Legal Ops Tip: Transform your team by doing 3 things at a time.

Legal team transformation need not be intimidating, expensive nor require a cast of thousands in order to be effective. 

It is really very easy to progress an effective legal team transformation in a way that compliments your existing workloads. 

Here is our key tip for how to really get your transformation program moving, no matter the size of your in-house legal team. 

Our tip: Think of 3 simple things that you and/or your team can do better each month – and then do them. 

Effortless Legal Team Transformation Action Profile

To make sure that you are guaranteed to succeed with “your power of 3 transformation” strategy to transform your in-house legal team, ensure that each of your 3 initiatives meet the following requirements: 

• Relevance: It must benefit/improve work you are required to do / legal services you provide on a regular basis.

• Self-Authored: Your in-house legal function must define the initiative themselves.

• 5 Hour Rule: You cannot spend more than 5 hours total on each initiative.

• Focus: The initiative must have a clear and demonstrable benefit for your internal clients.

• User Friendly: The initiative must be really simple to implement by ultimate end-users.

Effective Legal Department Efficiency Initiatives

Great examples of simple to implement legal department initiatives that meet all of the above legal dept. "simplicity criteria" include:

(a) Checklists: Have you in-house counsel team members define an issue/contract/procedural checklist and get it on to your intranet.

(b) Document Workflows: Produce a more efficient workflow, or simply document one that everyone needs to know.

(c) Client Feedback Session: Ask your clients for some feedback with a meeting or desk-top survey to understand their views on how your team is providing legal services.

(d) Precedent Muster: Ask your team to contribute their best templates for potential inclusion into your department’s template library. This is a super easy knowledge / contract management initiative.

(e) Knowhow: Add some useful know-how to your intranet as part of your knowledge management strategy. Just be sure to make sure it is relevant to the work that you in-house counsel engage in on a daily basis.

(f) Project Unpack: Analyze the performance you have achieved on a recent, common project scenario and identify lessons learnt for next time. Consider focusing on project management improvements, approach to risk mitigation and document management efficiency strategies.

(g) Pro-Forma Schedule: Draft a pro-forma schedule for your most common commercial agreements and include “user notes” to aid more intuitive and qualitative preparation by the commercial biz units.

(h) Teams Channel: Open up a Microsoft Teams discussion channel where any team member in your in-house legal department can ask any question and which all team members can provide answers.

All of the above initiatives are incredibly simple to implement, will deliver high user uptake and will directly improve your work and ultimately your end-client experience.

By keeping things “bite size” – in the space of one year you will have delivered 36 legal transformation powerful initiatives that improve the efficiency of your in-house legal team and the client legal service you provide. 

Cost to you? Nothing but a bit of time - which is a great financial management strategy. And this demonstrates quite clearly that you do not need to have a dedicated legal operations team to effectively start your legal team transformation journey.

With the power of 3 – you, as General Counsel / Head of Legal / Chief Legal Officer can easily move the needle on your in-house legal team’s transformation safely and effectively and build up a powerful track record of success.

Such a track record usually improves your chances when you end up asking to implement initiatives that might require additional resources - as you start to pave the way for establishing a more dedicated legal operations function (should the size of your team warrant the same)!  

Ready To Transform Your Legal Team?

Please check out the GLS solutions and know-how resources listed on the right side of this page – they might assist your legal team with the issues explored in this Blog. 

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