{"id":27428,"date":"2023-06-18T12:23:05","date_gmt":"2023-06-18T12:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mattersuite.com\/blog\/?p=27428"},"modified":"2026-10-19T11:33:07","modified_gmt":"2026-10-19T11:33:07","slug":"what-is-legal-operations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mattersuite.com\/blog\/what-is-legal-operations\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Legal Operations? A Complete Guide to Legal Ops"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Legal operations, or legal ops, is the unit of an in-house legal department that manages the business side, like budgets, vendor relationships, technology, and legal processes. This helps lawyers spend their time on legal work while someone else manages the machinery around it. In recent years, legal ops has gone from just an administrative afterthought to one of the critical roles in the corporate legal sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Is The Goal of Legal Ops?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Legal operations\u2019 job mainly involves separating the work that needs legal expertise from the work that doesn\u2019t really require it. Budgeting, coordination with vendors, reporting to finance, and designing the process don\u2019t really require a law degree, but lawyers have had to deal with it for years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once legal ops handles this extra work, it frees up time for in-house lawyers. This brings value not only to the work of lawyers but also improves performance as well. At a more granular level, legal ops gives the department a factual basis for its decisions on spend data, cycle times, and vendor performance. Efficiency for any business means stats and metrics. When legal ops comes into play, the legal team improves its numbers and delivers more with fewer resources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Rise of Legal Ops in 2026<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Legal departments are squeezed between workload and resources. The 2026 ACC Annual Chief Legal Officers Survey<\/a> polled 1,049 CLOs across 43 countries, and 59% of them said their workload went up over the past year. At the same time, 42% are working under new cost-cutting mandates, and 58% have absorbed law firm rate hikes. Most departments are holding headcount flat or shrinking it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Legal departments are constantly asked to deliver with fewer resources, so it makes sense why the role of legal ops moved up the organization chart. In the same survey, it was found that 84% of CLOs now report directly to their CEO, which is a five-point jump from the year before. Legal departments are being asked to function exactly like a business unit and the role of legal ops is how it happens in practice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rising pressure on legal departments is making significant changes in the way they function. According to the CLOC\u2019s 2025 State of the Industry Report<\/a>, implementation of AI in legal ops has doubled since 2023, which is just two years. This ties to the reason why the role of legal ops has risen and why it still keeps rising. Someone has to take the ownership of tools, ensure that they fit into the existing workflows and monitor how the team uses them. This responsibility is taken by legal ops. Also, with AI adoption, legal teams are able to take on more work without hiring, so the tech and the role are growing together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Areas Does Legal Operations Cover? The Two Legal Operations Frameworks<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately, for the legal ops, there are two real reference points, which can actually help them build their practice. These are CLOC’s Core 12 and ACC’s maturity model. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both these models have been built by legal experts after extensive research and they serve very different purposes. They shouldn\u2019t be compared to each other but rather be used side by side to get the best results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CLOC’s Core 12<\/strong><\/a> It shows all the functional areas that legal ops should cover. There are a total of 12 such functional areas, from financial management to knowledge management, which are critical to the functioning of any legal department.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ACC’s maturity model<\/strong><\/a> <\/strong>assumes the functional areas are already running well and asks an even harder question, which is: how good is the department at each area and what does the best version look like. Understanding which framework applies to where a department currently stands changes what evaluating legal ops actually looks like in practice.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

CLOC’s Core 12<\/strong> Model<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

This is a reference model mapped out by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium. It breaks legal ops into twelve functional areas that most legal departments need to master:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    \n
  1. Strategic Planning<\/strong> \u2014 This area involves anticipating and setting a list of short- and long-term goals that meet business and legal needs and support the department’s overall direction.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. Financial Management<\/strong> \u2014 This involves budgeting and managing resources (time, people, money, technology) in a deliberate way that connects legal spend directly to outcomes.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Firm & Vendor Management<\/strong> \u2014 As the name suggests, this is about building relationships with outside counsel and vendors in a way that produces measurable value and brings transparency into the work.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Technology<\/strong> \u2014 This area involves finding the right tools and deploying them so that manual work can be automated and help in scaling as the needs of the legal department grow.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. Business Intelligence<\/strong> \u2014 After years of work, the legal department collects a vast amount of crucial data that can be used to spot trends, find inefficiencies, and support decisions with evidence. This area deals with that.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. Information Governance<\/strong> \u2014 Since the legal department is built on sharing confidential information, this area ensures that there is a clear set of rules that can be followed while information is organized and shared in order to control risk and stay compliant.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. Knowledge Management<\/strong> \u2014 This area is responsible for capturing all the information that the team already has so that it can be reused across different matters.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. Organization Optimization & Health<\/strong> \u2014 This means building and retaining a legal ops team that’s genuinely equipped to do this work well.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  9. Practice Operations<\/strong> \u2014 This area takes responsibility for taking the administrative load off the plates of lawyers.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  10. Project\/Program Management<\/strong> \u2014 This area is responsible for running cross-functional initiatives with real project discipline.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  11. Service Delivery Models<\/strong> \u2014 Legal work can often become difficult to manage, which is why it\u2019s important to match each piece of work with the right resource, whether that\u2019s an internal team, outside counsel, or a vendor, to ensure it\u2019s handled as efficiently as possible.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  12. Training & Development<\/strong> \u2014 With time, it becomes important to invest directly in the legal ops team’s own skills and growth. This area is responsible for that.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    ACC’s maturity model<\/strong>\u00a0<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

    This covers 14 functional areas, and for each one, it describes what “early,” “intermediate,” and “advanced” actually look like, rather than just naming the category:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      \n
    1. Change Management and Communication<\/strong> \u2014 This is about how well the department drives adoption of new processes and keeps people informed as things shift.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. Contract Management<\/strong> \u2014 This involves how contracts get drafted, reviewed, and tracked across their lifecycle.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. eDiscovery<\/strong> \u2014 This covers how the department handles the identification, collection, and review of information for litigation or investigations.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    4. External Resources Management<\/strong> \u2014 This is about how outside counsel and other external providers are selected, managed, and evaluated.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    5. Financial Management<\/strong> \u2014 This means budgeting, forecasting, and cost control across the legal function.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    6. Information Governance (Records Management)<\/strong> \u2014 This involves how records and information are retained, organized, and disposed of in line with policy and risk tolerance.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    7. Innovation Management<\/strong> \u2014 This is about how the department identifies and adopts new approaches, tools, and ways of working. It was added in the 2.0 update, building on ACC’s original 2017 model.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    8. Intellectual Property Management<\/strong> \u2014 This covers how the department tracks and protects the organization’s IP assets.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    9. Internal Resources Management<\/strong> \u2014 This is about how the legal team’s own people and workload are structured and allocated.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    10. Knowledge Management<\/strong> \u2014 This involves capturing institutional legal knowledge so it stays reusable as people and roles change.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    11. Metrics & Analytics<\/strong> \u2014 This means measuring the department’s own performance and using that data to guide decisions.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    12. Process & Project Management<\/strong> \u2014 This covers how legal work gets planned, run, and delivered with real project discipline.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    13. Strategic Planning & Legal Operations Leadership<\/strong> \u2014 This is about how legal ops sets direction and aligns with the broader business.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    14. Technology Management<\/strong> \u2014 This involves how the department selects, implements, and gets value out of its technology stack.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      Legal Operations vs Traditional Legal Department<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

      A traditional legal department runs solely on lawyers, which means even administrative work falls on their desks, whereas a department with legal ops benefits from the fact that the extra, surrounding work is assigned an owner so that lawyers can focus on legal problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      \"Legal<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

      What Gets in the Way of Legal Ops Adoption<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

      Knowing what legal ops should do is rarely the hard part. Getting a department to actually adopt it is. A few challenges show up repeatedly:<\/p>\n\n\n\n