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.

"How are we going to take the resources that are currently allocated, that haven't been clawed back, that we may not see in the next budget cycle and get some stuff rolling right now so that we can prepare ourselves to not only be addressing all of the needs for agility and the technology needed for remote work to continue and whatever it is that's going to be the priority for our businesspeople," Hackett said.

Data may hold the key to some of those answers. According to Hackett, most legal and ops teams are focused on data that helps to better manage the way the department does its work and delivers services. But data can also be used to help the department guide companies on how certain matters should be handled. Win/loss patterns for cases, cost averages and networks of preferred outside legal providers can help guide corporate decision making and save time.

"This is data that most departments have had no experience in bringing forward and the ops folks out there as they start to get further into the data practices are going to make their [general counsel] superstars," Hackett said.

But case strategies may not be the only aspect of life in a corporate legal department to receive a second glance in the age of COVID-19. The "Emerging Technology and How to Effectively Tune Out the Noise to Find What Works for Your Department Panel" held on Wednesday examined other new realities that may be confronting in-house attorneys moving forward, including around the selection of vendors.

Panelist John Albright, chief legal and compliance officer at Hub International Ltd., pointed out that many legal service startups may be on shaky financial ground. " As we're looking at these platforms and evaluating them, it puts added pressure on you to make sure that you're selecting a vendor that's going to be there for the long haul," he said.

Corporate attorneys may also need to be prepared for the chance that remote courtroom appearances become a mainstay even after the pandemic has resolved. Many courts have already eased regulations around the use of video chat and other remote technologies.

"Now that courts are holding Zoom trials, I think we can say that a lot of those barriers have been removed and I think there will be a lot of appetite to continue a lot of these measures moving forward," Albright said.