About

Legal Operations by Shearman is a startup within a 150-year-old institution created to meet the people, process and technology needs of in-house law departments.

Our experienced business of law experts support general counsel and legal operations leaders in setting up, managing, and maintaining the operations of the legal function.

Our Story

Pre-pandemic, our Client Value Team and Global Technology Solutions leaders identified changes in the landscape for legal services. This included clients increasingly focusing on many aspects that fell outside the realms of technical legal advice. It was clear that many of these additional services were highly valued and influenced some of our clients' buying decisions. A task force was formed to identify areas where we could add further value to client relationships.

Recognizing that in-house law departments have similar challenges to our lawyers, we identified alignment between the strongest areas of need (from our clients) and our own legal operations capabilities, to support the development of an initial legal operations offering. Our client conversations indicated that many legal operations departments are still in the early stages of development, while our teams have been supporting the business needs of lawyers for a generation. In 2022, we launched Legal Operations by Shearman to support our clients in setting up, managing, and maintaining the operations of the law department.