Legal Department Best Practices

Updated February 20, 2025 | Argopoint Consulting

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. But the reality is while this approach will generate modest improvements, they will not be significant and sustainable. The legwork has already been done, by the top minds in the legal industry, to ID the best solutions to the challenges that law departments face.

Most legal executives don’t have time to do the management work and research from the bottom up, and they don’t have to. Benchmarking and best practices help, and free up lawyers to do more lawyering while the legal organization runs more efficiently.

HOW TOP LEGAL DEPARTMENTS ARE MANAGED

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

They locate examples of superior legal department performance and to understand the processes and practices driving it.

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.

FIND OUT WHAT THE TOP LEGAL DEPARTMENTS ARE DOING IN YOUR INDUSTRY

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.