Our sixth and seventh episodes—focused on “The Future of Compliance and Legal with a Digital Lens”—feature guest speakers Josh Hogue, Andreas Pyrcek, and Dr. Annie Green.  I asked our guests “what is legal operations, and what do we mean by the future of compliance and legal with a digital lens?”  Josh said:

“I think legal operations really, and I’ll look at it too, from outside, and then also, internally here at EY. We have what we call EY Law, which is a traditional law firm, where we’re actually practicing law outside the U.S., but internally, in the United States, because attorneys, and non-attorneys can’t split fees, we’re not a traditional law firm.  So really, what we focus on within the U.S. is primarily around, basically, the business of law, that’s really what legal operations has become.  Especially in the past, I’d say, six to seven years, it’s really taken off where most law departments, they’re actually identifying folks to have a director of legal operations.  So if you think about everything from Contract Lifecycle Management to matter management, it’s a number of things from operating model process technology, but it’s really about how can you help the attorneys within law departments work smarter, be optimized, and help them actually be able to be more efficient.  And if there’s certain tasks, or things that they do on a regular basis that can maybe either be outsourced or pushed down to other types of resources, that’s really what a lot of the things that we focus on from an operational standpoint.  So, I think overall, it’s really kind of focusing and putting a business lens over what we would typically think of as the traditional practice of law.”

Interested in hearing more?  Check out Episode 6 (available January 31, 2022) and Episode 7 (available February 24, 2022).