Fractional Legal Operations Leadership
Fractional Legal Ops Director
Many small and medium-sized law departments do not have the scale to justify hiring a full-time legal operations director, instead appointing an attorney, paralegal or IT person to handle legal operations in addition to their other responsibilities. This often leads to work getting put on the back-burner or to a situation where the responsible person is having to simply do the best they can in areas where they have little background or skill. Law departments faced with this type of situation— and who are not ready to make the jump to a full-time, dedicated legal operations professional— should consider hiring a fractional legal operations director to work one or two days per week to ensure essential legal business processes do not fall by the wayside.
A good fractional legal operations director should be a jack-of-all-trades, with experience in most if not all of the CLOC 12 Core Competencies Reference Model, the ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model, and other, similar models. For instance, a good fractional ops director should have experience with law department strategic planning, financial management, outside counsel management, legal technology, data analytics, and other areas.
If you are in need of a fractional head of legal operations, I have significant experience in all the above-mentioned areas and more, and would be glad to help.
Fractional Outside Counsel Management
Year after year, surveys like the Blickstein Law Department Operations Survey indicate that the #1 task absorbing the greatest amount of legal ops directors' time is outside counsel management, absorbing approximately 12% of all director time. Vendors have to be onboarded, budgets created, recorded and enforced, metrics tracked and circulated, preferred provider panels assembled, rates negotiated, and bills reviewed. Not all legal operations departments have the time or expertise to address these issues as anything but a one-off, which costs them time and money in the form of administrative snafus and (likely) suboptimal prices from their firms and other providers.
I ran most of the financial processes for a $156B legal department, including budgeting, AFAs, invoice review, dashboarding, scorecarding, and financial management of multiple massive legal matters, one of which exceeded $60M in lifetime spend. I later worked for five and a half years for one of the largest e-billing providers in the world, working with a large network of clients to understand their needs and business processes and building tools to help with all the above. If your law department needs help with outside counsel management, think of me.
Fractional Legal Data Czar
As I’ve written before, a statement like “Everybody needs to take responsibility for data quality” in practice end up meaning the exact opposite: “Nobody needs to take responsibility for data quality.”
A data czar is a single accountable individual who measures and monitors data quality and remedies data issues to make it easier and cheaper to mine insights from your data. The data czar adds value by working with you to evaluate the quality of your data, identifying key zones in your data that are in need of improvement, and putting together a plan to remedy the most immediate issues without losing sight of longer-term, more profound transformations of your data that could reap even greater dividends in the long-run.
Some large corporate law departments have designated, full-time data czars in house. However, most either do not have a data czar, or have as their data czar as a person who juggles many other, more tactical and time-sensitive issues that make it hard to ever get around to managing data quality. In the short run, organizations may get away with ignoring data quality issues, but in the long run neglecting these issues leads to a sort of “data debt” that snowballs and eventually prevents the law department from moving forward. In particular, organizations that do not address their data quality issues now will likely be prevented from harnessing the full value of data-hungry artificial intelligence applications.
Most organizations do not have the scale to justify hiring a full-time data czar, but that doesn’t mean data quality issues can just be ignored. Hiring a fractional legal data czar is a more flexible way of managing data quality issues, and can be cost-effective compared to hiring an FTE. I’ve worked deeply with legal data— particularly e-billing and matter management data, but other forms as well— for years and years, starting as a senior business analyst through Elevate Services and later as the primary person responsible for producing benchmarking research out of one of the world’s largest databases of performance benchmarking for corporate law departments. I have over 5 years of experience in product management, designing and building analytics products in the e-billing space and working as a subject matter expert on projects to maintain and improve the data quality in some very big databases.
If you are curious about whether you might benefit from hiring a fractional data czar, consider performing a top-to-bottom review of your data quality. If you do not have the time or resources to conduct this review internally, consider hiring a consultant.