Whether a law degree is necessary or even helpful for legal operations roles has been the topic of a lively debate on LinkedIn. As Corporate Counsel reported earlier this week, Akshay Verma, a former director of legal ops at Meta and current chief operating officer at SpotDraft, posted a comment about a trend in which employers hiring for legal ops positions require or prefer candidates with JDs.
Verma, who is himself an attorney, sees this as “a huge miss.” “By insisting on a JD, companies are losing out on fantastic candidates who possess the real skills and experiences needed for legal ops,” he wrote. As suggested by the nearly 300 likes and 100 comments on his post, many seem to agree.
In Above the Law’s most recent demographic study of 185 legal operations professionals, conducted in 2022, we found that just 20% of legal ops professionals had a law degree. However, the percentage goes up substantially for individuals in leadership positions: 62% of vice presidents and 47% of heads of legal operations had JDs.
A correlation between law degree and level of seniority was also noted by Kevin Cohn, the chief customer officer at Brightflag, who commented on Verma’s post. He said his own analysis of legal ops job postings several months earlier showed that “a JD was required anywhere from 3% to 15% of the time,” with 15% of director- and VP-level positions requiring a JD.
