How a global team handles legal task management at Revolut

Revolut’s legal team skyrocketed from 2 lawyers to almost a hundred, in the space of just 5 years. 

With such a strong global legal presence, how does the team work efficiently to address and resolve requests from the wider business? And how does the team deliver key metrics that accurately measure legal’s impact and success?

We asked Daniel Geller, Deputy General Counsel at Revolut. 

Hi Daniel! Tell us about the legal team at Revolut - how has it grown over the years?

I joined as the second lawyer, and that was in 2017. We now have over 100 people globally - and that includes paralegals, company secretaries and compliance specialists.

What barriers did legal task management present to growth? 

One of the biggest challenges was making sure that the right requests were going to the right lawyers. 

Everything changes so quickly. In the early stages, legal requests came through Slack, emails, or even just colleagues approaching your desk. 

We wanted to get ahead of the problem and develop a legal task management system that would:

• Allow legal to manage and allocate requests
• Help the team prioritize their workload
• Add accountability to the work we did
• Offer an insight into the quality of service we provided
• Offer an audit trail of legal work so everything was trackable

As the business matured, legal’s work became more nuanced, and we needed specialists on board - whether that’s regulatory experts, disputes lawyers, data protection lawyers, or employment law professionals. 

We knew that the need for this system would only become more urgent as time passed.

Legal is providing a service to other colleagues in the business ... it’s important to codify that so we know our strengths and points of improvement

How did you resolve legal task management?

We used Jira, a project tracking platform, and built a single point of access. 

It acts as our legal service desk, and we have certain SLAs in place around the urgency of the request and the product it relates to - any advice that the legal team offers is then recorded on that ticket.

Who was involved in creating the legal service desk?

It was a team effort. The GC, Tom Hambrett, and I worked with our legal team as their input was key. We collaborated with the operations team to build it out and become more Jira literate. 

Senior management reviewed the plans we had and offered input on how we could improve the workflow. And our data analyst and data science teams helped us build the dashboards. 

What does that workflow look like?

1. Colleagues fill out a form in Jira

They can add information around:

• Background and context
• Relevant jurisdiction, country, entity and so on
• Key dates legal should be aware of
• Additional resources, such as design workspace assets, contract templates, and so on

The more information, the better legal can help.

2. This request finds its way to our help desk

Here it's filtered through to a specific team, based on automations and logic flows we’ve set up in the platform. 

3. It’s assigned to a lawyer

‍The colleague who submitted the request can get in touch with that lawyer and ask for information, and in Jira we time how long it takes for the lawyer to offer advice and resolve the problem. 

4. Once the task is resolved, we ask for a Net Promoter Score (NPS)

‍Legal is providing a service to our customers - other colleagues in the business - and it’s important to codify that so we know our strengths and points of improvement.

5. The NPS score and response times feed into our KPIs

‍Legal's KPIs are displayed in a series of dashboards that we share with the wider business. 

We take a data driven approach and have dashboards that cover a broad range of legal metrics, such as:

• Number of requests incoming per team
• Number of tickets assigned per individual
• Prioritization of requests 
• Breakdown of requests per product 
• External Counsel spend and breakdown per firm
• Legal counsel utilisation and capacity 

These are super useful when it comes to communications with senior management and informing on areas such as hiring and capacity.

Everything is an iterative process - it’s better to launch a simplified version of your solution, and iterate, than it is to delay launching because you’re striving for perfection

How do legal task management dashboards help legal grow more efficiently? 

They help us gauge legal’s capacity and individual lawyer utilization, so we can make really strong business cases for headcount. 

For example, we’ll approach the centralised hiring team to explain that we need more lawyers in certain regions due to an increased number of tickets. 

We can point to our dashboard and explain how the team based in that region has had an uptick in tickets over the past quarter or two, or has had to involve outside counsel to manage the workload.

With the latter, we can make a strong case on spend - how external counsel cost us X amount in a particular matter, and how it would be more efficient to hire a full-time lawyer.

We do the same with the NPS score; Tom (Hambrett, GC) and I have access to the feedback that comes through these forms, and we can distil that to team leads and say - ‘Lawyer X is getting consistently great scores, across Y number of tickets resolved this quarter. You should consider putting them up for a promotion.’ 

What advice would you give in-house legal teams looking for ways to work more efficiently?

Don’t overanalyze. Everything is an iterative process - it’s much better to launch a simplified version of your solution, and then iterate, than it is to delay launching the process because you’re striving for perfection.

You can mitigate some of the risks, but you'll never be able to mitigate all of them. You'll learn a lot more from launching version one of a process than from not having anything out there at all. 

Want to learn more about how legal can work more effectively at high-growth businesses? Join our community of 900+ in-house lawyers and legal ops teams to network with legal leaders like Daniel, who have been there and done that.