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Law school is still the road most frequently traveled en route to becoming a legal operations director, according to a new study.

The “Anatomy of a Director of Legal Operations” study, conducted by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) and automated contract review company LawGeex, examined the backgrounds and characteristics of 235 current legal ops directors, using their LinkedIn profiles.

The data, released Sunday, indicated that close to three-quarters of the legal ops directors hold a law degree, while a quarter hold an MBA.

Unlike in many other areas of the law, women also had a strong showing in operations, with more female than male leaders in the group analyzed. Nearly 60 percent of legal ops leaders in the study were women.

The majority of these directors, 58 percent, previously served in an in-house legal role. Another 10 percent worked as paralegals before their current positions and 24 percent came from a legal ops background. Nine percent came to legal ops from other operations roles that were not necessarily housed in a company's legal department.

As far as pay goes, the study indicated that some ops directors can bring in an annual salary of $300,000.

Aaron van Nice, director of legal operations at Baxter Healthcare Corp., was quoted in the study. He has held that role for a decade, after serving in the same role at Merrill Lynch.

“I think the key skills are around being a change agent and being able to get things done within the organization,” he said. “The core prerequisites are financial acumen, project and process management expertise, and a consulting (continuous improvement) mindset.”

As for how the role has evolved, he said, “The key difference in the past three years is the expansion of the role to many more things beyond vendor management, legal technology and administrative processes. Today, legal ops is involved in lots of areas, some of them outside of typical legal work, such as privacy, cybersecurity, e-discovery, compliance and policy management. I think it has also expanded to much smaller departments than was the case 10 to 15 years ago.”

In the study, about 21 percent of the institutions that had a legal ops function were found within Fortune 500 companies. About 6 percent were in Fortune 1000 companies, and another 3 percent were in U.K. top 500 stock exchange companies.

The average tenure of the legal ops director in the job is 6.7 years, according to CLOC and LawGeex's study.

It also appears the trend of hiring a legal ops director is largely a U.S. one. About 78 percent of these employees, the study said, are in the United States. The country with the second-highest number of legal ops directors is the U.K., with only 4 percent, while Canada has 3 percent. The Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan each accounted for just over 1 percent of directors studied.