What’s a Contract Operations Professional?

Petro Krasnomovets
By Petro Krasnomovets,
4th February |
24

As Legal Ops is growing and maturing, we see more and more segmentation with roles that are designed for specific professionals. A Contract Operations Professional is one of those positions. 

In a recent interview with artificial lawyer Eric Laughlin, the CEO of CLM company Agiloft has mentioned an interesting new position that takes roots in legal ops. To be more specific, Eric talked about ‘contract ops’ and being a Contract Operations Professional. 

‘It’s a specialty within legal ops, which is a big field, and it’s connected to CLM (contract lifecycle management), which is not really legal tech, but enterprise tech,’ Laughlin explains.

‘The job role is one where you are working to understand and optimise the substance of a contract within an enterprise; to optimise the formation of contracts between two businesses, and to understand and optimise how the contract and its data flow through the tech stack of a business.’

From the perspective of the growth and maturity legal ops have seen over the past few years, such a position makes a lot of sense. It diversifies the need to understand what the legal content of a contract holds, when and how it is useful, etc. while still having a major emphasis on the technology a law firm uses to store, move, and analyze their data.

‘It’s a very unique set of skills, but over time people can get proficient on what is the substance of the role. They are not crafting contracts, but learning how to optimise them inside the business, and thinking about sets of data points contained inside those contracts and how they relate to each other. It’s about thinking how a clause could change the performance of a contract down the line,’ says Eric. 

What is the role of a Contract Ops Professional?

As we’ve already established, a good Contract Operations Professional is required to have extensive knowledge regarding both the legal content of a contract as well as the technology that supports the document management lifecycle in a company.

That said, this position is not designed for a lawyer.

How so?

Well, you don’t technically need a legal degree to understand the terms of a contract, like the conditions of termination of a deal if certain requirements are not met.

Moreover, a broader understanding of business processes is much more beneficial to this role than legal expertise because of the person’s involvement in overall document management processes at every stage of their “journey”.

The skills a potential Contract Ops Professional is to have are:

  • Technical skills at a level that surpasses the average. That said, there’s no feasible need to learn coding. 
  • Data analysis experience and capabilities. 
  • Business analysis skills are crucial as they will be crucial to developing efficient business processes.
  • Soft skills are also a must-have as the only way to know where people are struggling or are less effective than needed is to talk to them. 

We live in interesting times. The legal industry is evolving and changing much faster than ever before, and this brings a serious question: what do you think of the legal ops concept and would you be willing to consider hiring a Contract ops Professional?