Improving the Impact of Corporate Legal Departments: 2019 State of the Corporate Legal Dept. Report
It’s time for corporate legal departments to focus on the value they provide to their organizations, not just cost savings. That’s among the findings of the “State of the Corporate Legal Department 2019,” published by Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, the International Bar Association (IBA), the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium (CLOC), and Acritas.
As corporate legal issues become more wide-ranging and complex, such as data privacy and regulatory compliance, teams of lawyers are no longer enough to solve problems optimally. They require new approaches such as more effective project management and greater collaboration between in-house teams, outside counsel and alternative legal service providers.
The report also identifies specific levers that corporate legal departments can use to deliver greater performance and value to the organization while maintaining cost efficiency. Creating high-performance teams with diverse skillsets, greater demographic diversity, and embracing innovation are among the areas cited by the report as improving performance metrics.
The legal departments that will be most successful in the coming decade, the report concludes, will be those that relentlessly focus on four key areas: modern teams, modern systems, modern support, and modern metrics.
