Legal Teams: Why You Need to Get Your Hands Dirty with Process – Part 1 

In our recent No Bull Work­shop, some key themes emerged from our room full of Legal Oper­a­tions enthu­si­asts, that chal­lenge accept­ed conventions. 

The first was the hid­den inno­va­tion oppor­tu­ni­ty that’s locked up in the con­tent that in-house lawyers gen­er­ate every day (check out our last blog for a recap on that discussion.) 

The sec­ond big theme was process: the need for legal teams to get involved with busi­ness processes. 

That’s right, legal process improve­ment actu­al­ly means busi­ness process improvement. 

We repeat­ed­ly hear that busi­ness­es com­plain that in-house lawyers over­com­pli­cate things with too much process. But legal teams strug­gle to work with and rein in chaot­ic busi­ness prac­tices. So, is there too lit­tle process or too much? 

Real­ly, it’s the lack of process where it’s most need­ed. Espe­cial­ly where busi­ness and legal process­es inter­face. This is what caus­es legal teams to get over­whelmed, and to fail to keep up with the demands of the business. 

In this first part of our #NoB­ullSeries two-part blog, we’ll dig into why Legal Process Improve­ment is so cru­cial for legal teams, what it real­ly means, and how to spot the prob­lem areas. 

Good at pro­ce­dure, bad at process 

Lawyers have not tra­di­tion­al­ly done ​“process”. A big part of a legal team’s job is stick­ing to pro­ce­dures — whether it’s han­dling trans­ac­tions, man­ag­ing com­pli­ance, or han­dling disputes. 

But here’s the thing: the pro­ce­dures legal teams are good at man­ag­ing tend to focus on the legal work, not the over­all busi­ness transaction. 

Lawyers are also ​“keep­ers of risk” so will intro­duce process­es to man­age legal risk. But that can eas­i­ly lead to over-reg­u­la­tion and bottlenecks. 

What lawyers are not trained to do is to opti­mise, and to think about process strate­gi­cal­ly, in a way that aligns Legal Oper­a­tions with the business’s goals. Yet it’s an essen­tial skill that lawyers must learn and apply, because no legal process exists in iso­la­tion from the busi­ness context. 

Try­ing to do it in iso­la­tion will always result in mis­align­ments where it mat­ters most: where that legal process inter­faces with a busi­ness process (or busi­ness realpoli­tik) that it hasn’t account­ed for. 

To para­phrase Mike Tyson, you don’t want your legal process to get punched in the face. 

The Biggest Gap in Process Man­age­ment for Legal Teams 

The biggest gap in legal process man­age­ment can be summed up in one word: misalignment. 

There are lots of kinds of mis­align­ments: in expec­ta­tions, in how risk is man­aged, in under­stand­ing who’s respon­si­ble for what, and just poor com­mu­ni­ca­tion. These gaps often show up as mixed sig­nals between legal and busi­ness teams about what suc­cess looks like, dif­fer­ent takes on risk ver­sus reward, and con­fu­sion over who’s sup­posed to be doing what. 

These mis­align­ments don’t just slow things down. They can cre­ate real risks for the business. 

• If in-house legal and busi­ness teams aren’t on the same page about how much risk they’re will­ing to take on in a par­tic­u­lar type of deal, it can lead to drawn-out nego­ti­a­tions and inter­nal back-and-forths that delay sig­na­ture and length­en time-to-revenue. 

• Lack of inter­nal align­ment often results in mixed sig­nals to the oth­er side and there­fore reduced trust. 

• And if there is no clear process for arriv­ing at a final risk deci­sion, that can lead to sign­ing bad deals. 

When there’s no clear under­stand­ing of who’s han­dling which tasks, or what the default legal posi­tions are, or what the approval process is, and which deci­sions require approval, that’s when you get delays, bad deci­sions, missed oppor­tu­ni­ties and finger-pointing. 

But here’s the crux of it: these mis­align­ments aren’t just process prob­lems. They are cross-func­tion­al. And that means they’re peo­ple problems. 

When the foun­da­tion isn’t sol­id, when peo­ple aren’t aligned, intro­duc­ing new process­es is like build­ing on sand. This is where legal teams hit road­blocks or imple­ment process­es that col­lapse at first con­tact with the real world. 

Why Legal Teams Strug­gle with Process and the Broad­er Impact on Legal Oper­a­tions 

Even when legal teams (re)design process­es, we fre­quent­ly hear the com­plaint that the busi­ness isn’t fol­low­ing them, or that there are too many. So, why do legal teams strug­gle with embed­ding new or improved processes? 

One big rea­son is that lawyers aren’t typ­i­cal­ly process opti­mi­sa­tion experts. Legal train­ing does not include the skills need­ed to design and imple­ment process­es that go beyond the legal work and into the broad­er busi­ness oper­a­tions. Yet there is no legal process that isn’t part of a big­ger busi­ness process. 

There’s also a com­mon mis­con­cep­tion that tech­nol­o­gy is the best way to solve process prob­lems. But while tech­nol­o­gy can help, it’s not a mag­ic fix. In fact, legal tech­nol­o­gy projects often have a high fail­ure rate (70 – 80%), because they’re often rolled out with­out first fix­ing the under­ly­ing process issues. Tech­nol­o­gy speeds up and scales process. If the process isn’t good, even the most advanced tech won’t get you the results you’re after. 

Anoth­er chal­lenge is that legal process issues often start with a more fun­da­men­tal upstream prob­lem: lack of clar­i­ty. Lack of clar­i­ty emerges from poor­ly draft­ed doc­u­ments that are tough to under­stand, or big-pic­ture mis­align­ments at lead­er­ship lev­el. Often teams will rush to design a legal process and present it to the busi­ness as a done deal only to find that the busi­ness isn’t on the same page and doesn’t like it. These are the ele­phants in the room that get ignored while peo­ple tin­ker with gran­u­lar adjust­ments to the down­stream processes. 

Tack­ling these issues requires an hon­est diag­no­sis of the prob­lem, hav­ing some tough con­ver­sa­tions upfront and dri­ving mean­ing­ful change at the root, rather than just slap­ping on a quick fix. 

Why Do Legal Depart­ments need to get involved with Process? 

Poor process man­age­ment results in the wrong rules, in the wrong places. That might mean the legal team itself lack­ing the clear, repeat­able process­es required to make their work fast and effi­cient. Or it could be over­ly rigid process­es that favour risk reduc­tion over out­comes. Or process­es that are just unclear, bad­ly defined and poor­ly com­mu­ni­cat­ed. Or the absence of a process at the inter­face between legal and busi­ness where clar­i­ty is need­ed. Or even a poor­ly artic­u­lat­ed process that isn’t owned by legal, but which legal touch­es and could help fix. 

Either way, the impact on the busi­ness can be serious: 

• With­out a clear process for han­dling rou­tine busi­ness-as-usu­al (BAU) sales con­tracts, the busi­ness will be high­ly depen­dent on the legal team for get­ting con­tracts out, and legal will be inun­dat­ed with repeat queries, result­ing in a slow­er sales process. 

• With­out a clear pol­i­cy on fall-back posi­tions, esca­la­tion and approval, nego­ti­a­tions can drag on for months, wast­ing resources and affect­ing sales figures. 

• If legal teams expect busi­ness teams to take on tasks that were tra­di­tion­al­ly han­dled by legal with­out giv­ing them the prop­er train­ing and tools, it can lead to frus­tra­tion, poor adop­tion and mis­takes. A com­mon exam­ple is when in-house legal teams expect the busi­ness to self-serve on rou­tine doc­u­ments using automa­tion but doesn’t think through the change man­age­ment process. 

• A sales team might close a deal and expect it to be wrapped up in days, only to dis­cov­er that the legal process is just get­ting start­ed lead­ing to months of back-and-forth. A mis­match between legal process time­lines and what the busi­ness expects. 

These kinds of mis­align­ment not only delay deals, but also strain the rela­tion­ship between legal teams and busi­ness teams. Legal teams get bogged down with rou­tine requests, leav­ing no time for more strate­gic, for­ward-think­ing work. Even­tu­al­ly the busi­ness gets blind­sided by unex­pect­ed changes in the com­pli­ance land­scape, or unbud­get­ed exter­nal legal costs because of a lack of legal resource for strate­gic projects. And of course, it neg­a­tive­ly impacts the lawyers’ well­be­ing – a huge top­ic in its own right that we’ll come back to again and again. 

How Can Legal Teams Iden­ti­fy Where Process­es Are Need­ed? 

So, how do you know where Legal Process Improve­ment is needed? 

Here’s a sim­ple three-step frame­work to spot the red flags: 

• Busi­ness dis­sat­is­fac­tion: If busi­ness teams are unhap­py with the speed and turn­around of legal ser­vices, that means the legal team lacks a repeat­able sys­tem­at­ic way of pro­vid­ing that ser­vice. If there is fre­quent con­fu­sion about how things get done, that means either the busi­ness or legal process­es are unclear (or both), or the way in which the legal process inter­faces with the busi­ness process is misaligned. 

• Legal team pres­sure: When team mem­bers feel like they’re con­stant­ly under pres­sure and can’t do their best work because they’re always putting out fires and deal­ing with urgent, rou­tine tasks, that sug­gests that the rou­tine work needs to be optimised. 

• Rely­ing on exter­nal law firms for rou­tine work. If legal teams are out­sourc­ing rou­tine work to law firms, it’s time to look at why those process­es aren’t being han­dled in-house. Exter­nal legal advice is expen­sive and is best used for high­ly tech­ni­cal or high-risk work. Rou­tine work should be done in-house, auto­mat­ed or out­sourced to low-cost ser­vice providers, all of which needs a good process to make it work. 

Legal teams must intro­duce process­es where repeata­bil­i­ty and clar­i­ty are need­ed. And sim­pli­fy process­es where they are cre­at­ing too many fric­tions. They must get their hands dirty not only with their own process­es (their Legal Oper­a­tions), but with the busi­ness process­es they inter­act with, too. Lawyers can bring a unique per­spec­tive to busi­ness process­es and are often well placed to act as a glue between busi­ness func­tions – pre­cise­ly because they inter­act direct­ly with so many of them. 

Legal teams must be proac­tive in this. It’s bet­ter to influ­ence or even lead and be seen as a val­ue-add, than to have fin­gers point­ed at you when things go wrong. 

Con­clu­sion: Wrap­ping Up Part 1 of Legal Process Improve­ment 

We’ve kicked off this two-part series by chal­leng­ing the myth (among lawyers) that they’re not meant to be busi­ness process experts. And the myth among busi­ness teams that lawyers just like to over­com­pli­cate things. The real­i­ty? A lack of process where it’s most need­ed, and too much process where sim­pler light-touch reg­u­la­tion and trust-based sys­tems could do a bet­ter job. 

Mis­align­ments in expec­ta­tions, risk man­age­ment and respon­si­bil­i­ties aren’t just process prob­lems — they’re peo­ple prob­lems. That means peo­ple (includ­ing lawyers) need to get stuck in to solve them. With­out that, even the lat­est most sophis­ti­cat­ed tech­nol­o­gy won’t help. 

In part two of this blog series, we’ll dive into the ​“how” of it all — how to imple­ment and inte­grate these process­es so they work. 

Ready to take action? If your legal team needs help with Legal Process Design, reach out to the team at LexSolutions. 

18 Sep