Process family
Legal operations: litigation intake, legal hold, disputes, DSARs and filings
Seven legal department templates: litigation intake, legal hold, dispute resolution, GDPR data subject requests, regulatory filings, compliance policy exceptions and trademark clearance, grouped by the matter that triggers each.
Legal operations is the non-contract work of an in-house legal team: opening and preserving a matter when a claim arrives, resolving disputes, answering data subject requests inside the statutory clock, meeting regulatory filing deadlines, granting time-bound exceptions to internal policy and clearing a trademark before it is used. The seven templates share a department, not an order, so this family groups them by the matter that starts each.
Three of the charts form a short chain when a claim arrives. Litigation intake preserves the original and its receipt evidence, puts a provisional deadline in the calendar for counsel to verify, screens for conflicts and urgency, routes budget and external-counsel selection, and opens the matter with an owner and a next action. Counsel's preservation instruction then runs through the legal hold process: an authorization gate, scoping of custodians and systems, notices and chased acknowledgements, technical preservation, periodic review and a documented release.
Dispute resolution carries the matter from an assessment of merits, exposure and deadlines through an authorized direct-resolution attempt or the formal route to implemented obligations, file closure and lessons learned. Matter budgeting beyond intake, e-discovery review and settlement approval have no charts of their own. The other four are request- and calendar-driven. The GDPR data subject request process is one route for every statutory right, access to objection: log it and start the one-month clock, verify identity, triage the right, search systems and processors, redact third-party data, extend where complex, respond and record the decisions.
The regulatory filing process runs from a trigger or due date through obligation analysis, evidence collection, certification and submission to a retained receipt and a reset obligations calendar. The compliance policy exception process handles a request to depart temporarily from a named policy clause: external duties and alternatives tested, compensating measures defined, authority routed, a time-bound approval registered and closed at expiry. Trademark clearance runs the screening, search and legal assessment that precede a filing decision; filing, prosecution and renewal of the mark are not yet drawn.
The usual failure across all seven is the same: a deadline that lives in one person's inbox. Each chart puts the clock in its first phase, before any analysis, and names who verifies it, whether counsel confirming a response period, the DSAR owner starting the one-month clock or the filing owner confirming the obligation. Contracts, the larger half of most legal teams' work, are sequenced under the contract lifecycle. A personal data breach is not a data subject request: it follows security incident response, which holds the data breach response and HIPAA notification charts.
Templates in this family
- Litigation intake process flowchart: receipt to matter opening — Litigation intake process template for preserving receipt details, provisional deadline visibility, fact collection, conflict screening, urgent assignment, budget routing and matter opening.
- Legal hold process flowchart: scope, notice, preserve and release — Legal hold process template for recording the trigger, counsel authorisation, custodian and source scoping, notice acknowledgements, preservation exceptions, reviews and release.
- Dispute resolution process flowchart (intake to closed obligations) — Dispute resolution process flowchart template: log notice terms, preserve records, assess deadlines and options, attempt direct resolution, follow the selected formal route, implement the outcome and close.
- GDPR data subject request flowchart (DSAR, receipt to closure) — GDPR data subject request process flowchart: log it and start the one-month clock, verify identity, triage the right, search systems and processors, redact third-party data, extend where complex, respond and record the decisions.
- Regulatory filing process flowchart (trigger to acknowledgement) — Regulatory filing process flowchart template: confirm the obligation and deadline, collect evidence, compile and certify the filing, submit it, handle corrections, archive receipts and reset the calendar.
- Compliance policy exception process flowchart (request to expiry) — Compliance policy exception process flowchart template: identify the clause, test external duties and alternatives, define compensating measures, route authority, register a time-bound approval and close at expiry.
- IP trademark clearance process flowchart (search to filing decision) — Trademark clearance process flowchart template: define the mark and intended use, screen obvious conflicts, search relevant sources, assess earlier rights, record risk and decide whether to file.