There's No Shortcut to Legal Operations Maturity

Measuring maturity is all the rage in legal operations. ACC Legal Operations recently released its “Maturity Model for the Operations of a Legal Department,” which takes a crack at defining the elements of early stage, intermediate and advanced levels of maturity for a variety of different law department activities. CLOC is collaborating on surveys and articles on the same topic. Of course, the question of law department operational maturity was a major focus of the 2017 Law Department Operations Survey.

Now in its tenth year, this survey, which is published in alliance with Consilio, is the oldest and most comprehensive survey that focuses solely on the law department operations function to provide benchmarks that are useful to all law departments. The survey has always focused on the changing roles, responsibilities and expectations of legal operations professionals, but this year, for the first time ever, we asked them to rate themselves and their departments on how far they are along the maturity curve in 13 different areas.

Most survey respondents feel their law department operations in general are quite mature. More than 60 percent rated themselves a three, four or five (on a five-point scale), and 12 percent ranked themselves as a five. “Considering how new many law department operations functions are, and how much there is to be done, it's very surprising that so many consider themselves to be mature,” said Reese Arrowsmith, VP, head of legal operations at Campbell Soup Company, chair of the ACC Legal Operations Group and advisory board member for the LDO Survey, in the survey report.

“There is a lot of pressure on legal operations professionals to drive their departments toward operational maturity,” said David Cambria, director of global operations for law, compliance and government relations at Archer Daniels Midland and chair of the advisory board for the LDO Survey. “In many instances, they are being evaluated on this very issue and feel the need to perform quickly.” This pressure is likely to increase as legal operations professionals gain a better understanding of what a mature function really looks like and realize they are not actually as far along the curve as they thought.

The temptation will be to shortcut the process by simply adding technology, but problems do not get solved with technology alone. A good illustration can be found in some of the LDO Survey responses.

Most do not consider themselves too far along the path in terms of reporting, metrics and analytics. Electronic billing is considered quite mature: Only 26 percent rate themselves on the lower half of the scale. Almost a quarter rate themselves as fully mature.

Why so low, when so many have invested in electronic billing or even more sophisticated technology to accomplish exactly this function? It's because, too often, those tools are not working effectively for them. When asked about their effectiveness, LDO Survey respondents only gave their reporting tools a 5.9 on a ten-point scale, ranking it as one of the least effective technologies they use. This is because these reporting tools, no matter how sophisticated they are, cannot get there by themselves.

Cambria outlined a few steps for success, no matter what technology you are attempting to integrate. “Identify your problem and develop an overall plan to solve it. This usually requires not just new technology, but a technology-enabled process. Find the right people to be involved, and communicate well to get buy-in from the rest. And most importantly, implement with focus, as a blind reliance on technology alone can easily result in a botched implementation, actually moving you backwards on the maturity curve.”

I live in suburban Chicago, and a few years ago my then-13-year-old asked if he could ride his skateboard to the Community Recreation Center, about a mile away and just down the street from the schools he had been going to since kindergarten. About a half hour later, he calls frantic. He's lost. I asked what he sees, and he said, “the lake.” Lake Michigan is about three miles away—in the opposite direction. It turns out that he had entered “Park District” into his phone, and it brought him to the lakefront park rather than the recreation center. He relied solely on the GPS, ignoring the fact that none of the streets he was on were the same ones he took to school every day. I shudder to think where he would have ended up if he could skate on water.

The lesson my teenager learned that day is the same one I am trying to impart here: Technology can be helpful, but it is no substitute for maturity.

Brad Blickstein is principal at the Blickstein Group and is the publisher of the Annual Law Department Operations Survey, which is now in its tenth year. For more information about the survey and more detailed results, please visit www.blicksteingroup.com/ldo.

Article first appeared in print under the title “No Shortcut to Maturity.”

Measuring maturity is all the rage in legal operations. ACC Legal Operations recently released its “Maturity Model for the Operations of a Legal Department,” which takes a crack at defining the elements of early stage, intermediate and advanced levels of maturity for a variety of different law department activities. CLOC is collaborating on surveys and articles on the same topic. Of course, the question of law department operational maturity was a major focus of the 2017 Law Department Operations Survey.

Now in its tenth year, this survey, which is published in alliance with Consilio, is the oldest and most comprehensive survey that focuses solely on the law department operations function to provide benchmarks that are useful to all law departments. The survey has always focused on the changing roles, responsibilities and expectations of legal operations professionals, but this year, for the first time ever, we asked them to rate themselves and their departments on how far they are along the maturity curve in 13 different areas.

Most survey respondents feel their law department operations in general are quite mature. More than 60 percent rated themselves a three, four or five (on a five-point scale), and 12 percent ranked themselves as a five. “Considering how new many law department operations functions are, and how much there is to be done, it's very surprising that so many consider themselves to be mature,” said Reese Arrowsmith, VP, head of legal operations at Campbell Soup Company, chair of the ACC Legal Operations Group and advisory board member for the LDO Survey, in the survey report.

“There is a lot of pressure on legal operations professionals to drive their departments toward operational maturity,” said David Cambria, director of global operations for law, compliance and government relations at Archer Daniels Midland and chair of the advisory board for the LDO Survey. “In many instances, they are being evaluated on this very issue and feel the need to perform quickly.” This pressure is likely to increase as legal operations professionals gain a better understanding of what a mature function really looks like and realize they are not actually as far along the curve as they thought.

The temptation will be to shortcut the process by simply adding technology, but problems do not get solved with technology alone. A good illustration can be found in some of the LDO Survey responses.

Most do not consider themselves too far along the path in terms of reporting, metrics and analytics. Electronic billing is considered quite mature: Only 26 percent rate themselves on the lower half of the scale. Almost a quarter rate themselves as fully mature.

Why so low, when so many have invested in electronic billing or even more sophisticated technology to accomplish exactly this function? It's because, too often, those tools are not working effectively for them. When asked about their effectiveness, LDO Survey respondents only gave their reporting tools a 5.9 on a ten-point scale, ranking it as one of the least effective technologies they use. This is because these reporting tools, no matter how sophisticated they are, cannot get there by themselves.

Cambria outlined a few steps for success, no matter what technology you are attempting to integrate. “Identify your problem and develop an overall plan to solve it. This usually requires not just new technology, but a technology-enabled process. Find the right people to be involved, and communicate well to get buy-in from the rest. And most importantly, implement with focus, as a blind reliance on technology alone can easily result in a botched implementation, actually moving you backwards on the maturity curve.”

I live in suburban Chicago, and a few years ago my then-13-year-old asked if he could ride his skateboard to the Community Recreation Center, about a mile away and just down the street from the schools he had been going to since kindergarten. About a half hour later, he calls frantic. He's lost. I asked what he sees, and he said, “the lake.” Lake Michigan is about three miles away—in the opposite direction. It turns out that he had entered “Park District” into his phone, and it brought him to the lakefront park rather than the recreation center. He relied solely on the GPS, ignoring the fact that none of the streets he was on were the same ones he took to school every day. I shudder to think where he would have ended up if he could skate on water.

The lesson my teenager learned that day is the same one I am trying to impart here: Technology can be helpful, but it is no substitute for maturity.

Brad Blickstein is principal at the Blickstein Group and is the publisher of the Annual Law Department Operations Survey, which is now in its tenth year. For more information about the survey and more detailed results, please visit www.blicksteingroup.com/ldo.

Article first appeared in print under the title “No Shortcut to Maturity.”