Today's General Counsel, May 2025

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THOUGHT LEADERSHIP

GCs Need Efficiency, Legal Ops Need Structure—Legal Tech Delivers Both By EVAN WONG

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egal teams are often caught trying to balance two things: efficiency and structure. Thankfully, legal tech plays a pivotal role in navigating this challenge. On one side, there’s pressure to move fast—keeping up with business priorities and minimizing friction. On the other, there’s the need for standardized workflows that ensure smooth, error-free operations. This highlights the push and pull between general counsel (GCs) and legal ops. GCs want speed. They need efficiency to focus on high-impact work and avoid getting bogged down by admin tasks. Simultaneously, legal

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ops are responsible for making sure legal workflows are in order—organized, scalable, and trackable. When these priorities don’t align, the result is frustration, inefficiencies, and missed opportunities. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The right technology can bring both sides together, giving GCs the agility they need while allowing legal ops to maintain the structure that makes it all work.

COMMON STRUGGLES THAT CREATE FRICTION On paper, GCs and legal ops are working toward the same goal— making the legal department a high-

MAY 2025

performing, business-aligned function. But in practice, their approaches can clash. GCs are focused on outcomes. They want to cut through red tape, resolve matters quickly, and free up time for strategic work. If something is slowing the business down, they want it fixed—yesterday. Legal ops knows that speed without structure leads to chaos. They think in terms of systems, consistency, and long-term scalability. A process that works once isn’t enough—it needs to work every time, for everyone. Tension arises when these perspectives don’t align. Without the BACK TO CONTENTS


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