Law Firm Operations
Law firm operational risk: what partners should know
Legal risk is well understood. Operational risk often isn't. Here's what every partner should have visibility over.
Partners typically have strong visibility over legal risk — file review, PII, trust compliance. Operational risk usually gets far less attention, and usually costs more when it goes wrong.
The categories partners should see
Key-person dependency
Which operational areas would fail on day one if one specific person left?
Supplier concentration
Which single suppliers, if they failed, would materially disrupt the firm?
Renewal exposure
What contracts are approaching renewal in the next 6 and 12 months, and what's the total value?
Insurance and compliance
Is professional indemnity current? Cyber cover in place? Trust obligations documented?
Cybersecurity posture
Backups tested? MFA enforced? Incident response documented?
Technology continuity
What happens if practice management, document management or trust accounting is unavailable?
Reporting it upward
Partners don't need a 40-page document. They need a one-page operational risk view they can act on. That's what an operations register enables — see the Operational Risk Assessment Template.