They’ll include jargon to shorthand philosophy (Vision), an overarching aim or doctrine (Mission) and then a detailed set of objectives, which always need to be some version of SMART (typically Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-Limited). 

A Legal Strategy is different. You’re not dealing with incoming revenue or creating products or services. It’s all about how you’ll work, your protocols and processes, and sets out your aims.

The Legal strategy should therefore set out a Target Operating Model that not only makes best use of available resources, but which is able to deliver across all the requirements of the business, whether the business is able to articulate them or not. 

The Target Operating Model will describe how that delivery occurs, from protocol, process and procedure to documentation and supporting tech, not forgetting to set out the available resources and responsibilities. For the rest of the business, the Model describes how Legal will interface with all other departments in every facet of interaction. 

The true magic of Legal, of course, is when it is able to be proactive, spotting potential problems well before they arise and inputting legal insight into the overall business strategy process. If you picked out the phrase ‘whether the business is able to articulate them or not’ in the foregoing paragraph, well done, because kind of insight is key to proactivity.

For instance, if the business is looking to grow by a certain percentage next year, securing funding might be the key plank, in which case the core of the Legal strategy will be to support that funding effort. This will entail, among other things, getting all the Due Diligence documentation in place, anticipating what requests are going to come from the business and setting up to deal with that. 

That will also see you contending with another issue, one which prompts one of the most famous strategy maxims: Strategy is about deciding what not to do.

One of the most delicate pieces of the strategic puzzle is deciding what not to include. You can’t do everything and if you have a major initiative to support – eg raising capital – a lot of other things will have to go on the back burner, so you’ll need to figure workarounds for them.

This might involve looking at what is sitting with your team which might not necessarily need to sit with your team. For example, a lot of the time legal teams end up with dealing with Data Subject Access Requests (DSARs) because in smaller companies, the compliance function is often lumped together with Legal. But this is quite simple work, it doesn’t need to sit with Legal. If you have processes in place where someone can access the required data and send it out, that can be dealt with by the Customer Experience team, and you can give them some canned responses to help them. 

Growing the business will also involve taking on more people, which has major implications including increased demand for Legal. That means thought needs to be given as to how Legal scales up or offloads some work to external providers or starts getting the business to do more of its own legal work, not just DSARs, but other stuff, for instance Non-Disclosure Agreements, with templates and support from Legal. 

Key to this early stage of strategy development will be interrogating and understanding the needs of the business. You might think of this as investigation, but we prefer the word discovery, as it implies a more organic process where you’ll find things you weren’t specifically looking for but that will enrich your understanding.

The vast majority of people in the rest of the business won’t ‘speak legal’, so they often won’t know how their business requirements impact on Legal or may not even realise that there are some things they need to route through Legal rather than just fudging or ignoring them. The latter can lead to catastrophe but be cautious in how you deal with such instances or you’ll get the reputation as ‘The No Department’. We’ll deal with that in a later episode. 

This discovery process is also an opportunity to educate the business as to what Legal can do, and to talk about what Legal might be able to do, if it were set up to deliver. 

Not only that, but the overall business strategy may have originally been conceived without Legal input. In that way, if Legal understands the business in sufficient depth, it can be in a position to inform the overall strategy going forward.  

It’s worth getting your head around how precisely your business measures itself, but don’t necessarily expect to simply map general OKRs onto Legal, as they likely won’t measure what you need to measure – Legal just doesn’t work like other teams and general OKRs won’t have been conceived with Legal in mind.

Rather, you’ll have to adapt what you’re given or come up with your own OKRs. This is a vital part of the process, so it’s worth getting as right as you can and reviewing and tweaking as you go along.

Tracking your own KPIs/OKRs will be vital if you’re going to justify adding resource. That may not necessarily be directly within Legal. For instance, if you find that Marketing is generating 80% of your requests, maybe Marketing needs their own dedicated resource, a satellite to your core Legal team. 

So, we’ve established that your aim will be to set up the optimal Target Operating Model, and that you’ll need to understand the business strategy first, then go do some discovery work among your user base to deepen that understanding as you find out their requirements, then set the parameters for your own team to align with the objectives of the business.

So far, so good. Now to the writing.

Before you start this, recognise what you need to do. The output of your strategic process should not be a one-hundred-page document which is going to sit in a drawer gathering dust. It needs to be a living thing, which will be reviewed and amended as you go along.

The initial output we recommend is some kind of presentation (PowerPoint / Google Slides remain king here…) which can be rolled out to all who need to see it, and which will be easy and appealing to refer back to as you go along. One important element of the rollout is getting people excited about this. It should be aspirational; it should feature stretch goals.

You’ll also need some kind of project plan or schedule detailing when everything is going to be done by and think about training for the rest of the business, where necessary. You may also put your mind to other artefacts, whether that be FAQ documents, infographics and possibly even some templates for tactical actions.

Make your strategy part of your work, not your free time – a rookie error. Too many people write strategy after hours or at weekends, classically on a Sunday, maybe in the afternoon after a couple of glasses of Merlot or whatever. Your strategy is fundamental, it’s a work thing, not an after-hours thing or ‘whenever I can fit it in between walking the dog and taking the kids out’ thing.

Your strategy should speak to your modus operandi, your style of business. It should be clear that this is what we are, this is who we are, this is what we do. It should create positive engagement with the concept of Legal, making it live for the business. If you create a good strategy, it’s much more likely that the CEO – who may well want to sign it off – will take you into their strategy process, which is where you’ll hit the strategic big time.

It’s tempting to think there might be a grid or template you can fill in, but this is the wrong way to approach strategy. One size does not fit all. Your Legal strategy should be as bespoke as the business you’re serving, and your strategic process will be vital learning for you, so treat it as an opportunity not a chore. Another important input to strategy is Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Most lawyers have already been operating to some form of KPIs, but more often the businesses we work with use Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) which as it implies, is subtly different, identifying often three Key Results which illustrate how the Objectives will be met. 

It’s worth getting your head around how precisely your business measures itself, but don’t necessarily expect to simply map general OKRs onto Legal, as they likely won’t measure what you need to measure – Legal just doesn’t work like other teams and general OKRs won’t have been conceived with Legal in mind.

Rather, you’ll have to adapt what you’re given or come up with your own OKRs. This is a vital part of the process, so it’s worth getting as right as you can and reviewing and tweaking as you go along.

Tracking your own KPIs/OKRs will be vital if you’re going to justify adding resource. That may not necessarily be directly within Legal. For instance, if you find that Marketing is generating 80% of your requests, maybe Marketing needs their own dedicated resource, a satellite to your core Legal team. 

One logical approach would be to follow the approach of the business, to facilitate alignment. For instance, your business might have an overarching five-year plan and a rolling twelve-month plan underneath that. If that’s the case, try that for yourself.

Some businesses, believe it or not, do their OKRs on a three-monthly basis (!). This might be ok for a cutting-edge research or tech department but is overkill for Legal. If that’s the case you might want to point out that Legal works differently and is essentially all about business continuity, not continuous reinvention. Instead you might want to map out a three monthly mini-review of yours when the others have done theirs, just to make sure yours remain fit-for-purpose as the business evolves.

Ultimately, no strategy should be set in stone. Another famous strategy maxim is: No Strategy Survives the Battlefield! 

Yours should be as flexible as the business it serves, designed in lockstep with the business to ensure maximum alignment, but first and foremost being a Legal plan that addresses your optimisation aims in the way only you, the in-house counsel, knows how.