Leadership
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As legal operations teams face mounting pressure to transform overstretched legal departments, their success depends on managing expectations. Frances Dupree explains why under-promising and over-delivering is key to showcasing the value of legal ops.
Dupree, a Legal Operations Associate at Inmar Intelligence, knows this pressure to perform all too well. “As legal operations professionals, we’re always so eager to solve problems. We jump in headfirst and make so many promises, but the reality is you can only do so much.”
According to Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), “legal ops provides the strategic planning, financial management, project management, and technology expertise that enables legal professionals to focus on providing legal advice.”
In essence, it takes administrative, resource-intensive tasks off in-house counsel’s plates, allowing them to focus on strategic work. Legal teams are notoriously over-stretched, with Thomson Reuters 2025 Legal Department Operations Index finding that 56 percent of legal departments report being under-resourced. As such, legal operations is often perceived as the silver bullet, with the business having unrealistic expectations as to what the department can achieve, that it will solve all problems which, as Dupree points out, is impossible.
Handling the pressure to fix everything – yesterday
Legal operations is the visible mechanism for transformation within a business, like a poster child for change. It’s seen as a shiny new solution that will revolutionize a legal department, and whilst it has the potential for transformation, expectations need to be measured.
According to ACC, legal departments with a dedicated legal ops function employ five legal ops professionals on average, with larger multi-billion-dollar companies averaging around 12, and smaller companies around two.
Because teams with fewer human resources will struggle to make as much impact as their counterparts with larger teams, Dupree strongly recommends considering what a legal ops professional or team, can realistically achieve – and communicating this clearly.
The pattern of over-promising and under-delivering
Through her work with Amazon, Moderna, Circle, Priceline, and Apellis Pharmaceuticals, Dupree has identified a common pattern across different teams. Eagerness leads to over-promising, without consideration of systematic constraints that cause roadblocks and lead to under-delivery.
“You could make a promise to implement an eBilling system or create dashboards with all of the team’s billing information, only to find out that you can’t do that because Oracle is not integrated yet,” she explains.
Legal operations is a function that relies on data to generate insights and create change, and system integrations are key to accessing this data. Access to clean data from Finance, Sales, Procurement, and IT systems all play a role in its efficacy. The best ideas depend on cross-functional alignment and infrastructure that may not yet exist.
Expectation setting as a strategic discipline
Several structural reasons contribute to the ballooning expectations that arise when legal operations is introduced.
- Legal ops is often poorly understood
Many stakeholders see legal ops as a catch-all solution and expect to see changes in cost-savings, automation, technology and reporting, without factoring in the capacity of the team. - Business impatience with legacy processes
It’s well known that legal has lagged behind other business functions when it comes to modernizing, and as such, there can be a real impatience for the department to catch up to other areas of the business as soon as legal ops is implemented. - Vendors can over-promise
Legal tech is synonymous with legal ops, and unfortunately in a market with countless legal tools on offer, vendors can sell the story of instant ROI, creating pressure for legal ops to deliver results before implementation is complete. - Over-commitment
Many legal ops professionals set themselves up to fail, as their desire to make change can lead to over-commitment early on.
Dupree advocates for clear communication about what is possible, what is dependent on other teams, and providing timeframes that build trust with business stakeholders. Delivering consistently on smaller commitments does more for credibility than missing ambitious promises.
Building trust and credibility gives legal ops value, helps to secure larger budgets, and gain executive sponsorship for future projects.
As businesses increasingly expect legal to operate like a strategic function, the ability to say, “here’s what we can do, here’s what it will take, and here’s when you’ll see value,” as Dupree puts it, becomes just as important as the technology itself.
Under-promising and over-delivering isn’t about caution. Rather, it’s about building a function the business can rely on and operate sustainably.
