Legal operations professionals are in hot demand in large and small companies across all industries, and the limited supply of veteran legal ops professionals isn't stopping companies' efficiency ambitions. But instead of competing for that limited pool, companies should explore the potential of internally promoting promising employees to legal ops roles, and also hiring outside of the legal sector to meet their project management and data analytics needs. 

As legal ops' prominence has grown in multinational and regulated companies, so has its presence in smaller and unregulated organizations, said Julie Brush, founder partner of Solutus Legal Search, a law firm and in-house consulting and hiring adviser.

"Now we're starting to see a much greater number of organizations bringing this function in and bringing it in much earlier in the company's lifecycle," Brush said.