In-house legal departments have consistently been asked to do more with less, and 2023 will be no exception. This places an even greater emphasis on ensuring the right people are focused on the right projects.
With 59% of corporate legal departments shifting work in-house and more than half grappling with how to disseminate the work, corporate legal needs to find ways to cost-effectively shift lower value work off their plates in order to focus on higher complexity issues and demands.
In this year’s Association of Corporate Counsel State of Corporate Litigation survey, we also learned:
- 29% of in-house legal teams are working most closely with the CFO office over the CEO, COO, and Chief Compliance Officer
- 25% of legal matters cost over $200,000
- Litigation matters last 1-2 years on average
- 48% of respondents pay more than $400/hour for outside counsel
Legal teams are continuously under scrutiny to control costs, while mitigating risk. The question is, how can this be done when legal matters are not decreasing or becoming less expensive?
One answer is to identify lower complexity work that is a drain of your team’s valuable time or too costly for outside counsel r and shift it to a more cost-effective approach.
You can’t get a bigger plate, so here are some examples of where you can start to make room:
- Cleaning up of backlogs.
Do you have piles of complaints, contracts, or other documents that need data extracted? Don’t pay hundreds of dollars an hour for this work. Instead, work with an Alternative Legal Solutions Provider (ALSP) such as Integreon. We can manage that work and complete it in a timely fashion for much less. - Subpoena response.
52% of legal departments rarely or never use workflows or technology to manage third party subpoena response. Integreon has successfully partnered with insurance companies, technology companies, and e-commerce companies to build a process to respond to third party and law enforcement subpoenas for a fraction of the cost of your internal resources. We can even help recover fees where applicable. - Document review.
If your legal department is paying for outside counsel or technology providers to review documents for investigations or litigations, moving that work to an ALSP is an area where corporate legal departments can see immediate savings. At Integreon, we build a process specific to your matters with a dedicated team who not only reviews the documents, but consults on what they are seeing, what they are NOT seeing, and provides technology suggestions to increase efficiency. - Witness preparation.
Searching and tagging documents that have already been reviewed is a big expense. Integreon has built workflows to identify documents for deposition and witness binder preparation. Working closely with outside counsel, our team is able to do the heavy lifting of organizing the larger data set into targeted populations.
By partnering smartly with your outside counsel and a trusted ALSP, you can stretch your legal spend much further.
Please contact Integreon today to discuss a solution that fits your legal department.
