Organizations around the world will be turning to their playbooks and refining their focus and the law department cannot be an outlier in this effort. What are you doing to make sure you are prepared? These are our top tips to help you get your law department “house in order” in anticipation of what may be a difficult 2023.
What to Expect in 2023 – Legal operations trends that will shape the year ahead
With a possible recession on the horizon, organizations around the world will be turning to their playbooks and refining their focus to be sure they come through the other side stronger than before. The law department cannot be an outlier in this effort, so what are you doing to make sure you are prepared? As you contemplate your strategic plan for 2023, these are our top tips to help you get your law department “house in order” in anticipation of what may be a difficult 2023.
Understanding Legal Spend
If you haven’t already, now is a good time to make sure you have a full picture of your legal spend and how that benchmarks against others of similar size/industry. The General Counsel Netherlands has great benchmarking resources available to help you. If you don’t have immediate access to your spend data, talk to your finance partners to see what reporting they can generate for you. You can also reach out to your external legal service providers and ask them to provide data (spend, work type, region) that will help to shape your current state spending patterns. You’ll want to know your spend (by strategic priority, geography, and business unit), how that tracks against budget, and your mix of internal vs. external – as a starting point.
Internal Resource Management
The law department plays a critical role in supporting the business through economic downturns and resources that were stretched before may be taxed even further. Making sure that your team is spending their time on the right work is key not only to driving efficiencies but maintaining employee engagement. If you don’t have easy access to work type/volume data, consider conducting a survey across the team. Basic questions should be answered like: “what is it” and “how much of your time (%) do you spend doing it?”
Once you have a sense of the type of work being done across the department, consider mapping this against a risk/volume matrix in order to identify any areas of work that might fall into the right left quadrant, which may – for example – be ripe for automation, managed legal services, or self-help tools and training.
Maximize External Resource Value
Many law departments are looking to their external counsel to understand not only what can be done to achieve greater value but where they can achieve greater cost savings from those relationships. For more tips on how to maximize value from your external providers, listen to our latest podcast on the topic.
Remove Any Barriers to Future Revenue Generation
While sales and revenue may decrease sharply in the moment, recessions are like seasons – they come and go. Take this time to focus deeply on optimizing the contracting function in anticipation of an inevitable surge in demand. This will position the law department for future success by avoiding delays or complications when demand increases that could frustrate the internal client, delay revenue generation and compromise stretched resources.
Wrap up
While you may be asked to trim your sails and reduce budgets, being creative around how you can still get the work done (the business still goes on!) will be critical. If you’re unsure where to start, we welcome a conversation to help you navigate these coming months successfully and identify the most compelling quick wins and greatest ROI projects to become a future-focused law department that emerges on the other side of 2023 stronger and more productive than ever before.
