How a Big Company Launched a Legal Ops Team That Won Over Skeptics

For in-house legal and external affairs teams, proving value is just as important as delivering it—especially in large organizations where competition for resources is fierce.

That’s a lesson that the external affairs operations team at Australia-based mining giant BHP has learned firsthand. Speaking in a Corporate Legal Operations Consortium webinar this week, Gabrielle Ahern, principal of external affairs operations, and Lauren Ziegelaar, manager of legal operations, discussed how the company’s legal ops team evolved into a broader function supporting more than 500 employees across external affairs—and how they’ve had to work just as hard at articulating their value as they have at creating it.