Change My Mind: Business Agility is the Most Important Competency for Legal Operations Professionals

Legal Operations is a multi-disciplinary field, requiring aptitude in finance, technology, vendor management, workforce strategy, data analysis, communications, and so much more. Professionals can develop substantive acumen in any of these areas sufficient to allow them to determine “what” the focus of the corporate legal department. However, the culture of the “how” we execute is rarely discussed with the same type of rigor and it requires just as much planning and care to deliver the desired business outcomes. 

Legal operations professionals must possess core business agility skills and be empowered to drive the culture of agility within the legal department. 

This is necessary because traditional legal education does not prepare lawyers and legal professionals for “the business of the law,” especially in-house. The typical legal professional joining a corporate legal department does not have foundational business, financial or technology aptitude, and it falls to the Legal Operations function to model and train on these skills. 

The main tenets of business agility are:

• Define what you want to do quickly.  
• Pick a few things to tackle in time-boxed iterations or sprints.  
• Review them often with your stakeholders.  
• Ruthlessly prioritize that backlog of projects against your OKRs.  
• Get MVP (Minimally Viable Product) out to the stakeholders for immediate feedback and to begin the feedback loop.
• Fail fast: When it’s wrong, pivot to what’s right. When it’s right (but could be better) commit to a few improvements and push it out again quickly.  
• Continue with this spirit of continuous improvement until it is “good enough,” then return back to review the backlog to rinse and repeat.
• Conduct “lessons-learned” sessions regularly to ensure that we are continuing with the things that are working and discontinuing the things that are not working.

Let me apply some of these concepts to our real world:

• Implementing new technology or tool.  
  
  Most colleagues I speak with are still designing and implementing technology solutions using waterfall methodologies (i.e. spending large amounts of time to implement, get just right, then kick off to the entire legal department at one time). History, and decades of quantitative data, show us that these highly complex, large technology implementations are highly likely to fail.  
  • A better way forward using agility.
    
    Pick a tool. Instead of solving the whole problem at once, select a single use case or team that has a need for the tool. Invite that team and any other stakeholders to participate in a two week (not months) sprint to experiment with the tooling. Determine if additional investment (time) is required to get it delivered to end-users. Begin to use as beta or proof of concept. Gather feedback. Demonstrate wins. Incent and invite more colleagues or teams as you are ready.
• Curate a new reporting dashboard for the CLO and leadership.  
  
  Reporting is sexy and if you ask any executive whether they need more of it, the answer is always yes! But what we report on and how we measure what matters is often not well understood or agreed upon. Most colleagues I speak with grab huge lists of metrics in an attempt to cover all areas of the practice, and then spend months creating the ultimate dashboard. They quickly realize that is not the ultimate dashboard because half the data was dirty, it still doesn’t yield the right insights, or metrics 5-25 weren’t actually what mattered anyway.
  • A better way forward using agility.
    
    Rather than spending a month creating some high-fidelity draft with beautiful data visualizations, pick some very small number of key KPIs you want to report on. Share a MVP (minimally viable product) and allow the CLO or other to react to it. They’ll know what they want after they see what they don’t want. You’ll know immediately with discussion whether the reporting yields actionable insights. The earlier and more often you cycle this, the faster you will arrive at the right outcome.  

The themes should be clear: Move with pace toward “good enough,” and the faster you share early-stage drafts and work product with your customer, the faster you will reach your shared business outcome. 

The imperative has never been clearer for Legal Operations professionals to become more agile. Our profession should offer additional education and training on the “how” we do our work and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of legal ops and the businesses they serve.

Author Bio:

Kelly Mickelson is the Head of Legal Operations at Thomson Reuters.  She has 15 years of experience in technology, project management and operational roles, but learns something new every day. She is the co-chair of the ACC’s Metrics & Analytics Interest Group.  She really enjoys mentoring others and took on a new challenge last year as a facilitator for the #IamRemarkable initiative (through Google). Outside of work, she enjoys spending time with her husband and two dogs and tending to all of her gardens (when the Minneapolis/St. Paul  snow isn’t covering them).