There has been a lot of industry buzz about legal operations, or “legal ops.” So, what exactly is legal operations, and why is it important to your department?

The inaugural Legal Ops Brief column defined legal operations and its purpose. Now it’s time to discuss the composition of this transformational team.

This article will dive into the legal ops team’s guiding force: the legal strategic roadmap. This plan defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps needed to reach it. It also serves as a communication tool — a high-level document that helps articulate the “why” behind both the goal and the plan for getting there.

We all know change is inevitable for organizations that want to grow and evolve, so why does change have such a negative connotation? This column will focus on how to shift your legal department culture to one of accepting, adopting, and promoting change.

At the end of the day, business and technology organizations need to partner to establish a consistent cadence for evaluating business process and available technology stack in order to determine the right direction to take to secure competitive advantage.

I reached out to Mike Russell, the legal operations leader at Trane Technologies, for advice on how to improve processes and evolve reporting from tabular to visual analytics.

Considering systemic racism and what can be done to create change may feel overwhelming. What can we do to contribute to change? What can we do to eliminate unintentional bias? This column focuses on diversity and inclusion efforts that corporate legal departments can take to become catalysts of change.

Properly analyzing invoices is critical to managing and controlling outside counsel spend. This column will focus on methods to manage legal invoicing, with a specific focus on reducing the administrative burden of in-house attorneys.

As we approach the end of the year, it’s common to evaluate individual and team performance. The legal ops function is involved with many parts of the legal department. Thus, success needs to be evaluated from multiple angles.

Due to the many successes of remote work, companies and legal departments are actively assessing their workforce of the future. After months of process innovation and continued employee productivity, companies realize employees do not need to be in the office to be effective.