4 Pitfalls To Avoid In Legal Operations (and How to Deal With Them)

1. Thinking Too Narrowly About Sourcing the Right Labor In the Right Place At the Right Price

It takes an ecosystem of skills to have a successful legal function, which ideally includes operational experts, technical specialists, data analysts, project managers and, of course, lawyers. Unbundling legal business services from the practice of law is now a standard practice for running a law department, so matching resources with the appropriate work is now table stakes for avoiding overspending on legal services; using a mix of internal employees, alternative legal service providers, law firms and other providers, domestically and offshore, is central to getting this right. Legal operations teams, including leadership, should have multidisciplinary backgrounds and leadership experience outside of legal departments in order to bring new perspectives, scrutiny into current practices and fresh ideas about alternative ways of delivering results.

What to do? Legal departments can seek benchmarking help from service providers on operational models that work and what options exist among peer firms. Each organization will rightfully take a different risk posture toward legal work, but available options include internal or external nearshoring, offshoring and the hybrid models that grew, thrived and matured well before the pandemic sped up the need for legal departments to develop and execute their right-sourcing strategies.