The Association of Corporate Counsel, in partnership with Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory, recently released a survey report on the maturity of legal departments across 15 legal ops functions. Using a maturity scale of 1-100, the mean for the combined score of all 15 functions is 34.2, which as the chart shows means that the average department is just nudging into the intermediate stage – not exactly something to write home about.
What the surveyors do write home about is the importance of legal ops professionals. “Departments that employ at least one legal ops professional are more advanced across all 15 functional areas compared to those with no dedicated ops professional,” the report says. Interestingly, the most mature functions are compliance and financial management. The least mature functions (below) are innovation management, e-discovery and change management – none of which is beyond early stage maturity.
Published August 17, 2021.
