Today the Association of Corporate Counsel and Wolters Kluwer Legal and Regulatory are releasing the 2020 Legal 
Operations Maturity Benchmark Report. The report is over 80 pages long and is exploding with scatter graphs and bar charts which assess how well corporate legal departments have adopted various initiatives, such as knowledge management, strategic planning, innovation, technology and information governance. The press release states that the report offers some of the first numerical data to support key findings about legal operations Including:
1) Despite increasing focus on legal operations, most organizations, on average, still do not have a mature legal department.
2) A legal operations professional on staff makes a measurable improvement to a legal department’s maturity rate across ALL 15 functions tested.
3) Although legal operations functions have been shown to reduce costs and increase efficiency, many legal departments continue to face a diversity of challenges in the maturation process.
The full report will be available for download here.
How Innovative Are Corporate Legal Departments? Law firms that have done a lot of hand-ringing about developing their own innovation in the past five years will be comforted to learn that innovation is not as pervasive in corporate legal departments they have feared. In house legal departments have their own innovation and change management challenges. The report documents a spectrum of innovation across industries. For example, legal departments in ecommerce and real estate have the highest operational maturity scores. One can’t help but wonder what similar charts comparing the Amlaw 100 law firms would reveal.
The Survey Survey respondents were from 316 legal operations organizations across 29 countries and 14 industries. The report identifies and assesses 15 legal operations functions and 92 sub functions which are cross indexed by sector size country and other categories.
The report sponsors provided some perspective in the press release. “Building on the success of the ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model, this report provides unprecedented detail and granularity to the in-house legal operations landscape,” said Veta T. Richardson, ACC president and CEO. “It allows legal department leaders to quickly assess how they rate on a variety of metrics and informs the development of a roadmap to improve critical functions. ” “The study findings indicate that a legal operations function within a legal department significantly increases efficiencies and drives maturity forward,” said Ken Crutchfield, Vice President & General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. “We are pleased to partner with ACC on this study, which I believe will play a critical role in helping professionals drive innovation within legal departments as the industry continues to evolve.”
The report ends with a “best in class index” that profiles the behaviours of the most mature departments in various the areas of legal operations. Curiously knowledge management is not listed at all in the best in class section of the report. It turns out that even the most mature departments were not very mature when it came to knowledge management and contract management. The departments that were most mature overall only included 13 of the 15 possible functions on this best in class list. Contract Management and Knowledge Management were excluded because less than half of the best in class departments have related subfunctions in place!
There is a lot to digest in the report about corperate legal departments. But as an outsider I appreciate how the report could be used as a model for benchmarking other organization types.
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Here is the full press release:
EMBARGOED UNTIL: Tuesday, April 28, 10:00am EST
ACC and Wolters Kluwer Release 2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmarking Report
WASHINGTON (April 28, 2020) — The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), in partnership with Wolters Kluwer, has released its 2020 Legal Operations Maturity Benchmarking Report. One of the most comprehensive reports of its kind, it offers some of the first numerical data to support several key findings, which include:
1) Despite increasing focus on legal operations, most organizations, on average, still do not have a mature legal department.
2) A legal operations professional on staff makes a measurable improvement to a legal department’s maturity rate across ALL 15 functions tested.
3) Although legal operations functions have shown to reduce costs and increase efficiency, many legal departments continue to face a diversity of challenges in the maturation process.
“Building on the success of the ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model, this report provides unprecedented detail and granularity to the in-house legal operations landscape,” said Veta T. Richardson, ACC president and CEO. “It allows legal department leaders to quickly assess how they rate on a variety of metrics and informs the development of a roadmap to improve critical functions. ACC is committed to developing best-in class research for our in-house counsel members, and we thank Wolters Kluwer for supporting this project.”
“The study findings indicate that a legal operations function within a legal department significantly increases efficiencies and drives maturity forward,” said Ken Crutchfield, Vice President & General Manager of Legal Markets at Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S. “We are pleased to partner with ACC on this study, which I believe will play a critical role in helping professionals drive innovation within legal departments as the industry continues to evolve.”
The study analysed data for 316 legal departments, ranging in size from one employee to hundreds of employees, across 29 countries and 24 industries. The report identifies and assesses 15 legal operations functions and 92 subfunctions in each department and cross-indexes them by sector, size, country, and other categories. The report is intended for legal department leaders, who can now quantify the maturity of their department relative to their peers. It also helps in-house leaders identify which practices, processes, or tools are available or advisable to implement.
A company’s score in each of the legal operations functions and subfunctions tallies to a final overall maturity score, on a scale of one to 100, to give in-house teams an overall sense of their department’s maturity status. Closing the report is the “best in class” index, which profiles the most mature departments and the areas of legal operations in which they excel.
The report will be available here.
About ACC: The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) is a global legal association that promotes the common professional and business interests of in-house counsel who work for corporations, associations and other organisations through information, education, networking, and advocacy. With more than 45,000 members in 85 countries employed by over 10,000 organisations, ACC connects its members to the people and resources necessary for both personal and professional growth. By in-house counsel, for in-house counsel.® For more information, visit www.acc.com and follow ACC on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
About Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S.:
Wolters Kluwer (WKL) is a global leader in professional information, software solutions, and services for the healthcare; tax and accounting; governance, risk and compliance; and legal and regulatory sectors. Wolters Kluwer helps its customers make critical decisions every day by providing expert solutions that combine deep domain knowledge with advanced technology and services.
Wolters Kluwer reported 2019 annual revenues of €4.6 billion. The group serves customers in over 180 countries, maintains operations in over 40 countries, and employs approximately 19,000 people worldwide. The company is headquartered in Alphen aan den Rijn, the Netherlands.
For more information about Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory U.S., visit www.WoltersKluwerLR.com, follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
