Alexandra Svensson

If you’ve worked in-house, you’ve probably been told at some point to “do more with less.” Initially a response to the Great Recession, business scrutiny over legal budgets persists: according to a recent survey of general counsels performed by EY and Harvard Law, GCs expect 25% greater workloads in the next three years while 88% of them plan simultaneous budget cuts. At the same time, research also shows that legal productivity is stagnating. Eighty-one percent of GCs surveyed by Gartner reported legal cost as a percent of company revenue increased or stayed the same during the past two years. These trends obviously put practitioners in a tough spot: how do you deliver on your value proposition while workloads are increasing, resources are constrained, and productivity is stagnating?