Operate Legal · A field manual for in-house teams

Run legal like a system,
not a scramble.

Practical playbooks, battle-tested templates, and the benchmarks to back you up — for legal ops managers and in-house teams who'd rather ship than sit in status meetings.

Est. 2022 · Free, forever · No sales calls
§ The core

Four shelves.
Everything else is a distraction.

We keep the library tight on purpose. Every piece has shipped at a real company, been through a real review, and earned its place here before we published it.

01
Playbooks

Step-by-step guides for the work that repeats. Opinionated, with defaults.

  • 01Rolling out a contract intake process in 30 days
  • 02Standing up a vendor review workflow
  • 03Running the first GC hire in a 200-person company
  • 04Building a legal ops function from scratch
02
Templates

Redlined, commented, and field-tested. Drop in and adapt.

  • 01MSA with marked-up fallback positions
  • 02DPA for US ↔ EU data flows
  • 03Vendor security questionnaire (short form)
  • 04Board-ready legal ops quarterly review
03
Decisions

Frameworks for the calls that keep you up at night.

  • 01Build CLM in-house vs. buy enterprise
  • 02When to hire your second in-house lawyer
  • 03Outside counsel — consolidate or diversify?
  • 04Self-serve contracts — where to draw the line
04
Benchmarks

Numbers from 400+ in-house teams, refreshed quarterly.

  • 01Contract cycle time by company size
  • 02Outside counsel spend as % of revenue
  • 03Headcount ratios: lawyers to employees
  • 04Tooling spend per legal FTE
Flagshipv1.3 · Updated Mar 2026

The Simple
CLM Kit.

A free contract lifecycle system for teams who aren't ready to spend six figures on software.

Most teams don't need enterprise CLM. They need a shared inbox, a clean template library, an approval routing matrix everyone actually follows, and a way to see how long things take. This kit gives you all four.

2,400+
teams using it
≈34%
cycle-time drop
Free
no email gate
What's inside — 6 files
14.2 MB · ZIP
  • 01
    Intake Form
    One front door for every contract request.
    Typeform + Google Form
  • 02
    Approval Matrix
    Who signs off at what dollar amount and risk tier.
    Sheet
  • 03
    Template Library
    MSA, SOW, NDA, DPA, order form, and the common ones.
    12 redlines
  • 04
    Playbook
    Our default negotiation positions with fallback language.
    PDF, 22 pages
  • 05
    Tracker
    Status, cycle time, counterparty, and obligations.
    Airtable base
  • 06
    Metrics Dashboard
    Cycle time, volume by team, and backlog aging.
    Looker / Sheet
No newsletter spam. One email, the kit, done.
§ Start here

Pick
your situation.

The same advice doesn't apply to a 40-person startup and a 4,000-person enterprise. Pick the path that sounds most like you — we'll route you to the right three or four pieces.

New

I’m new to legal ops.

Start with the first-90-days playbook and the intake rollout guide. Skip the tooling rabbit hole — it comes later.

Fix

Our legal function is a mess.

Before you buy anything, run the triage checklist. Nine out of ten times the problem is routing, not tooling.

Scale

We’re scaling fast.

Build the approval matrix, the self-serve contract library, and the metrics dashboard — in that order.

§ Quick wins

Four changes you can
ship this quarter.

−41%
contract turnaround time

Move intake off email. One form, routing rules, SLA per tier.

A week of work
+3×
intake visibility

A shared board with status, owner, and age. Review weekly.

An afternoon
−18%
outside counsel spend

Rate cards, matter budgets, and a monthly spend review.

One quarter
−5d
onboarding-to-first-draft

Template library + playbook. Ship with sensible defaults.

Two weeks
§ The Operators

Be one of the
founder Operators.

A quieter space for legal ops leaders who want more than the public library — longer pieces, a small peer group, and a look at what we’re working on before it’s published.

01
Deeper content

More ops content, earlier.

Longer pieces, working drafts, and templates we don’t publish to the open library — the stuff we’d only send to a peer who asked.

02
A peer room

A small group comparing notes.

Legal ops leaders talking candidly about budgets, headcount, tooling, and vendor calls. No LinkedIn audience, no vendor agenda.

03
First looks

See what’s coming.

Early access to new playbooks, benchmarks, and interviews — while we’re still editing them and you can push back.

See what the Operators get →Invite-based · small founding cohort