How to Become a Legal Operations Manager

There is no single path into legal operations. You could start as a paralegal before finding a place in legal operations. You could be a corporate lawyer with a keen interest in business and technology. Or you could transition from another area of the organization.

No matter your background, getting into the legal operations function (and succeeding in it) depends on the skills you develop. Below, we’ll cover some core skills you can develop and the steps you can take to position yourself for a move into legal ops.

Develop Skills Within the 12 CLOC Core Competencies

While most of your skills and experiences from your current and previous roles will be transferable to legal ops, there are a competencies specific to legal operations that it’s useful to be aware of. You’ll find reference to these skills in legal operations job descriptions, and you’ll need to show how you have developed them during interviews for legal ops roles.

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) — a global community of legal operations professionals actively working to standardize operational practices — created a set of 12 core competencies to define those skills for legal operations professionals to successfully fulfill the role.

Don’t worry if 12 competencies sound like a lot to develop, not all competencies are needed for each legal ops role. However, developing your skills in some or all of these areas can help your chances of snagging a legal operations manager title.

Financial Management

Legal departments need to demonstrate that they can run like a business and be an effective steward of the company’s expenses. This means steering away from the conception that the legal department is just a cost center.

This is easier said than done when an hour of outside counsel can run north of $1,000, and business’s legal demands are ever-increasing.

If you’re looking to get into legal operations, working on improving your financial acumen is a great way to gain relevant experience.

Learn how to speak the language of finance by familiarizing yourself with concepts like accrual accounting and financial planning and analysis (FP&A). Offer to help track the budget or report on spend for a specific project you’re already working on, or offer to evaluate pricing and service providers.

Vendor Management

Competentily managing the legal department’s vendors and fostering strong relationships is another core part of legal operations’ responsibilities.

Vendor management responsibilities include:

• Facilitating regular business reviews with your key outside counsel partners
• Helping to negotiate fee arrangements
• Creating billing guidelines and ensuring enforcement
• Establishing methods for reporting and firm benchmarking

To develop vendor management skills, offer to help evaluate vendors for a new project or ask to sit in on relationship reviews with existing vendors.

Cross-Functional Alignment

Legal operations is a role that constantly searches for ways to drive efficiencies. Creating these efficiencies relies on a strong partnership between legal and the rest of the business.

As such, you must learn to manage relationships with HR, IT, finance, and more. Develop these relationships by offering to collaborate on cross-functional projects or asking to be involved in regular meetings with other departments.

Legal Technology and Process Support

Unsurprisingly, technology and process support involves the management of IT tools and legal department workflows. Depending on your organization’s needs, you may also need to operate:

• Contract management software: Helps teams organize and track their contracts and signatures and ensure enforcement of those contracts.
• E-billing and matter management software: Helps in-house teams understand spend at a glance, plan their budget stress-free, and manage reporting.
• E-signature tools: Help in-house legal teams execute agreements with signatures and identities both digitally and securely verified.
• E-discovery software: Helps in-house legal teams create, organize, and review electronic records for investigations or litigations.
• Board management: Provides matter board planning, activity tracking, workflows, and matter progress monitoring for in-house teams.
• Legal hold: Provides log tracking templates and data collection and preservation, and monitors the progress of legal holds.
• Knowledge management: Helps in-house teams capture client and matter data in a shareable database the entire team can access for easy knowledge sharing.

By joining CLOC, you can see which vendors most legal operations professionals prefer. Follow that by becoming a super-user of the tools you use in your current role and showing that you are proficient in leveraging technology to drive efficiency.

Data Analytics

Legal operations rely heavily on forecasting and analyzing data to drive efficiencies and optimize spend.
You must be able to set metrics, track KPIs, and interpret the data against company objectives to help the company make data-driven decisions. Look for opportunities to take on data analytics and reporting tasks in your current role. If you’re new to working with data, try an online course (such as Brightflag’s Legal Ops 101 course on data and analytics) to learn the basics.

Communications

With a department that relies heavily on relationship building and interdepartmental collaboration, communication is key to the legal ops role.

Some of your responsibilities in legal operations will include:

• Creating consistent processes across legal stakeholder groups
• Planning and executing all-hands meetings
• Publishing regular departmental communications

Take on some of these responsibilities in your current role, such as communicating with your department and planning/conducting large or strategic meetings. This will set you up for an easier transition into legal operations.

Organizational Design, Support, and Management

You’ll also need to gain skills in properly structuring your corporate legal department and providing them with training and growth opportunities. Each role should have clearly defined responsibilities and goals.

To gain this skill, you can get involved in developing and providing training in your current role.

Strategic Planning

The role of legal operations manager is inherently strategic, with operational efficiency being the core directive. Seeking these efficiencies hinges on your ability to correctly match work to your best available resource.

To develop strategic planning skills, create a structured 30-, 60-, and 90-day plan in your current role. The plan should outline objectives and KPIs to help you align your efforts with long-term goals.

Litigation Support and IP Management

Litigation support involves capturing data relevant to any ongoing litigation or investigations, often through an e-discovery platform. Intellectual property (IP) management involved facilitating the protection of your company’s IP, namely through patent and trademark registration and maintenance.

Paralegals and attorneys who have previously worked on ligitation or IP matters may already have these skill sets. If litigation and IP support isn’t in your wheelhouse already, don’t worry. Your overall technology and process support skills and experience are transferable to these areas.

Knowledge Management

Knowledge management reduces duplicate work and streamlines internal processes.

One way to gain this skill is to organize templates, policies, processes, memos, and other documents in a central location.

Information Governance and Records Management

Information governance and records management isn’t just about creating an efficient and effective way to store intellectual property, vendor and customer data, and other sensitive information. It’s also about identifying gaps in that information.

To gain this skill, take advantage of as many training programs and workshops as you can. Often, companies will offer these internally, though you can also find some with external organizations.

Leverage the Legal Operations Community

While you can take courses for certain aspects of legal operations, like data analysis, you cannot go to school to learn legal operations as a whole. You need to learn from your peers and community.

To gain insights from the community, join groups like CLOC, attend events, and connect with influential people on LinkedIn, such as:

• Kevin Cohn (Chief Customer Officer, Brightflag)
• Christine Uri (Chief Legal Officer, ENGIE Impact)
• Sheila Dusseau (Head of Global Legal Operations, Ferring Pharmaceuticals)
• Jennifer McCarron (Director of Legal Operations & Technology, Netflix)
• Alex Herrity (Director of Legal Solutions, Adidas)
• Stephanie Corey (CEO & Co-Founder, UpLevel Ops)
• Colin S. McCarthy (CEO and Founder, Legal Operators)
• Mary O’Carroll (Legal Operations Leader)

You could also connect with legal operations professionals in active communities like:

• Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC)
• Legal Innovators Network (LINK)
• Legal Operators

The right connections, who also understand your background, can help you land your next role.

Consume Industry-Related Content to Stay on Top of Industry Trends

Even if you land a role in legal operations, the learning will never stop. To stay on top of industry trends (both before and after you’ve landed the role), read industry-related content.

One way to do so is by joining CLOC and signing up for industry-related news. The Brightflag blog also contains industry definitions, best practices, interviews with experts in legal operations, and more. The In-House Outliers podcast, run by Brightflag’s COO, Alex Kelly, contains valuable insights from industry experts. Brightflag will continue to be a resource for those entering and excelling within legal operations.