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Legal departments may be flying blind without a legal plan, according to survey results released Wednesday.

The ”Legal Operations Health Check,” conducted by Australian legal matter management software company Xakia, found nearly half of respondents' legal departments didn't have a formal strategic plan.

“Articulating a strategy is a way of keeping yourself accountable and by writing it down you can also share it, and if everybody is on the same page, both metaphorically and physically, that gives everybody the same goal to head towards,” Jodie Baker, Xakia's founder and chief executive officer, said. 

Smaller teams were less likely to have a plan in place. One-third of teams with more than 50 members had no plan, compared with 48 percent of teams with 10 members or fewer. Nearly 40 percent of teams with 11 to 50 members had a plan.

Baker said that's likely because smaller companies have fewer resources. If a small team's stretched for time, developing a strategic plan may not be prioritized. But Baker said that the increasing amount of templates available to smaller legal departments can make it easier for resource-thin teams to plan ahead.

“It's gotten much easier for smaller teams to be able to pick up [templates] and articulate their strategy in a way they couldn't before,” Baker said. “But without that, and before those things were available … it's certainly been very difficult for them to do that.”

Larger companies were about three times more likely to report they faced planning-related challenges, which Baker said could be because they have staff designated to reflect on strategy and identify what needs improvement.

Of companies with a legal operations strategy, most said it aligned well with their company's overall strategy. Only 19 percent of respondents said their strategy aligned well with corporate and support functions.

Xakia's survey also found legal teams lacked metrics. Almost half of respondents said their legal ops strategy didn't include well-defined and measurable metrics, and more than half said they don't regularly track metrics. More than 40 percent don't review their legal ops strategy's progress.

“A strategy in and of itself, just writing something down on a template, is great,” Baker said. “But it's only going to get you so far. You need to move toward implementation and part of that implementation is reflecting on whether or not it's effective.”

Baker said the survey had “hundreds” of respondents, mostly from Australia and the U.S., though others responded from Europe, Asia and Africa. Most were general counsel, though 18 percent came from designated legal operations staff. More than 10 percent listed themselves as C-suite executives.

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