Using Data to Build Your In-House Legal Department Strategy

Key takeaways:

• Establish legal operations as a dedicated business function that manages technology, processes, vendor relationships, and data analytics, enabling lawyers to focus on strategic legal counsel while transforming the department from a cost center into a measurable business partner.

• Collect legal department data continuously in real-time from the start of each quarter rather than waiting until the end, initially over-collecting across multiple workflow areas because the most valuable insights often come from unexpected data patterns.

• Present legal operations impact to leadership by selecting 2-3 key metric categories with 2-5 curated data points each, ensuring all metrics tell a cohesive story and are displayed in readable formats with context that non-legal stakeholders can easily understand.

• Use data insights to identify specific workflow bottlenecks and inefficiencies, implement targeted process improvements, and track measurable impact over subsequent quarters to demonstrate value through evidence rather than assumptions.

How often do you think about the operational side of running a legal department? Maybe when budgets come up, or when someone asks why contract reviews take so long?

Most legal professionals focus on the practice of law—the contracts, negotiations, and legal analysis that require their expertise. But behind every high-performing legal team is a robust operational foundation that makes the magic happen. That’s legal operations, and it’s transforming how legal departments work, with 64% of legal leaders planning to invest more in legal technology to keep pace.

Legal operations connects legal expertise with business efficiency. It handles the technology, processes, vendor relationships, and data analytics that enable lawyers to focus on what they do best: providing strategic legal counsel that drives business outcomes.

What is legal operations?

Legal operations is the business function that handles the administrative, strategic, and operational aspects of running an in-house legal department. Legal operations professionals manage everything except the actual practice of law—from technology implementation and vendor management to process optimization and data analysis.

Legal operations transforms how legal departments work by introducing business discipline to legal practice. Instead of operating as reactive cost centers, legal teams with strong legal operations become strategic business partners who drive measurable value.

The field emerged as companies recognized that legal teams needed dedicated operational support to scale effectively. Legal operations bridges the gap between legal expertise and business operations, enabling lawyers to focus on high-value legal work while ensuring the department runs efficiently.

Here’s where things get interesting: while other departments have long relied on data to prove their worth, legal has historically operated differently. Business runs on data, and legal operations makes that possible for legal departments. The universal language of business comprises benchmarks, KPIs, graphs, metrics, and spreadsheets. Legal, however, has historically lagged behind the numbers; in fact, research shows that less than a quarter of legal departments are considered digitally ready to leverage technology effectively. While sales, marketing, and other departments propel themselves with data and analytics, using curated and colorful reports to tell their stories, lawyers have been relegated to using words—and waffling phrases like “Well, it depends.”

That needs to change. Data is critical to agile, accurate decision-making, and building an in-house legal department strategy. To get there, you need to understand the broader landscape of legal operations and how data fits into the picture. The modern legal team can no longer afford to be left at the gate. At Ironclad, we’ve been on a year-long data journey of our own, and we’re ready to tell our story—starting with what legal operations actually means and why it matters for your department.

Why legal operations matters for modern legal departments

Legal operations has become essential because legal departments face unprecedented pressure to do more with less while proving their strategic value. This strategic importance is reflected in recent budget trends; while 96% of legal departments reported budget cuts and hiring freezes recently, 83% of legal operations professionals reported a budget increase, according to The 2025 Legal Operations Field Guide. Modern businesses move faster than ever, and legal teams without operational support become bottlenecks rather than enablers.

Legal operations addresses three critical business needs. First, it enables legal departments to scale without proportional headcount increases through process automation and technology implementation. Second, it provides the data and metrics leadership needs to understand legal’s business impact. Third, it frees lawyers from administrative work so they can focus on complex legal judgment and strategic counsel.

Companies with mature legal operations report measurable improvements in contract cycle times and cost management. For instance, after investing in their contracting process, 48% of organizations cite better contract data visibility and management as a key benefit, which improves cross-functional collaboration. Legal operations transforms the perception of legal from “department of no” to strategic business partner.

Here’s the thing: legal departments that invest in operations see real results. They close deals faster, reduce outside counsel spend, and can actually quantify their impact on the business. Without that operational foundation, you’re left guessing—and guessing doesn’t fly when the CFO asks what legal is contributing to the bottom line.

The CLOC 12 legal operations competencies

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) established 12 core competencies that define the scope of legal operations work. These competencies provide a framework for understanding what legal operations professionals do and how they add value to legal departments.

The 12 competencies cover strategic and operational areas. Strategic competencies include financial management, vendor and relationship management, and strategic planning. Operational competencies encompass technology management, process optimization, and data analytics.

Here are the complete CLOC 12 competencies:

Financial management covers budgeting, cost tracking, and demonstrating ROI for legal investments. Vendor and relationship management handles selecting, managing, and optimizing relationships with outside counsel and legal service providers.

Strategic planning focuses on developing legal department strategy and aligning legal goals with business objectives. Knowledge management captures, organizes, and shares institutional knowledge across the legal team.

Technology management encompasses selecting, implementing, and optimizing legal technology solutions. This is a critical area of focus, as over half of legal leaders say that identifying opportunities for using GenAI applications is a top priority. It’s a worthwhile pursuit, considering 93% of legal professionals agree that using AI has improved how they work, according to The State of AI in Legal 2025 Report. Data and analytics center on collecting, analyzing, and reporting on legal department performance metrics.

Project management applies structured methodologies to legal initiatives and implementations. Business partnering builds effective collaboration with other departments and stakeholders.

People and culture development includes change management, training, and fostering collaboration within legal teams. Communications handles internal and external messaging about legal department value and activities.

Corporate governance addresses compliance, risk management, and regulatory requirements. Process design and management maps, optimizes, and standardizes legal workflows.

These competencies work together to create comprehensive operational support for legal departments. Most legal operations professionals specialize in several competencies rather than mastering all 12.

How legal operations transforms legal departments

Legal operations fundamentally changes how legal departments operate and how they’re perceived within organizations. The transformation happens across three key dimensions: operational efficiency, strategic positioning, and business partnership.

Operational efficiency improves through process standardization and technology implementation. Legal operations professionals identify repetitive tasks, implement automation solutions, and create workflows that reduce manual effort. This allows legal teams to handle increased workloads without proportional staff increases.

Strategic positioning shifts as legal departments gain visibility into their performance and impact. Legal operations provides the metrics and reporting that demonstrate legal’s contribution to business outcomes. Instead of being viewed as cost centers, legal teams become strategic partners with measurable value.

Business partnership strengthens through improved collaboration and service delivery. Legal operations creates systems that make it easier for other departments to work with legal, reducing friction and improving relationships across the organization.

The result is a legal department that operates more like other business functions—with clear metrics, efficient processes, and strategic focus. Legal teams with strong legal operations support report higher job satisfaction, better business relationships, and greater recognition for their contributions.

What does this mean for you? It means your legal team stops being the department that slows deals down and starts being the one that helps close them. It means having answers when leadership asks about contract volume, turnaround times, or risk exposure. And it means building a foundation that scales with your company instead of breaking under pressure.

Building your legal operations strategy with data

Data collection forms the foundation of effective legal operations. Without reliable data, you can’t measure performance, identify improvement opportunities, or demonstrate value to leadership. Building a data-driven legal operations program requires systematic collection, analysis, and reporting.

Here’s how this plays out in practice. In 2019, Ironclad Legal went through a transition. Our team grew from a department of one—our GC Chris Young—to a team of three. As we drafted our team plans and began charting our course for the year ahead, we faced a key question: what type of legal department did we want to be?

We wanted to be creative.

We wanted to be innovative and redefine the traditional role of in-house legal.

We wanted to play a key role in shaping company initiatives and be active thinkers instead of reactive ones.

We wanted to invest in data and build our department on the principle of being data-driven.

Unsure where to start, we decided to track as much data as possible over the coming quarter. Then we asked, “OK, what is interesting here? Which data points should we add next quarter? What story does this data tell?”

This exercise led to a Legal Team Quarterly Data Report and corresponding company-wide presentation of our findings: our inaugural Quarterly Legal Review, our take on a QBR. It marked our team’s debut as a data-driven department and set the tone for subsequent reports, reviews, presentations, and a whole lot of process improvements and changes—data-driven wins, including:

• Tracking quarterly deal patterns to implement a team SLA and better allocate resources during high-deal-volume times where team resources are required for contract negotiation.
• Aggregating year-over-year contract volume data to create a data-backed headcount expansion case.
• Collecting contract redlining information to inform discussions on whether to revise our sales papers to reduce deal friction.
• Using contracting data to actively participate in real-time sales forecasting, placing the legal team on the front line of deals closing and decision making.

We learned much over the past year, earning our stripes through trial and error. The biggest takeaway? Arming the modern legal team with data to operate as an efficient business unit isn’t as scary as it seems.

The barrier to entry for basic data collection and analytics is actually quite low: a computer, a plan, and team buy-in. Based on our experience transforming Ironclad’s legal team into a data-driven operation, here are proven strategies for building that foundation.

Collect data in real-time, early and often

Waiting until the end of the quarter (or any period) to begin collecting data will overwhelm you. Worse, it will be too late to pivot or tweak your collection system. Result? A pile of work, not much time, and messy data. It’s better to continuously collect data and ensure a full, robust data pipeline for analysis at quarter end.

Don’t be afraid to cast a wide data net

At the beginning of your data journey, over-collect rather than focus too narrowly on validating only assumptions. A wealth of data will paint a picture. If your assumptions are correct, fantastic. If not, that’s even more valuable. You don’t always know which data ends up telling an interesting story—until you have it laid out in front of you.

Tip: It’s wiser to over-collect data over time versus under-collecting, which may come back to haunt you when you discover you’re missing key points to tell your story.

Set up systems that enable data collection

While we’re confident in Ironclad, any contract management system can make collecting contract and process data easier. With built-in data collection mechanisms, digital contracting helps legal teams to produce comprehensive contracting reports.

A legal intake system is another effective way to capture data, with less manual effort and higher data quality.

Tip: The sooner you implement these systems and collection methods—even from existing in-house systems—the sooner you build your data pipeline. And that story.

Measuring and communicating legal operations impact

Legal operations success depends on your ability to measure and communicate impact effectively, which is why industry reports offer key benchmarks for assessing performance in critical areas. The principle “if you’re not measured, you’re not valued” applies directly to legal operations—you need concrete data to demonstrate how operational improvements drive business value.

Once you’ve built that data pipeline and collected meaningful information, the next step is turning those insights into a story that resonates with leadership. With your data pipeline full, it’s time to aggregate, analyze, and share your story. Adhering to the three rules above, you should be data rich, even if that means multiple spreadsheets intelligible only to you. The power of data is being able to share it with others to tell your story.

Here are my tried and true guidelines:

Choose your metrics wisely

At the end of a full quarter of data collection, you’ll have far more metrics than your colleagues have time (or interest) to review. Tell a powerful and compelling story by presenting your findings strategically. Identify two to three big picture categories—e.g., legal intake, sales workflows, departmental CLM usage—then fill out the categories with two to five curated metrics.

Tip: Make sure all metrics connect to your story cohesively.

Create a readable format for those not entrenched in your data

To get colleagues (and time-crunched senior leadership) to pay attention to your findings or report, simplify. Select a readable length, provide context and definitions, and supplement metrics with powerful, enlightening graphs. Ask yourself, “Will these terms and metrics make sense to someone who started working at this company two weeks ago?”

Share the report

Inform your internal partners about your team’s activity (and its importance to the business). Two good approaches: book time during an all-hands meeting to share your findings and showcase your department’s data-driven mission; distribute your report as a quarterly legal review, setting the expectation it’s a recurring initiative.

Create a template

After publishing your initial report, create a template from it. Strip the data but keep the structure for next quarter, so you don’t have to start from scratch. This makes the process faster and creates a consistent report, ready for company-wide distribution.

Using data insights to drive process improvements

Improving processes is one of the most impactful areas of legal operations work, as poor processes can lead to significant losses—one study found an average value erosion of 9.2% of contract value. Data reveals bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and opportunities for improvement that aren’t visible through casual observation. Legal operations professionals use this intelligence to redesign workflows, implement automation, and eliminate waste. Reducing manual intervention is particularly important for risk mitigation, as 92% of contract management errors are human errors, according to The 2025 Legal Operations Field Guide.

After you’ve established your reporting rhythm and leadership sees the value in your data storytelling, it’s time for the real payoff. You have the data, you’ve told the story—now what? Use your findings to unearth trends and make changes. What areas of improvement has data illuminated? Is your department providing more resources to assist with department X over department Y? Is one workflow requiring a disproportionate amount of time and team energy?

Let data provide the intelligence your team needs to make data-driven decisions and build an in-house legal department strategy. With insights, implement changes and track the impact over the next quarter. Empower your team to move beyond thinking that a process change is working to accurately measuring and showing improvement.

Building a data-driven legal operations foundation

Data-driven legal operations represents the future of high-performing legal departments. By implementing systematic data collection, analysis, and reporting, legal operations professionals transform legal from a reactive cost center into a proactive business partner.

The journey requires commitment to measurement, willingness to experiment, and focus on continuous improvement. Legal operations professionals who master data-driven decision making position their departments for sustained success and recognition.

Our ultimate goal is arming legal with the same resources and advantages other departments enjoy. And why not? As purveyors of heretos, thereins, and shalls, legal deserves to operate with the same data-driven approach as the rest of the business.

The data-driven legal department is the department of the future. The department that instead of saying, “Well, it depends,” confidently responds, “Well, the data shows.”

Modern legal operations platforms make this transformation achievable for teams of any size. The right technology provides automated data collection, intuitive reporting, and integration capabilities that eliminate manual work while improving accuracy.

Ready to build your data-driven legal operations foundation? Request a demo today to see how Ironclad’s platform supports comprehensive legal operations programs with built-in analytics, workflow automation, and reporting capabilities that prove legal’s strategic value.

Frequently asked questions about legal operations

What does someone in legal operations do?

Legal operations professionals serve as the business backbone of legal departments, managing technology, processes, vendor relationships, and data analytics while enabling lawyers to focus on legal work. They handle everything from managing the budget and technology to improving workflows and tracking metrics. Their main job is to make sure the legal department runs efficiently so attorneys can focus on providing legal advice rather than administrative tasks.

How do you get started in legal operations?

Legal operations careers come from diverse backgrounds including law, business operations, project management, and technology. Many professionals transition from paralegal roles, corporate functions, or consulting into legal operations positions. There’s no single path. Some people start as paralegals or lawyers and develop a passion for the business and tech side of things. Others transition from roles in finance, project management, or IT within the same company. The key is having a knack for process, an interest in technology, and a desire to make things work better.

What skills are most important for legal operations?

Successful legal operations professionals combine analytical thinking, project management skills, technology aptitude, and strong communication abilities with understanding of legal department needs and business operations. The most valuable legal ops professionals can bridge the gap between legal expertise and business operations, translating complex legal requirements into efficient workflows and measurable outcomes.

How do you measure legal operations success?

Legal operations success is measured through operational metrics like contract cycle time reduction, cost savings, process efficiency improvements, and qualitative measures like stakeholder satisfaction and legal team productivity. The key is tracking metrics that matter to business leadership—time to close deals, outside counsel spend, contract volume handled per attorney, and process automation rates.

What’s the difference between legal operations and legal practice?

Legal operations handles the business aspects of running a legal department while legal practice involves providing legal advice, conducting legal analysis, and making legal judgments that require bar admission and legal expertise. Legal ops focuses on the how—making the department run efficiently—while legal practice focuses on the what—the actual legal work and counsel that lawyers provide.

---

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.