Legal department operations teams are not a particularly new entity in corporate legal departments, but in the last few years they've crossed the threshold into a household fixture as a means to curb costs and infuse more business-like structures into in-house legal work.

Thomson Reuters Legal Tracker, the company's e-billing offering, recently published its first Legal Department Operations (LDO) Index Benchmarking and Trends Report to give law departments and their operations teams a sense of the current outlook of legal operations work. The report found that 51 percent of legal departments now have dedicated legal operations staff.

Carly Toward, director of business operations for Thomson Reuters Legal Enterprise Solutions, said the report indicates that legal operations has matured over the last few years, moving from a cutting-edge idea for a department to a fairly commonplace one.