Using Legal Playbooks To Streamline Law Departments

The hybrid workforce continues, yet back-to-work policies are more prevalent in the law department and other places of work. The role of the legal operations professional to ensure cohesive style guidelines among all employees, staff, vendors, and other services providers is more complicated. A way to unify the various remote locations, in-office schedules and those with 100% remote work is the use of legal playbooks.

What Are Legal Playbooks

In a chaotic work environment, a legal playbook provides the foundational guidelines for everyone in the law department. It creates a rules structure and dynamic resource to promote consistent standardization. The use of legal playbooks helps mitigate risk through consistency in legal practice, including contracts, human resources, processes, training, and more. As a manual, legal playbooks provide critical information about processes, task functionality and strategies.

Why Use Legal Playbooks

The good news about legal playbooks is that everyone can use them. From a paralegal and lawyer to an associate, human resources staff, or contract manager, legal playbooks provide the guidance that settles many of the “how-to” questions. A good rule of thumb when creating legal playbooks is determining the format. Should the guidelines be printed and added to three-ring binders with a set on everyone’s desks, or should a digital file copy be accessible on the company’s hard drive?

Considering the workforce of the here and now, with many on the legal team scattered in remote locations, a digital playbook is a best practice. This enables updates to the resource, accessibility for anyone needing the reference guide, and less time to locate critical information. It also means that the resource remains up to date.

In the legal department, there is less time to manage workload. Training is required when a new paralegal or junior associate joins the legal team. A legal playbook provides foundational instruction and positioning in various areas so that lawyers can maintain focus on managing matters and servicing business units throughout the company. Certainly, the initial time invested in creating a legal playbook requires hours of work; however, the result of knowledge capture is worth that dedication. A newer legal team member can search for answers and resolve issues without disturbing a senior lawyer. This becomes an efficient process and best practice in the law department, especially in areas with routine processes.

In law departments without a legal playbook, it’s easy to understand that lawyers would not want to create one. The task, they’d say, is too “time-consuming, complex and non-billable to a current matter.”

The answer to potential complaints about such a task is to present the benefits and ask for an outline to begin the drafting process. At the core of the legal department is a quest to add value to the enterprise. A legal playbook provides that path to operational efficiency, training guidelines, and a more cohesive structure. Once the team if familiar with using playbooks, it opens the door for the development of other guides on various topics. Creating an atmosphere of utilization of instruction and standards manuals is helpful for the long-term success of the law department.

Value of Legal Playbooks

Who doesn’t want clarity in any role in which they work? A legal department suffers from chaos due to the pace at which it works. A legal playbook can help mitigate that chaos, especially for newer members of the legal and operations teams while senior members maintain their rigorous schedules managing legal matters.

• Navigation of repetitive issues with the legal playbook allows everyone on the team to make efficient decisions with confidence and clarity. There are boundaries in a legal department that may go unsaid, but not unread! A legal playbook provides that nuance and organizes the legal team into effective collaboration. It can provide acceptable positions and procedures and become a roadmap for business unit leaders while creating an actionable guide for legal strategy.
• There are benefits to using a legal playbook beyond just the legal and operations teams. Business stakeholders can reference a guide to better understand what the legal team approves, say, during contract negotiation, instead of inquiring each time. The time savings for both parties are valuable.
• Efficiency improves with the use of a legal guide, and this occurs throughout the enterprise. Junior lawyers, newcomers to the team, business stakeholders, and others benefit from having a digital copy of a legal playbook accessible. It’s a fantastic source that synchronizes everyone’s experiences and streamlines the completion of everyday tasks.
• Risk management is a critical component in every law department and company. Having a legal playbook as a reference for anyone in the enterprise mitigates the risk of error. Moreover, a playbook can identify areas of inconsistency, flag them and address necessary solutions.
• One of the best benefits of having a current legal playbook is the onboarding of new team members, whether they work in legal or operations. Initial questions can be answered from reference points in the manual, and how to conduct repetitive tasks are detailed in the guidebook, too.

Developing different versions of a playbook for respective audiences is a smart business practice, so many people can be assisted with process and procedure. Playbooks coordinate with enterprise legal management software, which aligns legal teams, business stakeholders and outside counsel into one collaborative dashboard. Contact us to learn more.