A 5-step template for heads of legal to craft an effective legal department strategic plan.
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Legal Department Strategic Plan Template
This year's top priority for legal leaders is to improve third-party and extended enterprise risk management.
To achieve this, an effective legal department strategic plan that aligns your enterprise strategy with specific initiatives for your function is essential. When executed well, your legal strategic plan should offer a clear roadmap to accomplish your business goals.
Download the Gartner Legal Department Strategic Plan Template & Toolkit to learn:
- The 5 activities that are key to an impactful legal strategy
- What tools and frameworks are needed to build a measurable legal strategy
- How to capture and communicate your legal department strategic plan to stakeholders with a simple and visually impactful one-page template
More About the Legal Department Strategic Plan
The Gartner Legal Department Strategic Plan and Toolkit helps legal leaders define the roadmap for executing the key actions required to meet their legal department’s strategy initiatives in alignment with the enterprise business model and goals. Leaders can leverage this legal strategy template to create and communicate a clear action plan that states where the legal function currently is, where it needs to be, how to get there and how to measure progress.
Legal Department Strategic Plan FAQs
What is an effective Legal Department Strategic Plan?
A effective legal department strategic plan is a functional roadmap that assesses current resources, costs and budget and aligns them with the company’s mission and goals. It sets a plan to align with enterprise goals to grow and innovate, despite changing and often unpredictable business conditions. A legal strategy sets priorities, manages trade-off decisions and and ensure it continues to make critical investments to meet business needs.
What are the 5 key activities for an effective legal department strategic plan?
- Verify the business context. Confirm the enterprise mission and goals and make sure your employees know how they apply to their everyday work. Align your legal goals for impact.
- Assess your legal function’s ability to deliver on your goals and create a plan to fill the capability gaps that will slow your impact.
- Strategically manage legal budgets to prioritize cost, budget and investment decisions to favor initiatives that will drive impact — and demote those that won’t.
- Decide how to measure your progress. Select measures and metrics that will demonstrate the progress you’re making against the commitments you’ve made.
- Document your strategy — ideally on just one page — to simply and clearly state where the legal organization is, where it is going and how it will get to the future state.
Why should use our Legal Strategy Template & Toolkit?
The Gartner Legal Strategy Template and Toolkit helps legal leaders develop a multiyear department strategy and implement that strategy through identifying measurable annual targets. Working through this Tool will enable you to:
Develop your strategic plan
Identify key threats, challenges and drivers to address through the strategic plan
Determine priority areas, goals and metrics that will address department and organizational challenges
Prioritize initiatives and track implementation to fulfill your strategic goals
Communicate the strategic plan across the department and organization
Develop an annual plan based on your multiyear strategy at the start of each year to make progress toward it. The initiatives you plan on an annual basis should contribute to the execution of the multiyear strategy. Annual planning can serve as a course corrector for your multiyear plan if necessary.