expectations of availability and communicability from early on
• Let your business teams know where/how to find you
• Share the escalation path with people who need to know 

Conclusion

A coverage plan allows your team to be both forward-thinking and flexible by considering your resources at a time when they’re stretched thinnest. Having a solid plan in place lets you approach this time of year more strategically and puts you in a position to effectively serve your team while also taking the time you need to spend with people who are important to you.

Learn how LinkSquares CLM can help your team build your coverage plan. Contact us today.