Optimizing Business Efficiency with a Multi-Disciplinary Legal Operations Team

Shulin Tay,Head Of Legal And Compliance - Singapore, Revolut

Shulin Tay,Head Of Legal And Compliance - Singapore, Revolut

Revolut is a global financial super-app that provides more than 30 million customers worldwide access to a wide range of innovative and convenient tools to manage their money. These tools span everyday payment needs, travel essentials, investment products, and more. Revolut is supported by 6,000+ employees, of which 100 are legal department staff located in 15 offices across four global regions, namely the UK, EMEA, APAC, and the Americas.

The legal department plays a key role in supporting Revolut to achieve its business goals by navigating legal challenges and ensuring strong corporate governance. The department established a multi-disciplinary legal operations team in 2022 to optimize efficiency and drive digitalization and modernization. The legal operations team collaborates with practice group leads to develop solutions that meet the specific needs of the legal department. Over the past year, the department has implemented several key initiatives, including 1) data-driven strategies, 2) capacity management, and 3) external legal counsel management.

Data-driven Strategies:

As a department, we have embraced data-driven management to measure efficiency, customer satisfaction, risk, capacity, and legal spending. In 2022, our lawyers leveraged their legal expertise to build risk quantifiers that provide a standardized framework for assessing legal risk. This has helped us to facilitate quick decision-making and reduce variation in approach.

Risk Scores

Last year, three new risk quantifiers were rolled out to quantify risks associated with litigation disputes, M&A deals, and new global expansion decisions. The results of the quantifiers provided our lawyers with a standardized score that may be assessed against Revolut’s risk appetite and provided guidance on the next steps.

Computing a risk score has been an effective and accessible way of conveying risk to the wider business. Rather than saying a potential matter is 'risky,' the teams are now equipped to provide a percentage score as to how much legal risk a particular decision will create so that the company can make an informed decision.

Data Visualization Dashboards

In addition to risk scores, we collect large amounts of data from all of our processes and utilize management information (MI) dashboards to provide data visualization via real-time data review across all levels of the legal department. These dashboards cover many different areas, from monitoring overdue service level agreements (SLAs) to the business stakeholder (customer) satisfaction to spending data. These dashboards are targeted to give us the data in the right format and at the right level to guide business decisions and manage performance in real time. These data could be broken down by region, practice group, and even down to individual employees.

Our data-based approach allows us to review the performance of our legal teams in a consistent and objective manner. Performance is managed using key performance indicators (KPIs), which every legal team has in place. Standard KPIs for teams include response time SLAs and customer satisfaction, whilst bespoke KPIs exist for certain teams, all of which enable the teams to monitor and optimize for quality, speed, and cost. The standard team KPIs in place are calculated as follows:

• Response time SLA -

the percentage of time overdue for advice based on agreed service timelines with the business

Customer satisfaction -

based on satisfaction surveys and utilizing the industry standard Net Promoter Score (NPS) calculation

This has allowed for a novel legal performance management system to be created that utilizes outputfocused KPIs as opposed to billable hours. In 2022 this allowed the Legal Department to decrease the percentage of time overdue on agreed service timelines from 8 to 3 percent whilst in parallel maintaining customer satisfaction at 98 percent. In addition to the departmental improvements, this data has allowed us to focus on particular teams in order to resolve issues such as reducing the percentage of overdue SLAs or overdue contract negotiations within a short time frame.

Capacity Management Model:

We aim to automate processes where possible and take as much manual administrative work away from our lawyers as we can. This can be seen through the creation of an automation capacity management model. This model allows team owners to increase efficiency and improve overall productivity within their teams, resulting in faster turnaround times, improved customer satisfaction, and extra time for our lawyers to focus on more value-adding tasks.

The premise utilizes story points, which are allocated on an automated basis. These story points estimate the resource required and the complexity of a task. The model compares the workload and output of counsels against target levels of utilization, which is displayed on an MI dashboard. Team owners can then make decisions on work allocation and hiring using objective data rather than anecdotal observations.

External Legal Engagement Approval and Monitoring:

The legal department made a conscious decision not to outsource legal spend management to a third-party provider as we believe that we could build a solution in-house. A bespoke process and tool were created in collaboration with the general counsel (GC) and heads of legal to enable fast and transparent legal external engagement spend within Revolut. The process was built using our internal service management software with data collection built in by design. The key steps include:

a. Request submitted by counsel b. Approval by GC or delegate c. Approval by a centralized procurement team d. Engagement monitoring e. Automated spending updated upon invoice payment

All the data is then collated for analysis to determine where money is spent with breakdowns by firm, legal team, and jurisdiction. This has allowed us to make strategic decisions around technical needs from our panel firms and identify expertise gaps informing hiring decisions.

Computing A Risk Score Has Been An Effective And Accessible Way Of Conveying Risk To The Wider Business

The next step is to build engagement satisfaction data, so firms can be evaluated in real-time based on the service provided for each engagement. Since its inception, this process has handled millions of pounds in spend approval and enabled the analysis via a MI dashboard that shows the trends and breakdowns in our spending, which is used, among other decisions, to identify expertise gaps and inform hiring.

The implementation of these innovations resulted in significant benefits for the legal department and Revolut as a whole. The legal department was able to handle an increased workload whilst maintaining the same resource levels and boasts one of the highest retention rates as a department in the company. The success of the innovations can be measured objectively through our KPIs, showcasing the reduction in overdue SLAs and high customer satisfaction of the wider Revolut business.

Investing in a legal operations team will go a long way to supporting a legal department’s operational efficiency and maturity, which would ensure that the department is able to provide legal services efficiently and in a way that stimulates the company’s growth.