Welcome to Legal Ops Briefs—inspired by the mot-r mindset, this blog series of 3-minute reads gives in-house Legal Ops quick, operational insights. Each post will explore the tech, trends, and tactics that boost operational effectiveness and ease legal team stress—without adding to the noise.
Why Legal Ops Should Lead LegalTech Decision-Making
Legal operations teams are often tasked with solving complex workflow and resourcing challenges—yet when it comes to choosing the technology meant to solve those problems, too often they’re sidelined. IT and procurement lead the process, and legal ends up with tools that don’t fit their needs, increase complexity, and fail to deliver measurable impact.
If LegalTech is meant to empower the legal department, then Legal Ops must lead the decision-making process. Without their input, you risk investing in tools that check boxes—but don’t solve problems.
The Hidden Cost of Delegating LegalTech Decisions to IT
When Legal Ops steps back from the selection process, IT or vendor management typically takes over. While well-intentioned, these groups evaluate tools based on features, security specs, and vendor history, not the operational pain points that legal teams face every day.
The result? You get tools that technically work but functionally fail—solutions that:
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Don’t reduce workload or burnout
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Introduce more data silos and toggle tax
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Disrupt existing workflows without improving them
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Require legal teams to work around the tech instead of with it
As highlighted in Avoiding LegalTech Failures, legal teams then become the unintended victims of decisions made without their insight—and without consequences for the teams who made them.
Why Legal Ops Is Best Positioned to Evaluate LegalTech
Legal Ops sits at the intersection of legal service delivery, business strategy, and process efficiency. That makes them uniquely qualified to lead LegalTech evaluation from a position of practical impact and measurable outcomes.
Here’s what Legal Ops brings to the table:
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Deep understanding of legal workflows and bottlenecks
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Context on team capabilities and constraints
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Insight into which problems need solving first
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A focus on long-term adaptability, not just short-term fixes
When Legal Ops leads, the question shifts from “What features do we need?” to “What outcomes do we need to deliver?”
Outcome-Based Tech Decisions Require Legal’s Frontline Input
LegalTech decisions should start with a “Jobs to Be Done” framework—what are the legal team’s core functions, and what’s preventing them from being executed efficiently?
Legal Ops can define these outcomes and match them to real, functional use cases, ensuring:
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Clear evaluation criteria based on success metrics
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Alignment with current and future operating realities
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Minimal second-order effects from implementation
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Increased adoption and team buy-in
As a bonus, Legal Ops can facilitate premortems—prospective hindsight exercises to surface risks before a solution is selected. This type of planning strengthens the implementation phase and minimizes rollout failures.
From Support Function to Strategic Tech Leader
To succeed, Legal Ops must stop thinking of themselves as just an administrative function and start acting like strategic technology owners.
This doesn’t mean cutting IT out—it means collaborating, with Legal Ops driving and IT supporting:
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Legal defines the problem and desired outcome
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Legal Ops identifies functional gaps and bottlenecks
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IT ensures security, scalability, and integration support
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Together, they choose tech that works and lasts
This shift isn’t just about smarter tech—it’s about elevating Legal Ops as the operational brain of the department.
Chime In. Be Heard.
Has your Legal Ops team taken the lead on a LegalTech decision—or been stuck on the sidelines? What changed when you had a seat at the table?
Share your insights and help other teams advocate for smarter, outcome-driven decisions. Whether you’ve championed the right tool or learned the hard way from being left out, your experience matters. Let’s elevate Legal Ops from tech users to tech leaders—together.
mot-r is the Legal Work Orchestration solution for General Counsel. It is designed to reduce overwork and elevate legal service quality of legal teams of all sizes. With workflows, dashboards and granular reporting, it improves operational effectiveness and client service quality. Created by a team of enterprise software experts—who have a passion for reducing the human cost of legal work—mot-r is a trusted supplier to general counsel teams in financial services, healthcare, real estate, sports management and more. When you're ready to modernize how your in-house team works, we're ready to help.
Mike Tobias: Jul 1, 2025 8:45:00 AM
