Built by people who do the work.
Operate Legal is a practical resource for small law firms — playbooks, decisions, templates, benchmarks, and tools for the people running them.
A practical library,
not a blog.
This site exists for the people running small law firms — practice managers, COOs, managing partners — and the work they actually do: tightening intake, making matter flow visible, reducing billing leakage, planning capacity, picking software that earns its seat cost.
Everything here is tested against real firms. If we haven't seen it work, we don't publish it. If we aren't sure, we say so. You'll find opinions — that's deliberate. Most “it depends” advice isn't worth the words.
There's no paywall on the library. A few templates and tool exports sit behind a free account so we can email you the file and stay in touch about new work.
Operators, writing
for operators.
Operate Legal is written by a small team that works directly with small law firms on their systems, workflows, and legal technology. Between us we've managed firms, built practice-management systems, sat in on a lot of intake calls, and watched many more billing-leakage conversations than anyone should.
Everything here comes from that work — not from consulting decks, vendor sponsorships, or content-marketing playbooks. If we haven't seen a pattern work at least a few times, it doesn't go on the site.
The honest
commercial bit.
Operate Legal is free. The same team also runs two things that aren't:
Techsperience — legal-tech support
A small implementation and support team that helps firms put practice-management, intake, billing, and document systems into real use. Hands-on, scoped in weeks not months. techsperience.co.uk
Clearmatter — matter management
A lightweight matter-management product for small firms that have outgrown spreadsheets but don't want to buy a heavy practice system. Separate site, separate pricing. clearmatter.co.uk
We'll mention Techsperience and Clearmatter where they’re relevant — in a footer line, on contextual callouts at the bottom of tool pages, and here. The point of this site is the library; the rest is secondary.
A short set of
house rules.
- Specific, not generic. Real numbers, real matter types, real firm sizes. Abstraction is the enemy.
- Opinionated, not neutral. If we think something works, we say so. If we think it doesn't, we say that too.
- Operator-shaped, not consultant-shaped. Every piece is written for someone with a calendar full of real matters and not enough time.
- Free, ad-free, written in-house. No courses, no sponsored content from other vendors. Templates sit behind a free account so we can email you the file and the occasional update on new work.
- No legal advice. We're writing about operations, not law. Anything that touches substantive legal work stays out of scope.
Questions, contributions,
corrections.
Run a small firm and have an operational war story worth writing up? Think we got something wrong? Email is best.