Why Your Legal Department Has a Reputation Problem It Can’t See
Welcome to Legal Ops Briefs—inspired by the mot-r mindset, this blog series of 3-minute reads gives in-house Legal Ops quick, operational insights. Each post will explore the tech, trends, and tactics that boost operational effectiveness and ease legal team stress—without adding to the noise.
Most legal departments believe they are well regarded by the business. The data says otherwise — and the gap between those two perceptions may be the most pernicious blind spot in corporate legal operations.
In 2023, Onit and Provoke Insights surveyed more than 4,000 enterprise employees alongside 500 legal professionals across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Germany. The findings were striking because they identified the size of the perception gap between legal and everyone else.
Seventy-three percent of legal professionals viewed their relationships with internal clients positively. Meanwhile, only 27% of business colleagues considered legal a good business partner. Seven in ten said it took days or weeks to receive a response. Only 41% viewed legal as efficient. And 67% of employees admitted to bypassing legal entirely — citing bureaucracy, slowed productivity, and a lack of understanding of their business needs.
These are not the numbers of a department that is incapable. They are the numbers of a department that is working very hard inside a system that makes its effort and capabilities invisible.
That distinction matters. The people in your legal department are not providing poor service because they lack commitment. In most cases, they are providing the best service the operating environment allows — and the operating environment is converting their effort into exactly the wrong signal.
Consider how this works in practice. A business unit submits a contract for review. The request enters whatever intake process exists — formal or informal, structured or ad hoc — and joins a queue that the requesting team cannot see. Days pass. The business unit hears nothing. They do not know that the lawyer handling their request is simultaneously managing fifteen other matters, three of which escalated overnight. They do not know that the review itself took two hours but sat in queue for four days because there was no triage mechanism to surface it. What they know is that they asked legal for something, it took a week, and the deal nearly stalled.
That experience, repeated hundreds of times across an organization, becomes reputation. Not because legal is slow, but because the system that mediates between legal and the business provides no visibility into what is actually happening. The business experiences delay. Legal experiences overload. Neither can see the other’s reality. And in that gap, trust erodes.
The Onit data sharpens this further. Relationships between legal and its internal clients declined year over year in every department surveyed, with the steepest drops in sales and procurement — precisely the revenue-generating functions where legal’s contribution should be most visible. Sales relationships declined 30%. Procurement relationships declined 41%. These are significant shifts. They represent a deterioration in the partnerships that most directly affect the organization’s ability to generate and protect revenue.
And yet, from inside the legal department, the picture looks different. Legal professionals see the effort they are expending. They know the complexity of the matters they handle. They feel — correctly — that they are working at or beyond capacity. The disconnect is not between effort and perception. It is between effort and the system’s ability to translate that effort into something the business can see and value.
This is why reputation problems in legal departments are so persistent and so difficult to address. The instinct is to work harder — to respond faster, to turn reviews around sooner, to be more available. But working harder within a system that obscures your work does not improve your reputation. It accelerates your burnout while leaving the perception gap intact. The business does not see you working harder. It sees the same delays, mediated by the same opaque processes, producing the same friction.
The problem is not effort. It is visibility. And visibility is not a communications problem — it is an operational one. It requires the kind of structural change that makes contribution measurable, response times transparent, and workload distribution visible to the people who depend on legal’s output.
If you suspect your department has a reputation gap but aren’t sure, there is a simple and uncomfortable test. Ask three business unit leaders you work with regularly to describe, honestly, what it is like to work with your team. Do not ask whether they are satisfied — satisfaction questions invite politeness. Ask them to describe the experience. What happens when they submit a request? How long does it take? Do they know what is happening during that time? Would they describe your team as a partner or a checkpoint?
The answers may be difficult to hear. But they will tell you something that no internal metric currently captures: whether the system you are operating inside is translating your team’s effort into the reputation it deserves, or converting it into the opposite.
Chime In. Be Heard.
Have you experienced a perception gap between how your team sees its performance and how the business experiences it? What operational changes have made the biggest difference in rebuilding trust? Share your insights. The Legal Ops community advances when practitioners share what works — and what doesn’t. If you’ve found ways to increase visibility, improve intake, or reduce friction, let the community know. Your perspective could help another team close its own reputation gap and elevate the practice across our field.
This post draws on data from the Onit/Provoke Insights Enterprise Legal Reputation Report (2023, 4,000 enterprise employees and 500 legal professionals across the U.S., U.K., France, and Germany). The survey was commissioned by Onit, a legal technology vendor, and administered independently by Provoke Insights; commercial interest is noted. For the full structural analysis of how reputation damage functions as one stage of a reinforcing cycle, see The Quiet Crisis: Why Your Legal Team Is Struggling and What the Evidence Says You Can Do About It, the first paper in the mot-r Foundation Series.
mot-r is the next-generation ELM platform for modern Legal Ops teams. Unlike traditional ELMs, CLM tools, or disconnected point solutions, mot-r provides a low-risk way to resolve the structural causes of legal overload—not just track matters after the fact. By bringing structure to legal intake and visibility to execution, mot-r helps legal teams improve service quality, regain capacity, and reduce burnout. The result is better decisions, higher-value legal service, and an operating model teams can sustain as demand grows.
