Year in Review - 2022 Accomplishments

As the small but mighty OGC Ops Squad gears up to take on our new 2023-2024 strategic plan, we also reflect on what we accomplished in 2022. 

In many respects, 2022 was more difficult than 2021.  In 2020 we were at the ready to shift our department over to remote work. 2021 was a banner year. From our desks at home with greater control of our schedules we got an enormous amount done.

During 2022, a hybrid work schedule meant supporting team members both in our shared office and home offices with different equipment and internet providers.  In the NYC area it meant a commute that was more fraught, as well as more time.  Seeing folks in person again was reaffirming that we are indeed social animals, but also brought more frequent interruptions during the work day and less focused concentration.  

Our team time spent supporting outside legal service providers increased 43%.  In large part that was due to bringing our company's international legal teams and a large recent acquisition onto our matter management system. Completing cybersecurity reviews, and initial deployment of Priori Legal's Scout also played a role.  Finally, law firms hiring back legal billing personnel and leaving their clients to train them was a factor.

On the other hand we spent about an equal amount less in tech support issues, as a result of having coached the technology services organization more in how best to support our department and up-skilling our administrative team to provide tier 1 support to attorneys.

We reduced our time a bit on legal-facing tools, despite a significant DMS upgrade and deployment of a discovery tool, but increased our time significantly on client-facing tools, in particular on self-service, intake and contracts related apps.

We spent 36% less time on human resources tasks.  In large part this was due to corporate having built a strong HR function, but also due to training the admin team to take on a large portion of the department on and off boarding tasks.  This enabled us to invest 30% more time on building a stronger ops function, focusing on refining and documenting our core project management tasks as well as integrating a new team member and shifting some work to best deploy our collective strengths.

For 2023, our priorities are process optimization, metrics, continued adoption and extension of tools we've rolled out over the past few years, and talent development.  Looking forward to the challenge!  What challenges are you taking on this year?