Putting the legal team at the heart of the business plan: from strategy to effectiveness to efficiency | Practical Law

Putting the legal team at the heart of the business plan: from strategy to effectiveness to efficiency | Practical Law

This note explores the principles of our strategy to effectiveness to efficiency plan. This will empower you to put your legal team at the heart of your organisation's business plan and to play a big part in its success.

Putting the legal team at the heart of the business plan: from strategy to effectiveness to efficiency

by The Centre for Legal Leadership
Maintained • United Kingdom
This note explores the principles of our strategy to effectiveness to efficiency plan. This will empower you to put your legal team at the heart of your organisation's business plan and to play a big part in its success.
The best legal functions are those that have a plan which considers the wider business's goals, challenges and stakeholders' views. Knowing how to develop and implement a strategic plan will enhance the standing of your team and improve its contribution to your organisation.
To make your legal team as valuable to your organisation as possible, it pays to have a strategy and a plan to implement it. This note looks at how a general counsel can create and implement this strategy through a seven-stage plan and follow-up sessions. This will help you assess your current position and establish your desired future position. We recommend establishing a small process flow team and holding sessions every three weeks. This should give you enough time to:
  • Digest the outputs of each session.
  • Consult with colleagues as needed.
  • Prepare for the next session meaningfully.
  • Keep up the day job.
At the same time, it should maintain the tempo necessary to cover significant ground without missing anything and avoid creating overly relaxed timetables that people fail to meet.

Analyse the organisation's structure

The first step in this process is to think about your organisation in its legal context. Gather as much hard data from across the organisation about other business units:
  • Size.
  • Functions.
  • Plans.
  • Budgets.
  • Existing and anticipated legal commitments (for example, contracts and legal and regulatory requirements).
Examine what your legal function currently does and what it should do, if different. Find out what your organisation expects, or should expect, of the legal function, both at an organisational level and for each business unit that you work with. You could consider running an online survey among senior management and selected team members before this session. Ask questions that will help you create a vision of where you want to go and how to get there. A powerful question is:
"Tell us what we should do better in future for your team, why it will be an improvement for both teams and how you can help us to make this change."

Define your function's role

Defining your function's role enables you to decide how to position yourself for the future. Questions to consider at this stage of the process include:
  • What work should we be doing and not doing?
  • Who should we be doing the work for?
  • How should the work be done? For example, in-house, by external counsel or via a managed legal service.
  • What changes should we prepare for given what we know about the organisation's and our team's current activities and future plans?
  • What are our core team values and motivators, and are they what they should be?
At this point you can set out the main areas you feel your team should prioritise. The output of this step should be a first draft strategy for everyone in your team's "role working group" to take away and work on and refine for the next meeting. Active engagement by your team (and other key business stakeholders) in the development of the plan is more likely to result in active ownership of its delivery.
For further information, see Practice note, Key functions of a legal team.

Create a strategy and revised outline business plan

You and your team should discuss the first draft strategy with stakeholders and other people in the business, and fine-tune it accordingly. The aim of this stage is to discuss the development of the strategy so far and provisionally finalise it. This stage should include a thorough analysis of your current corporate business plan and known external impacting factors against your new strategy. It should identify gaps, ambiguities and known differences.
For further information, see Setting the strategic direction for your in-house legal team.

Gap analysis between current and revised plan

Once you have identified the gaps between your existing position and your proposed plans, take a closer look and detail how you intend to bridge those gaps. Rectify any errors, ambiguities and omissions that you find in your plans as you look at each aspect of your operations more closely.
Next, assess and quantify what this will involve and, if necessary, rework the plan. This is a time-consuming process that will require input from other teams that will be affected by the change. It may help to "borrow" skills from your Finance, HR or IT teams to help you with this exercise. You'll also need to specify the exact nature of the gaps identified and discuss ideas for plugging each gap and what it will cost.

Fill the identified gaps

Revise your plans and develop a draft change management plan in the light of your learnings. Check all the points against each other, as well as the underlying business, and look at cost, resource, timing and sequencing implications. Then sense-check the end plan and timetable it against your targets, list all the stakeholders who will be affected and consider what that impact may be. The main objective of this step is to fill the gaps identified in the previous two steps without disrupting existing business operations.
Change is a job in itself and change planning and delivery will involve the temporary use of extra resource or resource that is temporarily released from other work. Delivering change that matters is not a learning opportunity, and you'll need to use the most relevantly skilled people that you can find. Some people may struggle to stop doing or to deprioritise their normal work and client activities for emotional reasons, as much as time and pressure ones. It is therefore vital to identify the correct people to work on change analysis and delivery.
For further information, see Practice note, Change management: an introduction.

Keep stakeholders engaged

Once you have assessed the impact of your plans on your stakeholders, decide the extent to which you want or need them to be involved and how realistic that involvement is. Remember to watch out for "tacit blockers" who may not actively oppose your plans but are not very cooperative either and may slow things down through their inactivity. This is one reason why big changes often take longer than you may initially think.
For this reason, it is often wise to try to build some "hidden slack" into your timetable to enable your stakeholders to meet your deadlines. In this context, keep your plan under continual review and communicate closely with stakeholders. You may also want to think about making a separate plan to manage and satisfy your stakeholders' requirements.

Finalise the plan

Finalise your plan, including your stakeholder communication programme, and set out the first two months of its operation. Test the plan in a structured way with your key stakeholders, add in any last-minute revisions and then start rolling the plan out.

Follow-up sessions

Once your plan has been live for around a month and implementation is in progress, start the follow-up process. This could comprise three sessions with intervals of two months between them.

Listening to stakeholders

Analyse early feedback from stakeholders and, if necessary, revise the plan while it is in progress. We rarely get everything right first time and circumstances do change while plans are being executed, so plan for change and make a virtue of it.

Three-month progress check

After three months, get your team together to measure the plan's progress against outcomes and assess any areas that may need to change. This is the effectiveness assessment stage.

Five-month progress check

After five months, your plan should be running smoothly, and you may well be getting close to having completed all the changes needed and moved into the "new steady state" for your function. However, it's still a good idea to monitor progress and tweak the plan as necessary, especially if the wider business goals change during its lifecycle. You will probably want to evaluate outcomes with stakeholders and look for further improvements and any demonstrations of success that you can make. You are now starting to move into the efficiency stage of running your department.

Repeat the process

Business is not static, and neither should your department be. You should regularly evaluate what is happening to the business and the wider commercial and legal framework that your business operates in. This will enable you to continually evolve your department and make timely and supportable budget and resource claims as part of the annual budget cycle. For further information, see Practice note, Fitting legal into business strategy, plans and budgets.
A well-run legal team should only experience the "earthquake" jolt of change if the business itself does the same (for example, during a merger or restructuring). The rest of the time the legal team should be continually reassessing and making small changes so that major changes are unnecessary.
The Centre for Legal Leadership provides education, coaching, mentoring and related career support services for in-house leaders to get the best performance from themselves and their teams.