Process & Procedures are the documented, repeatable steps that define how legal work is performed across your department - driving consistency, predictability, and scalability.

High quality legal department performance comes from good people using good processes. The “processes” and “procedures” become the operational DNA of your legal function - the codified workflows that ensure consistency, reduce risk, and enable scalability.

Without documented processes, legal work becomes ad hoc, variable, and dependent on individual memory. Or, as we like to call it at GLS, work becomes “artisanal” as opposed to “industrial” - and routine and volume based legal tasks should be approached in an “industrial” manner.

The lack of  focus on optimised “processes” leads to inefficiencies, inconsistent outputs, and an inability to onboard new team members effectively. Worse still, it makes automation impossible - because you cannot automate what you haven’t standardised. 

Indeed the lack of focus on legal team's existing “processes” and associated “adequacy” prior to the procurement of new CLMS systems - is the single biggest as to why CLMS led tech enablement success has been beyond reach for so many legal teams. 

This station on the Legal Operations Line is a rallying call for legal teams to stop and think specifically about the processes and procedures that underpin legal team operations.

Specifically, its ensuring that every recurring legal task - from contract review to compliance reporting - follows a known, agreed, and optimised path. These procedures are not bureaucratic overhead; they are the foundation for performance, quality control, and transformation.

And, and get this because it is non-negotiable - it is a pre-cursor to any form of technology adoption. The low tech work (i.e. identifying and optimising your processes) always comes before the “high-tech” work (i.e. spending money on fancy systems). 

Critically, Process & Procedures are also a risk management tool. They ensure that legal work is performed in a way that aligns with the business’s risk appetite, regulatory obligations, and strategic priorities. 

Process and Procedures are the rules by which your legal tech, your team, and your business partners operate - making this aspect of legal department planning one of the most critical that you can engage in. 

The Process & Procedures station defines how legal work is designed, executed, governed, and improved across the legal function. It converts legal strategy, policy, and risk appetite into repeatable, scalable operating discipline.

◾️ Demand Intake and Qualification: Definition of what constitutes a valid legal request, including minimum information requirements, prioritisation logic, and routing rules. This scope element underpins effective Legal Services Request and demand management.

◾️ Work Categorisation and Matter Typing: Standard classification of legal work by type, complexity, risk, and business value. This enables consistent resourcing, escalation, pricing logic, and meaningful analytics.

◾️ End-to-End Legal Workflows: Design and documentation of standard workflows covering intake, execution, review, escalation, approval, and closure for recurring legal activities. This forms the operational backbone of service delivery across contracting and advisory work.

The GLS team has identified more than 2,500 processes and procedures that underpin the optimally performing in-house legal department. Whilst this number seems incredibly high - it is actually not.

◾️ Roles, Responsibilities, and Handoffs: Clear definition of who does what, when, and why — including handoffs between lawyers, legal operations, the business, and external providers. This reduces friction and dependency on individuals.

◾️ Decision Points and Approval Logic: Documentation of approval thresholds, decision authorities, and exception pathways to ensure speed without loss of control. This aligns naturally with governance and delegation frameworks.

◾️ Service Levels and Delivery Standards: Establishment of turnaround times, response expectations, and quality benchmarks by work type. This creates transparency for internal clients and supports performance management.

◾️ Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs): Creation and maintenance of SOPs for repeatable legal tasks to ensure consistency, quality, and defensibility. SOPs directly support onboarding, training, and scalability.

◾️ Exception and Escalation Management: Clear rules for identifying, escalating, and resolving non-standard or high-risk matters without breaking the operating model or creating process drift.

◾️ Interaction with External Counsel and Providers: Definition of when and how work is outsourced, including escalation criteria, handoff processes, and integration with internal workflows. This strengthens alignment with vendor and spend management.

◾️ Knowledge Capture and Reuse: Embedding mechanisms to capture precedents, playbooks, and lessons learned as part of execution — feeding directly into knowledge management and future efficiency.

◾️ Risk Calibration and Proportionality Controls: Embedding proportionality so legal effort aligns with risk and business value, preventing over-lawyering and unnecessary delay.

◾️ Regulatory, Compliance, and Audit Touchpoints: Integration of compliance checks, regulatory requirements, and audit triggers directly into workflows rather than treating them as afterthoughts.

◾️ Documentation and Artefact Management: Standards governing document naming, version control, storage, and retention to ensure auditability, searchability, and system readiness.

◾️ Process Ownership and Governance: Clear ownership of each process, including accountability for maintenance, change control, and communication — preventing silent degradation over time.

◾️ Continuous Improvement and Optimisation: Use of data, feedback, and performance signals to refine processes on an ongoing basis, linking directly to analytics, planning, and transformation activity.

◾️ Technology and Automation Readiness: Design of processes with downstream enablement in mind, ensuring compatibility with CLM, workflow tools, AI applications, and broader legal tech investments.
 

When it comes to the pursuit of “utopian” state automation - even the most basic legal team task must map back to an underlying process - e.g. - which template do i use. 

We encourage you to read our deep dive on legal process and procedures a- the “infrastructure level” of a high performing in-house legal department. 

In GLS legal ops speak – the Process & Procedures is considered a “Foundational” and a “Repeater” resource within the process ecosystem of an in-house legal team.
 

A Foundational Resource: 
Is responsible for determining the overall performance capabilities of a “critical” legal function. If it is not optimised, the function can never be fully optimised. 

A high-performing legal department does not treat processes and procedures as static documentation or compliance artefacts. It treats them as core operating infrastructure — deliberately designed, actively governed, and continuously refined to support scale, risk management and commercial velocity.

World-class legal departments consistently demonstrate the following best-practice features.

◼️ Process-Led Operating Model (Not Lawyer-Led Variability): Processes are designed to govern how work flows, rather than relying on individual lawyer preference or memory. This ensures consistency of outcomes regardless of who handles the work and allows legal judgement to be applied within a controlled, repeatable structure.

◼️ Clear, Accessible and Decision-Focused SOPs: Standard operating procedures are written in plain language, structured around decision points and outcomes, and designed to be used in real time — not filed away. They are concise, practical and directly aligned to how work is actually performed.

◼️ Explicit Process Ownership and Accountability: Every material process has a named owner responsible not only for documentation, but for performance, relevance and continuous improvement. Ownership is treated as an operational responsibility, not an administrative one.

◼️ Authority-Aligned Workflow Design: Processes are explicitly aligned to delegated authority and risk tolerance. Decision rights are embedded into workflows so that matters conclude at the lowest appropriate level, reducing unnecessary escalation and senior bottlenecks.

◼️ Apex Process Prioritisation: Optimisation efforts focus first on apex processes — such as legal intake, risk acceptance, approval thresholds and contracting pathways — recognising that these determine the behaviour of hundreds of downstream activities.

◼️ Embedded Templates, Playbooks and Self-Help Tools: Templates, clause libraries, checklists and guidance materials are not standalone assets. They are embedded directly into processes and triggered contextually, ensuring consistent application and reducing rework.

◼️ Visual Process Transparency: Key processes are supported by clear visual workflow diagrams that make roles, hand-offs, decision points and escalation paths immediately understandable to both legal and business users.

◼️ Integrated Training and Capability Enablement: Processes and procedures form the backbone of onboarding, role-based training and upskilling. Lawyers are trained on how the department operates, not just on legal knowledge.

◼️ Continuous Feedback and Improvement Loops: Structured mechanisms exist for lawyers and business users to flag friction points, inefficiencies and failures. Feedback is treated as operational data and feeds directly into prioritised improvement cycles.

◼️ Data-Driven Performance Measurement: Process performance is measured using defined metrics such as cycle time, escalation rates, rework frequency and risk outcomes. Decisions about improvement are based on evidence, not anecdote.

◼️ Technology and Automation Readiness by Design: Processes are deliberately structured to be digitisation-ready, with clear inputs, outputs and decision logic. Automation and AI are applied only where processes are already optimised offline, ensuring technology amplifies performance rather than entrenching dysfunction.

◼️ Risk, Compliance and Business Alignment: Procedures are tightly aligned to the organisation’s legal obligations, regulatory environment and commercial risk appetite. This ensures that speed, control and protection are balanced intentionally rather than by default.

◼️ Central Governance with Local Flexibility: A core set of standardised processes applies consistently across the organisation, while allowing controlled variation where business context genuinely requires it. This avoids fragmentation without enforcing false uniformity.

◼️ Living Process Architecture: Processes and procedures are treated as living assets — reviewed regularly, stress-tested under change, and updated as the business, regulatory environment or operating model evolves.

◼️ Eligibility for Benchmarking and Transformation: Processes are documented and structured in a way that allows them to be benchmarked against peer performance and transitioned toward an objectively defined optimal state.

◼️ Institutionalisation of Legal Judgement: At its most mature, process optimisation converts individual legal judgement into organisational capability — reducing dependency on specific people while increasing confidence, speed and consistency of outcomes.

Without wishing to sound self serving - using an expert in legal team process and procedure optimisation is by far and away the most qualitative and cost effective means of driving in-house legal department performance. Why? Well see if you disagree with the following:

(a) Legal Team Members: are far too expensive a resource to be plotting out basic operational workflows in addition to their legal work - and their expertise is limited to “front of house” as opposed to systems level; and 
(b) Paralegals: whilst more cost effective - do not necessarily have the practitioner perspective that can allow for proper process identification and optimisation.

This is just one area where using dedicate experts who have the diagnostic tools and benchmark data on what world class process and procedure optimisation looks like - makes all the sense in the world. 

Take a read of our thought leadership piece on processes and procedures - your core legal department infrastructure to discover critical insights on the role they play to help your legal team achieve industrial scale legal outputs. 

When a legal department invests in optimising its processes and procedures, the benefits are not internal or theoretical. They are direct, measurable and felt immediately by the business.

A well-designed legal process framework fundamentally changes how quickly, predictably and confidently the organisation can operate. Benefits include: 

◼️ Faster Commercial Execution: Optimised legal processes remove unnecessary hand-offs, approvals and rework, allowing contracts, advice and decisions to move at the pace of the business rather than becoming a brake on momentum.

◼️ Predictable Outcomes: Standardised workflows deliver consistent legal outputs, reducing last-minute surprises, scope creep and inconsistent advice that disrupt business timelines.

◼️ Lower Cost of Legal Support: Clear, repeatable processes reduce manual effort, duplication and avoidable escalation to senior lawyers or external counsel, materially lowering the cost of legal support over time.

◼️ Scalable Legal Services: Process-driven delivery allows legal to absorb growth in demand without chaos, enabling expansion, transformation initiatives and increased transaction volumes without constant headcount increases.

◼️ Faster Risk Decisions: Risk-aligned workflows ensure issues are resolved at the appropriate level, avoiding over-lawyering while maintaining governance and enabling confident, timely business decisions.

◼️ Improved Cross-Functional Collaboration: Clear processes make it easier for commercial, procurement and operational teams to engage legal effectively, reducing friction and improving planning across the organisation.

◼️ Technology That Delivers ROI: Optimised offline processes create the foundation for successful automation, workflow tools and AI, ensuring technology investments genuinely improve speed and insight rather than entrenching inefficiency.

◼️ Reduced Dependency Risk: Institutionalised processes reduce reliance on specific individuals, protecting the business from disruption caused by turnover, absence or organisational change.

◼️ Legal as a Business Enabler: When legal becomes predictable, responsive and commercially aligned, the business engages earlier and more constructively, improving outcomes across the organisation.

◼️ Sustainable Growth Infrastructure: Process optimisation establishes the operational backbone required to support long-term growth, regulatory change and increasing business complexity.

Well-defined processes and procedures are core legal infrastructure. When this station is mature, the legal function shifts from reactive support to a predictable, scalable business enabler.

◾️ Clarity and Consistency: Clear processes remove ambiguity around roles, steps, and decision-making, allowing the legal team to operate with confidence and consistency.

◾️ Faster Service Delivery: Repeatable workflows reduce delays, eliminate unnecessary back-and-forth, and materially shorten legal cycle times.

◾️ Improved Internal Client Experience: The business experiences legal as structured, responsive, and easy to engage — strengthening trust and credibility.

◾️ Reduced Risk and Rework: Standardised procedures embed risk controls and quality checkpoints, reducing errors, inconsistency, and downstream remediation.

◾️ Measurable Performance and Insight: Defined processes make legal work observable and measurable, enabling leadership to identify bottlenecks and drive continuous improvement.

◾️ Platform for Scale and Automation: Process discipline underpins onboarding, growth, and legal-tech deployment — automation is only possible where work is standardised.

The Process & Procedures station is essential for:

◼️Legal departments of all sizes

◼️Legal operations teams

◼️General Counsel and Heads of Legal

◼️Legal tech and innovation leads

◼️Compliance and risk management teams

◼️IT, digitisation and transformation teams

Process and procedure maturity is the single biggest determinant of whether legal technology succeeds or fails. Technology does not fix broken workflows — it amplifies whatever already exists.

◾️ Technology Requires Process Definition: Legal tech tools rely on clearly defined steps, decision points, inputs, and outputs. Without documented procedures, systems are configured on assumptions, resulting in workarounds, shadow processes, and user frustration.

◾️ Workflow Automation Depends on Standardisation: Automation only works where activities are repeatable. Well-defined procedures enable workflow engines to route matters, trigger approvals, apply rules, and manage exceptions at scale.

◾️ Data Quality Is a Direct Function of Process Discipline: Clean, reliable legal data depends on consistent process execution. When procedures are followed uniformly, data capture becomes accurate, enabling meaningful reporting, forecasting, and insight.

◾️ AI Enablement Starts with Structured Work: AI tools — including intake triage, document classification, clause analysis, and decision support — require structured, predictable workflows. Undefined processes dramatically limit AI usefulness and increase risk.

◾️ Faster and Safer Tech Adoption: Clear procedures reduce training effort, speed up adoption, and lower change-management risk. Users understand how technology fits into their day-to-day work rather than being forced to adapt blindly.

◾️ Lower Total Cost of Ownership: When technology is built on strong process foundations, organisations avoid excessive customisation, re-implementation, and vendor dependency — materially reducing long-term cost and complexity.

◾️ Scalable Legal Operating Model: Process-driven technology enables legal teams to absorb volume growth without linear headcount increases, supporting managed services, shared services, and global operating models.

◾️ Onboarding Becomes Slow and Risky: New hires take longer to become productive because there is no clear “way of working.” Productivity ramp-up is inconsistent, quality varies, and senior lawyers are dragged into hand-holding instead of value creation.

◾️ Shadow Systems Proliferate: In the absence of defined processes, individuals create their own spreadsheets, trackers, email rules, and side processes. This fragments information, breaks visibility, and undermines any central system or reporting effort.

◾️ Approval Chaos Destroys Momentum: Unclear approval paths lead to unnecessary escalation, duplicated reviews, and last-minute intervention. Deals slow down not because of risk — but because no one is sure who is authorised to decide.

◾️ “Hero Lawyering” Replaces Operating Discipline: Productivity becomes dependent on a few high performers who know how to navigate chaos. This is not a strength — it is an operational liability that collapses the moment those individuals leave or burn out.

◾️ Continuous Improvement Becomes Impossible: You cannot improve what you cannot see. Without stable processes, root-cause analysis is guesswork, lessons learned are not embedded, and the same inefficiencies repeat quarter after quarter.

◾️ Legal Ops Investment Loses Credibility: When process fundamentals are ignored, legal operations initiatives are perceived as overhead rather than enablers. This erodes executive trust and makes future investment materially harder to justify.

Process and procedure maturity is the single biggest determinant of whether legal technology succeeds or fails. Technology does not fix broken workflows — it amplifies whatever already exists.

◾️ Technology Requires Process Definition: Legal tech tools rely on clearly defined steps, decision points, inputs, and outputs. Without documented procedures, systems are configured on assumptions, resulting in workarounds, shadow processes, and user frustration.

◾️ Workflow Automation Depends on Standardisation: Automation only works where activities are repeatable. Well-defined procedures enable workflow engines to route matters, trigger approvals, apply rules, and manage exceptions at scale.

◾️ Data Quality Is a Direct Function of Process Discipline: Clean, reliable legal data depends on consistent process execution. When procedures are followed uniformly, data capture becomes accurate, enabling meaningful reporting, forecasting, and insight.

◾️ AI Enablement Starts with Structured Work: AI tools — including intake triage, document classification, clause analysis, and decision support — require structured, predictable workflows. Undefined processes dramatically limit AI usefulness and increase risk.

◾️ Faster and Safer Tech Adoption: Clear procedures reduce training effort, speed up adoption, and lower change-management risk. Users understand how technology fits into their day-to-day work rather than being forced to adapt blindly.

◾️ Lower Total Cost of Ownership: When technology is built on strong process foundations, organisations avoid excessive customisation, re-implementation, and vendor dependency — materially reducing long-term cost and complexity.

◾️ Scalable Legal Operating Model: Process-driven technology enables legal teams to absorb volume growth without linear headcount increases, supporting managed services, shared services, and global operating models.