Key Takeaways from the “What is Next for Legal Operations” session at VANTAGE
As many of you are aware, the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) has identified 12 Core Competencies for the Legal Operations Function. What you may not know is that HBR has further distilled these Core Competencies into three groups by level of organizational maturity: Foundational, Advanced, and Mature, and performed survey work across the Legal Operations landscape to determine where Corporate Legal Operations organizations are more or less mature.
The session spotlighted practices of best-in-class Legal Operations professionals who analyze data from outside the department (e.g., outside counsel spend/matter data), combined with data on internal metrics (e.g., staffing models across matters and diversity statistics) to drive continuous improvement in spend management, while ensuring that they achieve non-financial strategic goals and KPIs. HBR’s dashboard offering, Counsel Command, was highlighted as an example of best-in-class analytics that deliver actionable data that is useful to (and useable by) end users, providing insight to legal department metrics as well as incorporating HBR’s data cleansing and benchmarking expertise.
Within the construct of CLOC’s 4 Foundational disciplines: 1) Strategic Planning; 2) Financial Management; 3) Outside Counsel/Vendor Management; and 4) Technology Enablement, this session outlined best practices for each – at each level of organizational maturity. Key data-driven insights focused on the gap that “high degree of maturity” organizations report regarding financial and vendor management (3 of the top 4 most mature disciplines) and the data analytics necessary to make these data actionable; the chasm between the stated importance of having a technology strategy and roadmap and the number of departments who actually have one; and the acknowledgement that an analytics dashboard is key to achieving organizational maturity in Financial and Vendor Management, but is not a top priority in their near term technology enablement plans.
For additional information on HBR Consulting, Counsel Command analytics or the CLOC Legal Operations Maturity Model, please contact Matthew Gillis (mgillis@hbrconsulting.com).
