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Legal operations professionals say the field, which aims to increase efficiency through tech and process improvement in-house, is growing, but many opportunities in the space may be outsourced long term.

After legal ops hits initial process improvement and tech adoption goals, maintenance is likely to be outsourced to keep head count and budget lower, some ops leaders said. Kevin Clem, the chief commercial officer at HBR Consulting, has already seen some departments outsource ops work.

“I think a lot of it will be outsourced,” said Connie Brenton, NetApp Inc.'s chief of staff and senior director of legal operations. Her team already outsources some legal ops work, including e-billing tool management.

She said “as a general rule it makes more sense to outsource maintenance” because it takes a “less expensive resource to maintain” than to design and implement a process. Out of 21 legal ops technology tools at NetApp, she said most are currently in maintenance mode.

Brenton said it has to be the “right place, right time, right price” to outsource. Tools and processes involved should be stable, meaning the tool has collected enough data and isn't “having errors in the system.”

Gap Inc.'s head of legal ops and Corporate Legal Operations Consortium board member Mike Haven said low-risk work not tied to a competitive advantage, such as invoice review, process automation and beta extraction “can and should be outsourced.”

His team factors a process or tool's risk level, competitive advantage and complexity when deciding whether to keep in-house or move it outside.

“Smart resource allocation is a sign of maturity in a legal department,” Haven said.

Size could also play a factor in which legal departments outsource ops work. Bennett Borden, the chair of Drinker Biddle & Reath's information governance and e-discovery group, said smaller companies “lean more toward outsourcing.”

When legal faces head count restrictions, Clem said outsourcing could also become more likely because departments would “rather add an additional lawyer … than [add] even one or two legal operations people.”

But outsourcing isn't always the best option, legal ops professionals and consultants said. Most departments want to keep “core mission critical activities close to their vest” with in-house investment, Haven said.

“I would not outsource the primary foundational components of the legal operations team,” he said. Those components include, for Haven, legal ops staff who strategize, manage “legal spend, control the law firm relationships [and] control the knowledge resources.”

A noticeable shift in outsourcing also may not happen right away. Many legal departments don't yet have a legal ops function. Those that do tend to be in the early stages of tech adoption and process improvement, Brenton said, and few, if any, “will be done with everything [in legal ops] this year or even in five years.”

General counsel using legal ops as a quick fix to a set number of problems may lean toward outsourcing once those tasks are improved. Clem and Aaron Crews, Littler Mendelson's chief data analytics officer, said most of the GCs have this task-list legal ops mindset.

But Haven has mostly seen general counsel using legal ops as a strategic tool for long-term, ongoing improvements, a vision he shares for the field.

“I certainly see the future of legal operations as more of the steward of fostering a culture of continuous improvement as opposed to just swooping in and fixing the problem and then leaving,” Haven said.