Breaking Barriers: Becoming a Legal Force in the Boardroom
Building Trust and Influencing the Board with Expert-Tested Strategies and Peer Success Stories: Key Take Aways from Women Influence & Power in Law 2024
This week, women from across the Legal industry gathered in Chicago for Women Influence & Power in Law 2024. Mitratech was thrilled to be at the forefront of conversations with a roundtable discussion, “Becoming a Legal Force in the Boardroom: Building Trust and Influencing the Board.” Hosted by Mitratech’s Liz Lugones and McAlister Southern, this session explored the unique challenges and opportunities of shifting the perception of legal departments from cost centers to true strategic business partners.
Lugones and Southern worked through candid insights and actionable strategies while the roundtable unpacked what it takes to foster innovation, build trust, and align legal operations with business priorities. This discussion focused on key tactics for preparing and aligning with stakeholders to ensure a successful board meeting. It highlighted the importance of collaborating with other leaders to identify common themes, while also positioning the board as a partner in success — an extension of the team working toward shared goals
Let’s dive deeper into the key takeaways from the discussion and explore how a better understanding of your data and initiatives can help lead the charge to reshape the boardroom.
Fostering Innovation and Continuous Improvement
This discussion illuminated tactics for preparing and ensuring alignment across the business when facilitating a successful board meeting. For Lugones’ table, the focus was on which steps are needed pre-board meeting and how to ensure alignment with other leaders along the way.
“It’s critical to capture common threads from other issues or points that your colleagues may have. TALK TO EACH OTHER PEOPLE. You need to have an understanding of the Company and Board’s priorities and goals so you can align your efforts to meet them. You’ll always find better success in getting investment and buy in if it aligns with those goals.”
Liz Lugones
Vice President of Professional Services, Mitratech
When considering these goals and initiatives, it helps to look at the three lenses of cost, value and risk. But the most essential part is that you feel prepared in understanding the board lens of review and questioning. Essentially, your Board is an extension of the team, and understanding them more deeply helps you see them as your partner in success.
Innovation and securing buy-in don’t just have to be about adopting the latest tools, either; it’s also about finding smarter ways to do more with what you already have.
By maximizing existing resources — whether that means better leveraging technology, streamlining workflows, or empowering your Leadership Team to adopt a mindset of continuous improvement — legal teams can unlock greater value for the business and serve as a better strategic partner.
Building a Future-Ready Legal Department with Smart Tech Investments
The right technology allows legal teams to reduce redundancies, improve communication, and gain real-time insights to aim for the most efficient operations. But how can you convey the investment is worth it to leadership and board members? Constructing a compelling business case that demonstrates the value of investing in the legal tech stack is critical.
As someone within the department, you have the power to know what tech advancements can be beneficial for your team. To help make your case, take the following steps:
- Focus on how the investments in a tech stack will streamline operations, mitigate risk, and deliver value.
- Use metrics to quantify the benefits, such as reduced legal spend, faster contract approvals, or enhanced compliance.
- Design your tools with reporting needs in mind. Ensuring that your tech solutions can easily produce reports for leadership, board members, and other stakeholders is critical to avoid manual or duplicative work. Integrating technology that supports seamless reporting will optimize processes and demonstrate value clearly through efficient data flow.
- Collaborate with other teams, like IT and Compliance, to ensure your proposal fits within the broader business strategy and reinforces a unified vision across the organization.
This alignment helps demonstrate the value of the same thread across different areas of the business.
Mastering Internal Marketing: Aligning Legal Operations with Boardroom Priorities
Internal marketing, or the process of presenting legal operations as aligned with boardroom priorities, turns boardroom support from your biggest roadblock into your biggest advantage. However, in order to successfully do so, you must think like a board member.
TIP: Build your talk track and prepare for the presentation through the board’s lens. The Board of Directors is more likely to ask detailed questions such as if something impacts finances, valuation, reputation, or poses a risk that outweighs the potential value.
To resonate with the board, focus on how legal’s efforts directly address their top concerns — whether it’s cost savings, risk management, or operational efficiency. Then, you will be able to tailor your messaging to emphasize how legal initiatives contribute to broader business goals.
For example, highlight how contract automation has the ability to increase revenue recognition, mitigate risk and protect the company from costly penalties.
Harnessing Data Analytics to Showcase Legal’s Impact and Value
Effectively communicating legal’s value to the board can be an intimidating next step – unless you come equipped with the right direct, data-driven insights, that is. Focusing on measurable outcomes (like reduced contract cycle times) is what separates the best from the rest. When you can present quantifiable results (and add suggestions for how to interpret and leverage that data), you start functioning as a more strategic partner that is supporting the business’ long-term success.
Boards will likely care about how legal initiatives tie into bottom-line results. Understanding this, you can hone in on presenting reports that highlight legal’s role in driving growth. It is important to note that legal’s role with the BOD is not to know everything but to be honest, a trusted partner and to find answers.
Paving the Way for Legal Ops’ Strategic Future: Empowered Leadership in Action
To sum it up, how you present to your board is just as important as what you are presenting. Your board and leadership are on the same team. By approaching from their perspective you will be successful in leading the charge of being a changemaker.
The best way to make effective change is to have the right partners along the way. Ready to further the conversation on how to shift the perception of legal departments from being seen as cost centers to business value drivers? Explore Mitratech’s comprehensive suite of legal solutions or get in touch with our team today.
