What Is Legal Operations?

Key takeaways:

• Implement legal operations to handle all administrative and business management tasks (budgeting, vendor management, technology, data analytics, process improvement) so attorneys can focus exclusively on high-value legal work rather than paperwork and operational duties.
• Start your legal operations journey by identifying your department’s biggest pain point and focusing on one high-volume, low-complexity process like standard NDAs rather than attempting to address all 12 CLOC Core 12 competencies simultaneously.
• Adopt digital contract lifecycle management software as your first technology investment to automate repetitive contract workflows, enable business self-service, and gain visibility into contract data that demonstrates legal’s strategic value to the organization.
• Leverage data analytics and performance metrics to transform legal from a perceived cost center into a strategic business partner by quantifying value delivered, such as contract turnaround time reductions, cost savings from vendor optimization, and risks mitigated.

Legal operations is the function that handles the business and administrative aspects of an in-house legal department’s work—everything except the actual practice of law. Legal ops professionals improve how work gets done, manage technology, and turn legal teams into strategic business partners, a trend reflected in predictions that legal technology spending will increase to about 12% of in-house budgets by 2025.

Modern businesses face increasingly complex legal challenges. Most major enterprises need in-house legal teams, but they struggle to balance flexibility with cost management.

Legal operations solves this challenge. A strong legal ops strategy helps your legal department handle more work in less time while cutting unnecessary spending.

This guide explains what legal operations is, what legal ops teams do, and how to build a successful strategy that helps your legal team demonstrate its value and contribute directly to business growth.

Defining legal operations

Legal operations is the function responsible for all administrative and management tasks within a legal department that aren’t directly related to practicing law.

Legal ops encompasses several key areas:

• Budgeting and cost management
• Productivity tracking and optimization
• Vendor and outside counsel management
• Data analytics and reporting
• Information technology and legal tech implementation
• Process improvement and workflow design

Because legal operations isn’t focused on the law, legal ops tends to be closer to the rest of the enterprise. You might describe legal ops as a liaison, or go-between, capable of communicating with the legal department and the other departments in your business. Legal ops speaks the same language as both departments.

If you’ve ever watched your sales team try to communicate with legal, then you’re well aware that the two departments don’t really speak the same language. Legal ops can act as a translator, facilitating clearer communication between the departments. In fact, a Gartner survey found that in businesses with a legal operations manager, that role is often served by a non-lawyer, a trend Gartner predicts will see legal departments replace 20% of generalist lawyers with nonlawyer staff.

What does legal operations do?

Legal operations professionals manage and improve legal departments to help them work more strategically. The role varies by organization but focuses on enabling legal teams to work more strategically.

The Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC) defines legal operations as “a set of business processes, activities, and the professionals that enable legal departments to serve their clients more effectively by applying business and technical practices to the delivery of legal services.”

Legal ops capabilities help organizations:

• Manage risks more effectively, a crucial capability when 79% of in-house legal leaders are concerned about risks stemming from ever-changing regulatory, policy, and business updates, according to The 2025 Legal Operations Field Guide
• Monitor compliance requirements
• Implement the right technological tools
• Deliver more value to the enterprise

Typically, an in-house legal team may consist of one or more senior counsel and commercial counsel reporting to a general counsel or VP of legal, augmented by a legal operations head, specialist, or team.

Beyond core responsibilities like vendor management, internal staffing, and departmental budgeting—which CLOC identifies as part of their Core 12 framework—legal ops teams also handle critical business processes like contract management and business intelligence. This includes overseeing the creation, management, and storage of legal contracts such as non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), master service agreements (MSAs), sales contracts, and business agreements. They also enable self-service contracting for business users across departments like sales, finance, marketing, and operations.

At a high level, legal ops is often charged with projects like:

• Analyzing the legal department’s performance and working to optimize it, cutting out unnecessary spending
• Expanding the use of technology to meet the ongoing needs of legal and other departments
• Building and using metrics to improve legal decision making
• Improving internal communication, both within the legal department and throughout the business
• Clarifying the legal department’s role to other departments within the enterprise

The CLOC Core 12: essential legal operations competencies

To understand what legal ops actually does day-to-day, it helps to look at the framework created by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), which has become the industry standard. They call it the “Core 12,” and it’s a pretty solid map of the territory. Think of it less as a rigid checklist and more as a guide to the different hats a legal ops pro wears.

Here’s a quick, no-fluff breakdown of what those 12 areas cover:

• Business intelligence: This is about using data to make smarter decisions. Instead of guessing, you’re tracking metrics on things like contract turnaround time or legal spend to show what’s working and what’s not.
• Financial management: Managing the legal department’s budget, forecasting costs, and handling billing from outside law firms. It’s about making sure the department runs like a business, not a money pit.
• Firm and vendor management: This involves selecting, managing, and evaluating outside counsel and other vendors. The goal is to get the best value and performance for the money you’re spending.
• Information governance: This is about managing the company’s information securely and efficiently. Think records retention policies and making sure sensitive data is handled correctly.
• Knowledge management: Creating systems so that the team’s collective knowledge doesn’t just live in people’s heads or get lost in email chains. It’s about building a library of templates, playbooks, and past work that everyone can use.
• Organization optimization and health: This focuses on the structure of the legal team itself—defining roles, creating career paths, and making sure the team is set up to work effectively.
• Practice operations: This is the nitty-gritty of how the legal work gets done. It’s about streamlining the processes for things like contract review or litigation support so lawyers can focus on being lawyers.
• Project and program management: Applying project management discipline to legal initiatives, whether it’s implementing a new technology or handling a major piece of litigation.
• Service delivery models: Figuring out the most efficient way to get legal work done, whether that’s handling it in-house, sending it to a law firm, or using an alternative legal service provider.
• Strategic planning: Working with the General Counsel to set long-term goals for the legal department that align with the overall business strategy.
• Technology: This is a big one. It’s about choosing, implementing, and managing the tech stack for the legal team, from CLM systems to e-billing tools.
• Training and development: Making sure the legal team has the skills and training they need to stay current and effective, both in legal expertise and in using new tools and processes.

You don’t have to tackle all 12 at once. Most teams start with the biggest pain points—usually financial management, technology, and practice operations—and build from there.

Why legal operations matters for modern businesses

So, why is everyone suddenly talking about legal ops? It’s because the speed of business has increased, and the old way of running a legal department can’t keep up. Legal teams are getting buried in low-value, repetitive work, and they’re seen as a bottleneck instead of a strategic partner.

This is where legal operations comes in. It’s not just about making the legal team more efficient; it’s about fundamentally changing its role in the business. When you get legal ops right, you change the department’s role from a source of expenses to a source of strategic growth.

Here’s what that actually looks like:

• It lets lawyers be lawyers. By taking over the business side of things—the budgeting, the tech management, the process optimization—legal ops frees up attorneys to focus on the high-value legal work they were actually hired to do.
• It aligns legal with the business. Legal ops professionals speak the language of business. They use data and metrics to track performance and demonstrate value, which helps the rest of the company understand what legal is doing and why it matters.
• By managing vendors more effectively, optimizing processes, and using technology to automate tasks, legal ops can directly reduce the company’s legal spend. You’re not just cutting costs; you’re getting more value out of every dollar the company spends on legal.
• It makes the business faster. When legal is a black box where contracts go to die, deals slow down and frustration builds. A good legal ops function streamlines workflows, like contracting, so the business can move faster without taking on unnecessary risk.

Ultimately, legal operations is about running the legal department like a business. It’s the function that ensures the legal team has the right people, processes, and technology to support a fast-growing company. Without it, legal teams are stuck in a reactive mode, constantly fighting fires instead of helping to build a more resilient and successful business.

What challenges do legal ops teams face?

The in-house legal industry is facing a major shift. If legal teams do not adopt new ways of handling business requests, they will find themselves unable to keep up with the accelerating pace and complexity of the rest of the business, a significant concern given that 83% of legal departments expect demand for their services to increase.

Most legal teams have realized that departmental responsibilities like financial management, technology support, analytics, and record management require skill sets that attorneys may not have. That’s why they’ve turned to legal operations specialists, who have the knowledge and expertise needed to apply best practices to these problems.

Legal teams face four key operational challenges:

Slow turnaround times and inefficiency: Without technology to automate contract intake, approval, and review processes, legal teams can’t prioritize requests effectively. Stakeholders get frustrated waiting for responses, making legal appear as a business bottleneck, which helps explain why chief legal officers now rank finding ways to work more efficiently as their top strategic initiative.

Perception as a cost center: Legal teams struggle to quantify their value without access to contract intelligence and performance data. They can’t demonstrate risks mitigated or time saved, making it difficult to justify investments in the legal department.

Remote collaboration difficulties: Legal teams need technology that enables seamless collaboration with business partners across departments. Without proper tools, they can’t maintain contractual obligations or keep pace with business needs.

Resource constraints: Stagnant budgets combined with increasing workloads force legal teams to “do more with less.” When legal professionals spend time on low-risk tasks, it slows the entire company and increases exposure to compliance risks.

Legal teams that fail to modernize their contracting may spend unnecessary weeks or months on manual tasks that more efficient teams spend only hours or days on—a risky proposition considering 92% of contract management errors are human errors, as noted in the guide.

Faced with all this, general counsel (GCs) at companies of all sizes are asking what are, essentially, legal operations questions. How can the legal team increase its output without increasing its budget? What’s the best use of a lawyer’s time? How efficient is my legal team relative to legal teams at other companies? How much does it cost to process a typical contract?

These challenges highlight why many legal ops teams focus heavily on modernizing contract processes as their first priority. Contract management touches nearly every aspect of the Core 12 competencies—from financial management and technology implementation to process optimization and business intelligence.

How digital contracting carves a path to success for in-house legal operations

Digital contracting through contract lifecycle management software automates contract processes and workflows for high-volume agreements like NDAs. This technology replaces outdated manual processes with efficient, modern workflows.

Digital contracting helps legal teams:

Work more strategically: Legal professionals can prioritize incoming requests like contract reviews instead of getting bogged down in administrative tasks. This shift is already happening, with The State of AI in Legal 2025 Report finding that 57% of legal professionals say AI allows them to be more strategic with their work.

Gain pipeline visibility: Teams get real-time insight into contract status from initial intake through final approval.

Enable self-service: Business users can launch their own contracting processes confidently, reducing legal bottlenecks.

Drive cost efficiency: Automation reduces the need for expensive outside counsel on routine matters.

Focus on high-value work: Legal teams can concentrate on risk management rather than paperwork processing.

Become business partners: Legal transforms from a “black box” into a collaborative business enabler.

Identifying high-volume contracts and creating cloud-based templates that the entire company can access also eliminates the unnecessary emails that different departments send back and forth between legal for routine signatures and contract review.

Further, storing agreements in a secure, searchable repository decreases time lost to hunting down or recreating preexisting knowledge, which often costs companies tens of thousands of dollars in lost time.

The data insights that come from digitizing contract processes are where legal ops teams really demonstrate their value as business partners. Being able to tap and report on a goldmine of process data (like average cost and turnaround to process contracts) and contract metadata (like upcoming contract renewal dates) is key to turning legal from a cost center into a business center, a central, reliable hub of information for the organization.

This kind of business intelligence capability lets legal leaders answer strategic questions that directly impact company performance:

• What were our most commonly executed contracts in the first three months of implementation?
• How does this number compare to prior measurements?
• Do any trends emerge from the data that can help predict growth?

Why legal can’t scale without in-house legal ops

The legal profession is notoriously change-averse. Part of this problem stems from the highly specialized nature of legal work, and part of this stems from the nature of the industry—a high-stakes profession where you’re rewarded for following protocol, not for taking risks.

But here’s the thing: even the most sophisticated technology won’t solve your problems if you don’t have the right operational framework to support it. For most teams, the main barrier to modernization isn’t just to decide what technology to implement. It’s aligning their people, processes, and tools toward a company set of business values and metrics.

This is where legal operations becomes absolutely critical. Digital contracting technology enables legal teams to work faster and more effectively than they have in the past, but legal ops is the catalyst that makes that transition a reality—from streamlining contracting turnaround to delivering valuable business insights for an organization’s senior leadership.

Real world digital contracting: how Branch and Asana took control of contract management

The Branch story

Mobile linking and measurement platform Branch Metrics had little visibility and insight into its own global contract management, from formal review of agreements to associated data.

Worse, every quarter, Legal Operations Manager Josephine Vong painstakingly reviewed 1,000+ contracts over email, spending hours simply looking for the latest version of an agreement in flight between teams. This challenge illustrates several Core 12 competencies in action: the need for better information governance, technology implementation, and practice operations optimization. Looking to unblock the organizational bottleneck, centralize contract storage and keep better tabs on incoming requests from various teams, Branch implemented Ironclad’s digital contracting platform.

“Our old way of doing things made even finding contracts difficult,” says Vong. “By streamlining our entire contracting, Ironclad helped us accelerate high-volume, high-value contracts and create self-service process for our business users.”

The solution addressed multiple legal ops priorities simultaneously. Those high-volume agreements included deal-driving NDAs, MSAs, and data processing agreements (DPAs)—typically manually processed the same way time and again. By automating the contracting steps into repeatable workflows, Branch’s legal operations team transformed a time-consuming, scattered process into a fast-tracked business process that freed up legal professionals to focus on higher-value strategic work.

Getting started with legal operations

Jumping into legal operations can feel like a huge undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be. You don’t need to solve every problem at once. The key is to start small, focus on the biggest pain points, and follow a phased roadmap to build momentum from there.

Here’s a practical way to begin:

1. Identify the biggest problem. Talk to your legal team and your business partners in sales, finance, and procurement. Where are things breaking? Is it the time it takes to get an NDA signed? Is it the lack of visibility into contract renewals? Find the one thing that causes the most headaches for the most people.
2. Focus on one process. Don’t try to fix everything at once. Pick one high-volume, low-complexity process to start with. Standard NDAs are a classic for a reason—they’re frequent, relatively simple, and a quick win can show immediate value.
3. Map it out. Before you bring in any technology, just map out the current process. Who’s involved? How many steps does it take? Where are the bottlenecks? Just getting it all down on paper will reveal a lot.
4. Look for technology that fits the problem. Once you understand the process, you can find a tool that actually solves your problem, rather than buying a complex system and trying to force your process into it.

The goal is to show a tangible win that makes life easier for everyone. That’s how you get the buy-in you need to tackle bigger challenges. If you’re ready to see how technology can help you get started, you can request a demo today to talk with someone who’s been there.

Resources for legal ops

For more insight into in-house legal operations trends and best practices, check out these resources:

Download the latest Legal Operations Field Guide Join the Ironclad Community Watch webinars on demand Learn from the Ironclad Academy Listen to a legal ops podcast

As you define the future of digital contracting, you’ll find the resources here to support your journey.

Frequently asked questions about legal operations

What’s the difference between a paralegal and a legal ops professional?

It’s a common question because the roles can sometimes overlap. The simplest way to think about it is that paralegals typically support lawyers with substantive legal work—like legal research, drafting documents, and case management. They work within the legal process. Legal ops professionals, on the other hand, work on the legal process. They focus on the business and operational side of the legal department: the budget, the technology, vendor management, and making the whole department run more efficiently. A paralegal helps a lawyer do their job; a legal ops pro helps the entire legal department do its job better as a business unit.

Do you need a law degree to work in legal operations?

Absolutely not. In fact, many of the most successful legal ops leaders don’t have a law degree. The role is more about business acumen, project management, and a knack for technology and process improvement. People come into legal ops from all sorts of backgrounds—finance, IT, project management, and even from being paralegals. What’s more important than a JD is an understanding of how a business operates and a passion for making things work better.

How do you measure the success of a legal ops team?

This is a critical question. Unlike legal work, which can be hard to quantify, legal ops is all about metrics. Success is measured by tangible improvements. You can track things like a reduction in contract turnaround time, cost savings from better vendor management, or higher satisfaction scores from business partners. Other key metrics include the legal department’s spend as a percentage of company revenue or the adoption rate of new technology you’ve implemented. It’s about showing, with data, that you’re increasing the legal team’s capacity and helping the business move faster.

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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.