How to Build a Legal Operations Team Structure

Legal operations, or “legal ops,” is quickly becoming a “must-have” function for larger enterprises and business teams. But in the process of building a legal operations team structure from the ground up, knowing where to start — and what skills your team will need — can seem like a tall order.

Unlike established business units like HR or IT, there’s no decades-old playbook to follow. The good news? You don’t need one. The legal ops field may be relatively new, but there are already proven strategies and plenty of resources for building a legal ops team that adds real value to the broader business.

In this blog, we run through the legal ops function’s key responsibilities, typical team roles, and different ways to structure your team.

Legal Ops Team Competencies and Responsibilities

A good starting point for planning your team structure is to think about the competencies you need within the team, as well as the core responsibilities of the legal ops function. The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) provides an excellent overview of this. Their “Core 12” model highlights key capabilities needed within legal ops teams, and they explain how core competencies can be grouped to represent different levels of maturity of the legal ops function.

It’s worth noting that CLOC’s Core 12 model has undergone a couple of evolutions since its inception so you may see it in different forms in their various legal ops playbooks.

For simplicity, we frame the model here in terms of three tiers of responsibility, corresponding to the second model linked above:

1. Core Legal Operations Responsibilities

Core responsibilities represent the basics of what your legal ops department should be able to tackle and the skills they need to do it. These capabilities should be present during the earliest stages of your new department’s maturity journey. The aim at this stage is to address essential pain points and improve how the legal department manages its spend and technology. The four responsibilities of this stage are:

Financial Management

The legal ops team is responsible for monitoring and analyzing legal spend, and finding opportunities to improve how that spend is managed. An essential part of this is mapping spend to company objectives and priorities to ensure that legal resources are being allocated in a way that drives business value.

Vendor Management

Vendor management is another big piece of the optimization puzzle, and many legal ops teams are developing in-depth vendor management strategies to help boost the value they get from outside counsel law firms. Good vendor management includes ensuring price transparency and accountability, as well as building mutually beneficial relationships between preferred vendors and the company.

Cross-functional Alignment

The legal ops team is also involved in building strong relationships with other departments and teams and finding ways to align workflows, processes, and goals between legal and other departments. New hires from within the business can be especially valuable in this regard because they bring their existing relationships and know-how to the role.

Technology Implementation and Process Improvement

The final core responsibility for any burgeoning legal ops team is to find ways to streamline processes and improve workflows, often using new tech and automation. That includes keeping an eye on the latest legal tech and trends and implementing dedicated legal ops solutions, like e-billing and matter management solutions.

2. Intermediate Legal Operations Responsibilities

The next step for your team is to start optimizing the legal department’s developing tech and process landscape — with an eye to reducing spend, increasing value, and tightening operations even further. Essential considerations at this stage include how your team is using data and how your strategy contributes to broader organizational success.

Data Analytics

Data-driven decision-making is a core part of the legal operations function. Maturing teams should focus on measuring and demonstrating the value legal delivers to the rest of the business. That includes analyzing developing trends, using data to improve workflows, and working towards predictive analytics capabilities to prepare for incoming spikes in workload and ensure better legal service delivery to the rest of the business.

Organizational Design, Support, and Management

As corporate legal departments take on more strategic responsibilities and get better acquainted with their data, legal ops professionals should step up as active contributors that shape how the business is structured and supported. That includes trying to proactively identify changing needs across the enterprise (and their implications for the legal team) and participating in activities like pitch meetings, fee negotiations, and outside counsel evaluations.

Communications

A key challenge many legal departments face is that the value of the legal function isn’t always clear to the rest of the business, often because that value is poorly communicated. Legal ops should step in to fill that gap by reviewing how value is being communicated, and collaborating with leadership in other departments to align metrics, goals, and innovation approaches. In short, a good ops team should ensure that it’s clear to every stakeholder how the legal team’s efforts are supporting and driving key business objectives.

Service Delivery & Alternative Support Models

Legal ops professionals are responsible for allocating legal work and legal matters — both internally and to outside vendors. But beyond the basics, the ops team should also be scrutinizing who the work is going to and how it’s getting done. For example, are matters being assigned to senior partners at outside firms when they could be handled just as effectively — and more cost-efficiently — by the firm’s junior attorneys? Or even an alternative legal service provider? Ensuring each matter is assigned to the right resource, both internally and externally, can go a long way towards enhancing operational efficiency and keeping the budget trim.

3. Advanced Legal Operations Responsibilities

The last stage of maturity occurs when legal ops start to work hand-in-glove with all other parts of the business that rely on legal services. That might include helping them shape their processes and workflows for maximum efficiency or building out a detailed service model for how legal works with their teams — from understanding their requirements to predicting incoming business needs. Responsibilities at this stage include:

Strategic Planning

While strategic thinking is essential at every stage of legal ops maturity, this is where it becomes core to the function. A mature legal ops team works closely with the General Counsel and other business leaders to plan for both short- and long-term business needs and to ensure legal considerations are built into business strategy from the start.

Knowledge Management

Collecting and organizing knowledge about the legal requirements and business needs of different departments is another key responsibility. Using this information, the legal ops team should focus on ways to speed up legal service workflows, automate processes, and improve service delivery. This is another area where having the right tech plays a crucial role, with many ops professionals using tools like legal AI and matter-tracking software to improve legal outcomes.

Litigation Support & IP Management

Helping to manage litigation and safeguarding intellectual property are two more key areas where legal ops can add value. Legal ops teams should work closely with IT, information security, internal investigations, and trusted software vendors to create secure processes and workflows, both for keeping sensitive IP information safe and to support litigation teams and reduce risk. For example, bringing more of the eDiscovery process in-house, reducing exposure to one or two trusted vendors, or using legal tech tools to identify potential issues before they escalate into litigation proactively.

Information Governance and Record Management

Legal ops should set up clear guidelines for how legal information is stored, shared, and organized in other areas of the business as well. That includes ensuring compliance with data privacy law and working with other teams to design secure systems that reduce the possibility of a data breach and the reputational damage that comes with it.

Common Legal Operations Roles

Figuring out the responsibilities your legal ops team should fulfill is only part of the equation. Understanding typical legal ops job roles and which you should hire first is equally important.

Head/Director of Legal Operations

As the person who heads the legal ops team, the Director of Legal Ops is responsible for making the big strategic decisions that drive the function — including resource allocation, vendor selection, and leadership initiatives. They’ll also play a role in evaluating new legal tech tools, shaping pricing strategies, and finding and rectifying process inefficiencies.

The ideal candidate? Someone with a proven track record of getting the most out of team structures and workflows and extensive experience in the legal operations space. Other must-have characteristics include strong leadership, change management skills, an ability to foster cross-department comms, and an understanding of how to approach transformation efforts in a legal context.

Legal Operations Manager

Your Legal Ops Manager is the person in charge of managing the day-to-day functioning of the team and helping to keep processes running efficiently. They work directly with stakeholders in both the legal department and members of other teams, like finance. As a result, the position requires excellent leadership and communications skills, strong managerial judgment, extensive experience improving workflows, and experience managing cross-functional projects.

Other desirable traits include profound knowledge of legal department operations, a solid understanding of legal tech, attention to detail, and a commitment to fostering actual process efficiency.

Legal Operations Specialist

If you imagine the Legal Ops Manager and Head as the pilots flying the aircraft, you can think of Legal Ops Specialists as the mechanics that keep the engine running. That includes identifying operational gaps and finding creative ways to optimize internal processes and workflows. Like the roles discussed above, Legal Ops Specialists often have to work in collaboration with other departments, and they play a significant role in keeping new processes and initiatives aligned with team objectives.

Look for candidates who have a proven ability to juggle multiple projects, a history of thriving in fast-paced environments, and the ability to work independently and proactively across projects.

Legal Operations Analyst

As the name suggests, Legal Ops Analysts are typically engaged to manage and analyze data, improve processes, and find ways to help the legal team manage matters more efficiently. They may also be called on to analyze work habits and KPIs across different parts of the team.

Unlike the other roles listed here, entry-level candidates can often fill the Analyst position, so legal ops experience isn’t a prerequisite. Instead, look for someone with proven analytical skills, a flair for technology, and a willingness to learn. Experience with tools like e-billing and eDiscovery platforms, as well as the business intelligence tools your team uses, is an advantage.

Specialized Legal Ops Roles

As the legal ops function matures, you may also need to hire for more specialized roles, including:

• Outside Counsel Manager: This role is responsible for overseeing relationships with outside counsel, including streamlining workflows, addressing billing issues, and facilitating rate negotiations.
• Legal Technology Manager: If you’re expanding into new tech rapidly, hiring a legal technology manager can help expedite research on new technology and tools. This role is also helpful for overseeing implementation and change management when onboarding new legal tech tools.
• Practice Area Support (IP, Litigation, M&A, etc.): As the name suggests, this role is typically embedded within a specific practice area. However, the individuals filling these positions should still report to the legal ops function to ensure that legal work is carried out in a way that’s efficient, streamlined, and aligned with the broader legal department strategy.

Which of these additional roles makes sense for your team members depends mainly on legal department needs, the responsibilities of the legal ops team, and the size of the legal function within your company.

Structuring Your Legal Operations Team

A final consideration is how your legal ops team will be structured. There are many options here, but factors like the size of the legal ops team and the responsibilities assigned to each role will give you a good idea of what your structure should look like. In general:

Smaller legal operations teams with only one or two legal operations professionals should report directly to the General Counsel.

Meanwhile, in moderately-sized legal operations teams, you might have a Legal Operations Manager leading the function, with analysts and other specialized roles reporting to them. In this structure, the Legal Ops Manager is also responsible for coordinating with the GC and helping to manage the strategic direction of the legal department.

Finally, large legal operations teams usually have a head of legal operations, with the legal operations manager reporting directly to them. In this structure, the Legal Operations Manager oversees the Legal Ops Specialists and Analysts, as well as any other specialized roles. In some cases, however, teams may choose to have Legal Operations Analysts or other specialized functions report directly to the Head of Legal Ops — if that makes sense for the projects they’re working on and their legal operations responsibilities.

Supporting Your Legal Ops Team With the Right Tech

Whatever legal operations team structure you choose, a vital part of ensuring your legal ops team operates at peak performance is making sure they have the right tools to do their job effectively.

As leaders in the legal tech space, Brightflag helps legal ops teams build smarter tech stacks, refine their processes, and stay ahead of the curve on legal operations.

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