Treat Your Legal Department Right

Legal expertise and an excellent handle of finding the risks and solving legal issues in the business isn’t the only thing you need when you’re welcoming a legal department. As well as a vital service in the legal world, it is an arm of your business above all else. You need to start thinking about what is going to give it the kind of professional organization that allows it to really flex that expertise and help you how they should.

Take the busywork out. A legal department often has a tremendous amount of work to do. Intellectual property, HR, hiring practices, so on and so forth. Underestimate how much work they have and you’ll see them fall behind on it so often that their services to you will start to suffer. That’s why you should look at providing them with tools like matter management software that can automate and take some of the work out of their administrative processes. Help them stay on top of their admin to stay on top of your legal matters. Keep things organized and accessible with less work needed to do so.

Get the accounts in order. It’s not cheap to run a legal department, either. Without a firm hand on your accounting, it’s easy for those expenses to overwhelm the business. Making sure your legal department stays cost-effective allows it to stay an essential safety net for the business without becoming too much of a risk instead. Don’t let money be your primary concern. Get a specific accounting system setup first. For instance, use legal accounting software instead of the accounting system used in the rest of the business. Reduce data entry errors by marrying your accounting to your practice management system.

Get the best team. When you start or expand on a legal department team, you need the right people to ensure the quality of the business matches your standards. Find the characteristics of your best past hires, for instance, to see what works best in the corporate culture. Make sure your future associates aren’t just looking for any job, too. See what they know about your business and past cases it might have been involved in. Of course, you need to make sure hiring in-house counsel involves the specific talents your business in most in need of. Whether that’s litigation, copyright law, collections or otherwise.

Remember, you are a customer and employer. A level of objectivity is required in dealing with clients as a legal department. However, you also need to remember that retaining them is essential. A good relationship between your management and your legal team is essential. Accessible and responsive answers to queries from both ends are key. Mastering the art of listening as well as talking, listening to their potential issues and needs as well as telling them what they need to do next.

There’s no doubt that a serious business can’t survive without some excellent legal expertise. But if you focus solely on that and not on the supports those experts need, you’ll have too many barriers to receiving the best service you can.