Legal Ops 101

This course provides an overview of accrual accounting, explaining terms and activities like the month-end close, true-ups, cutoff dates, accruals (and how they relate to accrual accounting overall!), and expense allocations. If you support your organization with legal billing and spend management, this course will provide a solid foundation for how you can be a better partner to your finance team. Your financial fluency will impress your accounting team and legal operations colleagues!

This course provides an introduction to financial planning and analysis ("FP&A"), the branch of finance operations charged with planning and forecasting an organization's expenses. Learn about the key tools FP&A uses to do this accurately, including budgeting, and how legal operations can partner with FP&A to achieve greater visibility into and predictability of legal spend. After viewing this course, you'll be a legal budgeting and forecasting pro, an essential and trusted extension of the FP&A team.

If you work for a US-based public company or a company that's looking to IPO in the near future, the chances are good you’ve heard about the Sarbanes–Oxley Act ("SOX"). But do you know the origins of SOX and the myriad ways it can impact legal operations? This course provides an overview of the role of auditors, the attestations and certifications third parties must maintain to support you in maintaining SOX compliance, and the five essential audit reports every software needs to provide.

“Matter management” is used to mean many things. This episode delves into the discipline of managing matters as well as the category of software legal teams use to do so effectively. It steps through the life cycle of matters, including intake, opening, active work, closing, and post-close assessment; summarizes the benefits of matter management software; and breaks down the matter management software category into its constituent parts. You’ll never wonder what matter management means again.

Outside Counsel Guidelines are the terms under which corporate legal teams engage law firms and other legal service providers. This episode delves into the areas covered in these guidelines, examples of best practices, and how to develop, monitor, and iterate your guidelines.

This course deep dives into LEDES (Legal Electronic Data Exchange Standard), a set of file formats for legal invoicing, and UTBMS (Uniform Task-Based Management System), a taxonomy used to classify legal work. Learn the important terms, benefits, and shortcomings associated with each so you never have to wonder what they are again!

This course explores the value of data and analytics in guiding your legal operations strategy, and how they can help demonstrate the integral role that legal plays within a business. Learn more about which metrics you should measure, and how you can apply the insights they provide to improve your work, digitize your legal team, and validate tech investments.

Presented in partnership with UpLevel Ops, this course examines the keys to successfully navigating your first 100 days as a legal operations professional. Learn more about the vital pieces of information you should be collecting, how to build strategic relationships, and best practices for developing a roadmap that will set you and your team up for future success.

Law firms and alternative legal service providers serve as essential partners to corporate legal teams. However, it's important to carefully evaluate these partnerships at regular intervals—as you would with any business relationship. This course explains the value of using a vendor assessment framework; introduces the “assessment triangle” of results, billing, and vendor diversity; and provides recommendations for the frequency and format of assessments.

Whether it’s enabling single sign-on, sending approved invoices to accounts payable, or another requirement, integration is critical to legal tech success. This course describes what an API is, how APIs work, and how they’re commonly used for legal tech integrations. It also provides a practical checklist for evaluating legal tech APIs. If you’re uncertain about your depth of technical knowledge, have no fear: the material in this course is presented in an approachable, no-technobabble way!

Legal technology platforms are vital to the legal operations function. But not everyone working in legal ops has a strong technology background—which can sometimes make understanding the capabilities and terminology of legal tech feel overwhelming. This course features an overview of the commonly used legal technology platforms, defines what a legal tech stack is (as well as its core tenets), and provides easy-to-understand breakdowns of some popular legal technology terms and processes.

Objectives and key results (OKRs) are a goal-setting framework that’s been widely adopted over the last 20 years, particularly among technology companies. This course introduces OKRs and describes how they work; discusses common OKR-writing mistakes and traps; and gives practical examples of OKRs for corporate legal departments. After this course you’ll have everything you need to become a strategic planning expert and lead the charge for your entire team’s next quarterly planning process.

Facilitating and guiding change is at the heart of what legal operations professionals do. Whether that change takes the form of new legal technologies, operational restructuring, or any other number of organizational improvements, it is important that those working in legal ops approach the process with a well-formulated change management plan. This course will cover what change management is, when and how to formulate your own change management plan, and a few of the golden rules that should be kept in mind as you begin the process.