The Top 2 Skills to Master for Legal Operations & Why

There’s a lot of skills to master for Legal Operations. I am but a young Padawan in the realm of Legal Ops, so I can only talk about the Top 2 skills that I’m currently honing to truly become a Jedi. Of Legal Ops.

These skills are not taught in law schools. I’m guessing it’s because they’re not strictly ‘legal’ stuff. I do think though that it’s a huge missed opportunity and I’m going to chitchat on WHY.

The Skill of Excel (or spreadsheets, generally)

In law school, the idea that “law is subjective” was constantly drilled into us. With that, it was quite hard for me at first to accept why “subjectivity” can be a bad thing in the business world.

When you work in a business, it all boils down to money. To be profitable, you have to do things that either gets you more money or helps you not to lose money. (In corporatespeak, maximize value or minimize loss)

So the people who want your legal services don’t want to hear that “law is subjective” all the time. They want to replicate the things or actions or formulas that would maximize value or minimize loss.

“That saves more money? OK. Do more of that.” They leave the intricacies of the law to you.

So how does Excel come into this?

Excel helped me to grasp the idea that Legal people need to show numbers. That as much as possible, the subjectivity must be boiled and reduced to objectivity. Because not ALL parts of legal services are subjective.

• How many cases has this happened at? — Need to track using Excel.
• How many documents have we sent out? — Need to track using Excel.
• Can you provide an estimate of legal costs for this new thing? Or better yet, can you make a calculator? — Need to set up the formulas on Excel and test them out.
• Is this an exceptional situation or a serious problem? — Need to track using Excel and compare the numbers.

(I have a separate post on trackers)

When you get these questions from your management, you can see that subjectivity is not useful here in any way. They will not accept “it depends” as an answer!

If you rarely get these questions, then fine, you can count manually. But if these are constant questions that you have to deal with, then Excel is your lightsaber.

Of course, there are things that can’t be reduced to numbers in Excel. And the intricacies of law need to be explained sometimes to the higher-ups.

But, as much as possible and in the parts that can be optimized, legal services need to come with numbers because that’s just how businesses roll.

The Skill of Flowcharts

So. Flowcharts. Not just boxes and arrows.

I’ve had to review a lot of SOPs in my current position and the biggest takeaway was that flowcharts are not just about the next step in the process.

You don’t put step after step after step and call it a day. There are so many things to consider that it’s really hard to make things flow.

But it is such an important skill to Legal Ops because it relates to processes and optimization (which is what Legal Ops is really about).

Some of the things to consider:

• Input: What document or information do you need for the process to work?
• Output: What do you produce as a result of the process?
• Decision: If the answer is Yes, what do you do? If No, what do you do?

(There’s a lot more but like I said — Padawan.)

When you create flowcharts, you streamline your thinking. Even the act of starting a flowchart means you have identified a legal service that you need to provide to your institution out of the many legal services that exists.

You force yourself to make things work in a way that makes sense while still accounting for so many scenarios. Not just for you, but for the people who have to work with you who may come from other disciplines or departments. They need your output, you need their input.

And flowcharts are so integral to Legal Ops that they are a prerequisite for so many things:

• Development of contract management software
• New product development
• Internal audits
• Business continuity management

Flowcharts are truly the way of the Jedi.

Legal Ops can be a massive tool of value creation for the business (or any institution that you work for). But to really wield Legal Ops, you have to go beyond the usual skillset taught in law schools. And that’s the fun part, learning new things.