Time For A Professional: A Law Department Primer On Legal Ops Hiring

If you’ve been fortunate as a general counsel, you’ve experienced the great outcomes that flow from hiring just the right lawyer for just the right job at just the right time. A legal operations professional is no different.

Such a person can step in to implement your vision and foster the processes and habits that will make your legal department more productive and a better place to work.  

If your people too often spin their wheels — sending endless emails seeking information that should be at their fingertips or using the wrong contract template because the documents are a mess — you may need a legal ops overhaul and a professional to bring it to fruition.

The Justification

But in this era of constant cost pressure on legal departments, how do you justify the expense?

After all, a strong legal ops professional will likely draw a salary between $150,000 to $250,000 per year, according to Vandana Dhamija, founder and CEO of Legal Operations Consulting, LLC, a strategic-solutions consultancy in the New York City area.

An important approach is for GCs to present the business and the legal function as two sides of the same coin, said Stephanie Hamon, the London-based head of the Legal Operations Consulting practice for Norton Rose Fulbright.

“You need to manage legal risk and people are very aware of that. But the other side is being that strategic business partner. You need to speak the same language as business and you need to manage your function like a business,” Hamon said.

This includes clear strategies, key performance indicators, and the ability to articulate the value of the “people-process-data-technology element,” she added. “It’s a different skill set. Most lawyers don’t get exposure to this skill set through their legal education.”

Dhamija noted cost pressure may justify a legal ops professional. “When your CEO comes in and says we need to save 30 percent and you know you have to find some money somewhere, a legal ops professional could come in and look at the budget find those savings.”

But budget is not all. For a large organization, another reason is the aforementioned risk management. The GC needs to know where there is reputational risk and whether something could blow up into major litigation. “These things must be flagged in a systematic way,” Dhamija said.

A third reason is the ability to articulate the value the legal team brings to the organization, Dhamija said. For example, those times when 10 minutes of legal advice from an in-house attorney helps another department avoid pricey litigation.

In Dhamija’s experience, it does not take long for legal ops professionals to pay for themselves. She described a hypothetical GC who says, “I’m going to spend this $250,000 and here’s the value I get: I know exactly what matters I’m dealing with; I’m tracking all my legal entities; I have my outside counsel invoices; and I know how these firms are billing me.”

“The amount of money you can save just from outside counsel billing is enormous,” Dhamija said. “Negotiating with your firms could make it cost-neutral.”

The Timing

Armed with the above, you can make your pitch. In Dhamija’s opinion, you should do it post haste.

“If you’ve been running a chaotic legal department the biggest challenge is change management,” she said. “Now, you have to change the behavior of your team, and for that reason and that reason alone, the earlier, the better. Because people get set in their ways and the legal ops person has to battle that.”

Hamon from Norton Rose Fulbright said there is no common denominator for the legal departments with whom she’s worked regarding legal ops, so it’s difficult to make a bald statement about the right time.  

“The one driver is the vision of the GC and the GC really being keen to be seen as a savvy business operator and a strategic partner,” she said. 

She has worked with a startup going through tremendous growth whose GC — and only lawyer — opted to bring on a legal ops professional as soon as possible. This GC essentially said, “We’ve got a blank canvas. Let’s build it right,” because this person had come from organizations that suffered from legacy ways of doing things.

“And anyone could see that wasn’t efficient,” Hamon said. “So, there’s no right moment. It all depends on the positioning you want for your legal function and its current role. But if you’ve got a seat at the table, and you want to be credible in making recommendations to influence the strategy of your organization, you have to have your own house in order.”

Sometimes it’s less proactive, Hamon noted, and more of a reaction, as when a legal department is under pressure to justify its headcount and its spend. By necessity, the department may have to concentrate on legal operations to collect the data and be able to articulate the value it creates.

“There’s no magic formula and there are no prerequisites,” Hamon said. Nor is there a single path to get where you want to be.

“You don’t have to go through steps one to 10 before you can do step 11,” Hamon added. “You can do things in parallel and in different orders. And the legal ops professional will help you understand your biggest pain points, where you should focus first, and what would be most helpful.”

The Individual

Once you’ve decided to seek your professional, you have to know what you want. While Hamon emphasizes that no one size fits all, she does assert two non-negotiable traits.

“First, the person has got to have good chemistry and rapport with the GC because the person must work to execute the vision of the GC. And second, the person must have empathy. You can’t do the job if you don’t have the ability to put yourself in other people’s shoes. It can’t be somebody with a large ego who wants to claim credit because the role is one of a facilitator. You’re there to make the legal team’s life easier and make the business side like legal more.”

The big debate, she added, is whether the person needs to be a lawyer. While legal training helps with credibility, if a GC wants to drive change, the department needs a catalyst.

“You don’t go to bed one evening thinking yellow and wake up the next morning thinking red if there hasn’t been an external influence,” Hamon said. “And I think bringing in somebody with a different skill set who isn’t a lawyer is a good way to create that catalyst. If it is a lawyer, it needs to be a lawyer who has experience in roles outside of the legal sector and who has training in addition to being a lawyer.”

The Right Hand

Whomever is chosen, a GC should be able to tell quickly if the choice was a good one.

“With the profession being where it is, I think the legal ops person is the right hand to the general counsel,” Dhamija said. “This person who is helping the GC with their requests, whether it’s working with the board or going out and talking to the finance team. The legal department is involved in every aspect of the company. They no longer sit in one corner somewhere and are never consulted.”

“If you’re keen to make change then change will happen,” Hamon said. “But it will happen faster if you’ve got a professional to help you do that.”

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Elizabeth M. Bennett was a business reporter who moved into legal journalism when she covered the Delaware courts, a beat that inspired her to go to law school. After a few years as a practicing attorney in the Philadelphia region, she decamped to the Pacific Northwest and returned to freelance reporting and editing.