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18 June 2020 / Stephanie Vaughan
Issue: 7891 / Categories: Features , Profession , Technology
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LegalOps: smart business for law firms

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Legal operations services to corporate legal departments: Stephanie Vaughan outlines a prime opportunity for law firms
  • The LegalOps function is broad and has grown in scope over the past decade, helping to enhance efficiency within legal departments.
  • LegalOps is no longer just about bodies, but about making those bodies quicker and more efficient.

Historically, legal operations (LegalOps) hasn’t been the strong suit or main focus of the in-house legal teams within corporate legal departments (CLDs). However, a variety of factors— from an evolving risk landscape to the emergence of new forms of technology like AI—are conspiring to push it to the forefront.

To be sure, there have always been the ‘Super Corporates’ that were big enough to tackle LegalOps in-house but, by and large, most CLDs don’t have bodies dedicated to this function.

For law firms this is an opportunity to offer LegalOps-related services to CLDs and, in doing so, further strengthen their standing with clients as strategic partners and trusted advisors.

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Three men wrongly imprisoned for a combined 77 years have been released—yet received ‘not a penny’ in compensation, exposing deep flaws in the justice system. Writing in NLJ this week, Dr Jon Robins reports on Justin Plummer, Oliver Campbell and Peter Sullivan, whose convictions collapsed amid discredited forensics, ‘oppressive’ police interviews and unreliable ‘cell confessions’
A quiet month for employment cases still delivers key legal clarifications. In his latest Employment Law Brief for NLJ, Ian Smith reports that whistleblowing protection remains intact even where disclosures are partly self-serving, provided the worker reasonably believes they serve the ‘public interest’ 
Family law must shift from conflict-driven litigation to child-centred problem-solving, according to a major new report. Writing in NLJ this week, Caroline Bowden of Anthony Gold outlines findings showing overwhelming support for reform, with 92% agreeing lawyers owe duties to children as well as clients
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