departments

How are law firms and in-house legal departments collaborating to deliver results?

“I think legal departments now are really focused on how do they narrow the funnel of work as much as possible to their own department, and that is through self-service or bots,” said Brenda Hansen, senior legal operations consultant at UpLevel Ops, an advisory firm for in-house legal departments. Through her lens, Hansen noted that legal departments are increasingly using technology to give their internal clients the best information they can before letting them go off on their own, and also outsourcing to alternative legal service providers.

Colin Miller, managing director at FTI Consulting added that teams are collecting and organizing data differently.

“The question has become ‘what do I do with this new form of data, and how do I transform it, and how do I enrich it in a way that allows me to do the things I used to do to make those legal decisions?’ so it has become more advisory in that regard,” said Miller. The change in data is forcing people to innovate very quickly, Miller added.

Collaboration is critical when it comes to cybersecurity so the team at Fasken have developed a collaborative privacy protection program for their clients.

“The Fasken Edge site helps

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Why Major Companies Are Outsourcing Legal Solutions

city-g491968b92_1920More legal departments are looking to outside talents to bolster their ranks and grow their business. Wolters Kluwer’s new survey of 100 legal executives shows that 93% of legal or compliance departments have outsourced work in the last three years.

And these are more than just smaller companies: The respondents came from entities making more than $500 million in revenue, with the increase most prevalent among institutions with $1 billion-$4 billion in annual revenue.

Why are even institution-sized firms pulling in external experts? And what duties are those hires performing?

Why Now? 

As the survey responses show, outsourcing legal solutions solves multiple problems for legal departments.

One: It eases workflow, allowing companies to redistribute workload to dedicated experts, thereby freeing their in-house counsel to manage and tackle larger, more complex aspects of their project.

Two: On-demand in-house counsel keep the budget down without sacrificing quality. As Wolters Kluwer found, GCs anticipate a 25% increase in workflow, but 88% anticipate needing to trim their budgets. On-demand solutions let them do both.

Third, hiring on-demand counsel for bespoke solutions allows companies to grow their business without burning out their staff. Plus, it lets legal departments test new methods that keep

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