October 2021- Consero Legal Ops Forum

September 26-28

Consero Legal Ops Conference – Dallas, TX

Panel Discussion on Maximizing the Value of Your Internal Legal Team

Law Departments are faced with increasing demand for legal support with the same staff or in some cases less staff.  Doing more with less has become a resounding theme. At the same time, Law Departments want their highest value resources doing the highest value work and provide strategic counseling to the company’s businesses.  Our panel (hosted by Andy Banquer from QuisLex and including Jamie from BT Americas and Diane Tanner from Celanese) looked at what Departments are doing to address this issue.  

• Many Departments, such as Celanese, are analyzing how their internal resources spend their time

• Findings show that a significant portion of work: (1) could be handled more effectively by tools or lower cost resources; (2) is duplicative; (3) is out of scope, typically done to help out another corporate function; or (4) shouldn’t be done at all.

• Many Departments, such as BT, are outsourcing high volume, lower risk work to LPOs.

• Many Departments are beginning to use automation and AI tools to reduce preliminary efforts and create no touch or low touch support models for certain work.

• Most attorneys are glad to move work away; some have trouble relinquishing control.

• There is also more emphasis on data (both internally collected and globally available) to measure performance, set fee structures based on expected outcomes or measured results, and augment contract negotiations.
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• The predominant takeaway is that there are more and more tools, technologies, resources, and strategies to handle a large portion of a Department’s demand for services.  Deploying these resources and strategies – basically “doing less with more” - can enable internal counsel to focus on higher value work.