When I decided (at the sprightly age of 18) to pursue a training contract and become a lawyer, I had really considered only a handful of careers. I knew that I wanted to work in London. I thought (at least, at the time) that I wanted to be in a high-flying, corporate job. Investment banking? Too maths-y. Consulting? To be honest, I couldn’t quite work out what consultants did.
Law certainly interested me. I liked its logical nature and the emphasis on verbal and written persuasion. There were some elements I didn’t like: the word “research” still makes me shudder. But there were enough ticks in the ‘pro’ column, so I duly pushed on down the corporate law route.
Things are always clear in hindsight – and looking back I could see the signs that I wouldn’t enjoy a career in corporate law. I liked technology, and there were few opportunities to pursue that interest. I liked being process-oriented, but most of my time was spent producing documents like research notes and contracts.
At the time, ‘legal operations’ was not a meaningful alternative to a training contract. In fact, the term was hardly used, even when I was an associate. Nowadays, there is an abundance of alternative routes into the legal profession. You can find law firm job listings for legal technologists, legal engineers, innovation and operations associates – and more.
So what does it mean? And why has there been such a growth in the breadth and variety of opportunities in the legal market?
The origins of legal ops
Legal operations is not actually new – legal teams have always thought about how to improve and iterate on their service delivery. But anything approaching a formal ‘discipline’ is probably around 10-15 years old, when the rigorous application of ‘continuous improvement’ and methodologies like ‘Six Sigma’ became the standard. In that respect, it’s a bit like legal technology: it’s been around in some form for as long as lawyers have but has only recently become a truly mainstream way of looking at legal work.
In the early days of legal operations, things were simpler. There was generally less highly complex work (think multi-jurisdictional regulatory advice). For in-house teams, there was significantly less cost-cutting pressure. For law firms, there was less incentive to be economical. Nowadays, much of the work that legal teams do is complicated, touching multiple parts of a business, spanning multiple jurisdictions – and on top of that, there is a lot more pressure to save money – especially the money going into law firm pockets.
In other words, legal operations has evolved because the demands on lawyers have evolved. That shift has necessitated a bigger focus on efficiency, automation, and resource management – so that legal teams can continue to provide what their businesses need.
What is legal ops?
The effort to make the delivery of legal services better. More efficient, higher quality – a superior experience for the consumer of those services.
There are several frameworks that people use to understand and categorise legal ops. In fact, whole industry bodies exist to set those standards. There’s the ACC (Association of Corporate Counsel) and it’s 15-point Maturity Model. There’s also CLOC (that’s the ‘Corporate Legal Operations Consortium’) and its Core 12 Model (which is slightly more jazzy since it’s presented as a big wheel).
However, the simplest framework for understanding legal ops is ‘People, Processes and Technology’. That is to say – how do you get the right people to work on the right processes, using the right technology? This is the central challenge of legal operations – and a whole industry has grown to answer it.
It means things like:
- managing knowledge: making it easier for people who need answers to find them.
- thinking about new service models: finding ways to cut costs and deliver more economically.
- working with data: looking at the metrics behind the work, spotting patterns, seeing where blockages might lie, and getting clarity about what interventions might improve things.
- using legal technology: finding clever solutions to make manual tasks and processes easier – and building powerful new tools to save people time and effort.
There are host of other resources that go into lots of detail about all the different aspects of legal ops and how it has grown. A couple of my favourites: this interview with the heads of legal ops at AIG and the John Lewis Partnership, and this amazingly well researched explainer article from the Lawtomated blog.
This sounds like it’s for me
That’s excellent news. Fortunately, there has never been a better time to go into legal ops. Many of the top firms now offer operations-focussed training contracts and grad schemes (like Slaughter and May, Clifford Chance, Herbert Smith Freehills, Linklaters – and many more).
Looking back, doing a legal operations training programme would have been a neat intersection of my interest in law and my interest in technology. And it also would have been the perfect entry into a career in technology: it certainly would have made the first couple of years easier.
If you stand back and look at the legal industry holistically, the trends are clear: legal operations will continue to become a more critical part of law – and navigating a career in this space might just turn out to be the best platform for a future career in the new legal world.
Shaz Aziz
Director – Client Solutions and Consulting
Neota Logic
