In-House Legal Teams

Transferring this work to outsourced legal talent doubles the benefits: not only does it allow your legal department to do this work more cost-effectively. It also frees up your higher-paying legal talents to tackle work that is more productive and valuable to the organization. If your company already has an offshore office, developing legal talent could allow your team to offer more „real-time“ advice to employees in global offices and cover more time zones to support the business. In 1989, American jurist Robert Eli Rosen published an article on the dramatic growth in the size, prestige and influence of in-house counsel in large American corporations. In less than 20 years, Rosen argued, in-house counsel have gone from a marginal and servile position — think „in-house consultant“ as well as „pet“ — to „general counsel,“ a central role in defining and meeting the legal needs of their powerful corporate clients. „He is more focused on becoming a trusted strategic business advisor, especially as the companies they serve are under increasing pressure from disruptive forces. The GC needs to gain the trust of the CEO and board while finding a way to influence the legal and business situation more strategically,“ Heinrich said. Ironically, it seems, from my extensive experience with the GCs since 2008, that the financial crisis has not significantly changed this fundamental truth – at least not yet. Although companies have tried to control external lawyers` fees even more closely since the FSB, this has not led them to terminate their relationships more often than before the crisis. On the contrary, companies are placing even greater emphasis on a „partnership“ model with their major external suppliers, in which these increasingly sophisticated and price-sensitive consumers concentrate the majority of their legal costs on a relatively small number of „preferred suppliers“ in exchange for discounts and other forms of investment by the law firm – discounts and investments that companies are even more willing to grant only before 2008. to keep the job. Whether the growing number of advisors and other potential „disruptors“ trying to convince companies that they can further reduce their legal fees by sending work to suppliers other than law firms will change these trends is a key question we will explore in CPP2. This trend is in contrast to what is observed in other professions, where women make up a significant percentage of the workforce, particularly in managerial positions.

As sociologists have long documented, when a profession is „feminized“ – which simply means that the majority of workers are women – the job tends to lose its status and other corresponding rewards such as pay. Primary school teachers and nurses – and many would even say now – are relatively recent examples. But as in-house legal departments have become more feminized, they have gained status both within the company and in the legal profession as a whole, and financial rewards have also increased. Moreover, GCs – especially in large multinational companies – not only intervene in specific controversies, but often decide important political issues themselves. For many important policy issues facing global companies – for example, the issue of third-party child labour standards in countries such as India and China – relevant legal standards are likely to be ill-defined, under-inclusive or overly inclusive, or contradictory. In such cases, it is often up to the GoC to develop, within these broad limits, a policy that is compatible with both the economic interests and the values of the company. Beyond this strategic importance, in Bloomberg Law`s 2021 Legal Operations Survey, lawyers most often cited the ability to improve attorneys` efficiency, reduce costs, and improve workflows as key considerations when deciding which legal practices to implement. The ability to facilitate implementation, reduce human error, and improve the health and well-being of lawyers was also identified as a priority consideration. In-house legal departments should also reduce unnecessary costs by implementing alternative fee regimes (AFAs). According to Bloomberg Law`s 2021 Legal Operations Survey, in-house legal respondents said that on average, 21% of their legal work is done under an AFA and that cost savings, cost/revenue certainty, and overall efficiency were the main drivers of AFA use.

New Zealand: The upheaval is far from over. For many in-house legal teams across New Zealand, business remains far from normal. We explore the challenges, some strategies for dealing with them, and our New Dynamic toolkit here. Legal services in 2020 must be more demanding than ever, with better control of legal expenses while providing strategic advice in an increasingly complex, global and ever-changing regulatory environment. Whether or not one believes that these efforts explain all professionalism, there is little doubt that such a „professionalism project“ was at the heart of the corporate law movement in the United States. At the heart of this project is the assertion that in-house lawyers are just as capable, and arguably more capable, of exercising independent professional judgment than lawyers working in outside law firms. As with other emerging professions, including the Bar Association itself, whose professionalism project included the founding of the American Bar Association in 1871, one of the first things the GCs did in the United States to increase their status and visibility was the creation of the American Corporate Counsel Association (ACCA), an organization that was very successful in elevating the status of in-house lawyer.