The rise of legal operations professionals has created a split-brain decision-making architecture that most vendors navigate poorly.
Where purchasing decisions once resided exclusively with partners, a new class of operationally-focused professionals now wields significant influence over technology evaluation. This creates a challenge: you must often convert the legal ops champion first, then equip them to execute the second sale to partners whose concerns differ dramatically from their own.
Your value translation must account for both audiences simultaneously, and you must arm your legal ops champion with language that resonates with partners who measure success through entirely different metrics.
The Emergence of Legal Operations
Legal operations emerged from recognition that running a law firm requires business expertise that lawyers typically lack. Finance, technology, human resources, and project management all benefit from dedicated professionals with relevant training. This created a new stakeholder type that maps most closely to a department head profile, with dominant relief and advancement concerns focused on operational improvement rather than client service delivery.
Legal ops professionals bring fundamentally different perspectives and priorities than partner colleagues. They're hired specifically to drive operational improvements, adopt technology, and bring business discipline to traditionally loosely-managed professional organizations. Their identity connects to transformation success. Their recognition comes from demonstrable improvements in metrics that partners may not prioritize or even track.
The varied scope of legal ops authority. The authority of legal ops varies dramatically across firms, creating a structural reality that vendors must map before investing significant sales resources. At some organizations, the Chief Operating Officer or Director of Legal Operations holds substantial budget authority and genuine decision-making power. Their control operates freely within defined domains. At others, legal ops serves in an advisory capacity, making recommendations that partners may accept or ignore. Understanding where a particular firm falls on this spectrum determines whether legal ops represents your champion or merely an influencer in a partner-driven decision process.
Different Metrics, Different Motivations
Partners and legal ops professionals operate under different incentive structures that activate different concerns. Partners focus on client relationships, origination credit, billable hours, and practice group profitability. Their financial and recognition concerns connect to these metrics directly. Legal ops focuses on operational efficiency, technology adoption rates, cost reduction, and process standardization. Their advancement and identity concerns connect to transformation outcomes that may not appear on partner scorecards at all.
Your translation must produce different outputs for each audience. Features presented to legal ops become outcomes around workflow efficiency, integration capabilities, and total cost of ownership. The same features presented to partners become outcomes around client service quality, competitive positioning, and impact on metrics that drive partner compensation. Identical capabilities require entirely different framing to resonate with each stakeholder tier.
Bridging the metrics gap. Successful vendors develop value propositions that resonate with both audiences and help legal ops translate operational metrics into language partners care about. This is the essence of arming your champion for the second sale. When legal ops presents your solution to partners, they must speak in terms of client outcomes and competitive positioning, not operational efficiency metrics that trigger partner indifference or active resistance. Your job is to provide the translation materials that make this second sale possible.
The Champion Without Authority Problem
The most common failure mode in law firm sales is cultivating an enthusiastic legal ops champion only to discover they lack authority to approve the purchase. Legal ops may drive the evaluation process, conduct demos, negotiate terms, and champion the solution internally, but final signature authority rests with partners who were minimally involved in the evaluation. This isn't a failure of the legal ops professional. It's a structural constraint that your approach must account for.
This dynamic creates risk for both vendors and legal ops champions. Vendors invest significant sales resources in relationships that can't close deals. Legal ops professionals stake their credibility and advancement trajectory on recommendations that partners may reject, potentially damaging their internal standing and triggering security concerns about future initiatives. The stakes affect your champion personally.
Navigating authority structures. Sophisticated vendors map decision authority early in sales processes before significant resource investment. Ask directly about budget approval processes, partnership vote requirements, and the specific individuals who will make or influence the final decision. This intelligence shapes engagement strategy and enables realistic expectations about sales cycles and close probability. If your legal ops contact can't answer these questions clearly, that itself is diagnostic information about their actual influence in the decision architecture.
The Partner Bypass Trap
Some vendors, recognizing legal ops' limited authority, attempt to bypass them entirely and sell directly to partners. This approach triggers multiple failure modes. Partners may lack time or interest to evaluate operational technology in detail. They delegate to legal ops specifically because they trust operational judgment on these matters. Attempting to circumvent this delegation activates control resistance in legal ops while failing to address partners' relief concerns around not wanting to manage these evaluations themselves.
Legal ops professionals who feel bypassed become active obstacles to adoption. They raise implementation concerns, question integration feasibility, or simply deprioritize a solution forced upon them. Their security activates against threats to their role and influence. Even if a vendor secures partner approval through direct selling, implementation may be sabotaged by resentful operational teams. The sale closes but the deployment fails, destroying reference value and future expansion opportunities.
The collaborative approach. The effective strategy engages both legal ops and partners appropriately throughout the sales process, respecting the structural reality of their different roles. Legal ops leads technical evaluation while vendors ensure partners receive strategic-level communications about business value. The vendor facilitates a collaborative dynamic rather than playing stakeholders against each other. This requires maintaining two parallel tracks of engagement with different value translations for each audience.
Reading the Political Landscape
The relationship between legal ops and partners reflects broader firm politics that vendors must learn to read. At some firms, legal ops enjoys strong partner sponsorship and genuine influence. Their recommendations carry weight because partners trust their judgment based on demonstrated success. At other firms, the role is marginalized, tolerated but not empowered. These political dynamics profoundly impact technology buying processes and determine how your approach should operate.
Signs of a strong legal ops position include dedicated budget authority, representation on key committees, direct reporting to senior leadership, and a track record of successful technology implementations. Signs of weakness include advisory-only roles, constant partner overrides, high turnover, and relegation to administrative rather than strategic functions. These indicators reveal the actual structure of decision authority beyond organizational charts.
Adjusting strategy to political reality. When legal ops is strong, vendors can invest confidently in that relationship, knowing recommendations will carry weight and legal ops serves as genuine champion. When legal ops is weak, vendors must invest more heavily in partner relationships while maintaining cordial operational engagement. Legal ops becomes an influencer rather than champion, and the first sale must occur at the partner level. Misreading this political landscape wastes resources and can doom otherwise promising opportunities.
Building Sustainable Multi-Stakeholder Relationships
Long-term success in law firm sales requires building relationships at multiple levels that survive personnel changes. The legal ops director who championed your solution may leave. The partner sponsor may retire. Vendors who depend entirely on single relationships find themselves repeatedly starting from scratch. Protecting your account relationship extends beyond individual deals.
Develop relationships with multiple legal ops team members, not just the director. Cultivate partner sponsors in different practice groups. Build operational relationships with IT, finance, and other support functions who influence technology decisions. This network approach creates resilience against inevitable turnover and provides multiple potential champions for future expansion opportunities.
The long game. Law firm relationships develop slowly but can persist for decades. The associate you work with today may become tomorrow's managing partner. The legal ops analyst may become the Chief Operating Officer. Treating every contact as a potential long-term relationship, regardless of their current authority level, builds the foundation for sustainable success. This is momentum protection operating across career trajectories rather than deal cycles.
The legal ops versus partner dynamic isn't a problem to solve but a structural reality to navigate. Vendors who understand both perspectives, respect both roles, and build translations that resonate across this divide position themselves for success in an increasingly complex law firm buying environment. Those who pick sides or attempt to bypass either stakeholder tier will continue losing deals to competitors who master this dual engagement model.