In an exclusive Q&A session with Legalwise Seminars, Sian Wingate, Legal Operations Consultant and Coach at Sian Wingate Advisory, addresses key questions regarding delegation options available to in-house lawyers to manage workload. She will be presenting in March at the upcoming In-House Counsel Conference.
How does a legal services register help in-house lawyers to delegate?
To effectively delegate legal services requests, you first need to know what they are. The next step is to decide who will assist with or perform the task or series of tasks needed to complete that service request.
In-house legal teams usually provide support using a blend of internal lawyers, legal support staff and external lawyers. Others will empower their wider organisational units to self-service some tasks.
Take a look at these examples:
- A property sale may need to involve a lawyer and an external legal executive.
- A contract review may require a junior lawyer.
- A strategic project may demand a senior lawyer, an external lawyer and a legal support person.
- A supply arrangement may be self-serviced by the organisation using a purchase order subject to legal-team issued purchase order terms.
- A litigation matter may involve a general counsel, an internal junior lawyer, two external lawyers and an external barrister.
This range of options between categories of personnel requires some clarity upfront on who can do what within that legal matter and crucially, who should do what based on experience, capacity and cost.
Investing some time up front to identify the “what” is the time spent compiling a legal service line register. This is a document that specifies each typical service provided by the overall legal function and maps out the typical tasks within each service.
Knowing the “what” makes delegating to the right “who” a lot faster and more effective.
If a legal team is struggling with delegation options, what should they do? Who could they seek advice from?
If a legal team is struggling with delegation options, first of all, get a document, open it up and start to brainstorm what legal matters or requests you have helped your organisation with in the past 12 months.
Alternatively, you may be able to mine this information from a database such as a matter management system if you have one.
If a legal team is struggling to document this data, they may be able to use an internal resource such as a business analyst if your organisation has one.
Alternatively, they can seek advice from a legal operations professional such as myself who is experienced in documenting this information. I specialise in helping legal teams to overcome delegation struggles. I do this by mapping out delegation options available based on current or future resourcing together with any technology tools they have available.
What is one of the most important takeaways from your topic that you think every in-house lawyer should adopt into their team or department?
To invest some time in getting clear on exactly what your function does in terms of deliverables and tasks in more detail. This data helps to drive many decisions from who to delegate to, gaps in resourcing to deliver that work or opportunities to assist with delivering that work using technology.
Sian Wingate is a seasoned in-house counsel with a passion for legal operations. Through her advisory consulting firm sianwingate.com, she helps overstretched in-house legal functions to free up their capacity so they can focus on what they do best: serving their organisations with their high-risk, high-value matters. Sian has more than a decade of in-house experience in successfully implementing her tried and tested techniques using her signature Legal Operations Framework. Her consulting services specialise in training and coaching sole counsel through to larger legal teams to utilise the free resources already available to them to create a foundation for successful delivery of their legal services. Services include legal operations audits, legal guidance resource creation, template vault development, team intranet knowledge banks and legal compliance framework design. Connect with Sian via LinkedIn.
