Starting a new position can be overwhelming, especially when you’re tasked with managing a department. Leading a legal department is particularly challenging, as it involves various roles and obligations, including financial, strategic, and risk management operations.
In addition to offering your legal expertise, you are now expected to act as a strategic business partner. To this end, you must promote greater collaboration with other corporate departments while improving your own operations. Meanwhile, the legal industry is pressured to keep up with technological advancements to provide a better experience for both internal and external clients. So we’ve prepared a few guidelines to help you navigate your new role.
So, you've just taken on a new job role and entered a highly demanding position that revolves around legal processes and project management.
It might be hard to admit, but few people will have continuous empathy for the fact that you just took a new position with new employees and new responsibilities. They may be patient for the first weeks until you adjust, but the company will continue to operate as usual – and expect you to deliver. So you need to get up to speed and start acting as soon as possible. Remember these axioms for a faster transition:
When it comes to your legal department's operations, it's not just about contract management. You should also try to optimize other areas and see how technology can cover most operations. Explore ways to streamline and automate tasks, such as collecting data on employees’ performance and compliance monitoring, to make the department more efficient.
Growing client expectations have forced legal professionals to adopt tools that help them provide services more efficiently. A recent development, legal project management (LPM), pushes legal professionals out of their comfort zone, turning them into more proactive and cost-efficient players.
How project management can help Legal better serve internal clients:
Here’s how to start with legal project management.
SMART is an abbreviation in which each letter stands for a certain goal's characteristic, such as:
The goal should be clear and specific so that everyone understands what exactly you're trying to achieve. For example, "We'll decrease cost per legal matter and average time to resolve a legal matter" instead of "I'd like you to be more efficient and productive."
You should be able to measure the progress of achieving goals. "The cost per legal matter should be cut by 20%" is an excellent example of a measurable goal.
People are more motivated to achieve a goal when they believe it's possible. That's why breaking down the steps needed to accomplish it is essential. So even if, according to your calculation, it's possible to cut the cost per matter in half in three years, it's better to choose a closer deadline and a smaller decrease in cost.
Make sure your goals align with your company's mission and contribute to its financial success. Otherwise, no one will be motivated enough to achieve it.
We all know how this works — if a goal doesn't bind you to a deadline, you are tempted to put it aside for later. So, you should clearly determine and articulate the deadline for each goal, regardless of its urgency.
One of the most critical factors in setting and achieving goals is their value. Changes must carry meanings consistent with the values of the company, customers, and employees who will try to achieve these goals, or you'll fail. We have a couple of tips on how to ensure this consistency.
Assess the company's image and internal processes to determine its core values, such as eco-friendliness or exceptional customer service. While the values conveyed to the public may differ slightly from internal values, they should still align. For example, customers may not consider employee well-being in the workplace, but satisfied and loyal employees are crucial for providing excellent service.
Consult your team to identify crucial values for their work and the company's image. If their values align, great. If not, communicate differences and suggest changes to management. For example, if employees don't appreciate sustainability, explain its impact on the company's image, teamwork, and personal benefits.
Practicing values is crucial to demonstrate their importance. For instance, if a company values sustainability, they can digitize paperwork to minimize paper waste. This action aligns with another value, work efficiency, as digital contract management can be automated, saving time and office expenses.
Create detailed documentation of the most efficient method for each work process, breaking it down into sequences and components. This will help your employees better understand the processes and execute them consistently. Let’s consider a few tried-and-tested ways of establishing work standards.
A project management tool widely used by technology and service teams, Kanban boards can help legal departments handle everyday or routine tasks much more efficiently. The tool visually depicts various stages of a task or project. The cards represent work items, while the columns show each step of the process. For example, you can label columns as "to-do," "in-progress," and "completed." Team members can quickly move cards from left to right to show their progress.
JTBD is a methodological framework that helps you better understand customer behavior. Focusing on motivation and context, it captures, defines, and organizes the needs of the customers.
To put things into perspective, the framework may show you that e-signature software can help your employees avoid spending hours of travel time to meet with a client just to sign a contract. It shows that you are not buying the software for the signature per se but paying for the time and energy it saves for your employees.
Legal operations impact customer experience, even though they are mainly hidden from clients. Regarding the JTBD framework, stakeholders, C-level executives, and the company are the clients that the legal department serves. Legal operations must enable the legal department to run like a business.
The People-Process-Technology (PPT) framework emphasizes the importance of balancing investments in employees, processes, and technologies for efficient work. By treating other departments as customers, the legal department can address their needs. This involves understanding the underlying problems, adjusting processes, and leveraging technology for improved efficiency.
It's crucial to follow the specific order of people-process-technology to avoid triggering new issues that may arise from changing priorities without involving employees or providing adequate training.
By building efficient workflows, the company can address these bottlenecks and determine which points can be improved with technology. For example, if a sales manager struggles with finding contract templates, the company should seek employee input on process bottlenecks. With a clear understanding of the processes and issues, the team can select the most suitable tech solution that addresses their needs. In this case it would be CLM software with contract repository, updated templates and workflows, requiring legal assistance only for non-standard cases.
Contracting is crucial for any organization as it governs all major business operations. So, efficient contracting should be your team’s priority. The first step toward it is taking full control over the contract portfolio and ensuring quality contract lifecycle management.
Non-legal departments often consider some stages of the contract lifecycle to be less important, which can lead to problems down the line. It's crucial to focus on the aspects that impact the quality of the contract portfolio and require your team's oversight.
To ensure high-quality and efficient contract management, start early and utilize automation. Automation systems provide pre-approved templates, auto-completion, and error detection, reducing drafting time and maintaining accuracy. Automatic storage of key entries eliminates the need for further editing.
For tracking contract changes, avoid email exchanges and use software with real-time editing capabilities. This allows parties to make or approve changes without multiple document versions, saving time and reducing errors.
Ensure contracts are easily accessible and actively managed for evaluation, analysis, and timely renewal or termination. Manual methods may work for a small portfolio, but with numerous contracts, missed renewal deadlines and financial losses are likely. Software can help by notifying employees of approaching contract review deadlines and identifying unprofitable or unfulfilled obligations.
To mitigate damage and promote healthy cooperation, you should track obligations under a particular contract. How to do it efficiently?
A practical and easy-to-implement approach, a contract or operational matrix means dividing the contract into understandable sections. This provides insights that clarify key contract points and explain vague clauses. You can make the contract understandable by combining technology, legal background, and analytics.
A well-functioning matrix includes the following parameters:
When creating a contract matrix, use details sparingly so that it does not become just a copy of the actual contract. However, the information should not be so minimal that it does not provide enough detail for your team members. Strive for balance.
Simply feed a signed contract into the CLM software, and the software will read it and look for actionable information that can be broken down or parsed into key terms. Other teams can use this information without the help of the legal department. Leveraging automation, you can more successfully fulfill and track contract obligations.
The second point that ensures efficient work and interaction with customers is the quality of the contracts themselves. When evaluating the quality of the contracts your department creates, pay attention to the following main elements.
Yes, the visual aspect of your contract matters. Make sure it is stylistically refined, branded, and identifiable. After all, your contracts are a visual representation of how much you value the partnership with your clients and vendors. Well-prepared contracts build trust while sloppy ones ruin reputations.
What's readable for lawyers may not be as easy to comprehend for non-lawyer clients. To ensure readability, structure your contracts logically. Dividing the content into cohesive sections is also helpful. In addition, an AI-based contract management system can 'translate' legalese into simpler, easy-to-understand language.
When reviewing and renewing contracts, you make changes frequently. Make sure your system is flexible enough to support this. The software should allow you to modify the contract quickly while ensuring consistency across all duplicates.
The role of a Head of Legal presents both exciting opportunities and unique challenges. As you navigate this new position, it is crucial to address the complexities of managing a legal department effectively. As you step into this position, you will face the task of balancing legal expertise with effective leadership and management skills. Effective communication, collaboration, and delegation are essential to ensure that everyone is aligned with the department's objectives and working together toward common goals.
Embracing a CLM solution can empower you as the head of the legal department. It enables you to automate processes, make informed decisions based on data, foster collaboration and knowledge sharing, and stay ahead in a rapidly evolving legal landscape. Try a free demo of ContractWorks CLM to see how you can successfully streamline contracting to navigate the challenges of your role and lead your team to success.