The growth of in-house legal departments has been a consistent trend in recent years, and legal technology plays a key role in driving this growth.
The legal ecosystem keeps evolving, and law departments must efficiently tackle new challenges, as well as new business priorities and opportunities.
According to a recent study conducted by EY, General counsels should now primarily focus on 3 key areas:
- Enhancing transparency and mitigating risks
- Digitising processes
- Enabling the business
Optimising processes and focusing on key risks is therefore crucial for law departments to maximise not only growth opportunities for the business, but also to effectively manage increasing workloads and ensure efficient use of available resources.
However, the rising complexity and risks associated with legal matters, and restraints on the budget are growing concerns among legal professionals, that need to proactively be addressed by adopting new strategic approaches.
So, which structure and processes should a forward-thinking legal department opt for to work effectively in this new scenario?
The best strategic approach should start from rethinking your current strategy to adopt innovative solutions for reassessing your operating model, processes, technologies, and staffing models.
Also, you should weigh pros and cons of different strategies to find the most effective one which would better fit the needs of your legal team and business.
Among these considerations, decisions on outsourcing or insourcing your legal matters and processes require a particular attention and analysis to strategically allocate resources and operate more efficiently.
In this article, we will briefly dive into the major factors you should consider when it comes to reassess your current strategy to better navigate changes, and thus decide whether to insource or outsource your legal work.
Outsourcing strategy: a cost-saving opportunity?
In the current scenario in which legal departments need to tackle limited internal resources and budget, it comes with no surprise that the primary focus is on cost-saving strategies.
Thus, re-evaluating sourcing strategies is an essential consideration when it comes to cost-saving opportunities.
As the cost of hiring outside counsel has significantly increased over the last few years, reducing outside counsel spending is often considered as a crucial step to start with, that is leading legal departments to internalise most of their legal activities.
In fact, in recent years, also in response to the increasing costs of law firms, corporate legal departments moved substantial amounts of work in-house and started focusing on building and strengthening their internal team, by recruiting more in-house lawyers and implementing talent retention strategies for example. Law firms must now compete on multiple fronts to prove their cost-effectiveness and technological prowess to optimise productivity.
In addition, the recent developments in legal technology and AI offer in-house lawyers greater opportunities now, more than ever before, to automatise and accelerate their work, enabling them to internalise most of the legal activities and manage rising workloads with limited resources.
With an all-in-one software solution, for instance, such as Legisway, you can benefit from a centralised and secure platform to increase efficiency and productivity within your legal department, while moving away from the most repetitive and tedious tasks and save time and costs.
