Webinar report: Identifying hard ‘benefits’ from transforming in-house legal operations

The first event examined the value of laser focusing on projects that make the biggest impact. 

In the modern commercial or public sector organisation, concrete benefits of business decisions are the only things that matter. And that includes those made in the legal department – how it’s structured, how it delivers and how it justifies expenditure on legal operations transformation. 

Tom Fleuriot is a specialist in this arena. A one-time commercial head and legal advisor for global defence company Babcock who went on to hold Legal Director roles at FMCG giant, Reckitt, Tom founded Flocsam, a legal operations tactics consultancy, in 2024. Flocsam provides in-house legal leaders with tailored, fast interventions that help them drive business strategy and enhance legal’s reputation. 

Why look for hard benefits in transformation? 

Typically, in-house legal leaders have a multitude of things across the department that they’d like to change. At the same time, they have next to no bandwidth beyond core legal matters. The first challenge, then, is to prioritise, which too often leads to the creation of roadmaps. A lot of time can be lost here as roadmaps struggle to keep up with changes in fast-moving business environments, meaning more resource is spent on planning than delivering. 

Looking beyond each problem to the hard benefit you can deliver while solving it helps you prioritise where to deploy your legal ops transformation resources. While recognising that universal issues for legal functions, such as risk reduction and contract visibility are vital yet hard to quantify, aim to illustrate a gain on your investment relative to its initial cost. Use this simple formula for calculating ROI: 

• I spend £50 and gain a benefit worth £150. That’s an ROI of 200% 
• I spend £50 and gain a benefit worth £60. That’s an ROI of 20% 

That said, while you may want to avoid using the hard number as the sole justification for a project, you’ll find there are benefits to that hard calculation exercise beyond defining thefinancial ROI. These include: 

• Pushing you harder to find additional value; 
• Helping you discern where your focus should lie; 
• Evolving a vague consensus into a firm alignment with the wider business strategy; and 
• Giving you a benchmark for future projects. 

How do we arrive at hard benefits? 

The good news about hard benefits is that they don’t need to be perfectly calculated. They can be based on proven estimation techniques rather than deep research techniques. Neither of these will give you perfect accuracy, however structured estimation can significantly reduce uncertainty to the point where you know enough to have the conversation, get alignment, and act with intent.

Estimation techniques include: 

• Top-down estimating, where the top line expenditure, people hours and other resources are forecasted by senior management, external consultants and other high-level advisers. Estimates arise primarily from historical data, personal expertise and technical/industry knowledge and/or experience in similar undertakings in projects elsewhere; 

• Bottom-up estimating, where you arrive at a number based on known data for component parts. This can work best when anchoring parts of the estimate to known data from of a previous project. For example, where an event has arisen 1000 times and is known to consume one hour and cost £1000 each time, these figures are factored into your overall forecast; 

• Range estimating, where known data examples are used to generate three possible outcomes – the minimum, maximum and most likely value. Through consultation and collaboration with colleagues, you can narrow the gap between the highest and lowest values and achieve as much as 90% accuracy in your forecasts through range estimation; and 

• Fermi decompositions, which can be helpful where there are no – or very little - known data to work with. Enrico Fermi was a physicist who devised a formula to ‘decompose’ large data sets into smaller subsets and thus generate approximate numbers to base working assumptions on.  These can result in wide variance, but the logical process and transparency can help to test where you need more data and where your assumptions make sense. 

Arrived at in this way, most estimates will usually be good enough. And if they’re not, they’ll give you time intentionality on where to seek out harder data: where outcomes are critical, or and when you just know you’re nowhere near in the rightballpark. 

Where will we find the hard benefits? 

Hard benefits are about a great deal more than cost reduction. Among C-suites, the four top indicators of success are: 

• Profit (72%); 
• Customer satisfaction ratings (65%); 
• Customer retention (59%); and 
• Employee satisfaction ratings (56%). 

To pursue these goals, C-suites are striving to: 

• Increase customer satisfaction (36%); 
• Improve operational efficiency (32%);
• Drive organic revenue growth (29%); 
• Improve brand profile and reputation (26%); 
• Develop new products and markets (25%);  
• Enhance ESG practices (20%); and 
• Reduce costs (19%). 

(Source: Thomson Reuters 2025). 

With these factors in mind, identify which goals in your organisation are really driving the need for the legal function. This will help you nail the hard benefits you can deliver. They may, for example, lie in tighter sales contract templates, amended freight tender contracts, compliance processes, etc, with the measurable benefits being happier customers, happier employees and higher profits. 

How do we demonstrate our hard benefits?

As regular CLL webinar attendees will know, demonstrating the value of legal is a perennial hot topic. Presenting your contribution is as much about finding the language that the C-suite recognises as it is about the hard benefits you’re delivering. A great way to get the attention your transformation efforts deserve is to frame your conversations with senior management in the most appropriate of these frameworks: 

• The full benefit, in which you break down and articulate how legal contributed to a major success in collaboration with other business functions, such as sales, marketing, HR, production, finance, etc: 
• The incremental benefit, where you can demonstrate that outcomes are improving year on year by repeating the same exercise; and 
• The accelerated benefit, where you can show that legal’s contribution enabled the organisation to reach a target ahead of the agreed timescale. 

See you next time 

Join us for the second webinar in this series with Tom. ROI: Honest costs of transforming in-house legal operations is on 3 March 2026 and will look at the eight types of cost - and how to approach them. Register here.