When the market conditions and macroeconomic climate are unstable, legal, like other departments, has to be more resourceful–and mindful of potential risks.
Legal ops’ role as the enabler of legal is extra important here, since they focus on administrative tasks, processes, and evaluating technology so that lawyers can spend time protecting the business and implementing measures that lower the company’s risk profile.
As a result, a lot of legal ops’ work involves helping in-house lawyers navigate risk in harsh economic times. Everything from the processes they implement, to the vendors they onboard, and the technology they adopt, has to help lawyers mitigate business risk.
Here are 4 ways that legal ops helps teams navigate risk in market downturns:
Data is the secret sauce for an effective legal ops team. It’s especially important that legal ops teams know what kind of data to collect so that they can enable smart decision-making across the business.
With the right data, legal ops can help legal uncover trends within their contracts, hiring practices, and internal workflows that might put the team at risk. This data can inform the processes they implement in the legal department and how they support the leadership team in making executive decisions.
Legal ops teams occupy a position in the organization that enables them to connect spending to outcomes and determine where the company should invest. Legal ops teams can use technology to track spend and calculate its overall effect on the bottom line.
By tracking spend and performance, legal ops will have a much-needed understanding of how money is moving in and out of the legal team, what produces the highest ROI, and when and where to make hires.
For too long, legal teams have depended on internal word of mouth to manage and maintain whatever consistency there is in their processes. Unfortunately, this means that when someone leaves the business, their knowledge leaves with them.
Legal ops can give their teams the gift of visibility by documenting processes and best practices. This helps legal ops improve consistency around internal processes, and it decreases the chances of duplicate work, non-compliance risks, and higher spend from inefficiency.
A lack of process visibility makes it hard to tell if you have access to the contracts you need — whether that’s last year’s NDAs or legacy contracts and disclosures. Non-standard processes and decentralized storage mean your docs could be literally anywhere, which puts you at risk for insecure storage and non-fulfillment of terms.
Legal ops can help navigate and mitigate these risks by creating data retention policies and ensuring that the business has centralized and searchable storage for their statements, reports, contracts, and other crucial legal documents.
Times are hard, but legal ops works harder. With access to sophisticated legal technology, legal ops can improve productivity and efficiency, while mitigating risk. See how LinkSquares CLM can help the legal team manage risks. Request a demo today.