Let’s say you’re a general counsel leading a resource constrained legal department. You’re entering planning season, and you anticipate even more work coming your way in the next year. You go into budgeting meetings armed with plenty of examples of your overworked team. But at the end of it all, you find out your department won’t be getting any additional resources.
This may be a familiar scenario for many company executives, and it hits home for anyone leading a legal team. There’s a widespread perception in the business world that legal is a cost center, which makes it incredibly difficult to acquire more resources and headcount.
But general counsel can actively look to get more resources. Over the past year, I’ve spoken to countless legal department leaders at a wide range of companies. A few common themes emerged.
Align your resource requests with your company’s top priorities. Is your legal department working on matters that are most important to the business? Legal plays a critical part in highly regulated companies.
For most other companies, revenue or profit growth is likely a top priority. At these types of companies, legal departments struggle to gain resources because they are viewed as cost centers that slow everyone else down.
It’s so important for general counsel to understand what’s valuable to your CEO and department heads. It will be much easier to gain resources if you can align your team’s work to revenue or profit growth,
For example, if you want more budget for contracting technology, don’t just talk about how it’ll reduce legal risk. Instead, frame your request in terms of its impact on faster deal cycles or more accurate sales forecasts.
This raises a question: How exactly do you measure the business impact of the legal team? By measuring the right actions and by collecting data—that’s how.
Leverage data to measure the legal department’s true impact. It’s critical to measure your team’s impact on the rest of the business. Avoid focusing on raw activity metrics in favor of outcome-based metrics that are aligned with company objectives.
Many in-house lawyers struggle with this because they come from law firms where the key metric is how many hours you billed. In the business world, it’s better to demonstrate how your work helps a business achieve its objectives.
Once you start collecting data, you must find a way to translate those metrics to a broader story for finance. The goal should be to show that you know how to move the needle for the business without using significant resources. If you’re absorbing extra work this year with the same budget you had last year, for example, tell that story.
Experienced general counsel know how to do more with less—and perhaps even more important, how to show their stakeholders how much they’re doing with limited budget. That makes them more credible, which helps them create a compelling case for more resources.
Keep stakeholders in the loop and set realistic expectations. Make sure to continuously communicate with your internal clients. Use service level agreements, deal thresholds, or playbooks to set the right expectations for processes and response times.
This is especially important when reviewing contracts for the sales team. Without setting expectations, the business may attribute delays to poor execution instead of understaffing.
If the business has the right expectations for response times, it will know how to manage their timelines with potential customers and counterparties. That enables it to set appropriate expectations with their key stakeholders. By continuing to have a two-way dialogue, your internal clients will know what to prioritize and predict when there may be delays in turnaround times for your team.
Legal innovation can help you absorb excess work. You don’t always have to hire a new full-time employee or use a large outside law firm. Both options make sense for some types of work but can be expensive or involve a lot of red tape.
The savviest general counsel find innovative ways to do more with less. For example, many have found ways to leverage software to streamline repetitive work. Generative AI is powerful and can be applied to all kinds of legal work.
For example, it can help with a wide range of contracting work, including template generation, contract redlining, or extracting key information from old agreements. Generative AI can also be used to summarize information and help legal teams draft bullet points, summaries, and memos.
Legal innovation includes more than just technology. Alternative legal services providers can also provide affordable, flexible options to absorb work when your team is overwhelmed. Many legal departments even augment their teams with an on-demand commercial contracts attorney during the quarter-end rush.
General counsel can position themselves in many ways to gain resources. Always making sure legal is aligned with company priorities is a common theme behind these suggestions, as is finding a way to creatively do more work with limited resources. That way, you can best position yourself for budget conversations during planning season.
This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.
Author Information
Alex Su is chief revenue officer at Latitude Legal and a member of the executive leadership team.
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