April 28, 2025

 Steve Harmon

contracts Consulting best practices elm legal operations cost savings contracts lifecycle management

As 2025 unfolds, law department leaders and their staff are living the French phrase plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.^[1] With (yet again) intensifying resourcing pressures and tighter delivery deadlines, what are legal ops professionals to do?

Improved legal ops is an obvious answer for ‘doing more with less.’ But to add maximum value, law department and legal ops leaders need understand that at its core, legal ops isn’t about improving (however defined) the operations of a law department. Rather, the paramount purpose of legal ops is to enable, accelerate, and better achieve the business goals of a company. Simply put, legal ops exists to deliver competitive advantage by making a law department a source of and a catalyst for an organisation’s business success.

In this context, the contracting process – negotiating and getting maximum business value from legal agreements – presents itself as a prime opportunity for legal ops to achieve its highest purpose. This, however, requires lawyers to adopt an idea that many of them may find counter-intuitive: legal teams shouldn’t focus on minimising legal risk. A law department – and, by extension, its legals ops function – adds business value by determining the right balance between legal risk and business benefit. When it comes to the contracting function, the correct focus isn’t lowering risk per se; it’s figuring out how much risk is tolerable for a given type of contract.

This approach focuses legal ops on appropriate resource allocation – specifically, calibrating the resources allocated (e.g., lawyers’ time) to the expected value of the activity in question. To put it in conceptual terms, this is the predicted business benefit (e.g., revenue), minus the predicted legal risk (which reflects the probability of an adverse outcome and the magnitude of loss that such an outcome entails).

It’s important to remember that the business benefit isn’t simply a reduction in the cost of lawyers’ time reviewing a given contact. Through routinisation and the use of simplified templates, technology and playbooks, legal ops facilitates:

• accelerated revenue (from shorter cycle times for sales agreements)
• reduced opportunity costs (i.e., because department lawyers have more time to work on higher value work and strategic deliverables)
• greater revenue realisation (from better monitoring and enforcement of counter-parties performance)
• lower costs (e.g., from right-sourcing and the use of cost-effective outside providers for procurement contracting and other contacts-related activities)

Similarly, legal ops professionals achieve more than just improved operations. Those who craft compelling business cases for transformational change and investment in their strategies demonstrate the bottom-line contribution of legal ops and law departments. But, as explained above, this begins with deep alignment between their legal team’s delivery and core business objectives.

Once legal ops professionals reorient themselves to transforming their law department from a cost centre to a business-value creator, they are on their way to delivering maximum value. As the French might put it, vive les legal ops!

[1] Roughly, ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same thing’ or ‘when things change, it’s still the same old situation.’