Services
What is legal operations?
'Legal Ops' Explained
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According to CLOC, where Leonie van Gulik is a member, “Legal operations” (or legal ops) describes a set of business processes, activities, and the professionals who enable legal departments to serve their clients more effectively by applying business and technical practices to the delivery of legal services.
Legal Operations professionals provide strategic planning, project management, and pragmatic process improvement that allows legal professionals to focus on providing legal advice.
How may I help?
If you work in an in-house legal department and recognize any of these problems, my support can help you:
Strategic planning
When? You wish to thoroughly look into your service model to ensure your team is focusing on the right issues.
Legal excellence
When? You feel Legal is not appreciated by the business and you want to improve the quality of your output and demonstrate your value.
Process improvements
When? You have time-consuming processes or other waste in your processes, or your processes are not mapped at all. ​
Implementation
When? Your vision and strategy for Legal is clear, but you wish to have some guidance in putting that into practice to realise tangible results.
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In-company training
When? You wish to educate the Legal team on Legal Operations and what mindset is required to achieve operational excellence in their day-to-day work.​
Business development
When? Your company has set an ambitious growth strategy and you want to restructure Legal to effectively support the expected growth.​
Resource management
When? Your budget is constrained but your workload is increasing (you need to do more with less) and you want to utilize your resources smarter.​
Vendor management
When? Your vendor pool got out of control and you wish to rightsize that pool by establishing clear processes around selection process,
(e–)billing process, evaluation cycle, etc.
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My approach
From strategic plan to effective implementation
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With my business, I aim to advise my clients on strategic planning for legal operations. This means I help clients first and foremost to identify their needs and stakeholders and on that basis help to create a legal strategy, if not yet available.
Next step is to create a legal operations plan - which is the “how” behind the strategy. A legal operations plan includes a playbook for the team, which sets out a way of working, including systems and tooling to be used to do this in an effective and optimal way. It covers the process from A - Z, how a question comes to Legal, how it is assigned within the team, systems used, who owns the process, and more.
Once the legal operations plan is written, the Legal (Operations) team implements that strategy with the ultimate aim of improving their way of working, including the speed and quality of legal services delivered to their clients.
Why work with a legal operations advisor?
For many lawyers, all the “operations” aren’t something top of mind or something they spend a lot of time on, and this is why it’s good to get dedicated specialists on board to help you out.
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Firms hire a legal operations advisor generally to save time, cut costs and improve overall quality.
There can be multiple cases in which a legal department decides to start working with a legal ops consultant, such as: dealing with increased regulatory and compliance regulations, keeping up with the company's growth strategy or managing limited resources.
What organisations can benefit from the help of a legal ops consultant?
Any company or organisation with an in-house legal department can benefit from the help of a legal operations consultant. Legal operations enable a more efficient in-house legal department and empower the lawyers in the organization to be more productive.
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Also law firms can improve their efficiency and effectiveness with the help of a legal operations consultant.
Get in touch
Are you curious to find out what Legal Operations can do for you? Let's have a cup of coffee to learn more about it.
Email: leonie@leonievangulik.nl
