Management consultants whether McKinsey, BCG or Accenture have made an industry out of identifying best practices and applying to specific company challenges.
Although most in-house legal and compliance departments have remained immune from this for many decades, the tide has been turning for some years now with many legal departments building out higher-performing teams, operations, and services. Leveraging best practice insight – from across all sectors not just legal teams – has been a key ways to support this.
One of these tools is the ‘Core 12’ from the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium:
“While every company and team has its own unique needs, the guidance in these functional areas – known as the “Core 12” – applies to many environments and requirements towards operational excellence”.
The Core 12 can be seen below:
Essentially these are the operations, services or capabilities which define the legal function. CLOC provide more context below:
“Legal operations” (or legal ops) describes a set of business processes, activities, and the professionals who enable legal departments to serve their clients more effectively by applying business and technical practices to the delivery of legal services. Legal ops provides the strategic planning, financial management, project management, and technology expertise that enables legal professionals to focus on providing legal advice.
The Core 12 allows any legal department leader or 3rd party consultant to assess their current state of performance maturity, map it to the ideal state, and then decide and plan what are steps they wish to take to improve which makes sense for their specific context and constraints.
The last aspect is critical as the Head of Legal in a Series A-funded start-up will have completely different challenges, requirements and objectives to a Fortune 100 legal team.
When selecting one of the 12, you can deep-dive further into that area of competence. For example, with Technology, CLOC provide the following high-level (and non-exhaustive) detail to help understand what good generally looks like:
TECHNOLOGY: Innovate, automate, and solve problems with technology.
Current reality: Teams often rely on manual, time-consuming, and fragmented point solutions. They may lack an overall technology vision and are deploying costly applications that are underused and disconnected from the team’s workflow.
Desired state: Create a clear technology vision that spans all of the needs of your organization. Automate manual processes, digitize physical tasks, and improve speed and quality through the strategic deployment of technology solutions.
- Create and implement a long-term technology roadmap
- Incorporate connected tools for e-billing, matter management, contact management, IP management, e-signature, and more
- Automate repetitive or time-consuming manual processes
- Determine where to build and where to buy
- Evaluate new vendors, suppliers, and solutions
- Assess emerging technology capabilities and incorporate into your long-term strategic planning
- Structure an effective partnership with your corporate IT team
Although the CLOC 12 isn’t of itself a useable tool as far as detailed diagnostic, business analysis or benchmarking is concerned, it does provide a helpful introduction for legal leaders looking to learn more about what good looks like in terms of legal operations and capabilities.
CLOC have a download guide with more information on the Core 12 which you can access here
Andrew Essa 