Articles Posted in Scaling Resources to Skyrocketing Legal & Regulatory Demands

The Point

What’s wrong with the corporate law function? For the last 40 to 50 years C-suites and boards have taken a hands-off posture on managing Legal, leaving lawyers in-house to manage lawyers in outside firms. Most of these lawyers are pretty good at law, but they’re bad at cost control.

Lacking the will to exert cost control on their fellow attorneys in firms — and free of accountability to the C-suite or board to do otherwise — general counsels passively continue to pay for the waste inherent in the billable hour business model. And fees to law firms have increased every year for the last twenty, except for two years during the Great Recession.

Meanwhile, from 1997 to 2017, law departments went on a hiring spree of in-house talent as an “economy move” — with in-house attorneys on corporate payrolls increasing by 203%. Continue reading

The Point

1. In the last four decades, legal and regulatory demands on business have increased exponentially.

2. These demands trigger chronic, gaping shortfalls between what a company needs in order to achieve legal or regulatory compliance, on one hand, and the resources that Legal actually possesses, on the other.

3. Such severe gaps in capacity call for responses at-scale. And at-scale impact won’t happen without disciplined systems and processes by which colleagues in Legal work together to accomplish what no single one of them could do on their own.

4. But most lawyers cherish their autonomy. So most avoid systems and processes they view as cramping their individual style. Continue reading