I have long predicted that legal work will slowly but surely be sucked in-house (where efficiency is rewarded), leaving less work for outside counsel (where efficiency is the enemy of the billable hour). The recent rise of Legal Operations is a major factor in making this happen, and Gartner has provided some data to back it up.
Two things stand out in Gartner’s 2019 survey of legal departments.
First, in-house legal teams without dedicated Legal Ops staff typically spend 30% more than those with a Legal Ops capability. This is a meaningful number, and it makes sense. Legal Ops will be looking at efficiency, value and ROI. Without them, you’re probably wasting some of your legal spend. 30% of wasteful spend, it turns out.
Second, in-house teams can shift over 60% of their legal work to a self-service model, offering dramatic productivity improvements to those who invest in automation. This also makes sense. Guided requests, automated drafting, virtual legal advisers and other self-service tools are no longer cutting-edge technologies. At risk of sounding old, I personally built my first automated contract template more than 20 years ago. With legal ops staff to steer these technologies to successful adoption, the conditions are finally in place for automation to take off.
Speaking of self-service, Gartner has also predicted that by 2023, “lawbots” will handle 25% of all internal legal requests. This also makes sense. Self-service has a number of powerful selling points. You don’t need to wait. You don’t need to talk to anyone. And robots are cheaper than people.
Kassandra, Esq. 