Do You Really Need Legal Ops? Yes. Here’s Why

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Deep Dive

Legal Ops Is For Everyone

Legal operations as a dedicated function is having a moment.

At big companies, legal ops teams are growing fast. At mid-sized ones, hiring a head of legal ops has gone from rare to routine. But if you’re one of just a few lawyers, or if you’re the only lawyer, at a smaller company, you might be wondering: Do I really need legal ops?

Maybe you’re managing a modest budget. Maybe you think of legal ops as a luxury for bigger departments. And maybe, honestly, it feels like just another thing to think about when your plate is already full.

I get it. I’ve been there.

But here’s the thing: whether or not you have a dedicated legal ops function, legal operations still matters.

Because legal ops is the business side of running a legal team; not some fancy add on. And it’s something you’re probably doing already . . . even if you don’t call it legal ops.

Legal Ops is a fancy word for how you run the Legal Department.

Let’s strip away the buzzwords.

Legal ops is budgeting and vendor management. It’s the technology tools you use (or don’t), the workflows you create, and the way you handle reporting. It’s how you onboard new team members and how you track what’s getting done. It’s how you make your team and yourself more effective.

In other words, it’s the things that keeps the legal function functioning.

And the smaller your team, the more important these foundational systems become. When you’re flying solo or close to it, you can’t afford inefficiencies or to lose track of priorities. You don’t have time to reinvent the wheel every time a question comes up.

If you’re the only lawyer, you are the GC, the outside counsel manager, the contracts lead, the employment advisor, the compliance department, the legal ops head—and more. So building even light-touch legal ops systems helps you protect your time and maximize your impact.

A Few Small, Mighty Wins

You don’t need to overhaul everything to get value. A few intentional systems can go a long way.

Here are a few areas where lightweight legal ops can make a big difference:

1. Legal Intake

If the way contracts and other requests for legal support land on your desk is via email, slack, or whatever communication tool the requestor happens to be using when they remember they need something, you’re not alone. But it’s also a setup for dropped balls, duplicated work, and burned time.

Try setting up a single intake form. Even a basic Google Form can work. It ensures you get the info you need up front and helps you track what’s in the queue. If you have budget, there are tools for this too. We’ve recently implemented Streamline AI. 

2. Outside Counsel Spend Tracking

If you work with outside counsel, track what you’re spending and why. Create a shared doc or spreadsheet that logs each matter, who’s working on it, and what it’s costing.

Not only does this help you manage spend, it also gives you the data you’ll need when it’s time to negotiate rates, or make decisions like switching firms, hiring additional internal resources, or moving work to an ALSP.

For example, if you find that you’re sending work to a traditional law firm for bandwidth reasons, it’s likely time to hire internally, find an ALSP, or negotiate a non-traditional arrangement for support from the firm. But paying law firm rates for work you could do internally if you just had that time, rarely makes sense.

3. Legal Knowledge Hub

You probably answer the same five questions repeatedly. Collect your responses, clean them up, and drop them in a shared doc or wiki. Now you’ve got a lightweight legal knowledge base that helps the business move faster without pinging you for every repeat issue.

You can do the same thing with a document internal to your team, where you document answers to common questions that you receive by email and intend to respond with. That way, even if the question requires a written response rather than referral to a shared doc, you have a template to use as a starting point and all legal team members give a consistent answer.

4. Reporting

Take time to reflect regularly on what’s getting done and make a record of it. What did legal touch this month? What risks did you mitigate? What projects did you move forward?

This helps you stay on top of work, drive impact, and create a record that you can refer back to at the end of the year if you’re advocating for additional team resources or to make other changes to the department.

My team keeps a “legal wins” document where we keep track of key wins throughout the year; most of these tie directly to company key results from the OKRs, while some of them relate to ways we found to deliver better service.

We also use data to support our reporting where we can. This is where reporting and legal intake tools can support each other really nicely, because the intake tool lets you conveniently keep track of all of the items you touch.

Think of legal ops as an opportunity, rather than one more item on your to-do list.

If you implement the ideas above, I think you’ll find that they actually make your team more efficient and help you drive more impact, even if they may at first seem to be one more item on your to-do list.

If you do give them a try, reply and let me know how it goes. I read every email.