The role of legal operations is having its well-deserved moment in the spotlight. We’ve written on the blog about legal ops and the wide-ranging benefits of adding this team of professional efficiency drivers to your team. Publishing firm Legal 500 also pushes General Counsels (GCs) to “unbundle internally” – and establish a legal operations department to improve planning, technology, communication, and financial management – everything beyond giving legal advice.
The advantages are clear, but it’s challenging to go from creating a legal ops team to building one that runs like a well-oiled machine. In this blog series, we’ll cover the three principles that will transform your legal ops team. Let’s dive in!
Communication gaps erode performance. Enterprises often experience these in two areas: financial reporting and sales cycles. But a well-tuned legal ops function bridges these divides.
Financial Reporting
The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) guides legal operations professionals to pursue activities that maximize resources through sound financial management. Often, companies need more visibility and predictability in their budgeting and forecasting. This leads to material cash impacts, including shortfalls and a lack of economic context when making investment decisions.
Given its proximity to deals and contracts, legal ops can share critical reporting that boosts finance team effectiveness. Opportunity areas include:
Legal ops teams have become an indispensable part of budgeting and financial planning by supporting activities like these.
Sales Cycle
When legal and sales fall out of sync, the deal pace slows. To avoid this, legal ops must pinpoint problem areas. This often means eliminating communication gaps by centralizing and integrating both teams’ data and systems.
Practically, this should include creating processes that move contract drafting and management workflows out of the inbox. LinkSquares, for example, built a Salesforce CRM integration within its contract lifecycle management (CLM) platform. This becomes a low-hanging fruit opportunity for many to reduce the email clutter that’s compounding poor communication. Reps benefit from automated contract status updates, and managers sharpen their ability to forecast, assess time-to-close, and predict revenues.
To support sales (or any critical business function), legal ops must also understand what their colleagues need and expect. This doesn’t mean becoming an order taker. Spend time defining common sales cycle disruptors and identifying process risks. Talk to key stakeholders; come up with step-by-step procedures and workflows to improve ownership, clarity, and accountability.
When teams don’t discuss these, sales process confusion turns to frustration. As one legal leader told us, “Communication missteps are rare when everyone knows who is doing what by when.” Once exposed, legal ops must rebuild the processes that once slowed down deals. Consider deploying tools to speed up contract creation by allowing sales to draft or request agreements directly from their CRM. Additionally, consider pre-approved terms or contract language that sales or customer success teams can use without interacting with legal.
Explore self-service reporting as well. Legal ops may streamline communications by adopting software to give business users access to custom contract reporting. For example: Does the revenue ops team need to pull reports on how many contracts renew this quarter or understand how many clients are headquartered in London?
Automate it – eliminate back-and-forth emails that paint the picture of other teams waiting on legal to comb through contracts. Come back to the blog next week to learn even more about how to transform your legal team. Ready now? Download this guide today.