Underscoring the legal department’s value to the business has become essential for General Counsel and law department leaders. When in a competition for scarce resources, the law department needs to be in line with other corporate functions demonstrating alignment to organizational priorities – shaking off the perception of the department of “no” and being seen as a business enabler and strategic partner to the business.

In this webinar, our speaker highlights the four pillars that are essential to demonstrating your value as a law department.

Aligning with the business

Understanding your internal stakeholder’s priorities and challenges, and how the legal team can help to support those priorities or solve those challenges is one of the most direct ways to ensure alignment with the business and demonstrate your position as a strategic partner. If you haven’t already done so, consider having a baseline conversation with your key business unit leaders. This will help to shape your direction and anticipate their legal needs allowing you to be closer to the front end of discussions and activities. It will have a tremendous impact on your relationship and is an opportunity for you to deepen your connections.

Designing a responsive department

Law departments often grow quickly without having the time for deep reflection as to how the business will interact with legal. Processes are often created on the fly, documents may not be stored centrally, or the way in which the work is sent to the department may not be structured, tracked or triaged. All of these operational elements of the law department can sometimes be pieced together as needed.

It’s important to remember that optimizing your department is an evolution and, regardless of where you might be on that spectrum, it’s worthwhile taking a pause to think about how you might design a legal function that is responsive to the business and delivers value. The strategic planning process can be a helpful tool to identify what you need to do to go from point A to point B.

Telling your story with data

Leveraging data to tell your story can be helpful provided you remain focused on the specific action or result you are trying to achieve. Otherwise, you can spend a great deal of time trying to unearth and synthesize data that might not be relevant to your objective or the business. Be sure to consider your objective. What messages do you want others to know or take action against? Who is your audience? It’s also important to be realistic about what data you can easily get access to otherwise this can be a never-ending effort.

Reinforcing your narrative

Some law departments may be frustrated that while they may have metrics in place and are reporting at a leadership level, the broader business may not fully understand or appreciate the legal team’s role or clearly see the value they deliver. It’s helpful to think about the narrative that you want the business to understand and build a programmatic approach to delivering that message.

Most corporations, if not all, will have some kind of marketing strategy and communications plan. As law departments are increasingly expected to operate like a business within a business, having a communications plan can help to ensure you are delivering the right messages to the right audience.