Insights

If you read our previous post, you know that one of our predictions for legal tech in 2025 is the rise of operations roles within the corporate legal department. “There will be no legal teams without legal operations,” Vaishali Gopal, our VP for Integrated Solutions, had said emphatically. Legal operations expert Gabriel Saunders echoes that thought. “I see legal operations as being commoditised in the next five to ten years. Everyone will need a legal ops person to compete.”

Gabriel is currently a legal operations manager at science-driven performance company Exos, where he transforms workstreams with his unique approach to process bottlenecks. He’s a sought-after voice in the field for his ability to break down complex concepts into information that can drive change that is both practical and meaningful.

So we were delighted to have Gabriel as the first guest of our new series, ‘Counselect Conversations’, through which we hope to unpack the trends and thinking that is re-shaping the future of the legal department. ‘ In this conversation with Vaishali, Gabriel shared his thought-provoking takes on some of the most burning issues in legal ops, including adoption, success metrics and maintaining vendor relationships.

Gabriel is an engaging speaker, who has a way of bringing things alive with examples and anecdotes. We’d recommend you watch the full video! But for those of you who would rather read, we’ve distilled the key insights by theme.

Here’s the video. The text follows.

On the Legal Ops function

“All the parts that happen in an in-house legal team in between the reading, writing and the thought-work around risk.” This was Gabriel’s memorable definition of what constitutes a legal ops role. It resonated with us in a big way here at Counselect—we, too, view legal ops as anything that makes the life of the department easier and frees up time for counsel to focus on their core functions.

Gabriel sees legal ops roles as having three pillars: financial management, technology management and legal acumen. He sees himself as falling in the technology bucket. A legal team should hire an ops professional based on their need and the day-to-day stuff they want team members to accomplish. Gabriel said that he’s often been asked ‘How good are you at reviewing NDAs?’ While he can do the job, that’s not his core expertise—he wants to be on a team that can leverage his expertise in technology.

At Exos, that’s what he does. He shared the example of an AI-based contract redlining tool that he helped deploy (Pincites). There were times when the attorneys couldn’t believe that the redlining wasn’t done by a human.

Adoption

Gabriel spoke about how “tenacity, empathy and persistence” are key to achieve full adoption of a tool. While noting the importance of being realistic about adoption roadmaps, he said that most change management programmes fail because the manager has “too rosy an idea of what the change will look like.” Then, Gabriel said something that is stuck in our heads:

“No implementation ever gets done, it’s just mostly done.”

In this context, he urged legal ops leaders to give team members time and walk the talk when it comes to adoption. He shared an example of how he conducted 325 individual meetings to drive CLM adoption.

Skillsets

Since “legal ops is a lonely spot in the business”, it’s crucial that ops managers are self-motivated individuals. Drivers of change have to operate with resilience, tenacity and with an eye on the long-term. Gabriel shared an example of how he wrote to a manager every fortnight for two years requesting a vendor switch for a tool. He didn’t hear back until one day when the manager responded with the green signal.

Technology skills are likely to come in very handy. He gave the example of attorneys trying to overdesign a contract by baking term dates into tables. It took someone with technical experience to let them know that it wasn’t a good idea because the metadata needs to be as clean as possible and Natural Language Processing is poor at reading tables.

He stressed on the need for legal ops managers to be process-oriented. He advised not attacking a problem until one understands it completely. “Sit inside the frustration of it,” he said. As a “collector of pain points”, the legal ops pro has to be the “empathetic voice” and the “listening ear”. Sometimes, an operations problem can be solved by “fixing the relationship between two people” so it’s important to think about the social and emotional factors that may be blocking a process.

Success metrics

It’s difficult for Legal to have KPIs because “we are in the business of avoiding things”, Gabriel noted.

“How do you measure things that didn’t happen?”

One of the metrics that could come in handy is ‘deal velocity’—how quick is the turnaround time and how speedily deals are getting done. Another factor to consider is what processes the ops manager has transformed. If everything was running on email, for instance, that could be a baseline to measure things. The first step towards a solution in this instance is to ask the legal team to send a form to everyone who sends in work. According to Gabriel, the ops manager’s “first empathetic act” could be to fill out the form themselves and offer to take people through it. Gabriel referred to this as a “great way to be seen by the business.”

Relationship with vendors

“Treat your vendors like you would your colleagues,” Gabriel said, while urging ops managers to “own the software”. He said it’s important to be very articulate and specific about your needs with vendors. He said that being a “rockstar customer” could shave off 10-15 percent of yearly cost. You can do this by making your vendor’s life easier (for instance, when you encounter a bug, go into “Inspect-Console-Developer Tools” on the browser, log the error code and send it to your vendor).

You should also ask the vendor: “What do you want to see in a feature request that makes it a user story?”

His advice was to try and give time to the vendor’s product and development team, and show them that you are genuinely interested in their tool.

When is the right time to hire for GCs?

For certain GCs, Gabriel suggested that an ops person should be their “second hire”. What he means is that it’s easier to build teams into and around optimised processes rather than the other way around. He recognises that this isn’t possible for many GCs but still suggests that the ops professional should be an early hire, unless the GC themselves wants to spearhead the role.

“If you want a database to run your department, if you want LLMs to optimise contract review and legal language modification, then you need an expert.”

“If you’re going to be doing the reading and the writing, then you’re not going to have time to look for tools and train them.” So the earlier one makes the hire, the better.

He described an ideal hire (or “golden goose”) as a specific kind of technical product manager—someone who “gets code, understands agile frameworks, understands the law.”

The future of legal ops

Gabriel likened the journey of legal ops over the last few years to the Sisyphus myth. He said it peaked two years ago, and we’ve seen a bit of a drop-off since. He predicts a new rise and evolution of the ops function, one that will be primarily tech-driven. Going back to the three pillars of the legal ops profession he referred to earlier, he said that the demands of the profession are going to lean towards the tech and finance pillars and away from the legal pillar.

As LLMs continue to “create optimisation”, Gabriel predicts a rise in the hiring of legal ops professionals and a drop in the recruitment of in-house counsel. But he also said that the trend will reverse once we have achieved “peak optimisation”. He predicts the commoditisation of the legal ops function in “the next five to ten years.” In his view, “anyone who wants to compete will need a legal ops professional.”

Concluding thoughts

As a parting thought, Gabriel said that it’s important for legal departments “not to wait too long” before hiring a legal ops professional. While acknowledging the concern that legal departments may have around wasting time and money on professionals who may not deliver what they want, he said that this fear shouldn’t hold them back from making incremental progress.

“Don’t let the fear of not finding the right person hold you back from finding the almost right person who can take you part of the way.”

This thought, like so much of what Gabriel shared in this conversation, resonates with us here at Counselect. The best time is now! If you’d like to have a conversation about how legal ops could fit into your department, do write to us [email protected] to set up a no-commitment discovery call.