Legal Operations and the Evolving Law Department - Notes from the 2015 LMA Bay Area Tech Conference

Legal Operations and the Evolving Law Department - 2015 Legal Marketing Technology Conference, Session Recap

The 2015 Legal Marketing Technology Conference was held in San Francisco, California, between October 14-16, 2015. This is currently the largest conference focused on the technologies available to legal marketers. This year’s conference was full of great technology sessions, but the additional sessions on legal operations, pricing, and gamification added depth to what this already preeminent conference offers.

The following is a recap of the pre-conference session, “Legal Operations and the Evolving Law Department.”

Legal Operations positions are becoming increasingly popular within law departments across the country. These positions are turning legal departments into businesses within businesses. Depending on the company, the legal operations team or director will manage outside counsel, strategic planning, financial management, vendors, data, technical support, professional development, communications, and any other aspect of the law department that can allow attorneys to focus more on the practice of law.

The conference panel included: Dan Baker, Senior Legal Operations Manager—LinkedIn; Jill Fukunaga, Corporate Counsel, Legal Operations--Veritas Technologies Corporation; and Lisa Konie, Director of Legal Operations-- Adobe Systems Incorporated. One of the most important takeaways from this session is that the legal operations team wants to meet and know legal marketers and pricing officers. They want to create relationships within firms that can help them get the matter handled effectively and efficiently, while maintaining work quality.

What else can firms be doing to integrate with the legal operations team? Options include:

• Be efficient in staffing- Can two attorneys work on a matter versus five? Can a non-partner handle the work?
• Communicate- find out what is important to your client. What are their priorities and the company’s priorities? Be proactive in your communication!
• Understand your client’s goals and expectations- Is the goal to save money? Is there an important timeframe for the project? Ask for meetings!
• Project Management- find out what you can do to help, and make their jobs easier.
• Keep billing simple and timely- complex bills waste time.
• Consider developing more e-learning and training opportunities for client legal departments.

Understand the balance of staffing and alternative fee arrangements (AFA). For example:

• Work to put an AFA in place- it is becoming the expectation.
• Have ongoing conversations about the AFA- firms must learn to staff appropriately.
• An AFA does not mean associates are the only attorneys on the project- firms must learn to maintain value and quality when an AFA is in place. Remember clients are paying for your expertise.

With a legal operations team in place, there are now people to perform data analytics and data governance. This leads to the question, what metrics are they looking at now? These include:

• The number of firms the company is using- many are narrowing down to fewer firms where value is established.
• Diversity of spend- who worked on the matter? Associates, Partners, Paralegals, etc.
• Share!- Firms have lots of data, share it. Discuss trends and aggregate information on costs based on what they see across multiple firm clients. Help manage legal spends and operations- you will be thanked.

The legal operations teams allow attorneys to focus on the practice of law, thereby creating a new level of efficiency. Performance reviews, transparency, and the exchange of data will all become common practice for these departments when dealing with outside firms. Communication on work product will increase, as well as the internal discussions of efficiency, which they expect from firms. Attorneys and firms will need to open the door to feedback that historically has been swept under the rug. Legal operations are now the eyes and ears for general counsel.