Grow A Legal Operations Career: 10 Tips From Leaders

Legal operations has never been more visible or more demanding.

Budgets are tighter, expectations from the business are higher, and the tech stack seems to change regularly. For legal operations professionals in corporate law departments, “keeping the lights on” isn’t enough. You’re expected to drive efficiency, manage risk, champion technology, and prove business impact.

In a recent fireside-style conversation, legal ops veterans Elizabeth Miller, Head of Legal Operations & Strategic Enablement at Delta Dental, and Christy Jo Gedney, Senior Director, Strategic Counsel & Litigation Management at Liberty Mutual, sat down with Kris Satkunas, Director of Strategic Consulting with LexisNexis® CounselLink® to talk about what it actually takes to build a successful career in this space.

They’ve spent 20+ and 28+ years respectively in roles that didn’t even exist when they started. They’ve built teams, survived change and helped define what legal operations is today.

Grow A Legal Operations Career With These 10 Tips 

1. Know What Legal Ops Actually Is (and What It Isn’t)

If you’re treating legal ops as “law-adjacent but less stressful,” you’re already off course. Christy’s definition is simple and spot on: Legal operations is everything that helps a legal department run, short of actually practicing law. That includes:

• Technology and tools
• Data and analytics
• Process design and project management
• Outside counsel management and pricing
• Budgeting, forecasting and reporting
• Administrative and support functions

Elizabeth frames it as maximizing the potential of your resources: people, process, technology, and budget. Legal ops asks: How do we make this department as effective, efficient and valuable to the business as possible?

2. Be Honest About Why You Want to Be in Legal Ops

If you’re an attorney looking to pivot into legal operations, the question to ask is blunt and necessary:

⇒ Why do you want to be in legal operations, really?

If the answer is, “I don’t want to practice law anymore, and this seems adjacent,” that’s not enough. Legal operations is not a fallback job for people who don’t want to practice anymore. It’s a discipline in its own right.

To thrive in legal ops, you need to genuinely enjoy things like:

• Improving processes
• Talking to finance about reserves, accruals and P&Ls
• Working with procurement and IT
• Evaluating tools, contracts and vendors
• Thinking about scalability and cost control

If those things sound painful, you will not love this work, no matter how much you like the idea of “strategic” projects. On the other hand, if you’re energized by fixing broken processes, connecting dots and making the whole system run better, you’re in the right neighborhood.

3. Adopt the Legal Ops Mindset: Curious, Brave and Non-Wallflower-y

Someone once said, “Legal operations is not for wallflowers.” And, there’s a caveat. You don’t have to be the loudest person in the room, but you do need to:

• Question how things are done today
• Ask “why” (a lot)
• Say “I don’t understand, can you walk me through this?”
• Pressure-test the status quo
• Look for easier, smarter ways to get to the same (or better) outcome

Kris added a counterpoint: Wallflowers have one thing going for them…they’re observant. And that’s crucial. The job is equal parts watching how things truly work and then being brave enough to suggest a different way. Curiosity + courage is the core operating system of a legal ops career.

4. Look Up and Out: Horizon-Scan, Don’t Just Look at Your To-Do List

You cannot succeed in legal ops with your head buried only in your own department. You need to:

• Watch what’s changing in the legal industry: AI, legal system abuse, cybersecurity, data governance, new pricing models
• Pay attention to how your business is changing: products, risk profile, geography, growth plans
• Stay plugged into the legal ops community: peer groups, conferences, associations, vendor roundtables

If you’re only focused on internal tasks and “getting through your queue,” you will quietly fall behind. Part of the job is constant horizon scanning: What’s coming next? What might hit us? How do we get ahead of it?

5. Build Real Business Acumen (Especially If You’re an Attorney)

Christy’s advice to lawyers eyeing legal ops is simple: Learn how the business actually runs. Legal ops sits at the intersection of law and business. You’ll be more effective if you can:

• Read and talk about a P&L and balance sheet
• Discuss cost-benefit tradeoffs with business leaders
• Understand how legal outcomes affect claims, revenue, customer experience, and brand
• Engage credibly with finance, risk and executive leadership

Elizabeth’s background in finance made her a natural bridge between legal and the rest of the enterprise. You don’t need to be a CPA, but you can’t be allergic to numbers.

6. Use Data and Metrics Without Freaking Everybody Out

Attorneys know legal ops = metrics. That alone can put them on edge. Christy’s advice when you introduce or expand metrics:

• Explain why you’re measuring what you’re measuring.
• Connect metrics to outcomes attorneys care about (results, risk, client satisfaction), not just legal spend.
• Keep it simple. Focus on a limited set of KPIs that actually drive decisions.
• Segment where it matters: by matter type, venue, risk level, etc., so the data reflects reality.

Metrics should feel like a flashlight, not a surveillance camera. The goal is to help people practice at the top of their license, not to shame them in dashboards.

7. Become a Translator: Legal, Business, Finance, IT, Vendors

Legal ops often functions as an interpreter between groups that don’t naturally speak the same language:

• Legal
• Claims or business units
• Finance
• IT and security
• Procurement
• Outside counsel
• Tech vendors

Legal operations professionals translate expectations, constraints and risks in both directions.

That might look like:

• Turning business expectations into service levels, playbooks or workflows legal can actually execute
• Helping the business understand the cost and risk associated with their requests
• Clarifying requirements and constraints for IT when rolling out new tools
• Making sure vendors understand real legal department problems, not just generic “innovation” talk

Influence without formal authority is the name of the game.

8. Get Good at Change Management: You’re the Gas and the Brake

The panelists agree that legal ops is basically a full-contact sport in change. A few of their core principles:

• Secure real sponsorship

Major changes need visible backing from the CLO or other senior leaders. People look up to decide how they should feel about change. If leadership is lukewarm, everyone else will be ice cold.

• Find your change advocates

Look for respected, collaborative people who embrace new ways of working and can influence peers. They’re your “fleet” to carry the message into every corner of the org.

• Don’t force “solutions” on people who don’t know they have a problem

Walking into a team and declaring, “You’re doing this all wrong; legal ops is here to fix you,” is the fastest path to resistance. Instead, listen, ask questions, and help them arrive at the realization that change is needed.

• Give away the credit

When something works, the people who own the work should own the win. Legal ops is often most effective when it’s slightly invisible. And maybe the most underrated tip: As your organization matures, your job isn’t just to be the gas on change. Sometimes you need to be the brake…slowing the pace to something sustainable and consumable.

9. Don’t Chase Every Shiny Tool: Start With the Problem

Tired of “Have you seen this new AI thing?” conversations? You’re not alone. Elizabeth’s approach to shiny-tool burnout:

• Start with: What problem are we trying to solve?
• Be honest if you don’t have the problem a new tool claims to solve.
• Leverage your existing enterprise tools before you buy something new (half the time, the capability already exists somewhere in the company).
• Use your peer network to shortcut endless pilots: what works, what doesn’t, what’s hype vs. reality?
• Ask vendors to share their roadmap and be willing to influence it. Great vendors listen to legal ops leaders and build accordingly.

Do a budget reality check: No one is working with unlimited dollars. Every tool should either make your department more efficient or more effective in a way you can articulate.
If it’s cool but not useful, it’s clutter.

10. Don’t Underestimate Culture and People

There’s one part of legal ops that will never show up cleanly in a job description: culture. Yes, you’re there to optimize legal spend, implement tools and manage processes. But you’re also shaping:

• How people experience their work
• Whether teams feel heard and supported
• Whether internal clients feel legal is a partner
• Whether your department feels like a true team, not a loose confederation of practice areas

Your career will go further, faster if you treat culture as part of the job, not “nice to have.”

Where to Go From Here

If you’re building (or rebooting) a career in legal operations, you don’t need to do all of this at once. But you do need to be intentional. You might start with:

• Asking “why” about one recurring process this week and really listening to the answer.
• Scheduling time with finance or claims to better understand their world.
• Evaluating one metric your department uses and clarifying its purpose.
• Saying no to one shiny new tool conversation that doesn’t align with a real problem.
• Reaching out to one peer in the legal ops community to compare notes.

Legal operations isn’t for wallflowers, but it’s also not reserved for superheroes. It’s for people who are curious, brave enough to question how things are done, and committed to making legal better for everyone it touches.

CounselLink Events Hub

The LexisNexis CounselLink events hub details current and previous panels and sessions that guests can view at their convenience. For a replay of “Build and Grow a Career in Legal Ops,” visit the events hub. 

To learn more about the CounselLink+ enterprise legal management solution, used by legal operations professionals the world over, reach us and schedule a conversation about making your legal department more efficient.