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
Continue Reading ACC and Wolters Kluwer Release Legal Operations Study – Legal Operations Leaders Drive Change But Innovation Lags in Legal Departments