Events

How do you find an area of Legal Operations? The experience of the Free Market

Ago 06, 2020

The online event "Digital Transformation for Legal Function," held its third webinar dedicated to processes and how these relate to transformation projects. The session was led by Rodolfo Christophersen, Regional Legal Operations Manager in Free Market and moderated by Andrés Jara CEO & Founder Alster.

The day had an introductory exhibition in charge of Andrés Jara, CEO of Alster, who made a rapid review of key concepts and references of skills models of operational models.

For its part, Christophersen described to the audience the tour of the area of Free Market Legal Operations from its beginning to today. He commented as a success factor the involvement of the gGeneral counsel of the Free Market, Jacobo Cohenfrom the beginning of the company and not only in a role as a lawyer, but also in the business and as that approach determined the foundations of the area of legal operations.

The area of Legal Operations of Free Marketlike many others Success Stories, it starts by solving the problems caused by the volume of the trials, which require urgent automation once they take a scale. As an anecdote, Christophersen mentioned that his first case management was not a specific one for the legal environment, but they used the same custodier relationship manager Business: Sales Force.

This tool just made him discover the the need to have unified processes to obtain homogeneous and automated data for decision-making, especially for the regional coverage of the company. This situation motivated the exhibitor to take actions that would be the basis of the area of operations, but not yet knowing that all this was about "legal operations”.

In parallel to Christophersen's efforts, Jacobo Cohen, General Counsel takes a trip to one of the events of the ACC in search of methodologies that allow you to structure the legal area to meet the requirements of the business and that is where they determine to find an independent area that is dedicated to the function of operations.

Currently, the area of Legal Operations of Free Market on average lead 100 initiatives that seek to give efficiency to the legal areas of each country and support the company's internal lawyers to deliver the best legal services to the business areas.

The exhibitor indicated that it is not an easy way, that it is full of errors and learning, however It encouraged all participants to take the risk, regardless of the size and resources of their legal departments.

With regard to where to start or which skills of the maturity models to choose, indicated that there are no kitchen recipesbut rather requires business vision, assess which urgent volume problems must be resolved to release time and become proactive lawyers that avoid problems and not manage problems.

This approach requires that the data be clean and structured, so he suggested that projects be carried out that allow the legal area to be “data- driven”that data capture is automated and is where processes become relevant as a fundamental pillar.

The website ended with a series of questions and answers from the audience, mainly interested in knowing where to form on this subject, to which both Christophersen and Andrés Jara indicated that it is currently a lot of self-management, although there are increasingly initiatives such as those generated by the Alster to address the efficiency challenges of legal departments.

We left some links to our blog, to deepen related concepts.

Communications | Alster