7 Tips for Leveling Up Your Legal Operations

Key takeaways:

• Establish a contract approval policy with clear risk categories (Low, Medium, High) based on factors like vendor type, contract value, and high-risk provisions to empower business teams to handle routine contracts independently while legal focuses on complex agreements.

• Implement standardized file naming conventions and folder structures that include agreement type, company entity, counterparty name, and date to reduce document search time from minutes to seconds.

• Adopt cloud storage platforms to enable automatic version control, audit trails, and centralized collaboration, eliminating version confusion and aligning with the 68% of law firms that have already transitioned to cloud-first strategies.

• Track key efficiency metrics such as contract turnaround time and self-service percentage to identify bottlenecks, measure improvement, and demonstrate strategic value to leadership.

Legal operations efficiency is the strategic optimization of processes, technology, and resources within legal departments to reduce cycle times and eliminate bottlenecks. The goal is to position legal teams as business enablers rather than cost centers, yet research shows there’s significant room for improvement, with one survey finding that only 54% of respondents believe their department operates efficiently. Legal operations efficiency transforms how legal teams work by automating repetitive tasks, standardizing workflows, and creating measurable value for the organization.

The Ironclad team has learned from legal operations professionals across organizations of all sizes. While some insights are strategic, the most impactful changes often start with simple, tactical improvements. Here are seven practical tips you can use today to make your legal operations more efficient.

How to improve legal operations efficiency

Let’s be direct. Everyone talks about “legal ops efficiency,” but what does it actually mean for your team? It’s not about working longer hours or just buying another piece of software. It’s about making practical changes to your day-to-day processes so you can focus on high-value work. This is especially critical when, according to the Harvard Business Review, knowledge workers spend an average of 41% of their time on non-strategic, administrative tasks. The tips below are the kinds of things that seem small on paper but compound over time. Implement a few of them, and you’ll wonder how you ever operated without them.

Think through your file names and folder conventions

Here’s something that sounds boring but will save you hours every week: getting your file organization right from the start. When someone on your team needs to find a contract, they shouldn’t have to dig through folders with names like “Contracts_Final_v2_ACTUAL_FINAL” or spend ten minutes trying to remember if it’s filed under the vendor name or the agreement type.

Good file organization cuts document search time from minutes to seconds, a crucial benefit when Gartner found that 47% of digital workers struggle to find information needed to do their jobs. But the key is thinking about who will need these files later and how they’ll actually look for them.

Contract organization depends on your business structure and user needs. Consider two key factors when designing your system:

• Who will need to access these documents in the future

• How they are most likely to search for them

Here are some common examples you could copy or adapt for your team:

Organizing by agreement type, then counterparty name, then agreement status:

[Agreement Type] / [Counterparty Name] / Drafts / [Your file goes here] [Agreement Type] / [Counterparty Name] / Signed / [Your file goes here]

Advantages:

• Quickly see all agreements of a certain type.

• Especially useful for team leads, such as the VP of sales, who want one place where they can find all contracts relevant to their department.

• The beauty of this approach is that, using modern cloud storage solutions (see tip #5, below) you can grant permissions to teams for the folder containing only the agreement type that is relevant to them. For example, your head of sales may have access to the Sales Agreements folder, but not to the Employment Agreements folder.

Organizing by counterparty name, then agreement type, then agreement status:

[Counterparty Name] / [Agreement Type] / Drafts / [Your file goes here][Counterparty Name] / [Agreement Type] / Signed / [Your file goes here]

Advantages:

• See all the contracts associated with a particular party. Especially useful if your business is based on a small number of deep partnerships, involving a variety of agreements.

Other things to consider:

• If you run an international business, consider adding parent folders for each region (e.g., North America, EMEA, APAC, etc.).

• If you have multiple legal entities, you may find it helpful to add parent folders for each entity or to include the entity name as a new sub-folder in one of the structures listed above. E.g., [Agreement Type] / [Counterparty Name] / [Your Company Entity] / Signed / [Your file goes here]

File Names: The exact format of your file names is not especially important. What is important is that it includes the critical identifying information, which will help you and other team members easily search for and find them later. The critical information is:

• Agreement type

• Your company entity (even if you do not yet have multiple entities, include this now to prepare for a future where your company creates new entities. Your future self will thank you!)

• Counterparty name

• Agreement date

Here’s an example file name convention you could adopt:

[Agreement Type] between [Counterparty Name] and [Your Company Entity] ([Agreement Date]).pdf

E.g., NDA between Google Inc. and Acme, Inc. (December 12, 2018)

Plan ahead

Here’s a simple change that eliminates one of those annoying back-and-forth emails during contract negotiations. Instead of having to coordinate on what the effective date should be—and then remember to update it every time someone signs—just set it to automatically be the date when the last person signs.

This removes the guesswork and saves time for everyone involved. Your business counterparts can focus on the actual terms instead of administrative date management, and you don’t have to track down signatures to confirm when something actually went into effect.

Here’s an example of a provision you can include in your templates to achieve this:

This Agreement is effective as of the date the last party signs.

Be intentional about signature order

While we’re talking about signatures, here’s another small change that prevents wasted effort: make sure your company signs last. It sounds simple, but it gives you control over when the contract actually becomes effective and ensures you’re not spending time on agreements that the other party might still be negotiating internally.

Most e-signature tools let you set up sequential signing workflows where you control the order. When the counterparty signs first, you know they’ve committed to the terms before your team invests time in final processing.

Documentation on setting up sequential signers is available for all the modern e-signature tools.

Think about how you refer to your contracts

When you need to reference an existing contract in a new agreement—like incorporating Master Agreement terms into an Order Form—you can make everyone’s life easier by using the date instead of creating a separate contract numbering system.

Think about it: every contract already has a date, so you don’t need to create, track, and maintain a separate numbering system. This is especially helpful when you’re dealing with multiple agreements between the same parties.

In anticipation of this, it’s common for contract templates to include a field for entering a unique number which can be used to identify the contract in future. Instead of adding a field to capture a unique contract number, it’s easier for everyone involved to simply refer to prior agreements using their agreement date. It should look something like:

“This Agreement is governed by, and incorporated into, the [OTHER AGREEMENT NAME] effective as of [DATE].”

Manage your MSAs online

If you find yourself attaching the same Master Service Agreement terms to every Order Form and Statement of Work, there’s a smarter approach: put those terms online and just reference the URL in your contracts.

This approach centralizes your master terms in one place that you can update as needed, and it keeps your Order Forms short and focused on the specifics of each deal. Instead of negotiating the same standard terms over and over, you establish an expectation that those terms are set.

For example, you may upload your Master Agreement terms as a PDF in your cloud storage folder, with Read-only access to those it’s shared with. Then include language in your contracts such as:

This Agreement is governed by the terms of the Master Agreement available at [INSERT URL].

It’s amazing how referring to terms stored online versus in a Microsoft Word document can reduce the number of negotiated agreements (by setting the expectation that standard terms won’t be modified) and simplify templates for your business teams.

Of course, this is not appropriate for every business—especially for highly negotiated agreements, this may not make sense. But if fewer than 50% of agreements of a certain type are negotiated by your customers or partners, this may be worth an experiment.

Use cloud storage

If you’re still emailing contract drafts back and forth or storing everything locally, you’re creating unnecessary work and falling behind industry trends. A recent study found that 68% of law firms have already moved to the cloud, reflecting a significant shift toward cloud-first strategies. This adoption of modern technology drives tangible results; for instance, The State of AI in Legal 2025 Report found that 72% of legal professionals report AI tools have improved their work speed. Cloud storage platforms like Dropbox, Box, and Google Drive do more than just store files—they automatically track who accessed what and when, keep version history, and let multiple people collaborate without the usual “which version is final?” confusion.

These platforms offer several efficiency benefits beyond basic file sharing:

• Automatic version control prevents confusion over document status

• Built-in audit trails track who accessed or modified files

• Centralized storage eliminates time spent searching multiple locations

Because it’s easy to link to other documents within these platforms, you can also use these systems to create a central place for legal team guides, policies, and playbooks, which link directly to the latest versions of the templates. This is a quick and easy option for legal ops managers in companies that do not already have a central, shared internal wiki for these kinds of resources.

Set a contract approvals policy

Here’s where you can make a significant impact on efficiency: create clear guidelines about when contracts actually need legal review. The goal isn’t to eliminate risk entirely—it’s to focus your team’s time on the agreements that actually require legal expertise while letting business teams handle the routine stuff independently.

When you establish clear criteria for when legal gets involved, deals move faster and your team can focus on complex, high-risk agreements that genuinely need your attention. But this only works if your business teams have the tools and templates to handle standard contracts correctly.

To do this, you’ll want to have implemented many of the tips above, to ensure that preparing standard contracts based on the latest templates is as easy as possible for your business people. This will reduce the risk of errors when filling out templates or using outdated agreements—a critical step given that 92% of errors in contract management are human errors, according to The 2025 Legal Operations Field Guide.

The best legal approval policies strike a balance between risk management and simplicity, which is critical since suboptimal contract management can erode the value of sourcing by 9 percent annually, according to McKinsey. After all, a fine-tuned policy is no use if it’s too complex for business people to apply correctly.

Some of the best policies I’ve seen empower business people to self-assess the risk of their contract based on clear criteria, and proactively escalate the contract to internal reviewers based on its risk category.

Pro-tip: Be sure to share these policy documents in a central place, such as a Google Doc. This will make it easy to update and re-share as you review and update the policy from time to time. For example, you might establish three risk categories for Vendor Agreements: Low Risk, Medium Risk and High Risk and create policies for each:

• Low Risk contracts do not require prior-approval.

• Medium Risk contracts require Legal approval–but this may be limited to a quick, cursory overview. So the business person can expect faster turnaround times.

• High Risk contracts require Legal approval–and business people should expect that the review and negotiation of these agreements may be a protracted process.

Factors typically include:

Vendor Type. Add to the below categories as necessary, and divide them into Low, Medium, and High risk categories depending on your team’s risk tolerance:

• Software

• IT Hardware

• Marketing & Advertising

• Consulting & Professional Services

• Events

• Real Estate

• People & Payroll

• Insurance

• Travel

• Office Management

Total Contract Value (e.g., $0-$10,000, $10,000-$50,000, $50,000-$200,000, $200,000+)

Presence of certain high risk provisions, explained in clear English. For example:

• Does the contract permit access to our confidential information? (for example, source code, financial data, pre-release product information, business plans, etc.)

• Does the contract permit access to personal information?

• Does the vendor have the right to terminate the contract at their convenience?

• Is there a penalty fee for contract termination?

It will be tempting to list out every possible non-standard clause, but resist the urge! The goal here isn’t to eliminate risk entirely, but to reduce it to an acceptable level for your business. It’s critical to strike the right balance between risk management and ease of use.

Worried your business people may not understand terms like “personal information” or “termination for convenience”?

Creating short explainer documents and sharing them in a central place, such as a Google Doc (see tip #6) can be a great way to empower your business people to take greater responsibility, and establish your legal team as a source of valuable support and expertise, rather than being seen as a blocker on business deals.

How to measure the efficiency of your legal operations

Here’s the thing: you can’t improve what you don’t measure. If you want to prove that your changes are working—and get buy-in for more resources down the line—you need to track the right data. Don’t overcomplicate it. Start with a few key metrics that actually tell you something useful.

How long does it take to get a standard contract, like an NDA, from request to signature? That’s your contract turnaround time, and it’s one of the clearest indicators of how efficiently your processes are running. If that number is measured in days when it should be measured in hours, you’ve found a bottleneck worth fixing.

What percentage of contracts are your business teams handling themselves with templates versus what needs to come to legal for a full review? Tracking this tells you whether your self-service tools are actually working. The higher that self-service number, the more time your legal team has for the complex, high-stakes work that actually requires their expertise.

These numbers tell a clear story about where your bottlenecks are and how the improvements you’re making are having a real impact on the business. In fact, organizations using CLM see an average 55% improvement across value metrics, according to The 2025 Contracting Benchmark Report. When you can walk into a meeting with leadership and show that contract turnaround dropped from five days to one, you’re not just reporting on legal operations—you’re demonstrating strategic value.

Building a foundation for sustained legal operations efficiency

Getting more efficient isn’t a one-time project. It’s about building a new way of working that compounds over time. By implementing the practical tips we’ve covered—from file naming conventions to approval policies—you’re not just saving a few hours here and there. You’re creating a foundation where the legal team can scale with the business, reduce risk, and help grow revenue.

The legal transformation from a source of expenses to a source of growth doesn’t happen overnight. But every small improvement builds on the last. Start with the tips that address your biggest pain points, measure the impact, and use those wins to build momentum for larger changes.

If you’re ready to see how the right platform can make this a reality for your team, it might be time to request a demo today.

Frequently asked questions about legal operations efficiency

What is the goal of legal operations?

The main goal is to make the legal department run like a business. It’s about handling all the non-legal work—like budget, technology, and process management—so lawyers can focus on practicing law. Ultimately, it helps the legal team be more strategic and move at the speed of the company.

What are the key areas of legal operations?

It covers a lot of ground, but the big ones are usually technology management (like implementing a CLM), financial management and budgeting for the department, vendor and outside counsel management, data analytics to track performance, and process improvement to make workflows smoother.

How does legal operations drive business efficiency?

By simplifying processes like contract review, legal ops reduces bottlenecks. This means sales deals close faster, procurement gets vendors onboarded quicker, and the whole business moves with less friction. It also improves compliance and reduces risk, which saves the company money and headaches down the line.

---

Ironclad is not a law firm, and this post does not constitute or contain legal advice. To evaluate the accuracy, sufficiency, or reliability of the ideas and guidance reflected here, or the applicability of these materials to your business, you should consult with a licensed attorney. Use of and access to any of the resources contained within Ironclad’s site do not create an attorney-client relationship between the user and Ironclad.