Director, Global Legal Operations

Purpose

The Director, Global Legal Operations is a global leadership role responsible for driving operational excellence, consistency, scalability, and continuous improvement across the Global Legal Organization. The Director will lead a globally distributed team of approximately five Legal Operations Team Leads and partner with legal leadership, functional teams, and key business partners to develop and implement common operating practices, processes, tools, metrics, and service-delivery approaches across geographies.

Global Legal Operations Leadership

• Lead, develop, and manage a globally distributed team of approximately five Legal Operations Team Leads, establishing clear priorities, roles, accountability, and performance expectations.
• Build the capabilities of Legal Operations leaders through coaching, feedback, development planning, succession planning, and knowledge sharing.
• Create a cohesive global Legal Operations team with consistent ways of working while recognizing appropriate regional and practice-area differences.
• Translate Global Legal Organization strategy and priorities into actionable Legal Operations plans, programs, standards, and measurable outcomes.
• Serve as a strategic partner to Legal leadership and other stakeholders on the operational effectiveness of the function.
• Establish clear governance and decision rights for global Legal Operations initiatives and drive accountability for execution.

Process Excellence & Global Alignment

• Drive continuous process improvement and global alignment across Legal, identifying opportunities to simplify, standardize, automate, or eliminate inefficient processes.
• Develop global standards, playbooks, governance frameworks, and operating procedures for priority Legal processes.
• Partner with legal practice groups and regional teams to map current-state processes, identify pain points and root causes, develop target-state processes, and lead implementation.
• Establish mechanisms to prioritize improvement opportunities based on business impact, operational pain, risk, strategic alignment, readiness, resourcing, and stakeholder support.
• Identify and scale successful practices across regions and practice groups rather than allowing duplicative processes and solutions to develop independently.
• Develop appropriate KPIs and service measures to assess cycle time, quality, cost, adoption, stakeholder experience, capacity, and operational performance.
• Lead change-management and adoption efforts necessary to ensure new processes become embedded ways of working.

Service Delivery & Operating Model

• Evaluate how Legal work is received, prioritized, resourced, routed, and delivered and identify opportunities to improve the Legal service-delivery model.
• Establish consistent approaches to intake, matter/work management, prioritization, escalation, and service levels where appropriate.
• Partner with Legal leadership to ensure work is delivered using the appropriate combination of internal resources, external providers, technology, automation, and alternative service-delivery models.
• Support workforce, capacity, and demand planning and identify opportunities to deploy Legal resources more effectively.
• Develop scalable global models that improve consistency while preserving appropriate flexibility for risk, regulatory, jurisdictional, and business requirements.

Data, Technology & Operational Insights

• Establish and maintain meaningful Legal Operations metrics, dashboards, and reporting to provide insights into performance, demand, spend, capacity, productivity, and service delivery.
• Use data to identify trends, diagnose operational issues, prioritize improvement opportunities, and measure the impact of implemented changes.
• Partner with Legal Innovation & Transformation, technology teams, and other stakeholders to identify opportunities where technology, automation, and AI can enable improved Legal processes.
• Ensure process design and technology strategy remain closely aligned so that technology enables effective operating models rather than replicating inefficient processes.
• Promote disciplined measurement of benefits, adoption, and value realization following implementation.

Program & Change Leadership

• Lead complex, cross-functional and cross-geography Legal Operations programs from strategy through implementation and sustained adoption.
• Establish clear objectives, governance, milestones, dependencies, resourcing, risks, and measures of success.
• Build alignment among stakeholders with differing priorities and influence decisions in a complex, matrixed global organization.
• Develop clear communication and change-management strategies for significant operational changes.
• Foster a culture of continuous improvement, accountability, collaboration, simplification, and operational discipline across the Legal organization.