Leading Law Departments: Meeting the MUCH More for Less Challenge

In this piece from Wolters Kluwer's ELM Solutions, Nathan Cemenska, director of legal ops and industry insights, highlights some eye-opening research from WK's LegalVIEW Insights, the biggest body of legal performance data in the world: spending by large corporate law departments on outside counsel has been flat from 2015 to 2020. That's right. Flat -- for more than 5 years!

"This is great news," Cemenska comments, "because it suggests that legal operations not only can succeed in its primary stated goal of controlling legal costs but has already demonstrated substantial success."

Talk about a silver lining. But there's a rub (or a cloud). Here's how Cemenska puts it: by showing that cost control is possible, legal ops teams have raised the bar for themselves by creating an expectation of more of the same in the future. "That expectation comes at a difficult time when ever-increasing legal needs are further intensifying what industry observer Richard Susskind famously called the 'more for less' challenge," Cemenska writes. "Indeed, 2021 data from EY indicates CLDs expect workloads to grow by 25 percent over the next three years, despite the fact that 76 percent say their work volumes are already challenging. Seventy-five percent of CLDs further indicated they do not expect budget increases to cover the additional workload."

Talk about a rock and a hard place. But there is a solution, Cemenska says in his piece entitled "Why CLDs need to become more discerning purchasers of legal tech and where to start." And he delivers some ideas on how a "more thoughtful, surgical" approach can work, including: creation of a technology advisory board now whether you have plans for new tech purchases or not. "Don't wait for the platform to start burning," he says. In addition, "subtract the unimportant. You will not have the time and resources to fix every area of maturity all at once." And remember: "You are not buying software—you are buying a relationship with the company behind it."

"The world has changed a lot in the last two years, and nobody is blaming CLDs for not having their technology act together as much as they theoretically could," Cemenska says. "However, the pandemic put the writing on the wall that technology isn’t just the way forward but potentially the only way forward, and the performance of CLDs that ignore that message will certainly be noted. Judged just as harshly will be CLDs who, rather than taking advantage of technology, allow technology to take advantage of them, creating a tangled web of solutions that do not go together and that nobody uses. But with patience and careful study, both of those outcomes can be avoided."

Check out "Why CLDs need to become more discerning purchasers of legal tech and where to start" .