A challenging economic climate is pushing legal operations chiefs to enforce more discipline on corporate legal departments, opening the door for conflicts with rank-and-file attorneys.
The dilemma that many leaders of legal operations face is the pressure to cut spending across legal functions as they anticipate higher costs for outside counsel and other mission-critical operations.
Legal operations chiefs are typically responsible for the modernization of a legal department’s workflow technology, including billing systems and policies that guide outside counsel spending.
Additional oversight mechanisms might cause friction with in-house lawyers who are accustomed to making their own decisions about work carried out by outside legal firms, analysts and companies say.
Brad Blickstein, a principal at consulting firm the Blickstein Group, suggests a wider mandate to keep costs in line – the result of economic circumstances – might give legal operations leaders new levers to advance efficiency initiatives, including the ways legal departments contract and source outside services.
“In-house counsel often push back, but will be less able to do so in tough economic times,” Blickstein told Legal Dive. “In terms of reducing costs from outside counsel, legal operations professionals have not been pulling the levers they have.”
A December 2022 survey of legal operations professionals by the Blickstein Group, in collaboration with Deloitte, found that 63% of legal...
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