Improving the Work of Your Legal Department: How Business Planning Can Help?

Improving the Work of Your Legal Department: How Business Planning Can Help?

BySean El Hani

Every business has to conduct legal operations, no matter they have a dedicated legal department for that or not. Legal compliance lies in the base of all business operations, risk mitigation, contracts management, etc. So the business planning for legal operations is just as crucial as for sales or marketing, for example. Yes, many companies underestimate its value.

When done right, business planning promptly improves legal workflows, simplifies communication with other departments, and ensures the legal team contributes consistent value without exhausting business resources. This works even better when a company has established a legal department as a part of their business structure.

Understanding the Scope: Legal Department Responsibilities

A legal department is responsible for far more than reviewing contracts or reacting to legal disputes. Among their responsibilities there can be:

  • corporate governance,
  • regulatory compliance,
  • employment law support,
  • intellectual property management,
  • litigation management,
  • providing legal advice, and much more.

Legal teams also often handle risk assessments, due diligence in M&A (mergers and acquisitions) transactions, data protection, and internal investigations.

So naturally, all these responsibilities require not only legal expertise from the professionals, but also tight communication and coordination with other departments — finance, HR, marketing, etc. Without proper business planning, the legal department can become a blind spot within the organization and not function to its full potential.

What Happens Without a Dedicated Legal Department?

Small businesses or startups commonly lack a formal legal team, due to the lack of resources or the ability to choose the qualified professional. In such cases, legal responsibilities are distributed across other departments or outsourced to external counsel. It’s cost-efficient and works pretty well, but it also carries significant risks.

Ad hoc legal management is not very convenient when it comes to regularly reviewing compliance, updating the necessary contracts and other documents, closing deals quickly and effectively. Or even litigation that could have been avoided with proper in-house legal oversight.

Moreover, when legal tasks are decentralized, it becomes more complicated to establish accountability. This is where structured business planning can bridge the gap — even without a fully staffed legal team — by integrating legal needs into comprehensive operational and financial planning.

Embracing Digitalization: A Business Planning Imperative

Even if you’re running an offline business, you most likely already use digital tools to manage financial operations, marketing campaigns, etc. Legal digitalization can also help a lot when it comes to establishing better business planning for your legal department. And it isn’t just about using modern tools — it’s about rethinking how legal work is executed, shared, stored, and secured across departments.

For efficient business planning, you should definitely prioritize digital solutions that upgrade legal workflows, improve team collaboration, and reduce operational expenses. Below are key components of legal digitalization that should be part of any strategic plan.

Digital Tools for Drafting and Collaborating on Documents

The amount of various legal documents that legal departments need to work with, is immense, and can be very different in nature, depending on the field your business is operating in, the specifics of your operations with clients and/or partners, etc. So, a lot (maybe even majority) of work time goes to drafting the documents, updating and editing them, discussing and implementing the changes. Even finding them in the system can eat up the time.

This does not only consume excessive time, but also can lead to version control issues. This is where document automation comes into play. No matter if your business uses one platform for generating, storing and reviewing paperwork, or you have a few services most suitable for your needs, working with digital documents with a centralized system is much easier and more efficient.

You can create pre-approved templates that will definitely be used frequently, save clause libraries, in this way reducing errors and standardizing language. Services like FormsPal can help with drafting many business-related templates, as well as provide a platform where the documents can be stored and easily accessed.

Many platforms also often support real-time collaboration. It helps with both internal and internal communication, as the documents can be shared with company departments and/or

clients through secure links. This significantly shortens review cycles and ensures transparency. Moreover, the budgeting becomes more clear, as all you need to do is count the cost of software licenses and integration with existing systems (if applicable).

Creating Digital Backups and Centralized Repositories

In legal operations, proper documentation is essential for audits, regulatory inspections, internal reviews. So, the best solution would be to centralize all legal records in a cloud-based repository. If you don’t have established repository for your business files, then you can take the following steps:

  1. Classify your business documents: identify the types of legal documents your business usually generates (e.g., contracts, policies, compliance records) and categorize them based on sensitivity, department, or function.
  2. Select a secure document management platform: choose a system with helpful features like role-based access, encryption, audit trails, integration with collaboration tools.
  3. Upload and tag existing documents: use metadata tags for document type, date, version and status, so that it’s much quicker to search for needed documents later.
  4. Establish access permissions: define who can view, edit, or approve specific documents; you can also set up workflows for document review, approval and archiving.
  5. Schedule regular backups and audits: make sure you have set up automated backups; perform periodic audits to verify document integrity and compliance with legal standards.

A huge plus of digitalization is reducing physical storage costs and minimizing the risk of data loss. You will also be able to track performance through metadata analysis much better and see if you need to speed up the operations related to contract executions or sales agreements, for example, and thus improve your business.

Digitalization of your documents storage is also helping with reducing paper usage, so your business becomes a part of sustainability movement.

Simplifying Secure Sharing Between Departments

Legal information is often shared with finance department, HR or operations team, therefore secure exchanges of such sensitive information must be a number one priority. Your business planning should prioritize systems that enable role-based access, encryption and audit trails.

For secure sharing, you can choose from several options:

  • encrypted shared drives,
  • secure email gateways,
  • or enterprise collaboration platforms with built-in legal compliance features.

The last option may be ideal for larger companies with specific compliance requirements, greater control needs, or existing IT infrastructure. And it’s rarely a good solution for smaller businesses, as you must have significant resources for upfront investment in hardware, software, and cybersecurity personnel.

Using established external platforms is a more cost-effective and scalable option. It’s best to first assess the provider’s compliance certifications (such as ISO/IEC 27001 or SOC 2), encryption standards, access control capabilities, integration flexibility, and user experience. And then, based on your research, choose the most suitable platform. Ideally if it also offers legal-specific features like secure document collaboration, audit trails, jurisdictional data storage options.

Optimizing Legal Workflows Through Strategic Planning

A solid business planning can help define legal KPIs, clarify team roles, and simplify cross-functional collaboration for your legal team. For instance, project management tools can be redesigned and adjusted specifically for the legal work needs. The team members can benefit a lot from using tracking systems for assigning, monitoring, reporting on legal tasks, etc.

With proper planning, businesses can also identify peaks in legal workload and determine it’s necessary to hire more people for the in-house team, invest in software that can help with automation and reducing the workload. For example, compliance reminders or policy updates can easily be automated.

Planning also involves evaluating whether some legal services (like trademark filings or routine contract reviews) can be outsourced while maintaining quality control. Balancing in-house work with external partnerships can reduce costs without sacrificing good performance.

Budgeting for Legal Operations: A Strategic Priority

Budget for legal teams can be a big issue. Usually (especially in smaller companies that are not directly working in a legal field), legal departments are viewed as cost centers rather than value drivers, which leads to chronic underfunding. This not only impairs work efficiency but can result in long-term financial losses due to legal exposure.

When drafting a business plan, legal expenses should be categorized and forecasted with the same thoroughness as marketing or product development. Everything should be properly calculated — salaries, software subscriptions, external counsel fees, training programs, compliance audits, document management tools and other digital programs.

To avoid interdepartmental friction, business leaders might need to clearly articulate how legal spending protects company assets, reduces risks, and supports strategic growth. It might seem obvious, but it’s important to sometimes state it out loud.

Final Thoughts

Legal departments are fundamental to modern business strategy, as they overview the most important — legal — side of all business operations, ensuring compliance and protecting business from potential disputes in the future. Legal team is definitely not just a reactive tool, but to use its power to its full potential, you as a business have to move beyond isolated legal planning and embed legal strategy into your core operations. Digital tools, optimized workflows and realistic budgeting can help your legal team to operate and collaborate more efficiently.