Four senior figures from Slaughter and May’s knowledge, innovation and legal ops teams discuss what legal ops means for the prestigious London-headquartered firm.
By Lottie Dobson, Emily Lew, Emma Walton and Jane Stewart, with commentary from legal operations executive Peter Morton and head of BI and pricing, Rich Smith.
“Legal operations” can be defined as the functions that support legal teams both within law firms and in-house, enabling them to serve their clients in a more efficient and effective way. Beyond efficiency, organisations can also utilise their legal ops function to meet growing business need and create bespoke solutions to internal and external challenges.
At the firm, we’ve seen an increasing number of dedicated legal ops teams, or sometimes virtual teams, springing up in our client organisations across all sectors, in response to the many changes in the way legal services are delivered. The functions that make up legal ops often vary between organisations. For in-house teams, legal ops is generally about optimising legal service delivery in the broadest sense and as well as more traditional efficiency projects, can also involve things like training and development projects, engagement projects, or the management of relationships with panel firms.
In addition to supporting our clients’ legal ops teams from within the firm, we also second members of our Legal Operations Graduate Scheme to our client organisations to provide direct support. As well as helping our clients, the secondment opportunity enables our graduates to apply what they’ve learned at Slaughter and May to the work they undertake with clients.
Legal operations executive Peter Morton says of his secondment to Vodafone:
“The client secondment was a really amazing experience. It gave me the opportunity to see (i) how a corporate legal ops function interacts with the rest of the business, and (ii) the range of stakeholders that are involved. I saw how some of the types of legal tech we use, such as automated documents and clause banks, can be applied in different ways. For example generating pre-approved contracts for sales and procurement teams.”
Meanwhile legal operations executive Lottie Dobson (see photo below), who went on secondment to Diageo, says:
“During my five months with Diageo, I was able to get involved in a range of strategic internal projects. It was interesting to work with a team outside of Slaughter and May, as they helped aid my development by teaching me new ways of working and exposing me to different internal systems. One project that stands out was helping to redesign the Diageo legal team’s internal portal. Working on the redesign required me to apply a user-centric mind-set in order to help create a site that would be easy to navigate. I also really enjoyed getting involved with helping to test the oneNDA template as it was adopted within the organisation to see how processes are advancing.”
The more we work with our clients on non-legal/transactional projects, the more we realise the appetite that exists for this kind of support. To leverage the learnings we were creating in bilateral client discussions, we set up a Client Innovation Network in 2021, which now has around 90 individual members from 50 organisations. The Network is open to members of in-house teams and others working in this space in our client organisations to connect and share ideas and experiences – although it is not exclusively aimed at legal ops teams, many members have this job title. The Network offers tech demo sessions, co-delivered by us and our legal tech suppliers, workshops and training sessions on topics including legal process design, digital literacy and other skills for the lawyers of the future, a forum to share resources such as market maps and procurement guides to help in-house teams navigate this space, and networking sessions, to give our clients opportunities to share experiences with peers across a range of sectors.
Which teams at Slaughter and May get involved in legal ops and what kind of work do they do?
For us, legal ops comprises our Knowledge and Innovation (K&I), Business Intelligence and Pricing, and Legal Project Management (LPM) teams. The legal ops work these teams carry out is varied and ever evolving, and we are happy to support all and any projects our clients are working on. The majority of our work however can be grouped into several core areas; knowledge management (KM) consultancy, LPM, training and workshops, legal process design (LPD), legal tech consultancy, and BI and Pricing.
KM consultancy
Many businesses have a need to develop and improve the systems they have in operation for storing knowledge and documentation. Our team consults with clients on best practice for knowledge management by offering advice on: (i) what systems to use to store knowledge, (ii) how to structure precedent and template documents, and (iii) how to collate, store and disseminate knowledge within their organisation.
Legal project management
Our Legal project managers apply workable and practical processes and solutions to the delivery of legal matters to help create greater visibility and certainty around scope, planning, costs and resourcing. Having a dedicated resource focussed on matter management allows our lawyers to focus on the legal and strategic work, particularly on our larger and more complex matters. Managing actions and timelines are just some of the ways we assist in driving the matter forward and provide invaluable support.
Training and workshops
Training is often bespoke, and – leaving aside legal technical training for these purposes – can centre on anything from growth mindsets, to digital literacy skills, to creating an inclusive workplace, to design thinking workshops focusing on finding a solution to a particular challenge.
Legal process design
LPD is a key part of our legal ops offering. This is a methodology we have developed at Slaughter and May to analyse a legal process to determine where time and resources are being expended, in order to identify opportunities for improvement, with the aim of delivering legal services more efficiently. It has its roots in service design, which seeks to put our clients at the centre of our legal processes.
The methodology involves producing a process map setting out the phases and tasks involved in a legal matter and then holding a deep dive workshop to identify challenges and come up with potential solutions. Looking at our work as a series of processes or actions gives us greater understanding of how efficiently we run our matters, and can help increase the rigour with which we manage our matters. We have applied this methodology to multiple matter types that our lawyers commonly work on for clients, which has resulted in over 100 opportunities for improvement. Following the workshops, we work with the key stakeholders to implement the outcomes in a cycle of continuous improvement.
LPD is something we also offer directly to our clients, either to examine a process within a client organisation, or to examine work that Slaughter and May does together with the client, with a view to identifying the key touchpoints and streamlining service delivery.
Legal tech consultancy
Legal tech can be used to deliver benefits to both clients and our internal teams and we’re often asked to suggest tech that could streamline a particular challenge, such as one client’s need to find an efficient way to gather reports from legal teams in carious geographical locations into group legal and assimilate the information they contained. Our 2019 Collaborate winner StructureFlow is another good case study to show how we can improve our client experience by providing clients with more visually appealing corporate structure diagrams, steps plans and process maps. At an internal level, it also reduces time taken to create the charts and maps and generally reduces friction in this process for our internal teams.
BI and Pricing
Our BI and Pricing team is responsible for shaping data and analytics strategy. The goal is to provide stakeholders from across the firm and in our client organisations with insights that improve service, business performance and general employee experience. This covers: the creation of client, matter and practice management dashboards, providing bespoke business analysis, and producing updates for clients on activity, fees or diversity measures. A key aspect of the work involves designing the underlying data taxonomies and managing a firm-wide network responsible for data hygiene.
Head of BI and Pricing, Rich Smith, comments:
“In recent years, ‘business intelligence’ has moved on from being a prettier version of the financial accounts to a hub for strategic insight about all aspects of the firm: who we are; what we do and where we want to be going.”
What is the future of legal ops?
As legal ops projects become more common and teams grow, there is an increasing need for resource and talent in this area. Senior Knowledge & Innovation Manager Emma Walton (see photo below) explains the motivation for launching the Slaughter and May graduate programme in 2021, commenting:
“Legal operations as a profession is still relatively new within the legal industry. To date there has been no specific route into legal operations. It wasn’t uncommon for people to move across from legal practice to roles in this area but as a result we were lacking in a pipeline of junior talent. With new roles emerging as a result of an ever-growing legal ops function, it seemed appropriate to create a way in to the industry that would allow junior talent to train amongst established professionals in an exciting environment.”
Our programme follows the format of a traditional training contract, in which our graduates rotate through each of the three legal ops teams. Lottie Dobson says:
“Rotating through different departments helped me to understand areas where we can work jointly to achieve a mutual goal. Going forward, it’s useful to understand the full capability/offering of other teams when wanting to enhance existing processes across the legal ops function.”
In addition to the three rotations and a secondment, graduates are offered the opportunity to attend a Legal Operations Consortium course alongside other City law firms. The course content ties in closely to the work of the three legal ops teams at Slaughter and May, in addition to including skills sessions on emotional intelligence and delivering presentations. Working closely with members of other law firms promotes open conversations about the industry, and allows our graduates to come back with a more varied perspective on how to tackle client demands.
As legal ops continues to grow industry-wide, we envisage continued development in our legal ops teams at the firm, reflecting both client need and the changing nature of the legal market and increasingly diverse roles and career paths that will be available in the future. Through initiatives such as our legal ops grad programme, and the engagement work we do with university students, we hope to continue to support young talent into the legal sector.
Lottie Dobson is Legal Operations Executive; Emma Walton and Emily Lew are Senior Knowledge and Innovation Managers; and Jane Stewart is Head of Knowledge and Innovation at Slaughter and May.
(From left to right below, Lottie Dobson, Jane Stewart, Emma Walton, and Emily Lew.)
