Young male manager stands listening to team at a meeting.Legal Operations Professionals Lead to More Mature Legal Department
"There is a palpable reason to adopt new technology," Catherine Moynihan, associate vice president of legal management services at the Association of Corporate Counsel, said. "The technology is enabling people to work in ways that didn't seem possible that long ago and the proof of concept is right before our very eyes."
April 28, 2020 at 10:17 AM
3 minute read
The most mature legal departments have at least one dedicated legal operations professional, according to the 2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmarking Report published on Tuesday by the Association of Corporate Counsel and Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory.
The report based its results on the ACC's 15-prong maturity model and data from 316 legal departments across 29 countries and 24 industries. The maturity model for legal departments includes compliance, financial management and information governance.
Catherine Moynihan, associate vice president of legal management services at the ACC in Washington, D.C., said in an interview that having one dedicated legal operations professional has a "distinct positive impact on maturity in each of the 15 functions we studied." According to the report, 73% of the most mature legal departments have at least one legal operations professional.
Functions that legal operations professionals have the greatest impact on, according to the report, are compliance, e-discovery and litigation management.
"We know that general counsel, on average, view compliance as the single most important issue to the overall business, so it is especially noteworthy that this is one of the areas in which legal operations professionals are having the greatest impact," the report says.
Despite the numbers showing that having a legal operations professional leads to a more mature legal department, Moynihan said legal departments are still not as mature as they could be.
"Everyone is picking their own path to advancement," Moynihan said. "Legal departments will pick one or two areas to make progress on, consolidate them, and then move on."
Moynihan said she has not seen legal departments make inroads in all of the areas at one time. The reasons for legal departments being unable to advance in maturity include a lack of resources and lack of personnel. However, Moynihan said in many cases there is a lack of interest or competing interest from the general counsel.
"A lot of this is about culture, which is the hardest kind of change," Moynihan said.
She said the general counsel and chief legal officers who buy into legal operations and make it a priority are the ones who have more mature legal departments. She said many top lawyers may believe in what legal operations can do but do not champion it in the right way.
Moynihan said the pandemic may make legal departments more willing to change. At a recent roundtable she hosted, legal operations professionals said that resistance to change from the top had dropped since the pandemic started.
"There is a palpable reason to adopt new technology," Moynihan said. "The technology is enabling people to work in ways that didn't seem possible that long ago and the proof of concept is right before our very eyes."
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