Legal Operations: on the art of smart collaboration

Continuous improvement ranges from up-to-date legal charters and guidelines, hiring and inspiring legal professionals (retaining them!), sound handling of legal matters, responding to a crisis, effective and efficient collaboration  with outside counsel, the use of legal tech and optimising legal processes to changing mindsets.  The aim should be to design a legal department being a countervailing business partner for the company, which adds value in more ways than just legal. Here’s the concept to use:

In the design of the operational model smart collaboration comes to play. It unlocks a broad range of opportunities for the legal department to optimize the way value is added. To get to that stage of smart collaboration one has to break down walls between legal and other staff functions, business and external providers. Having done that a client centric inter-disciplinairy way of working can be introduced to maximize value for the organization.

Smart collaboration brings the legal department to a next level of maturity with the following key characteristics:

• Client centric
• Risk based, data driven and business savvy
• Excellent, effective and efficient services
• Technology enabled
• Commited professionals