In Conversation
As one of North America’s legal operations (legal ops) veterans, Richard Brzakala has seen big changes in the structure of corporate legal functions. GC asks what the next stage in this transformation will look like.
I was almost a unicorn when I first started working in legal operations 20 years ago. The concept of operations, though well-defined in other business functions, was not well understood among legal counsel. Only the largest and most sophisticated legal departments were using e-billing products or matter management, and only the most far-sighted GCs thought of their function as a set of systems and processes that could be improved by careful design.
Today, there are armies of people working in legal ops, supporting GCs in their attempts to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the legal function. A big reason for that shift is that legal teams have come under increasing pressure to constrain costs and avoid unnecessary expenditure. Improving efficiency has become a second mandate of the GC role, one that sits alongside managing purely legal matters on the list of priorities for business. And so, inevitably, legal ops professionals have entered North American corporate legal functions, tasked with finding the latest and greatest things in the marketplace that can help improve processes.
