SOPs for Legal Department

Why a Legal Department?

When a company or a business enterprise carries out business activities, it has to ensure that those activities are in adherence with the laws of the land. Starting from registration and obtaining the necessary licenses to the issuance of appointment letters and payment of taxes, every country and state has laws governing how businesses are required to carry out these activities. If there are deviations in following the established laws, businesses become liable to face legal consequences. To ensure that all the necessary legal conditions are duly fulfilled, companies employ legal professionals or hire external service providers.

Legal Activities as a Distinct Function

Small enterprises ideally go for external service providers as their requirements are usually not very extensive. But the legal requirements are voluminous and complicated for large enterprises. They prefer to have their own legal departments to address their regulatory needs. The legal department of a company has to be treated like a full-fledged and distinct functional department. All the legal and regulatory activities should be treated distinctly as an independent function even if there is no separate legal department.

Corporate Governance

Almost every country has its own company law or act. The act defines when an entity comes under the purview of the act. And once it happens, the business or the individual must abide by the provisions of the act. The company law establishes the rules and regulations for governing a company. This covers but is not constricted to –

Incorporation and dissolution
Appointment of directors
Annual General Meetings
Shareholding and shareholders
Payment of dividends
Audits and statutory reporting
Adherence to other applicable laws, etc.

Corporate Communications

Earlier, mostly the big companies used to bother about their public relations and media rapport. But nowadays, business communication has become a sensitive area of work. One misplaced advertisement or tweet brings a week-long bashing on social media. Communication is no longer about what a company issues as a press release or expresses through its spokesperson in front of the media cameras. Therefore, any behaviour of a company that reaches the public needs to be checked for its legal validity.

Legal side of Financial Matters

The financial activities of a company are carried out by its finance and accounts departments. But legal aspects affect the financial management of a company. The legal department of a company takes care of these legalities. For example, many countries keep a close eye on the creation of a monopoly in their domestic markets. In such countries, when a company decides to buy another business, it must not only consider the financial aspects but also the legal requirements and constraints in doing so.

Human Resources and Industrial Relations (HRIR)

Lawmakers and law enforcement agencies are extremely strict regarding the treatment meted out to employees or workers. In labour-intensive and manufacturing industries, companies are required to follow extensive rules and regulations. This is towards ensuring the safety of workers, fair pay, securing the rights of contractual workers, prevent gender discrimination, etc. The overall objective of lawmakers here is to ensure that employees and workers employed by businesses in any industry are provided fair compensation and a suitable working environment. The role of the legal department is to provide guidance and inputs to the company regarding the applicable provisions of the law, its implementation, and necessary statutory reporting.

How YRC can help

SOP Expertise

SOP consulting is one of our flagship services. Since 2012, we have helped over 500 clients establish robust business processes. Our services extend to 20+ verticals. We engage experienced professionals with diverse academic and project exposure in our projects. We offer SOP design and development services to legal departments of companies. This also covers process design for legal divisions of SMEs.

Complex Legal Specifications into Simplified Procedures

The nature of legal activities required to be carried out vary from company to company. For some businesses, the requirements can be extensive and complicated. For others, it can be relatively simple and straightforward. Irrespective of the level of complexity, we assist clients in streamlining and defining their legal processes. Our objective is to ensure that the legal requirements and specifications outlined by clients are converted into simplified standard operating procedures.

Establish the Standards of Performance

When a complex legal activity is broken down as a sequence of smaller tasks, it has to be ensured that the output of every task qualifies to be the input for the subsequent task. If this is not so, the process breaks. In SOP design and development, our process consulting experts ensure that the standards of performance and output to be maintained for each task are clearly established.

Smooth Flow of Work

Delay in executing legal or compliance activities is something businesses avoid. Whether it is processing a contract with a supplier or responding to a statutory query, it is only good for business to be on time. Having SOPs is a way to ensure that procedures for carrying out various legal and compliance activities are laid down in advance. Once the activity is triggered, the process can be readily initiated. And once the process is initiated, the activities involved in completing it must go smoothly. Our SOP consultants seek to ensure that the processes they design are free from any internal bottlenecks and ambiguities.

Make Monitoring Easier

The purpose of SOPs is not only to serve as an operational roadmap for the executives. With well-defined processes, supervision and monitoring should also become easier. In SOP design, we try to make sure that heads and managers of the legal departments of companies find it easier to monitor the flow of work under their respective areas of supervision. We seek to pre-establish what needs to be monitored and when. SOPs provide the groundwork for initiating process automation.

Ease of Inter-departmental Coordination for Legal Compliance

Inter-departmental coordination is essential in business to reconcile progress and performance at the macro level. Almost every department of a company has certain legal ramifications of their operational activities. It is the duty of the legal department to keep a check on other departments pertaining to their responsibilities to comply with the applicable laws. Other departments may also require assistance and paperwork from the legal department. Our endeavour is to synchronize the requirements of inter-departmental coordination for ensuring legal compliance.

Excellent Coordination with External Agencies

A business enterprise consistently interacts with its environment. This interaction could be with suppliers, service providers, financial institutions, regulatory bodies, etc. The duty of the legal department is to ensure that the necessary legal formalities with these external agencies are duly completed on time in a consistent manner. Our goal of SOP writers is to work towards designing internal procedures for the legal department such that it can effectively and efficiently fulfil its external duties.

Easy Onboarding

Whenever new employees or new vendors are appointed, there are legal formalities involved. These are mostly in the form of contracts, agreements and other statutory forms. These processes need to be defined in advance so that onboarding can take place without any internal delay. Our objective is to ensure that the internal legal activities involved in the onboarding processes are mapped in advance. Our team of SOP experts for legal department help clients in identifying any internal bottleneck or requirement that may exist and seek to address them in the SOP planning phase.

To know more about our SOP consulting services for legal department of companies or if you have any specific queries for our team of business process consultants, drop us a message to schedule a callback.