Legal Department Best Practices

Best-in-class legal departments rely on best practices to identify and improve legal department performance.  Implementing best practices is a time-honored management technique that enables even the highest performing legal department to optimize key processes and functions. Ascertaining and utilization of best practices has become a key pathway for continuous improvement in leading forward-thinking legal organizations.  

Unfortunately, many legal departments continue to cling to the view that  improvement can be achieved by with their own "built from scratch" one-off, ad-hoc interventions. Their thinking: only "invented here approaches" are good enough, and  things should get better. But the reality is while this approach will generate modest improvements, they will not be significant and sustainable.

Most legal executives believe it’s tough to identify breakthrough opportunities. Benchmarking and best practices help.  However, seldom is this obvious; Peter Drucker once said that the best opportunities are “visible, but not seen."

LEGAL DEPARTMENT BEST PRACTICES: Overview

How do legal departments shift from a ad-hoc and "fire-engine-response" mentality to one of continuous improvement? 

Best practices is based on locating examples of superior legal department performance and to understand the processes and practices driving that performance.

Our experience is that almost every function and process performed by corporate legal departments has been studied, improved and optimized by at least one other leading legal organization.  These best practices used by other leading departments can be appropriately adapted to the situation of our client's departments.  Instead of having to “reinvent the wheel”, astute legal organizations learn from the practices, progress (and mistakes) of others via law department benchmarking.

LEGAL DEPARTMENT BEST PRACTICES: Solutions

Argopoint offers pragmatic, actionable advice for legal department leaders seeking to improve performance. Our benchmarking and best-practices services systematically uncover improvement opportunities. Of course, best practices are incomplete without considering relevant context and the operating environment.  When recommending best practices, we take into account our clients’ strategy and objectives, structure, historical context, capabilities.