Nine Steps to a Legal

Department Strategic Plan

Legal Departments are so often buried in work that it’s hard, if not impossible, to pause and contemplate strategic
projects. (In a FindLaw Corporate Counsel Center survey, more than 40 percent said they were too busy “fighting fires” to
achieve long-term goals.)
However, without a strategic plan, your Legal Department is unlikely to get out from under Sisyphean busywork to
accomplish meaningful improvements or demonstrate its value – or find operational adjustments that enhance not only
your service delivery, but your quality of life.

You don’t need a week-long retreat or a three-inch binder to create a Legal Department
strategic plan. Here are nine steps to create a straightforward but purposeful plan that will
fit on one page, so that in the year ahead, you can easily reference and execute it – then
measure and report on your success. The accompanying template is ready for your insights,
ideas and sharing.

Step One: Do your research.

Your plan must look to the future but account for the past and present. Moreover, because your Legal Department
doesn’t operate in a vacuum, your plan should take into account the wants and needs of your organization, your
executives and your business clients.
Start by collecting some information and feedback. In his article “Ten Things: Setting Goals for the Legal Department,”
Sterling Miller, the general counsel of Marketo, Inc., advises Legal Departments to:

• Look at last year (or maybe a few years). Where did your team struggle – workload, budget, personnel? What
problems would you like to solve? Are there any activities worth repeating? In short, what worked and what did
not? If you have access to your Legal Department Intelligence through Xakia or another legal operations platform,
review your data and dashboards; if not, the process may be a little more tedious, but you can capture key learnings
through law firm invoices, workload reporting and correspondence with the C-suite.
• Talk to your clients. Reach out to your business clients to learn their plans and concerns for the upcoming year
– from product launches to regulatory changes to major deals. Don’t forget to visit with the other administrative
departments, such as Human Resources and Finance. Where might they need legal support? How can your team
best anticipate and address the company’s legal needs?
• Talk to the boss. Miller writes: “As general counsel, I needed to make sure the goals of the department lined up
with those of my boss, the CEO… Additionally, and with permission from the CEO, talk with members of the Board
of Directors, especially the committee chairs (e.g. Audit, Governance, Compensation, et cetera). It’s important to
understand what the Board is concerned about heading into the year.”
• Talk to your team. Engage the lawyers and staff. What business issues are piling up? What technology is and isn’t
working? What changes would they recommend?
• Be proactive and forward-thinking. What legal, regulatory, business and political trends might affect your
organization in the year ahead? Consider 2018’s adoption of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which
had 47 percent of in-house counsel working to update their data security standards – what’s next?

Nine Steps to a Legal Department Strategic Plan 1

Step Two: Assess the big picture.

What are the company’s major goals for the year ahead? They should be listed front and center on your Legal
Department strategic plan. This will keep your team aligned with the overarching objectives for the organization, and it
will put your work in the larger context. Do not skip this step. According to Boardview, 95 percent of employees do not
understand their organization’s strategy; perhaps that’s why only 2 percent of leaders are confident they will achieve at
least 80 percent of their strategy’s objectives.

Step Three: Consider your vision.

We know that lawyers are cynical creatures, but a vision statement is the part of your strategic plan where you can
dream a bit; this is where you will articulate your aspirations and core values.
Consider, for example, IKEA’s vision statement: “To create a better everyday life for the many people.” It’s not about
furniture or retail or affordability; it’s more universal. By starting with a guiding vision, the company can then develop
strategies and tactics to fulfill it. Given IKEA’s vision to create better everyday life for the many, the company is unlikely
to pursue niche goods or develop expensive sub-brands.
What makes a compelling Legal Department vision? One place to start may be the primary roles of in-house lawyers, as
outlined by the Altman Weil Chief Legal Officer Survey:
• Support business objectives
• Advise company leaders
• Manage legal risk
• Be available and responsive
• Control legal spend
• Manage compliance
You could roll these into a vision of excellence: “To safeguard the company from harm; to drive responsible growth; to
be reliable and trusted advisers.” What does your company want most from you? Think big and broad.

Step Four: Outline your purpose.

Your purpose is essentially your identity: “This is who we are, this is why we exist.” To get there, we like these four
questions suggested by Forbes:
• What do we do? (Example: “We advance the Company’s strategy and minimize its risk”)
• How do we do it? (Example: “by providing effective and efficient legal solutions”)
• Whom do we do it for? (Example: “throughout the Company and its divisions”)
• What value are we bringing? (Example: “so together we can operate at our best and maximize the return to our
shareholders”)
All told, our example yields: “We advance the Company’s strategy and minimize its risk by providing effective and
efficient legal solutions throughout the Company and its divisions, so together we can operate at our best and maximize
the return to our shareholders.”

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Step Five: Draft your strategic objectives.

To find your strategic objectives, break this statement into several building blocks.
Again, taking our hypothetical:

Purpose Statement Element Potential Strategic Objective

We advance the Company’s strategy 1. Support Company Strategy
And minimize its risk 2. Minimize Company Risk
By providing effective and efficient solutions 3. Increase Department Efficiency
Throughout the Company and its divisions 4. Improve Service for Business Clients
So together we can operate at our best and 5. Improve Department Financial
maximize the return to our shareholders Operations

For now, pick the three objectives that you see as the most significant for your Legal Department.

Step Six: Define success.

For each of your strategic objectives, what’s the ideal result?

If your objective pertains to advancing company strategy, you may want to ensure the timely completion of a major
project; streamline a key business process; and decrease or automate low-strategic-value matters in the Legal
Department.
If your objective deals with your budget, consider working toward a reduction in legal spend or better negotiated
rates with primary law firms.
At this point, you don’t need firm metrics – we’ll address those later. In this step, think broadly about what you’re
working toward.

Step Seven: Commit to tactics.

As Thomas Edison once opined, vision without execution is hallucination. You have the vision and you know what
success looks like – how are you going to get there?
What will it take to get to the success you just imagined?
For each of your strategic objectives, write the tactics you will complete. These should be achievable, action-oriented
and with accountability – know who’s doing what when.
To go back to the hypothetical goal of “Improve Department Financial Operations,” your tactics could include
activities like:
• Perform an audit of last year’s budget to identify areas of waste and opportunities for improvement. (Q1)
• Determine five areas where alternative fees could bring budget predictability; complete law firm RFP process. (Q1)
• Review Legal Department Intelligence to scout low-strategic-value, simple tasks that could be automated or
eliminated. (Q2)
• Meet with top 10 law firms to discuss rate structure and outside counsel guidelines. (Q2)
• Work with Finance to build dashboard of department spend for real-time budget monitoring next year. (Q3)
• Build a data-driven legal budget for the year ahead. (Q3-Q4)
If you need ideas for specific actions, consider taking Xakia’s Legal Operations Health Check, which will provide
custom suggestions for your Legal Department in 10 major areas.

Nine Steps to a Legal Department Strategic Plan 3

Step Eight: Determine metrics.

How will you measure the success of your tactics? To what end are you applying these tactics?
These must be quantifiable. That can be pretty straightforward for projects with relevant time and money
measurements (cycle time, response time, spend); for more qualitative projects, such as improving business client
service, consider a before-and-after client survey so you have better year-end data than the anecdotal. “We improved
satisfaction with the Accounting Department by 10 percent” goes over better with your CEO than “Tim in Accounting
was really happy.”
To review some meaningful Legal Department metrics, we recommend downloading the 2018 State of Corporate
Law Departments, a report by the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium, Acritas and Thomson Reuters. The report
shares recommended metrics in four principal areas of legal operations: Prevention, Efficiency, Effectiveness and
Review. This “PEER” model was built to correspond to three key legal function goals: to be effective, to be efficient
and to prevent legal risk.

Step Nine: Share your plan.

Starting at Step One, your team was engaged in this process – now it’s time to show them the finished product. We
created the Legal Department Strategic Plan Template to fit on one page so it can be easily reproduced, shared, even
posted at workstations.
Sharing your strategy will do two important things, according to the ACC Legal Operations Maturity Model Toolkit:
It will provide focus and drive toward specific and important goals.
“People perform best when they have a purpose – when they understand not just what to do, but why it’s important,”
the ACC noted. “Engage as many team members as possible in the process, giving them an opportunity to understand
why the strategic goals are important and how the tactics and operational details support those goals.”

Now What?
Now of course comes the hard part – accomplishing the plan (and adjusting for the inevitable but
unpredictable shifts in your company’s strategy and operations) while continuing to handle your
everyday workload. Stay disciplined by planning accountability checks at regular intervals – monthly
or quarterly – and sharing the results with your Legal Department.
To make tracking and reporting on your progress easy – and automatic – consider a Legal
Department Intelligence tool like Xakia. More information is available at www.xakiatech.com.

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