How In-House Legal Teams can Reduce Legal Spending

In-house legal teams are being asked to do more with less. This means working faster and cutting costs.

We talk a lot about time savings, and today I want to address the topic of reducing legal spend.

There’s internal legal, which includes the salaries of in-house teams and their tools, and there’s external legal spending.

No matter the size of your organization, your costs for hiring external law firms can be significant. The challenge facing a lot of businesses is that new legislation and regulations require companies to invest heavily in legal work in order to remain compliant.

The number of new laws is growing significantly, and legal expenses grow in lock-step with these changes. It’s hard to do more with less in that environment.

Take on more work “in-house”

So how do you control legal spend even as your legal needs continue to grow? One way is to bring more of your legal work in-house.

This might seem more costly at first, especially when considering the costs to hire and train a team member. If your team is consistently paying for costly outside counsel to conduct repetitive legal work, it can be more cost-efficient over the long term to hire the expertise you need to handle it internally.

First, you have to have a clear picture of the repetitive work you’re outsourcing regularly.

Identify the redundant work

Another way is to closely monitor your external legal work to ensure you’re not paying for duplicate effort. When you receive an agreement, opinion or memo from outside counsel, it is woefully inefficient if that work is not stored so that it can be accessed again to avoid you having to go back to the well to pay for it again.

In many cases, legal teams can't find the work they’ve commissioned in the past because they have so many documents and no clear way of storing it for easy access when the need arises again.

With the high cost of outside counsel, this redundant effort and cost can be very significant.

Internal legal teams can eliminate a lot of that expense by mapping all the legal work, analyzing everything, and asking themselves how they can do it better.

Delegate non-legal work to non-legal service providers or team

Sometimes, the answer involves having other low-cost service providers handle the work, leveraging the existing stored knowledge. For this to work properly, the company must have clear storage of its templates, clauses, and agreements.

The problem is that mapping all of that work requires a non-trivial amount of effort for in-house teams, which are already under-sourced and overworked.

Change is hard, and it's a complex process. At Recital, we want to help simplify that process by making it easier to do “on the fly.” Instead of requiring that legal teams undertake massive implementation and mapping projects outside of their legal work, we want to make it part of their existing workflow.

Workflow improvements and leveraging stored knowledge

When in-house legal teams encounter valuable knowledge, like clauses that have been developed internally or externally, storing them for easy access in the future should be easy.

Costs can spiral unnecessarily when high-value work goes down a black hole, only to be duplicated when the need arises again.

One solution is to have a legal playbook for the company, but that asset can take time and expense to develop. An even simpler solution is for IHC to have personal clause libraries, where they can easily keep a record of their useful clauses, whether they were developed by themselves or outsourced.

Making this process simple and keeping it within an IHC’s existing workflows is one of our goals at Recital. Much of this is already possible using our Recital for Word tool, which offers up clause suggestions that leverage existing stored knowledge.

Want to try Recital for Word? Install it for free today.