At the center of CLOC's programming are 12 of what the organization calls “core competencies”; if you've spent any time around the organization, you've probably heard the phrase at least once. But for legal operations newcomers, discerning what the competencies are can be confusing, and figuring out exactly how and where they should be applied is even more so.

But the 12 competencies, said Jeff Franke, a member of CLOC's executive team and former legal operations head at Yahoo, are part of a bigger picture: determining legal department maturity. The 12 competencies, he explained, are meant to serve as a benchmark to compare a department's growth to others in the industry.

“This model is not designed to be about the maturity of legal operations; it's designed to be about the maturity of the legal department,” he explained.

At the “Legal Operations Maturity Model 2018: How Do You Rate?” session at the 2018 CLOC Conference, Franke, alongside Kevin Clem of HBR Consulting and Pratik Patel of Elevate, broke each of the competencies down into three different phases of department maturity: foundational, advanced and mature. Here's a snapshot of what your legal department should be accomplishing in each phase of maturity.

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Foundational

  1. Financial management: The process of how operations manages budgets, alongside both inside and outside spend.
  2. Vendor management: Not just financial management, but also relationships with outside counsel and service providers.
  3. Cross-functional alignment: How a department functions in tandem with HR, IT, finance, and workplace resources and others.
  4. Technology and process support: A large category that explores what tech a department is using and why, then how it's being supported with process improvement and change management.

Clem noted that with the foundational competencies, “one of these, or perhaps multiple of these, is what ultimately drove the need for legal operations.” Because of that, he explained, the leader of the legal operations department was likely previously in charge of one of these areas.

But sharp viewers may notice something is missing: actually putting together an operations plan. Franke noted that in a perfect world, a plan would be done at the beginning, but in practice, many departments aren't yet mature enough to create a comprehensive plan.

“What we find in most legal departments is that there's only the most rudimentary form of planning,” Franke said. “It's one of the big misses, and it's one area where we as an industry are really falling short.”

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Advanced

  1. Service delivery and alternative support models: Driving departmental efficiency by matching the nature and risk of the work with the right level and type of resources, such as internal resources, outside counsel, LPOs, and new law companies.
  2. Organizational design, support and management: Improved GC staff and overall team performance by globalizing the team and creating a culture of growth, development, collaboration and accountability.
  3. Communications: The ability to work collaboratively to have communications that are clear and consistent in the legal department.
  4. Data analytics: Collecting and analyzing relevant data from department tools and industry resources, and defining objectives to provide metrics and dashboards that drive efficiencies and optimize spend.

These four “require more legal planning and adoption” in comparison to the foundational competencies, Patel said. Typically, legal operations at this stage needs to have a formalized legal operations head to function, rather than a GC or attorney handling operations work.

At this stage, Franke pointed to service delivery as one particular area that many growing legal operations departments struggle with. “Most GCs, when they get overwhelmed, their first response is, I need another head count. But they don't stop and say, how am I delivering service … with the resources that I have?” Franke asked.

Mature

  1. Litigation support and IP management: Support for e-discovery, legal hold, document review, and managed services for litigation outcomes, as well as support for patent, trademark, copyright and other IP functions with tools, reporting, and vendor management.
  2. Knowledge management: The ability to enable efficiencies by creating seamless access to legal and department institutional knowledge through organization and centralization of learnings.
  3. Information governance and records management: Creating a records management program including a record retention schedule, policies and processes.
  4. Strategic planning: Creating a long-term strategy aligning yearly goals and corresponding metrics.

The final stage is one that is difficult to master—Franke estimated that only 5 percent of legal operations functions are mature, and the ones that have maturity in all 12 competencies he said he “could count on one hand.”

Mastering this stage “requires people internally within the organization to steer these kinds of initiatives,” often with initiative leaders under a global legal operations head, Patel noted.

He added that some may be surprised that litigation support in particular is this far into the maturity cycle, as it's often one of the first tasks legal operations looks to undertake. It's “something that a lot of people chase early on in their planning … but it takes a mature program to really do it effectively,” he explained.

Franke added that in an ideal world, knowledge management would be integrated from the beginning to further cost savings throughout the department's growth, but that's not how many departments function.

“It can be more difficult to do, because a lot of people haven't wrapped their arms around it. But it really should be more fundamental,” Franke explained.

More information about the core competencies, as well as where the conference's attendees rated their own maturity levels during the presentation, will be available post-show on CLOC.org.