The heat is on for corporate legal professionals continuing the long process of helping businesses adapt to the economic challenges wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic, but there may be a silver lining on the horizon.

Panelists who congregated virtually for Corporate Counsel's weeklong "Legal Operations in a Time of Disruption" web series pointed to new opportunities for legal departments to prove their worth and continue to push innovation inside their respective companies.

The web series launched on Monday with a keynote address from Susan Hackett, CEO of Legal Executive Leadership, who indicated that legal ops professionals can often serve as key strategic advisers for a department around the technologies and strategies that can be deployed to help drive efficiencies. That role may become increasingly important over the next few months as companies look to streamline 2021 budgets, forcing legal departments to ask themselves some key questions about how to prioritize the rest of the fiscal year.