6 Essential Legal Operations Skills for 2025
Working in legal operations is all about creating efficiencies so that your legal department can do its best work.
What some legal operations professionals fail to remember, though, is that their own professional development plays a big role in that process. Taking the time to refine a few key legal operations skills can not only help you position yourself as a legal ops leader, but it can have a beneficial impact on your legal team’s capabilities.
As the ACC 2024 Chief Legal Officers Survey pointed out, 40% of Chief Legal Officers focus on operational efficiency above all other strategic initiatives. This means it is vital that the legal operations skills you develop have a clear connection to measurable benefits within the business. With this in mind, let’s look at the top legal operations skills that can help grow your career, along with tips on how to develop them.
Budgeting
Your budget is the key to accurately forecasting legal spend, allocating your legal team’s limited resources effectively, and using data to strengthen your partnership with finance. With nearly half of CLOs reporting orders to cut costs, it’s more vital than ever to have a handle on budgeting for your legal department. If you start cutting blindly, you may wind up faced with burnout or emergency requests to cover spend that you didn’t plan for. Instead, build up your financial planning acumen to budget more effectively.
How To Develop Budgeting Skills
Dive into financial planning, communicate with finance, and pull accurate financial data. Get started with these resources:
- Legal Ops 101: Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A). Budgeting basics and keys to partnering with finance.
- What the CFO Wants. Tips for communicating financial data effectively and building a case for additional legal budget.
- Legal Spend Management. Guide to managing legal expenses and creating a legal spend strategy.
Internal Stakeholder Management
You need to be able to explain legal department priorities in a way that makes sense to the rest of the business. The best way to communicate persuasively with your internal stakeholders is to first build solid relationships with senior leaders, the broader in-house legal team, and other business departments. For example, building trust with finance can help gain an essential advocate for your legal team’s needs when budget cuts roll around.
Relationship building isn’t a quick fix, but it can pay dividends if you put in the effort.
How To Develop Internal Stakeholder Management Skills
A good place to start relationship building is in your own house. Gaining buy-in from the general counsel before you start advocating across the organization will ensure you’re representing the legal department as a whole.
Next, identify your most important internal stakeholders beyond the legal department and learn about the pressures driving them. For example, if finance is frustrated by incomplete or untimely reports from legal, learn how to create stress-free legal finances. The right software can help build positive ties between departments. Dropbox found that adopting Brightflag not only made their AP system run seamlessly, it also removed frustrations between their legal and finance teams.
You should also look for opportunities to collaborate with departments that have overlapping priorities. For instance, work with procurement to streamline contract management processes.
No matter who you are working with, practice strong communication and collaboration to build trust and establish relationships that can benefit you and your stakeholders for years to come.
External Stakeholder Management
Collaborating with internal stakeholders is vital, but learning to manage your relationships with vendors and outside counsel is also crucial to your success. After all, those relationships define a large amount of your work and expenses. Outside counsel alone comprises nearly 50% of the average legal budget.
With so much work handled externally, it’s important to build up your ability to manage vendor relationships and give feedback effectively. Implementing data-driven evaluations like law firm benchmarking streamlines these interactions. Ultimately, improving your external stakeholder relationships will help you improve several outcomes, such as more effective resourcing and ensuring billing behavior aligns with expectations.
How To Develop External Stakeholder Management Skills
Look critically at your existing relationships with outside counsel and other vendors. Do you have billing agreements or outside counsel guidelines that are meaningful and regularly followed? If not, it’s time to review what’s working and what requires clarification.
Consider holding regular relationship reviews with your top 10 firms. These forums are a best practice for outside counsel management and can be used to share data and align on expectations. Once you have expectations set, follow up to compare outside counsel performance against those criteria. Performance evaluation reports can simplify this review process.
Communicating feedback is simpler with the right data. For example, Cresco Labs used Brightflag to assess all of their external vendors accurately, which enabled them to discuss each vendor’s performance with confidence.
Rightsourcing
The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) describes the present role of legal operations as innovators that strategically drive efficiency and lower costs. Matching work assignments to the best available resource is one of the best ways for legal operations to maximize that role. Rightsourcing describes the method for making these matches. It might involve internal assignments, outsourcing to outside counsel, or outsourcing to an alternative legal service provider.
Sorting out how to get it all done without burning out or blowing the budget requires more than just identifying the lowest cost option. Take it from Paragon Legal, a leading company in the rightsourcing space that sources interim legal talent for in-house departments. President & COO Jessica Markowitz says rightsourcing is “about making the decision that will maximize the value your department can deliver.”
How To Develop Rightsourcing Skills
Before you can make rightsourcing decisions, you need to understand your data. Take a deep dive to identify all of the matters you are currently running and how much of each matter is assigned to external spend. Using matter management software like Brightflag can help you draw up this data quickly and accurately.
Next, compare what your data is telling you with the business and legal department objectives you want to achieve. For example, if you find that you have become overly reliant on outside counsel to the detriment of your legal spend budget, this is a sign that you can find savings by considering other resources.
Once you have a grasp of where things stand, take a look at all of your options to get work done. This should be a broad exercise, including in-house assignments, flexible talent, and alternative legal service provider hires. Consider details like your available headcount, the risk level of each assignment, and whether the work needs to be completed by someone embedded with your team.
Reporting and Data Analysis
Adopting a data-driven mindset helps you make better strategic decisions. And developing your own skill in reporting and data analysis positions you to highlight your team’s successes and advocate for the resources you need.
If this all sounds like drowning in spreadsheets, there’s good news. Generative AI tools like Ask Brightflag make data accessible through conversational user interfaces. This makes it easy to pull reports quickly without a secondary degree in Excel.
How To Develop Reporting and Data Analysis Skills
You can develop your data analysis skills through practical application. Acquaint yourself with the basics of data analysis. This includes things like recognizing that correlation and causation are not the same — just because data is linked does not mean one data point caused the other. Beginner data courses can be found online and through local professional associations.
When you’re ready to start evaluating your organization’s data, set meaningful legal department KPIs to narrate how you’re progressing toward your goals. This will also give you a chance to re-evaluate your plans and change course when your data supports it.
Next, consider how you expect to use your data. For example, you may want to identify the most cost-effective outside counsel in your roster, clarify how many contracts have been completed this quarter, or determine how much a certain matter type should cost.
Consider what data types you would need to report on to measure progress toward your goals. Some common data sets to consider are:
- Legal spend. Separate this by markers such as vendor, matter type, and department.
- Matter details. Keep track of how much is assigned to each resource and how matters are tracking against budget.
- Timekeeper mix. Check how external stakeholders are billing and which resources are being billed for different types of work.
The data types you need will include numeric data for finance reporting, date and time data for tracking time devoted to projects, and boolean data for separating matters completed versus open.
Once you have data to review, it’s time to flex your data interpretation muscles. Compare reports back to your KPIs and department goals. If you aren’t moving in the direction you expected, evaluate whether a change in course is warranted by your findings.
For more help developing your data analysis and reporting skills, check out these resources:
- Legal Ops 101: Data & Analytics. This video course will help you identify the best metrics and learn to use data insights to drive your decision-making.
- Legal Spend Management Guide. Learn how you can use legal spend management software to streamline financial reporting.
Legal Technology Knowledge
Legal tech helps legal operations professionals improve efficiency, accuracy, and productivity while keeping legal spend down. But with so many options on the market and the legal tech industry growing every year, it’s important to be a savvy shopper.
You might already know that sticking with old tech can make your legal department slower and more expensive. But, did you know that upgrading to the right technology can save legal budget and even pay for itself? In 2022, Lufthansa was able to recoup the equivalent of its annual Brightflag subscription cost within the first three months of the year.
How To Develop Legal Technology Knowledge
You don’t have to recreate the wheel when you learn about legal tech. Ask your network what they’re using and whether they’d recommend it. There are also numerous reviews on platforms like G2 and Gartner that provide a peek into what platforms are proving successful.
Stay on top of trends and learn what types of new tech are benefitting in-house legal departments by attending conferences or reviewing trend reports.
Finally, don’t be afraid to get in the weeds to build your confidence. Take advantage of webinars and platform tours to see what different tech solutions can provide.
Support Legal Operations Skills Development With Brightflag
As you build your legal operations skills, keep in mind that you’re most effective when you partner with good vendors that act as an extension of your team. The right partner supports your skill development by bringing deep experience in specific areas and knowledge of best practices drawn from working with hundreds of customers.
Brightflag is a trusted guide, offering the aid you need to develop your legal operations and legal spend management skills. With the help of Brightflag’s best practices to handle legal matters efficiently and control outside counsel spend, you get support to grow in scale and sophistication. You can also take advantage of an extensive resource library dedicated to the legal ops profession.
Book a demo today to learn more about how Brightflag can support you and your legal team.