The role of legal department operations professionals is evolving, according to our new report, highlighting LDO teams’ increasing drive for efficiency and value within corporate legal departments despite continued resource challenges
Key findings
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Legal operations work is evolving — Moving beyond its origins as primarily a cost-control function, legal operations efforts are expanding to focus more strongly on systems, processes, and technology.
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Many legal departments are under-resourced — More than half of legal department professionals surveyed report that they see their department as under-resourced, although company size and resources may influence whether respondents identify their department as under-resourced.
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Using technology to automate — Almost three-quarters of respondents say they plan to use advanced technology to automate legal tasks and reduce costs, yet almost half also characterize the pace of technology advancement in their departments as slow.
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While it’s become cliché to say that legal department operations (LDO) teams are under increasing pressure to not only reduce costs and accomplish more with less, this evergreen mandate is now being pushed more firmly as corporate general counsel (GCs) are facing additional pressure to show the value that their in-house legal departments can offer the organization.
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2025 Legal Department Operations Index
Indeed, our latest data shows that LDO teams are increasingly being enlisted to join their GCs in this pursuit of value and its articulation to management.
To examine this phenomenon further, the Thomson Reuters Institute, along with the Buying Legal Council, has published the 2025 Legal Department Operations Index that illustrates how the LDO teams inside each corporate legal department are being tasked with finding ways that their departments can improve efficiency and effectiveness to better serve the rapidly evolving needs of their organizations.
You can check out our 2025 LDO Index Infographic here
The findings in the report are based on a survey that was conducted in July of 128 corporate legal department professionals and GCs, including those responsible for legal operations, at corporations across the United States.
The report shows that LDO professionals — who in some cases are corporate GCs themselves — are increasingly acting as the point of the spear on many initiatives, even as they are still hindered by ongoing challenges of being under-resourced and facing flat or falling departmental and technology budgets.
Where GCs and LDO professionals diverge
Interestingly, the divergence in priorities, tech use, and spending between those in-house legal departments in which legal operations are overseen by a professional with a legal ops background, and those run by a GC who has been tasked with legal ops on top of other duties was a reoccurring theme throughout this report. Of course, this may reflect the reality that many corporate legal departments operate without dedicated legal ops professionals, which in turn may be influenced by company size. And when we compare GCs with professionals with LDO backgrounds, some of the disparity also may reflect differences in department size, resources, and maturity.
For example, legal departments with legal ops professionals overseeing operations saw an increased use of legal technology tools, along with a growing budget for these solutions — as well as a more sophisticated management of the department’s legal spend, according to respondents. Those with legal ops backgrounds also more commonly use alternative legal service providers and alternative fee arrangements, compared to GCs tasked with legal ops.
Of course, this could simply point to another ongoing complementary dynamic: Legal ops backgrounders push for efficiency and stronger cost-control, while GCs tend to prioritize client service and the quality of legal work. While together, these two roles seem to support each other and could result in a more well-rounded legal function, it is important to remember that these disparities may be influenced by differences in department size, resources, and maturity.
The report also examines the changing role of LDO professionals within in-house legal departments, the metrics they’re using to track departmental progress, the trends that are influencing how they will operate in the future, and how they are currently managing the changing legal tech landscape.
You can download
a full copy of the 2025 Legal Department Operations Index here
