LEGAL OPERATIONS CONSULTING

Many legal teams either have no legal strategy or have one that doesn’t support them or their clients well. This creates problems that result in unhappy clients, overworked lawyers and ultimately – substantial commercial and personal challenges.

Whilst each engagement is bespoke, a typical engagement includes the following steps:

• Assess the current state
• Identify key business and legal strategic goals
• Define success measures
• Clarify and articulate the roles of legal versus clients
• Prepare a legal strategic plan
• Support internal communications, reporting and training (if required)

Many legal teams and their clients struggle to develop and use ‘fit for purpose’ processes. Given the growing volume and complexity of most organisations’ legal and compliance needs, this leads to growing costs, profound stress and commercial problems.

A typical engagement to overcome these challenges includes:

• Mapping the current state processes
• Identifying and prioritising areas for improvement
• Analysing the root causes of issues
• Identifying improvements and opportunities to streamline operations
• Mapping the new processes
• Identifying controls for process compliance
• Preparing guidance and support materials

In-house legal teams spend most of time working with contracts to support their organisation.  Contracts with customers, vendors, partners and employees all require a delicate balance of legal compliance and risk to achieve a positive commercial outcome for the parties involved. Managing this balance is difficult, given the variety of stakeholders and competing objectives. Without robust processes and systems, managing contracts can be a never-ending nightmare for any legal team.

A typical engagement to help in-house Legal teams improve their contract management includes:

• Assessing the main contracting challenges being experienced
• Undertaking a contract audit
• Identifying the priorities of both the organisation and legal team
• Simplifying contracts whilst retaining their substance
• Implementing contract process improvements
• Preparing guidance materials
• Providing ongoing support as needed

Legal teams often find it hard to collect and share useful knowledge with one another and with clients. Amplified by recent increases in remote work, these challenges result in lost time, increased costs and difficulties serving and communicating with clients.

A typical engagement to improve a team’s knowledge management capability includes:

• Undertaking a knowledge audit
• Identifying prioritised knowledge requirements of legal teams and clients
• Assessing suitability of existing technologies to manage knowledge
• Designing and implementing a knowledge management system, maximising the use of existing technologies
• Preparing user guidance and training materials
• Providing ongoing support as needed

In-house legal teams are bombarded with sales pitches about new technology, but often struggle to identify and implement technology solutions to fit their needs. Common pitfalls when introducing new technology include workflow optimisation, user adoption and change management and client-side project management. This leads to problems such as failing to get purchase approval, cost and time blow-outs or implementation failures.

A typical engagement to address these issues involves:

• Defining and prioritising requirements
• Identifying potential vendors
• Preparing requests for proposals
• Assessing and scoring vendor proposals
• Supporting negotiations with vendors
• Preparing reports and recommendations

Additional options in a technology selection & implementation engagement include:

• Mapping and optimizing automated workflows
• Helping with communications and change management
• Providing client-side project management support
• Drafting user playbooks