Despite clear progression in the use of non-legal business professionals within in-house teams, general counsel (GCs) often still see ‘legal ops’ as more buzzword than beneficial.
There have been successes. Mo Ajaz is the highly-regarded chief operating officer (COO) at National Grid and, according to GC Alison Kay, he is vital in driving efficiencies. ‘We have a drive to make us much more business friendly and to act more like a business, as well as bringing in tech. We know which outside vendors to look to when it comes to tech.’
Thanks to this business focus, National Grid has become ‘much more alive to who is working on a particular job’, Kay says. She adds: ‘For example, why have we got 19 external lawyers working on a particular job which looks straightforward?’ The function is forecast to have reduced its spend by 25% over the last three years.
Neil Murrin (pictured), GC at transport app Trainline, describes the implementation of a legal ops team as ‘the biggest change’ his team has gone through in the last year. The new ops team led by Holly Manvell and Keruschka Shunmugam has overseen an overhaul in technology, with the legal function now utilising Jira software and Kanban Boards to keep track of resources, time and what is going in and out. ‘The last thing lawyers want to be doing is timesheets. It means we can talk to the business about where resources are being used – a prioritisation discussion.’ Aviva’s legal head Kirsty Cooper says the company had a false start with its first legal ops director but has since brought in Caroline Brown to ‘bring some rigour to our internal and external spend, tech, and use of data.’
For others, however, the very notion of legal ops is met with derision. Angus McBride, GC of News UK, recalls: ‘I went to this conference recently, and it was the same old crap about needing a COO.’
Philip Bramwell, GC of defence company BAE Systems, is equally cynical: ‘I spent 16 years in IT and telecoms, so I’m very used to inventing solutions to problems people never realised they had.’
He insists that the current legal ops fad is undermined by the software currently available on the market: ‘A lot of the software is in its infancy. Many of the programmes are not much more than relational databases you could write in Excel if you thought it was important.’
There has been a marked absence of major tech ‘wins’ over the last 12 months, mirroring the general lack of enthusiasm around legal ops. Stuart Kelly, head of legal at Network Rail, happily reports using Apperio to track his legal spend but is otherwise unimpressed by external adviser attitudes to tech. ‘I’m not pointing a finger at anyone in particular, but all firms have been telling us how innovative they are, and some of them have got big badges like “innovation law firm of the year”. It just doesn’t manifest itself.’
He believes in-house departments need to drive innovation and describes law firms driving this change as ‘an illusion’. ‘We know our problems better than anyone else, so we should be driving the innovation rather than law firms voluntarily coming up with innovation because it will come incredibly slowly.’