The Friction Eliminator In-House Lawyers Shouldn't Ignore

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Deep Dive

The SOP Lesson I Learned, Forgot, and Had to Learn Again

When I was running Thirst, my juice bar, I was a SOP fanatic. (SOP stands for standard operating procedure. And by my definition, it only counts if it's written down.)

We had documented processes for everything—not just how to make a smoothie, but how to wash a blender canister, deep clean at the end of each evening, and count and record cash before moving it to the safe. That level of specificity sounds excessive until it's the thing that keeps operations running when the person who usually handles something is out sick or brand new. I saw firsthand how a good SOP eliminated friction, and how the absence of one created it.

Then I went in-house as a lawyer, and somewhere along the way, I forgot that lesson.

Legal felt different—more sophisticated, more judgment-driven. SOPs were for operations teams. Except, of course, they weren't. The friction I watched pile up in those early years looked exactly like the friction I'd seen at Thirst. I'd just stopped recognizing it.

At Red Cell, the early days gave me an excuse to stay out of SOP mode. So much of the legal work was just me, then me and one colleague. At that scale, you can carry a lot in your head and get away with it . . . for a while.

But as our team has grown, and as Red Cell as a whole has grown, I've been reminded of what I already knew at Thirst and re-learned when I first went in-house. SOPs are more than just an operations tool. They're leverage, in document form. My team and I are actively investing in making sure ours are current.

And I'm back to believing what I believed then: I'll take a mediocre SOP over no SOP any day, because a mediocre one is just a good one in the works.

Why SOPs Are a Career Move (Not Just an Administrative Task)

When SOPs are lacking, it can create multi-team contract chaos with real costs. Deals slow down. Business partners get frustrated waiting on legal. Leadership noticed the friction. In-house lawyers are evaluated on more than legal accuracy. We're evaluated on whether we make the business run better or slower, and a well-documented process is one of the most direct ways to answer that question in your favor.

When legal owns a process with a clear map that other teams can follow, you stop being a bottleneck and start being an accelerant. That shift gets noticed at performance review time. Not "she's a great lawyer" (though that matters too), but "she built the contract process that cut our deal cycle in half." One of those statements is a compliment. The other is a case for promotion.

There's a second dimension here that's equally important. Lawyers who document their processes are easier to promote because their work scales beyond them. When a senior leader is thinking about moving someone up, one of the quiet questions on their mind is: what happens to their current seat? If the answer is "total chaos," that's a real obstacle to advancement, even for someone excellent. If the answer is "she built a process the team can run," that's a green light. You stop being indispensable to a single role, and start being indispensable to the organization.

6 SOPs Worth Owning and Documenting

You don't need to build all of these at once, and you don't need them to be perfect. Remember: a mediocre SOP you actually use beats a polished one you never finish writing. Start with the area of your role where things feel most chaotic, or where you've fielded the same question for the fifth time this month. Then go from there.

1. Contract Lifecycle (Request to Signature)

Document every stage from the moment a business team requests a contract to the moment it's signed and stored. This is the one process everyone assumes is obvious, and the one that causes the most confusion in practice. Who drafts, who reviews, who approves, who signs, and where the final agreement lives should all be written down.

2. How to Triage and Route Incoming Legal Requests

What counts as urgent versus routine? Who handles what type of request? Where do requests get logged, and what's the expected turnaround? A clear intake process reduces the number of times you're getting pulled into work that could have been handled differently (or by someone else).

3. Board or Committee Preparation

Materials deadlines, who drafts what, how minutes get handled, and who sends the final package. The further in advance you build this process, the calmer board prep season feels.

4. Contract Repository Management

Naming conventions, folder structure, where executed originals live, and how you actually find something two years later when you need it. This sounds basic, but the number of legal teams with no consistent system for this is genuinely staggering.

5. How to Onboard a New Team Member

What systems do they need access to, and who makes that happen? What processes should they understand in their first two weeks, and who walks them through them? A good onboarding SOP shortens the time it takes a new team member to become effective, and it signals to them from day one that this is a team that runs with intention.

6. How Legal Works with Other Teams on Repeat Processes (Multiple SOPs)

Some of your most important SOPs probably aren't internal to legal. Instead, they govern how legal operates alongside finance, HR, procurement, or whichever teams you interact with most. Who submits requests and how? What are the turnaround expectations? Who has authority to approve what? When these cross-functional processes are undocumented, every team ends up operating on a different set of assumptions. Writing them down and making sure the other teams have (and agree with) them too is one of the highest-leverage things legal can do.

Identifying Additional SOPs that Make Sense for Your Team

The above SOP examples are generally applicable to in-house legal teams across business sectors and company size and maturity levels. But depending on the specifics of where you work, you will have other processes that make sense to document.

Here are three ways to find them.

Pay attention to your repeat questions. If someone has asked you how something works more than twice, that's a SOP waiting to be written. The questions you answer on autopilot from colleagues, new hires, and business partners are a reliable map to the processes that live only in your head and need to come out of it.

Look for your handoff headaches. Think about the last time you handed something off to a colleague, went on vacation, or returned from one. Where did things slip? What required a long explanation that shouldn't have? The moments where institutional knowledge fails to transfer cleanly are almost always the moments that needed a documented process.

Ask your team what slows them down. If you manage other lawyers or legal operations staff, a simple question like "what takes longer than it should, or creates the most confusion?" will surface SOP candidates faster than any audit you could run yourself. The people doing the work day-to-day know exactly where the friction lives.

Where to Start

The lawyers who build this kind of infrastructure can spend more time on meaningful work, and less time chasing who owns what aspect of a deal. They make more of an impact and tend to enjoy the work more too.

The good news is you don't need to do it all at once. Pick the process that causes you the most friction right now because you're constantly fielding the same questions, or where things have slipped through the cracks before. Write down how it actually works today, not how it's supposed to work. Then refine it.

Aim for done over perfect. A two-page SOP your team actually follows is worth more than a 20-page policy that lives in a folder no one opens.

This week, pick one. Write it down. You can make it better later.