You and your team are intelligent, hard working and well paid, and yet your team as a whole does not have a high performance culture or consistent, systemized output that reflects this. What can you do about it?
High-performance Legal Departments have mastered these three components:
- Legal expertise is institutionalized
- Legal operations are streamlined
- Demonstrating Legal Department value to your organization
The following checklist for each of these components will assist in helping your team achieve a high performance culture.
1. Legal expertise is institutionalized
A high performance team is not the same as a collection of high performance individuals who do not work effectively together. Consider the analogy of a sporting team, where you must have both extremely talented individuals, and they must work seamlessly together.
To create and maintain a high-performance Legal Department, it is critical that legal knowledge and expertise relevant to both substantive and enterprise perspectives is fostered, continually improved and systematically shared across the team so they may work effectively together when each is required to step up and perform.
To achieve this level of high-performance, legal expertise must be supported and delivered as follows:
✅ High quality, intelligent people with deep substantive and enterprise knowledge
✅ A well considered organizational structure that facilitates team performance
✅ Transparency / visibility of work to facilitate learning by osmosis and eliminate duplicated effort
✅ Sharing of information, knowledge and learnings for continuous improvement
2. Legal operations are streamlined
It is critical that a high-performing Legal Department has the right systems, processes and tools to deliver work effectively and efficiently. To continue with the sporting analogy, it is far more difficult for a team with sub-quality equipment or facilities, or a lack of expert coaching to win an Olympic gold medal. Similarly, we must provide our Legal Departments with the highest quality environment within which they can deliver their legal advice.
To achieve a high-performance Legal Department, legal operations must be streamlined with:
✅ Legal matter management for a single, central source of truth to foster visibility
✅ Clear document management storage for ease of search, retrieval and version control
✅ Systemized legal intake to improve efficiency of receipt, assignment and resolution
For those who wish to take systems and processes to the next level:
✅ Spend management, with a clear resourcing strategy and real-time visibility over budget
✅ Contract management, including a central contract repository and lifecycle management
3. Demonstrating Legal Department value
A high performance legal team is recognized for the value it contributes to its organization. In this scenario, the rich get richer: where a Legal Department is highly valued, it will be invited into strategic conversations earlier and given the opportunity to contribute meaningfully throughout a matter lifecycle, rather than just at the conclusion after the deal is 'done' and the opportunity to influence outcomes is more limited.
High-performance legal teams will demonstrate value with:
✅ Clear, succinct and regular reporting of the most strategically impactful matters
✅ Real-time visibility and understanding of critical legal matters
✅ A data-driven culture that informs decisions about resourcing and budgets
✅ Clear understanding of organization strategic goals and prioritize legal work accordingly
High performance in-house legal teams
In-house legal teams who achieve institutionalized knowledge, streamlined legal operations and the ability to demonstrate value to stakeholders will enjoy the benefits of being part of a highly functional, effective and efficient team. Recognition from stakeholders that the Legal Department is an impactful and critical contributor to organizational goals will ensure the Legal Department receive and deliver high quality work and the cycle of continuous improvement will ensure that you are able to attract the highest talent.
If you would like to know more about Xakia's in-house legal toolkit to help you centralize your legal knowledge, streamline your legal operations, or demonstrate your Legal Department value, you can request a demo here.