Special report

2025 Legal Department Operations Index

Managing pressures both external and internal

Legal department operations (LDO) teams are under increasing pressure to not reduce or slow the growth of department costs but also evaluate and implement rapidly emerging technologies while maintaining and improving the operational state of their legal departments.

In July, the Thomson Reuters Institute (TRI) surveyed more than 125 seasoned corporate legal department professionals, including those responsible for legal operations, to ask about the changing role of LDO professionals in their department, trends influencing how they will operate in the future, the metrics used to track progress, and how they are currently managing the changing legal tech landscape. TRI is pleased to release these findings in the latest annual Legal Department Operations Index.

Among the key insights in the report are:

  • Legal operations work is evolving beyond its origins as primarily a cost-control function to focus on systems, processes, and technology, with 81% of respondents indicating their department has at least one dedicated legal ops role on their team. However, 45% of respondents classified themselves as “General Counsel tasked to run legal operations”, implying that in many cases, GCs are tasked with legal ops work on top of all their other duties.
  • More than half of legal department professionals (56%) surveyed reported their department was under-resourced, even though almost half (46%) said they expect to see more work being brought in-house.
  • More than half (55%) reported flat or decreasing budgets for the legal department, and a majority (51%) also reported flat or no change in their legal tech budgets.
  • Almost three-quarters of respondents (73%) say they plan to use advanced technology to automate legal tasks and reduce costs, yet 45% also characterise the pace of technology advancement in their departments as “slow”.

To download the complete 2025 Legal Department Operations Index please complete the form.

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