Why ‘Legal Operations Specialist’?

Legal operations, or even my career, wasn’t something I contemplated seriously until early 2018.

Pre-2018, I was content to put my finger on the biometric fingerprint reader at 9 am and 6 pm of every day and never had a stray thought about bringing work home.

Starting 2018, I stepped into a nightmare of overdrawn meetings, rushed deadlines and public shamings.

How to do work fast and accurate?

I had to produce accurate results in a short amount of time. How?

The answer was simple: Be organized.

But that was easier said than done when you’re in an industry that’s documentation-heavy. Especially when your company hasn’t fully embraced digitalization.

Also, that’s easier said than done when your work involves other departments.

All the while, the management was asking, “WHAT’S THE PROGRESS?” on every item on the list. (They say “Pressure makes diamonds”, but I’m not sure. All it does is make my stomach extra sensitive.)

So in the interest of saving my own sanity (and stomach), I started creating these things to be organized:

• Checklists. Helps me identify what I need to get the job done. Prevents oversights. Can be shared with other departments especially when they’re the ones supplying the information.
• Flowcharts. Helps me get the overview of the processes. Super useful to help other departments (and myself) understand what Legal does. Frankly, I can’t live without flowcharts (so I got myself a subscription to LucidChart).
• Trackers. Basically, Excel spreadsheets maintained by everyone in Legal on progress of work. A must to track who does what and the key to my current obsession: DATA.
• Guidelines and policies. A touch more difficult to draft as they require intense thinking and assent by everyone in Legal. But supremely important when there’s more than one way or standard of doing things.
• Submission forms. Memos are good but for information and documents that other departments have to send to Legal, this is the current Gold standard. Ensures that Legal receives the necessities from the very first step.
• Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Different from the flowcharts in the sense that they’re official, includes SLAs and becomes the baseline for when Legal is being audited.

What I realized is that being organized transcends beyond creating neat folders and naming files properly. It’s all about creating tools and resources and maintaining a well-functioning system.

Legal Ops: My calling?

I know that we don’t always get to do what we love. And I’ve never expected to have the perfect career.

But unexpectedly, I feel fulfilled. I look forward to the hours I could spare designing the tools and resources to help make Legal work smoother. It’s fun.

Above and beyond the act of creating the tools and resources, the fun is in taking a problem (“I can’t find information on X document and it delays process Y.”) and solving it.

But is that all that there is to Legal Operations? Definitely not. According to the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), there are 12 core competencies that every Legal department has to focus on to operate effectively and efficiently:

1. Litigation Support & IP Management
2. Knowledge Management
3. Information Governance & Record Management
4. Strategic Planning
5. Financial Management
6. Vendor Management
7. Cross-Functional Alignment
8. Service Delivery & Alternative Support Models
9. Organizational Design, Support & Management
10. Technology & Process Support
11. Communication
12. Data Analytics

(There’s plenty of terms here that I don’t claim to be 100% familiar with, but essentially these are the things that I’m really interested in.)

The Legal Operations Specialist, maximized to their fullest potential, will ensure that their colleagues in the Legal department are able to do legal work unimpeded and uninterrupted. Their colleagues will be free to do the lawyering.

Does that mean that the Legal Operations Specialist won’t do any legal work? Ideally, they won’t, directly. For example, they might not review contracts, but they work with their colleagues to develop contract review guidelines or develop a contract management system.

Most articles I’ve found state that people from any discipline can be a Legal Operations Specialist. While I’m sure that may be true, I believe that someone with a law degree will be particularly well-adjusted to this role as they’re more familiar with the legal processes.

Getting a Legal Operations job in Malaysia

A quick search on Jobstreet and Linkedin show that there is no such role advertised.

I’m not surprised. Looking at the tasks that a Legal Operations Specialist might undertake, you can see that some of them usually form part of the job description of more general roles, i.e. Legal Executive or Legal Counsel.

But this doesn’t deter me from my quest to become a Legal Operations Specialist. There may be no open roles yet, but the management of any company may be convinced of the need for one. Depending on the circumstances, of course.

As of now, I’m content to do 80% direct legal work and 20% legal operations work. My goal for 2020 is to gradually increase legal operations work to 40% and have it as part of my official KPI.

And who knows? Maybe the management of my current company will see the need for the role during my own time. And I’ll have just the person for the job…