Three Practical Ways to Optimise Legal Operations Without Growing Your Legal Team
Hannah Price Harries, one of our automation lawyers, reflects on her time in-house with the benefit of 7 years experience delivering legal technology solutions as part of the echo team
A decade ago, my days as an in-house lawyer were shaped by overflowing inboxes, paper files, repetitive manual drafting and the constant challenge of delivering more legal support with limited resources. Like many legal teams, we were busy supporting a fast-moving business – but not always working in the most efficient way.
Looking back, the change in the legal operations landscape is striking and I often wonder how differently I would approach that same workload today.
Interestingly, the answer isn’t simply “I’d use AI.”
I’d first want to understand where the pain-points are in everyday workflows through process mapping and root cause analysis. Depending on the friction-points identified and validated and before investing in the latest tech tool, I would want to explore whether simple improvements to existing processes – which should be mapped out end to end – could alleviate bottle-necks. Some of the starting questions I would ask are:
- How does work arrive in Legal?
- Where do bottlenecks occur?
- Which activities are repetitive?
- Which tasks genuinely require legal judgement?
- Where is information duplicated?
If bottle-necks can’t be remedied by process re-design and without investment in new tech, it is time to consider how AI, document automation, workflow tools and legal technology might deliver strong ROI by transforming day to day workflows.
In other words, successful legal operations start with understanding process rather than technology.
So, which areas would I tackle first?
If I were General Counsel today, these are the areas I’d tackle first to build a more efficient, scalable legal function:
1. Create Intelligent Matter Management
In the past, general transactional folders – whether real estate, commercial or wills and probate matters – lived in paper files stored in steel cabinets. Tracking progress meant physically retrieving a file and reading the last piece of correspondence.
Looking back, I probably spent more time looking for information than using it.
Today I’d expect every matter to have a single source of truth.
How I would handle this work in the AI age:
- Digital workspace: Use a digital workspace for each active matter with drafts, notes and scanned documents pulled into one place. Instead of a static paper file, I would have a live, intelligent dashboard showing the status of the matter at a glance, with AI highlighting completed activities, outstanding actions, dependencies and tasks awaiting input from the business or external parties.
- AI drafting tools: Deploy AI extraction tools to summarise long documents or correspondence, identify key provisions or deadlines, create redlines of draft documents against earlier versions, generate a chronology of events and surface the next logical steps to progress the matter.
- Intelligent Search: Search across the entire document repository instantly, rather than hunting through folders, email chains or scanned PDFs. Key terms, deadlines and metadata could be surfaced instantly through structured data capture.
- Automate workflows: Set up automated workflows to surface upcoming deadlines and tasks before anyone needed to chase them.
In short, the ‘matter file’ would no longer be a passive folder I had to dig through. It would be a dynamic, intelligent workspace that actively supports the progress of the transaction – even when the starting point is a stack of hard‑copy documents.
Instead of spending my day hunting for information, I’d spend it making decisions.
2. Build a Structured Legal Intake Process
Previously, stakeholders submitted legal requests either through a shared legal inbox or directly to individual lawyers, with no consistent process for triaging, prioritising or tracking matters. For a legal team of just two lawyers, this created significant challenges. Requests could be overlooked, duplicated or delayed, while stakeholders had little visibility of progress. The result was a steady stream of follow-up emails and phone calls, increasing administrative burden and creating frustration on both sides.
The legal inbox should no longer be your case management system.
How I would handle this work in the AI age:
- Capture required information: Introduce a single, centralised legal intake portal that guides colleagues through structured questionnaires, ensuring requests contain the information needed from the outset.
- Route tasks effectively: Use AI-assisted categorisation and routing to automatically identify the nature, complexity and urgency of incoming matters and direct them to the appropriate workflow or team member.
- Automate repeatable activities: Deploy self-service capabilities for routine queries, enabling colleagues to obtain answers to common legal questions without requiring lawyer intervention.
- Measure workload: Monitor demand, turnaround times and team capacity through real-time dashboards rather than relying on email inboxes and manual tracking.
- Continuous Improvement: Use analytics to identify recurring legal issues, bottlenecks and opportunities for process improvement across the business.
Legal would feel less like a reactive firefighting function and more like a structured, data-driven service. Lawyers like me could spend less time managing requests and more time advising on complex legal and commercial issues, where our expertise adds the greatest value.
3. Automate Routine Legal Communications
Routine correspondence – chasing for updates, sending reminders, issuing standard letters – was once drafted manually, consuming valuable lawyer time on administrative tasks rather than legal work.
Automate the administration – not the lawyer.
How I would handle this work in the AI age:
- Email templates: Use AI drafting tools to generate routine emails and standard correspondence in seconds for an efficient starting point, in the organisation’s preferred tone, ready for me to check and edit.
- AI summarisation: Use AI to summarise lengthy email chains and highlight key actions, decisions and outstanding issues before responding.
- Reminders: Set automated reminders to trigger when deadlines approach, approvals remain outstanding or documents have not been signed.
- Routine drafting: Use templates and automated workflows to ensure consistency, improve efficiency and reduce the risk of errors.
My time would shift from drafting routine communications to providing legal advice, exercising judgement and supporting the business on more complex matters.
The real benefit isn’t just fewer emails – it’s giving the business a more predictable legal service.
The Bigger Picture: AI as a Catalyst for Legal Operations
What ties all these innovations together is not just efficiency – it’s the shift toward a more strategic, data‑driven legal function.
Legal Technology and AI enables:
- Predictable service delivery
- Better alignment with business priorities
- Reduced legal bottlenecks
- Improved risk visibility
- A more empowered legal team
For lawyers like me, these tools represent not just technological upgrades but a new professional identity. The modern in‑house lawyer is part technologist, part process designer and part strategic advisor.
Technology shouldn’t automate a poor process.
Underpinning all this, though, is the need to understand current processes and plug efficiency gaps first and then look to technology to automate or streamline further. This means agreeing on playbook language, commercial stance on acceptable terms and identifying where business functions could achieve more efficient access to legal services.
That’s why successful legal transformation doesn’t start with software.
It starts with understanding how legal work really gets done.
Look out for part 2 with more practical ways to transform your legal operations team
Frequently Asked Questions
What are legal operations?
Legal operations are about improving the way legal services are delivered within an organisation. It combines people, processes, technology and data to help legal teams work more efficiently and demonstrate greater value to the business.
For smaller legal teams, legal operations aren’t necessarily about creating a dedicated Legal Operations function. It’s about taking a step back and asking whether the way work flows through the department is helping lawyers focus on the work that really requires their expertise.
How can small legal teams improve efficiency?
For many legal teams, the biggest opportunities don’t come from working harder—they come from working differently.
Start by understanding where legal requests originate, which activities are repetitive, where delays occur and which tasks genuinely require legal judgement. Once those processes have been mapped, the right combination of legal technology, document automation and AI can remove much of the administrative burden, allowing lawyers to spend more time advising the business.
Where should General Counsel begin when modernising legal operations?
Resist the temptation to start with software demonstrations.
Instead, begin by understanding how work flows through the legal team. Where do requests come from? Which activities are repetitive? Where are the delays? Which tasks require legal expertise, and which could be standardised or automated?
Once you have that picture, it’s much easier to identify where changes to process, document automation, AI or other legal technology will have the greatest impact. In our experience, the most successful legal transformation projects start with understanding the work – not the technology.
How do you know which legal technology is right for your organisation?
There isn’t a single solution that’s right for every legal team.
The best starting point is understanding your existing processes, identifying where lawyers spend the most time and agreeing what success looks like. Only then should technology be evaluated.
At echo.legal we work with legal teams to understand how work flows through the business. Our lawyers and legal technologists help teams map current processes, identify areas of automation and make your legal technology work smarter for your organisation.