Running your legal department like a business has rapidly become a necessity for general counsel as they attempt to get to grips with mounting pressure to demonstrate that their teams are not just costs to the business.

It's no longer enough to provide legal and risk counsel when every expense is under scrutiny and you are under pressure to seek out savings and identify potential revenue opportunities.

‎As National Grid global head of legal operations Mo Zain Ajaz says: "Legal functions must now be run in the most cost-efficient and optimised way. A GC, to do their job efficiently, needs to have someone in the organisation looking at strategy, law firm management and technology – just to name a few core areas – to give the GC more time and support."

The result has been the rise of the legal operations professional.

In the US, some large companies have used legal ops professionals for as long as a decade, in a bid to help reduce external legal spend and organise their departments.

But during the past three years, the trend has skyrocketed in the States and it is now spreading to the UK and Europe.

According to research from The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), the number of legal operations professionals working in US companies doubled between 2015 and 2016, with data for 2017 showing that 43% of the 1,100 GCs surveyed now had at least one legal operations professional within their team.

The sharp rise in the popularity of the role can be attributed to several factors.

The former senior director of global legal operations at Yahoo!, Jeff Franke, says: "One reason why the role has proliferated so much is that before GCs were not trusted advisers to the executive board and CEO in the way they are today. GC's roles are now so different and far closer to the business and their time is being sucked into other things."

Franke also explains that mounting cost pressures and the growing use of technology within in-house teams to produce data on their legal spend is also fuelling the rise of the role.

Franke is now part of the leadership team of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC). CLOC, like the ACC and UK-based Winmark, is trying to help provide training and networks for the growing numbers of the people working in the field.

Companies don't want to pay for traditional law. They want to know that processes have been optimised

CLOC has identified 12 core competencies that it believes cover in broad strokes what the role encompasses. According to CLOC, on top of budgeting for the department, managing panel reviews and analysing data, they believe the role also involves staying abreast of new technology to see how it can impact the department. Alongside this, legal operations professionals should also be improving the legal team's internal communication and professional development, as well as helping to improve and streamline communication between the legal team and the rest of the company.

However, Lloyds Banking Group's head of legal operations Sophie Schwass stresses that what the role encompasses – and therefore what the key skills needed are – will vary widely depending on the company.

She says: "While there are some key personal traits that make people in these roles successful, I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all description for someone in legal ops. Each company needs to look at what their strategy is and the person's responsibilities and role will then be bespoke to that particular company's needs."

While Schwass is a lawyer, she doesn't think the operations role needs to be performed by a qualified lawyer.

"It does not necessarily need to be done by a lawyer," she says. "The role is about making sure there is the right focus on the strategic agenda. Ultimately, the job is about ensuring that the legal team are really demonstrably creating value for the organisation. The role means that we look at the strategic agenda from a unique position because we sit across legal for the whole group and can often see opportunities that may not be visible from other vantage points."

Whether a company needs a dedicated legal operations person is determined by its size. Data from Winmark, which runs executive training to c-suite executives and has now started to build training in legal operations into its programmes, shows that the majority of global legal teams with between 76 and 100 staff have a full-time legal operations role, and with departments larger than 100 there may be a number legal operations professionals within one legal team.

"When you have a legal team of three to four people it's the office manager that will cover the legal ops remit. But as the team grows, it comes to a place where that becomes limiting and the person may not have the capacity to take it to the next stage," says chief executive of Winmark John Jeffcock.

The fact that this kind of role is relatively new means the ACC, Winmark and CLOC are all trying to capitalise on the interest through training and networks that allow the sharing of best practices as well as mistakes.

The next step, already under discussion, is to try to build the training into law schools and management schools.

Connie Brenton, chair of CLOC and chief of staff and director of legal operations at NetApp,  says: "One of the things that makes it such a difficult role to hire for, is that if you look at the 12 core competencies we set out as instrumental to the profession, you are going to be very hard pushed to find someone that has an expertise and background in all of those aspects.

"This is why we have people coming from various backgrounds right now and not all of them legal. There is no training ground for legal operations but that is the gap that we are trying to fill. We are talking to various schools to get courses in place."

She believes that when formal training starts, it will better define the role and elevate it to a position that is seen by more companies as a distinct job in its own right, rather than additional responsibilities piled on top of a lawyer.

Automation and artificial intelligence will likely accelerate the process as in-house teams' headcount drops and the need increases for better tracking and monitoring of how the technology is working and the savings it is creating.

As Ajaz concludes, while for many it is a role that is still in its infancy, this won't be the case for long. "Running a legal function is not just about providing legal advice. Running the function requires you to do the people management piece, the vendor management piece and strategy piece. People that have the skillset required for legal operations will have a much more significant role to play in organisations because the business of law is really important.

"Companies don't want to pay for traditional law. They want to know that processes have been optimised. If you compare law with the accounting profession, where you have management accounts and financial accounts. The financial accounts are about making the books balance, that's traditional law. The management accounts are about the lessons, they are about the decisions that should be made and about the trends and forecasting results. In a nutshell that is legal operations."