What Is Legal Operations in 2025?

Strategic in-house legal operations play a significant role in the smooth resolution of legal matters, but many teams still struggle to define the scope of the function. Here’s everything you need to know about legal department operations in 2025.

What is Legal Operations?

Legal operations, or legal ops, refers to the function that handles the business and administrative aspects of an in-house legal department’s work. In other words, everything but the actual practice of law.

Legal operations responsibilities might include:

• Outside counsel management
• Implementing new legal technology or managing the legal tech stack
• Budgeting and invoice management
• Legal process improvement
• Overall legal project management

Ultimately, the legal operations function aims to make the delivery of legal advice to the broader business more efficient and impactful. This is critically important work. However, while the field has experienced significant growth in recent years, there is still a lot of progress to be made when it comes to advocating for legal department operations roles to CLOs and GCs.

With that in mind, this blog explains why legal operations is crucial to business, the key responsibilities associated with legal ops roles, and the roles available for aspiring legal ops professionals—including how much legal operations professionals typically make, and the path they take to a career in the field.

Key Responsibilities of the In-house Legal Operations Function

The legal ops field emerged fifteen years ago, primarily focused on process improvement and technology deployment. While those aspects of legal operations are still important, legal ops plays a broader and far more strategic role today—serving as more of a “strategic business partner” rather than “back-office support function.”

In 2025, legal operations teams cover a much wider range of roles and responsibilities, including:

• Budgeting
• Tech integration
• Internal and external stakeholder management
• Reporting

Let’s unpack each point in a little more detail.

Budgeting

Smart budgeting has always been important for in-house teams, but in 2025, it’s more critical than ever. Especially as legal departments increasingly face the “triple whammy” of increasing workloads, rising costs, and intense budget scrutiny.

For example, the ACC’s 2025 Chief Legal Officers (CLO) survey shows that 60% of CLOs reported increased litigation expenses last year. At the same time, many legal departments report being understaffed, with 30% of CLOs stating that they need to hire more lawyers and 43% saying they need to outsource more work to outside firms. All of these factors make it vital to have access to solid data on which to base budgeting decisions.

Fortunately, budgeting is an area where the legal operations function can shine by maximizing the in-house team’s limited resources. That includes closely tracking legal spend data and using the data to improve how budgets are allocated.

Best practices for legal ops budgeting:

Use a budgeting tool to review historical data, identify spending trends and find budget inefficiencies and cost savings opportunities. Adding an invoice management tool to the mix can also improve overall spending visibility, making it easier to manage your budget flexibly and proactively.

Technology Integration

Choosing the right tech for in-house legal teams is a key responsibility of the legal operations function. But picking the right tools is just the first part of the process. Modern legal operations teams also oversee the successful implementation and integration of the existing tech stack.

Other responsibilities include helping in-house team members learn how to use new tools or platforms, and continuously monitoring the legal tech stack to ensure tools are being used and making a meaningful impact.

The rise of legal AI tools has added complexity to this work, with every new legal vendor touting “cutting-edge” AI capabilities. Unfortunately, some of these AI features lack real substance, and it’s up to the legal ops team to cut through the hype and select tools that add value.

Best practices for legal ops tech adoption:

Before selecting new tools or platforms, determine the in-house team’s pain points. Then match those pain points to potential tech solutions. Once implemented, track both adoption and performance metrics over time to ensure the tool solves the intended problem.

Internal Stakeholder Management

Legal operations often serves as a bridge between the legal department and other business units. That means the function communicates with other departments — like finance, HR, and IT — to explain why legal initiatives are essential for the business and to justify budgeting and operational decisions. Legal operations professionals also ensure alignment between the company’s and legal team’s goals, and the business initiatives pursued to accomplish both.

Legal ops professionals accomplish this through one-on-one meetings with internal stakeholders, establishing and presenting on important KPIs, and setting expectations for what the legal team can (and can’t) accomplish.

Best practices for internal stakeholder management:

Most high-level stakeholders want to know two things: How an initiative or investment moves the needle on the KPIs they care about, and how the legal team can contribute to the business goals their department is pursuing. The easiest way to get the answers to those questions is to make sure you understand what each department values most, and to back up your proposed initiatives with data that proves how the legal team can help.

External Stakeholder Management

In addition to managing internal stakeholder partnerships, legal operations professionals help manage relationships with outside counsel and legal service providers. External stakeholder management has a much different focus, though, oftentimes centering around tasks like:

• Evaluating potential firms and service providers
• Negotiating fee arrangements
• Tracking performance metrics for outside counsel and service providers
• Suggesting a strategic course of action to maximize the value of outside counsel engagements (for example, by consolidating matters under a few, trusted vendors to earn discounted rates)

Best practices for external stakeholder management:

Like internal stakeholder management, the key to successful outside counsel engagements is going into conversations armed with clear-cut data. A comprehensive e-billing and matter management solution, like Brightflag, is often a big help here. These platforms allow the legal ops team to track factors like outside counsel spend and provide a data-driven basis for comparing law firms to find the most cost-effective partners.

Data Analysis and Reporting

Beyond stakeholder management, in-house legal operations teams are responsible for analyzing legal data to extract actionable insights, such as:

• Spotting trends in legal work to inform better cost and workflow decisions
• Pinpointing bottlenecks and inefficiencies to improve legal operations management
• Producing real-time insights into ongoing matters or tasks, to ensure they’re being handled as efficiently as possible

This is one of the most significant areas where legal ops can add value to the legal department and the broader company.

Best practices for reporting and data analysis:

Data analysis and reporting tasks are often tedious, but they’re one of the most critical areas where legal operations can impact the business’s bottom line. To speed up and improve reporting, teams should leverage reporting tools, templates and automation, and tools like legal GenAI.

What Types of Legal Operations Roles Are There?

Legal operations teams can vary in size and structure, but specific core legal ops roles tend to emerge as they grow. Common positions within a corporate legal operations team include:

Head/Director of Legal Operations

The Head of Legal Operations makes all of the most significant strategic decisions, including resource allocation, vendor selection, and improving overall efficiency. An ideal candidate for this position is someone with proven experience heading up a dynamic and agile team, and a deep understanding of legal and other business functions.

Legal Operations Manager

The Legal Operations Manager is the person who runs the day-to-day functioning of the team. They also liaise extensively with internal and external stakeholders, requiring excellent communication, leadership and managerial skills.

Legal Operations Specialist

Legal Operations Specialists are adept at optimizing processes and workflows and spotting inefficiencies. They typically work more granularly than the previous two roles and across multiple projects and initiatives. So the ability to work proactively and independently is a key trait for the role.

Legal Operations Analyst

Legal Ops Analysts are the data wranglers of the legal ops world. The role is focused on using data to derive operational insights and improve efficiency across the legal team. Proven analytical skills and a good understanding of tech and platforms are needed to excel in this position.

Specialized Legal Ops Roles

Some additional legal ops roles can be considered as you build up or expand your team, including:

• Outside Counsel Manager
• Legal Technology Manager
• Practice Area Support (IP, M&A, etc.)

All of which can contribute to the final structure of your legal ops team.

How Much Do Legal Operations Professionals Make?

Many factors go into how legal operations professionals are compensated, including job title, experience, legal department (and company) size, geographic location, etc. In general, though, Brightflag’s recent 2025 Legal Operations Compensation Report highlights the following trends:

• The top 25% of legal ops professionals earn, on average, $240K per year
• The actual annual compensation for a Head of Legal Ops role ranges from $124K-$468K, with an average of $226K
• Department size and job experience play a strong role in compensation, with legal ops professionals earning significantly more in larger departments or with more than 5 years of job experience.

It’s also worth noting that some roles and job paths show faster pay growth than others. For example, the Head of Legal Ops role saw an 18% year-on-year increase according to our 2025 survey. Still, legal ops professionals from paralegal or administrative backgrounds earn less than other legal ops employees.

What Kind of Education or Professional Background is Required to Work in Legal Operations?

The truth is: You can’t go to school for legal operations, which means that the people serving in legal operations roles often come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Common routes into the function include paralegals, administrative roles and, of course, attorneys. As noted above, the path taken into the role can influence compensation.

With all that said, one of the best predictors of success as a legal operations professional is staying ahead of the game when it comes to sharpening your skills. This is why it’s worth staying up-to-date on the latest legal operations trends and technology and brushing up on legal operations basics and tips from the top minds in the space.

Legal Operations Hiring: Skills that Matter

When it comes to levelling up your skill set or what to look for in a new hire, there are a few areas to focus on to improve the value brought to legal ops roles. Let’s break these down in terms of hard and soft skills:

Hard skills:

• Data analysis is one of the top skills needed for legal ops roles. That includes familiarity with legal-specific data analysis platforms, like Brightflag, and more general tools like PowerBI or Tableau.
• Legal tech proficiency, including budgeting tools, e-billing systems, contract lifecycle management tools, etc.
• Project management and strategy skills are also key, especially for roles where you’ll be coordinating projects between departments.

Soft skills:

• Strong communication skills are another must-have because legal ops collaborates with many other functions and roles.
• Stakeholders and change management are essential for ensuring success with new initiatives and building trust, especially for leadership roles

Naturally, which of these skills are most valuable will depend on the specific legal ops role and the needs of the broader legal department.

Embrace Your Strategic Side to Move Ahead in Your Role

As legal operations continues to evolve, one fact is apparent: the future of the field lies in strategic leadership and big-picture thinking. To succeed, legal ops professionals are moving beyond support roles to become key drivers of value and innovation within their organizations. That includes championing the right tools and workflows to ensure the success of legal operations.

At Brightflag, we aim to make that transition as smooth as possible. Our dedicated, AI-powered Enterprise Legal Management platform is designed to make accessing and acting on critical data straightforward, supporting the value the legal ops team brings to the rest of the company and the evolving role of the legal ops team.

Interested to learn more? Contact us today to book a demo.