Extract from Jeffrey Wolff’s article “How Legal Operations Can Use Technology to Streamline Data Access and Decrease Reliance on IT”
Lawyers today are expected to wear more hats and handle more data than ever before. That’s where legal operations comes in. Also known as “legal ops,” these teams help corporate legal departments adopt technology, improve legal processes, and plan strategically to ensure their success from a business perspective.
Legal ops teams bring business and technical expertise to legal departments so that lawyers can spend their time focusing on substantive legal work. For corporate legal departments, the support of legal ops is invaluable as it can not only reduce costs but also make costs more predictable. These days, more and more organizations are catching on to the advantages of adding legal ops professionals to their legal departments and leadership teams.
But as data keeps expanding in volume and diversity, eDiscovery remains a major challenge for legal ops teams striving for efficiency. Legal departments often rely heavily on their information technology (IT) teams when it comes to accessing and controlling the data they need. That leads to frustrated legal ops teams and overburdened IT teams.
Fortunately, there’s a solution to this issue: legal technology. Legal tech tools are the path to efficiency for both legal ops and IT as they allow legal teams to directly access the data they need, find information more quickly, and control their data without depending on IT to do it for them.
In this blog, we’ll first review the basics of legal operations, including defining what it is, explaining how it fits into a broader organization, and discussing the purpose it serves. Next, we’ll explain the dynamic between legal ops and IT teams and discuss how legal technology can help legal ops optimize their results and decrease their reliance on IT.
