Legal operations is the work of running a company's legal side like a business: its contracts, its lawsuits, the outside law firms it hires and the bills those firms send. It is also called legal ops. The same name is used for the team inside a legal department that runs its budgets, its software and its processes.
Every company signs thousands of contracts, with customers, suppliers, staff and landlords. Each contract binds the company to do something, such as pay by a date, deliver by a date or give notice before the contract renews. The company's own lawyers form its legal department, and they are called in-house lawyers. For a big lawsuit or a merger, the company also hires an outside law firm, which usually charges by the hour.
Here is a typical case. The legal team of a drug maker in Ahmedabad agrees to supply medicines to a distributor in the United States for three years. A lawyer drafts the agreement in the company's contract lifecycle management (CLM) system. The draft starts from a template, a standard contract with wording that the legal team has already approved. The distributor's lawyers propose changes, and the two sides exchange versions until both accept the text.
The agreement is signed in India, so it must carry stamp duty, a tax that each state charges on many kinds of agreement. Through e-stamping, the company pays the duty online and attaches the stamp certificate to the agreement. Both sides then sign with an electronic signature. The signed contract goes back into the CLM system, which reminds the team of every payment date and renewal date.
Two years later, the distributor stops paying and files a lawsuit in an American court. The legal department opens a matter, which is the name for one piece of legal work, such as one lawsuit or one deal. It opens the matter in its enterprise legal management (ELM) system, which records the case, its deadlines, its budget and the law firm that the company hires.
The law firm runs its own systems. Its law practice management software records each lawyer's time in six-minute units and turns that time into a monthly bill. This way of charging is called the billable hour. The firm keeps every document of the case in a legal document management system, which limits who can open each file.
In an American lawsuit, each side can demand to see the other side's evidence. So the drug maker must find every email and file about the distributor, perhaps 4 lakh of them, and hand over the relevant ones. eDiscovery software collects these files, removes the duplicates and lets lawyers mark each one. Much of this reading is now done first by an AI model, and a lawyer checks its decisions. This arrangement is called human in the loop. A lawyer must check because an AI model can state invented facts with confidence, a problem called AI hallucination.