In-House Legal Department Processes & Procedures - Your Core Operating Infrastructure

Why They Matter More Than Most Legal Teams Realise — and How to Make Them Work

For many in-house lawyers, the mere mention of “processes and procedures” triggers an almost allergic reaction.

It conjures images of bureaucracy, rigidity, and unnecessary approval layers — the very opposite of what overstretched legal teams believe they need as demand increases and the business accelerates.

That reaction is understandable. 

It is also wrong.

Well-designed processes and procedures are not red tape. They are the primary drivers of efficiency, scalability, and credibility in a modern in-house legal function. 

When legal teams struggle with speed, delegation, inconsistency, or failed technology investments, the root cause is rarely talent.

It is almost always process and procedure design that has been ignored, improvised, or left to chance.

This piece examines what legal department processes and procedures really are, why they are so often misunderstood, why improving them is genuinely difficult, and how in-house leaders can approach optimisation in a way that is structured, realistic, and sustainable.

It also explains why GLS developed the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map - not as a consulting artefact, but as a practical way to make sense of something that is otherwise hard to see, hard to prioritise, and easy to avoid.

Why Processes and Procedures Matter More Than Legal Teams Think

At its most fundamental level, an in-house legal department is not defined by its headcount, seniority mix, or technology stack.

It is defined by how work flows through the function.

Processes and procedures determine:

◼️ how legal demand enters the team

◼️ how risk decisions are made and escalated

◼️ how authority is exercised and delegated

◼️ how quickly the business can move

◼️ how consistently legal advice is delivered

When these flows are informal, unclear, or person-dependent, legal performance becomes unpredictable. Bottlenecks form. Delegation becomes unsafe. Lawyers become gatekeepers rather than enablers. Technology struggles to deliver anything more than cosmetic improvement.

When processes are deliberately designed and properly empowered, the opposite happens: legal becomes faster, safer, more scalable, and more commercially aligned — without working harder or endlessly adding headcount.

That is not bureaucracy.

That is leverage.

Lawyers Come and Go — Processes Must Not

There is another reality that makes process and procedures non-negotiable.

In-house lawyers do not stay forever.

In many markets, the average tenure sits around 18–36 months. Go and check out some in-house bios on LinkedIn and you will see just how accurate that statement is. 

When legal performance relies on:

◼️ personal memory,

◼️ informal understandings, or

◼️ “how we’ve always done it”,

◼️ every departure quietly resets the function.

Well-designed processes and procedures are the institutional memory of the legal team. They are what allow performance to persist even as individuals change.

Without them, every new hire relearns the same lessons - at the business’s expense.

What Legal Department Processes and Procedures Actually Are

One of the reasons process work is resisted is simple conceptual confusion.

Processes and procedures are often mistaken for:

◼️ templates

◼️ policies

◼️ playbooks

◼️ vendor-defined workflows

None of these, on their own, are processes.

Put simply:

◼️ Processes define what happens: the sequence of activities, decisions, hand-offs, and outputs required to deliver a legal outcome.

◼️ Procedures define how it happens: who does what, under what authority, in what order, and subject to which controls.

Every legal team already has processes — documented or not.

When they are undocumented, they live in people’s heads. That makes them fragile, inconsistent, and almost impossible to improve systematically or automate safely.

Why Process Work Is Resisted

Proper process work surfaces realities many teams would rather not confront:

◼️ how legal is actually experienced by the business

◼️ where authority is unclear, duplicated, or hoarded

◼️ where delegation fails under pressure

◼️ where bottlenecks reflect structure, not workload

Process work is not just technical.

It is behavioural and organisational.

That is precisely why it is powerful — and why avoiding it quietly compounds cost and risk.

Mini Case Studies: When Great Lawyers Fall Short Without Process

1. The CLMs That Promised Everything — and Delivered Nothing

A respected legal team implemented a major (and perfectly good) CLMS system promising speed, automation, and control. Adoption collapsed within 12 months.

Why?

There was no agreed/documented contracting process. No shared view on intake, risk escalation, authority, exceptions or consistency around legal templates. Accordingly, the CLMS system imposed generic workflows that clashed with how the legal team and the business actually worked.

Lawyers bypassed it. The business lost confidence. The CLMS became an expensive repository, akin to Dropbox - which only costs a few dollars a month.

The technology didn’t fail.
The absence of process did.

2. “Improve Legal Performance” — But No One Knew Where the Problem Was

A new GC was told legal needed to perform better - but had no visibility of demand, capacity, or bottlenecks.

The GC quickly discovered that there was no formal legal intake process. Instructions arrived via email, WhatsApp, conversations in the corridor, or text message. Senior lawyers handled low-value work, capacity was opaque, and resourcing decisions were guesswork.

Fixing one apex process — legal intake — changed everything. Work flows were consolidated, became visible and was routed properly, self-help emerged, capacity became visible and could be optimised, and performance improved rapidly.

Nothing changed except the process.

3. Strong Team, Chronic Bottlenecks

A capable legal team was slow despite good talent. The issue wasn’t workload — it was authority embedded in process.

Unclear delegation and informal escalation meant senior lawyers became approval choke points. Once authority thresholds were made explicit and embedded into procedures, decisions moved safely downward and throughput improved without hiring.

The talent had always been there.
The process had been holding it back.

The Core Position

Processes and procedures are the institutional expression of legal judgement.

Without them, legal relies on memory, heroics, and goodwill.

With them, judgement becomes repeatable, scalable, and defensible.

This is how legal moves faster and safer at the same time.

How Serious Legal Teams Improve Processes and Procedures

Mature in-house teams consistently apply four principles:

Process Mapping First
If you can’t see the process, you can’t improve it.

Risk-Based Design
Not all work deserves the same scrutiny. Processes must reflect risk and value.

Authority-Aligned Engineering
Processes only work when decision rights are explicit.

Apex-First Optimisation
Fix intake, delegated authority, risk acceptance, and approvals — and the system shifts.

We have written a detailed piece on the key principles that should be observed in order for you to opitmise the performance of your legal team's processes and procedures. 

The Myth That Technology Will Fix It

Implementing matter management or CLMS systems is not process improvement - as you can see from the case study above.

Technology enforces assumptions. If processes are unclear offline, technology simply automates dysfunction.

This is why so many legal tech initiatives disappoint.

Why the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map Changes the Conversation

Most leaders do not underestimate the importance of process and procedures. 

They underestimate the scale of it.

Through its work across industries and jurisdictions, GLS has identified over 2,500 distinct legal department processes that materially affect speed, cost, and risk.

The Legal Transformation Tube Map makes this complexity visible and navigable by identifying the 15 core functional domains that define how an in-house legal team actually operates.

Once those domains are laid out visually:

◼️ the need for process becomes obvious,

◼️ the movement of work across the function is easier to see, and

◼️ prioritisation becomes possible.

The Tube Map does not replace judgement.

It organises it.

From Framework to Experience

Based on this framework, GLS has already identified the vast majority of processes that sit behind optimised performance at each station, on each line, and across the legal function as a whole.

That experience is embedded in the resource itself.

The Tube Map is valuable even without further engagement — it gives leaders a structured way to think about process, avoid obvious failure modes, and prioritise effort intelligently.

At the same time, it establishes something else clearly: the heavy lifting has already been done.

When Leaders Want to Go Further

For teams ready to move from understanding to execution, GLS works with in-house leaders to:

◼️ diagnose process maturity,

◼️ identify apex constraints,

◼️ design sequenced optimisation pathways, and

◼️ embed processes that survive lawyer turnover and business growth.

This is not opinion-led consulting.

It is evidence-based system design.

Conclusion: Process Is No Longer Optional

Processes and procedures are not red tape.

They are the operating infrastructure of the legal function.

Legal teams that take them seriously are:

◼️ more predictable,

◼️ more scalable,

◼️ more credible with the business, and

◼️ better able to absorb complexity without breaking.

Those that do not will continue to struggle — regardless of talent or intent.

The difference is not effort.
It is structure.

The GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map exists to make that structure visible, navigable, and actionable.

For in-house leaders serious about performance, this is where the work begins.

Ready To Transform Your Legal Team?

Please check out the GLS solutions and know-how resources listed on the right side of this page – they might assist your legal team with the issues explored in this Blog. 

© The GLS Group - Law Rewritten