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GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map
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Stations
Formative
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What Is The GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map?
Legal transformation should not require guesswork, trial-and-error, or blind investment. Yet sadly, for most in-house legal teams, they are forced to make structural, resourcing, and technology decisions without a clear, coherent view of what an optimally performing legal department actually looks like (and how their team compares).
The GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map exists to eliminate that uncertainty.
Built from thousands of real-world legal transformation engagements, the Tube Map is a fully navigable operating system for in-house legal performance engineering. It brings together the world’s largest freely accessible body of legal department performance intelligence, structured into a single, coherent view of how a world-class legal department is designed, operated, and scaled.
The Tube Map identifies 15 Critical In-House Legal Functions (“Lines”) that collectively account for the vast majority of a legal team’s achievable performance. Each Line is broken down into Critical Resource Elements (“Stations”), providing DNA-level visibility into the specific capabilities, structures, tools, and controls required for effective execution.
By exploring the Tube Map legal leaders can see in a few clicks:
◼️ what world-class looks like across every core legal function
◼️ how those functions interconnect and depend on one another
◼️ where performance gaps, constraints, or inefficiencies sit
◼️ what to fix, and in what order, to drive measurable improvement
In a single navigable view, the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map provides a clear, practical reference model for assessing current-state performance and blueprinting a legal transformation agenda that is grounded in evidence, sequencing, and execution reality - not theory.
In addition to this overview section - we highly recommend you review The GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map - An Intelligence & Planning Solution - A Complete Planning, Intelligence, and Performance Engineering System for In-House Legal Teams
How Can The GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map Help You?
The GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map is designed to remove uncertainty from legal transformation. It gives in-house legal leaders a clear, evidence-based way to understand how a high-performing legal department is structured, how their own team compares, and how to prioritise improvement with confidence.
Rather than relying on theory or generic benchmarks, the Tube Map functions as a navigable performance reference system, allowing legal teams to compare their current operating model against a coherent, world-class standard — and to identify what matters most.
Through a single interactive view, the Tube Map enables you to:
1. Whole-of-department visibility: see your legal function end-to-end, across all critical in-house legal functions, in a single coherent view.
2. World-class benchmarking: compare your current structures, processes, and capabilities against a proven model of an optimally performing legal department.
3. Performance gap identification: quickly surface missing, underperforming, or misaligned elements that are constraining legal team performance.
4. High-impact improvement focus: identify where targeted change will deliver the greatest performance and productivity uplift.
5. Functional interdependencies: understand how legal functions and resource elements interact, and how weaknesses in one area create downstream drag elsewhere.
6. True performance drivers: pinpoint the elements within each function that disproportionately shape outcomes and productivity.
7. Transformation starting points: determine where change should begin based on efficiency, workload pressure, sequencing, and organisational readiness.
8. Systemic constraint detection: identify recurring issues that appear across multiple functions, signalling broader structural problems.
9. Legal technology alignment: map how legal technology should support end-to-end workflows and align with the wider legal operating model.
10. Sequenced transformation roadmap: define and prioritise a clear, practical transformation journey - knowing what to fix, when, and why.
How To Use The GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map?
Here are some tips on how to use the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map:
◼️ Start Dept Level: view the full Tube Map to understand the complete, end-to-end structure of an optimally performing in-house legal department.
◼️ Explore Lines: view the complete, end-to-end structure of an optimally performing Line level in-house function - including scope, legal dept. value, business value and best practice features.
◼️ Explore Stations: move down each Line to review the detailed, station-specific performance intelligence to understand why each element matters and how it drives outcomes..
◼️ Further Intel Drill Down: open the linked guidance and reference material attached to each Station to access deeper or issues specific intelligence.
◼️ Compare and recognise: mentally map what you see against your own legal team to identify what is in place, what is informal, and what is missing.
◼️ Follow interdependencies: use linked Lines and Stations to see how weaknesses in one area create downstream drag across the broader legal department.
◼️ Understand Business Value: each Line and Station includes a defined Business Value profile - in legal operations, if the business does not value it, it should not exist.
◼️ Foundational Stations: confirm that core Foundational Stations are in place - without them, the legal function will be structurally inefficient and unable to scale.
◼️ Repeater Stations: assess how Repeater Stations are designed and optimised - improvements here create outsized ripple effects across the entire legal department.
◼️ Identify leverage points: focus on Stations that disproportionately influence performance or recur across multiple Lines.
◼️ Prioritise and sequence: use the Tube Map to determine what to fix first, what can wait, and how to structure a realistic, sequenced transformation path.
Critical Functions Only
One of the keys to effective legal operations is to not spend time on anything that is not critical or that cannot be reported. This is a fundamental tenet of the GLS “Finite Resource Theory” – you must make all your available resources count demonstrably.
As such, the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map only focuses on the 15 Lines that we believe cover the “essential activities” inherent to the “domain of responsibility” of most in-house legal teams.
When viewing the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map, if you see a function that your team performs but which is not expressly noted then it may be that:
• it may be captured by the activities that we have associated with an existing IHL Station;
• the activity itself falls outside of those core activities that the “typical in-house legal team” is typically responsible for; or
• it is not an activity that is truly critical to adding direct value to the business.
However, if you feel strongly that we have missed a “core activity” please do send your feedback to info@gls.global – we are always looking to build our knowledge base of the IHL industry, and so would very much welcome any and all constructive feedback.
Again, if an initiative is not truly meaningful (i.e. it does not directly contribute to the realisation of a mission critical requirement of the business), then it is not important enough for you to be focusing on.
Types Of Stations In The GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map
Formative Stations
On most Lines, there is typically an Station in whose light most other Stations on that line will bask – we call them “Formative Stations”.
The Formative Stations are without doubt the most important transformation points on each Line. Their qualitative status will directly impact the quality of all other IHL Stations on that line and the performance of the IHL Line itself.
Put another way – an Line can only ever perform to the standards and quality set by its Formative Station.
From a transformation planning perspective, Formative Stations are the first and most essential areas to be addressed if you want to optimise all other IHL Stations along the relevant Lines.
If you do not focus on your Formative Stations first, with maximum attention, you will unnecessarily and unavoidably throttle the performance potential of the entire IHL Line.
For example, if you do not first develop a definitive “Contracting Policy” (i.e. the parameters in which you will contract) you deprive countless other IHL Stations on the Contracting Line of the critical data that they need to perform optimally (see our White Paper – "Contracting Policies: Eliminate Weakness in your contracting function").
In the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map, click on the “Formative Stations Button" to instantly highlight the Formative Stations on each IHL Line.
Related Resource: See our White Paper on the Contracting Policy's impact on overall contracting efficiency.
Repeater Stations
Certain Stations are present across multiple IHL Lines and for the purposes of our GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map, we call these common elements “Repeater Stations”.
Sometimes a Repeater Station may also be a Formative Station, and where this is the case they are marked as both Repeater and Formative Stations.
From a transformation point of view, Repeater Stations, if optimised, offer the potential to improve multiple Lines at the same time, thereby, delivering a “multiplier” effect to your Transformation work.
A great example of a “Repeater Station” is the Group Legal Policy. Apart from being “Formative”, it is an important recurring IHL element on many IHL Lines. It is somewhat similar to “carbon” in biology – whilst there are countless lifeforms on this planet, carbon is an inherent element to all of them.
Repeater Stations can be instantly identified on the GLS Legal Transformation Tube Map at the click of the “Repeater Station Button".
