Fewer than 30% of companies made their law firms set a budget for tasks assigned to them.

Let alone manage their actual performance to such a budget. 2023 Thompson Hine survey (p. 10 of 16).

What other corporate function or business unit gets away with not having budgets for what it spends?

Corporate Legal can’t claim to “manage” what it doesn’t have budgets for. And payments to outside counsel take up 50% to 60% of its spending.

Most in corporate Legal are competent at the intricacies of the rules, at drafting contracts, and at knowing how judges and regulators think.

But they don’t know how, and are uninterested in, basic management disciplines that apply to everyone else in the business.

P&L-experienced executives in the C-suite need to demand of corporate Legal the same management disciplines they require of everyone else.

The Point

Tis the season to discuss next year’s law firm rate increases.

In the American Lawyer’s entry on this topic two days ago, legal industry experts cited a multitude of factors that could drive 2024’s pricing.

Except one: Clients’ purchasing power. And clients’ willingness to use their purchasing power.

And the fear that constrains almost all general counsel and chief legal officers from robustly leveraging that purchasing power in rate discussions with outside counsel.

This Matters to Your Business

What’s driving these constant hourly rate increases?

• Elements of law firm cost structure: Law firm consultant Kristin Stark as cited in the American Lawyer:”Stark and others say rate increases will be on the higher end because of still-rising costs for things like talent, insurance and some aspects of overhead.”
• Inflation-as-a-pretext: American Lawyer:”Despite the rate of inflation cooling significantly this year, firms are expected to at least keep their foot on the pedal heading into next year.”
• Simply demand-all-that-the-customer-will-bear: Law firm consultant Mark Medice:”I’ve spoken with a number of firms this year that grew rates, but they were more cautious and they’re regretting it …. There’s a lot of people trying to play a little bit of catch-up, and they’ll run out of opportunity runway if there’s a recession.”
• The mere passage of time: Legal operations consultant Mitch Kowalski: “Another year, another increase ….” Gartner analyst and lawyer Ron Friedmann:“IME, increasing #BigLaw rates is an evergreen headline”.

Because …

Most of the legal profession — including the general counsel and chief legal officers who speak for executive management — support the billable hour business model. And they treat it as simply beyond discussion. That’s because the corporate C-Suite and owners of small-and-medium size businesses overwhelmingly allow them to treat it that way.

So articles about law firm rate increases have the same tone as reports about OPEC’s price-setting. Because its oil-producing members collectively control a large percentage of supply, its members can, to a substantial degree, simply charge what they want for what purchasers need.

Spiraling hourly rate increases from law firms need not be a “given”. Clients’ purchasing power is a reality. Executive management needs to weigh in here, and use their purchasing power aggressively when bargaining with law firms over price.  

The Point

A judge’s ruling last week* illustrates which of the above two alternatives is better for the client company.

The court, after reviewing a law firm’s bill in a bankruptcy case, found that AmLaw 100 firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP** had overcharged its debtor client by about $1 million. On a $6.3 million bill†.

Lessons for a client company engaging a law firm:

1. Define the task and sub-tasks before work begins, to maximize the likelihood that the lawyers will understand exactly what you want — and that you will be able to make them accountable for following your wishes.

2. Identify by name or by experience-level which attorney will do what part of the task, to assure promised quality of representation, and to avoid paying partners and other senior attorneys for simple tasks.

3. Make your legal costs predictable by agreeing on the total fee in advance rather than agreeing to pay by the hour (perhaps with a bonus formula based on results).

This Matters to Your Business

From the court’s findings:

1. Define the task and sub-tasks before work begins.

“‘Activity descriptions shall not be ‘lumped’ — each activity shall have a separate description and time allotment’ … A reviewer cannot determine the reasonableness of a task shown in an invoice when it is aggregated with other tasks, as the time spent on a task is of paramount consideration in determining reasonableness ….

“It is not the Court’s job to piece together entries and try to make sense of them. Each entry must be capable of evaluation on its own ….”

“For example, entries that describe the task simply as ‘attention to diligence,’ include no additional information in surrounding entries to indicate what this task might entail.”

2.  Identify by name or experience-level which attorney will do what part of the task. 

“It is clear from the invoices that there was little effort by Pillsbury to staff the case efficiently or ensure that work was delegated appropriately. Each task often had an excessive number of attorneys involved, particularly senior-level attorneys.

“Instead of breaking up the work by topic or into teams with one or two people overseeing everything, Pillsbury often had a large group of people with their hands in everything … Many tasks have far more attorneys involved than is typically necessary.

“The invoices are also replete with instances of very senior attorneys (partners with more than 20 years’ experience) performing tasks that would be more appropriately assigned to first year associates … Pillsbury’s senior attorneys routinely performed tasks far below their paygrade ….”

3. Make your legal costs predictable by agreeing on the total fee in advance.

The charges at issue here were straight hourly billing.

Because …

The status quo? Corporate legal spending is out of control:

1. Average legal spending among companies rose 29% year-over-year. June, 2023 Association of Corporate Counsel Benchmarking Report.
2. Fewer than 30% of companies make their law firms set a budget for tasks assigned to them (let alone manage to that budget afterward). 2023 Thompson Hine survey.
3. Last year a mere 12.4% of matters assigned to law firms used alternative fee arrangements (fixed fees with a success premium), which are the chief antidote to soaring hourly bills. LexisNexis CounselLink® 2023 Trends Report.  

Micromanaging later on doesn’t work.

No outside counsel guidelines, however cleverly worded, or after-the-fact billing audits, however relentlessly pursued, or complaints from the client company, made once the bill comes — can overcome the billable hour business model’s structural impediments and disincentives to truly fiduciary client service.

* In Re: SC SJ Holdings LLC, et al, U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, filed July 11, 2023. No opinion posted on internet at time of this article’s publication. Official federal source available at time of publication at https: //pacer.uscourts.gov. Also available at time of publication: Pillsbury’s Fees Docked by Bankruptcy Judge for “Over-Lawyering”, Bloomberg Law, July 12, 2023 (subscription required); Pillsbury’s Fee Slashed for “Over-Lawyering”, Law 360, July 12, 2023 (subscription required).

** Rated number 65 among the 100 highest grossing law firms in the United States.

† In a Chapter 11 reorganization, the debtor’s legal bills must be submitted to the court for review before payment, in order to assure their reasonableness, so as to distribute the bankruptcy estate fairly according to the law.

The Point

My viewpoint comes from firsthand experience.

As a lawyer who accepted a corporate client’s offer to run one of its divisions 10 years into my legal career, I was blind to basic management disciplines until I had to answer to the P&L as a general manager.

Before changing places at the client / lawyer table, I did not appreciate the contrast between the practical skills and commercial instincts it takes to run a successful business, on one hand, and the narrow technical perspective I had acquired from my Ivy League law school and top-rated Wall Street law firm, on the other.

Conventional wisdom has long dictated that general counsels, whose “management” experience consists mainly of handing assignments to other lawyers, should run Legal on their own. But their failure to control spending, their reliance on legal fire-fighting instead of systematic prevention, and their sluggish efforts at efficiency innovations, all call for a proven executive — not an attorney —  to run this vital business function.

This Matters to Your Business

Legal’s status quo in 2023:

1. Spending by corporate Legal is simply out of control.

Average legal spending among companies rose 29% year-over-year. June, 2023 Association of Corporate Counsel Benchmarking Report.

Fewer than 30% of companies made their law firms set a budget for tasks assigned to them (let alone manage to that budget afterward). 2023 Thompson Hine survey.

Last year a mere 12.4% of matters assigned to law firms used alternative fee arrangements (fixed fees with a success premium), which are the chief antidote to soaring hourly bills. LexisNexis CounselLink® 2023 Trends Report.  

2. Corporate Legal lacks systems to avoid litigation and regulatory enforcement actions before they materialize. 

When I moved from practicing law to the other side of the client / lawyer table, I found that lawsuits and rule violation proceedings didn’t just happen. They arose from an operational failure somewhere in the company.

Lawyers ought to anticipate such failures by precautionary protocols, but they don’t. Here are a couple of approaches from other professions and industries:

After Action Assessments

When used in Legal this would examine lawsuits against the company, regulatory prosecutions, or other past mishaps for lessons about future prevention. “Strategies for Learning from Failure“, Harvard Business Review, Professor Amy Edmondson.

Early Warning Protocols

For instance, a general counsel would provide the CEO of a financial firm with talking points for the sales staff about a new SEC rule. Rationale: CEO involvement signals management’s seriousness about compliance, and periodic reporting mandated from the sales staff would enable Legal to look for red flags rather than wait for a fait accompli in the form of administrative action against the company.

3. Legal’s efforts at efficiency innovations are sluggish at best.

Both law firms and corporate law departments stonewall technology adoption and process improvement that could save money, save time, and increase the accuracy of their work product.

As an example, alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) offer law firms and corporate law departments the latest legal technology and most sophisticated workflow processes.

Renowned law practice expert Bruce MacEwan: “Our data shows 3, 4, 5, as much as 7 times” greater cost efficiency using an ALSP as compared to using a law firm, with equal or greater work product quality. Despite ALSPs’ cost efficiency, Mr. MacEwan was surprised at a disconnect in their data.

94.7% of general counsels opined that ALSPs were the most effective tactic available to them, yet only 8.8% said they were actually using ALSPs.

Because …

With the legal system’s persistently increasing demands upon business enterprise, this corporate function’s status quo in 2023 is unacceptable.

Of course, only qualified, licensed lawyers, whether in law firms or in-house, should be allowed to handle corporate tasks that call for an understanding of the law or of its institutions. This is as true today as it was a century ago.

But a proven executive — not an attorney — should have final say in managing legal risk. Because corporate Legal is a business function. And that function is not exempt from the requirements of cost efficiency and management discipline to which all other functions and business units are accountable.

From time to time in the coming weeks I will offer some thoughts on how this can work.

The Point

When should your business pay the exorbitant prices of a major law firm?

When you need the full attention of the best attorney available for the task presented.

But something else is happening.

The data say that in 2022 corporate clients were paying proportionately more for the total hours of junior lawyers, and getting less attention from their most proficient, experienced colleagues.

How did that happen? The data indicate that law firms “mitigated individual attorney rate increases by adjusting staff mix.” What does that even mean? Apparently it means the appearance of cost control on law firm charges by making less use of higher capability (higher priced) partners, while making more use of lower capability (lower priced) associates.

This Matters to Your Business

The LexisNexis CounselLink® 2023 Trends Report: In-depth Perspective on Rising Outside Counsel Billing Rates on such “individual attorney rate increases”:

“The average partner rate increased 4.5% (compared to 3.4% in 2021 and 3.5% in 2020). Average rate increases were up compared to 2021 in all law firm tiers and practice areas.”

To reduce sticker shock of such price increases, the 2023 Trends Report proposes this gambit, and it appears that in-house counsel and their law firm clients implemented it in 2022:

“Corporate counsel can mitigate individual attorney rate increases by adjusting staffing mix. For example, even though the median M&A partner rate increased by 6.4% in 2022, the median M&A blended average rate was flat compared to the prior year.”

Translation: “the blended average rate” is the total amount billed on a matter divided by the total number of hours worked by all lawyers the law firm assigned to it. When partners’ rates rise (as they did for M&A partners in 2022), the firm can keep the total amount billed on a particular matter flat, or close to it, by reducing the proportion of partner hours relative to the proportion of associate hours (as they did for M&A matters in 2022).

Because …

That “median M&A blended average rate” renders opaque the actual connection between a dollar of legal spending and the capabilities of individual attorneys assigned to a task — once the law firm has “adjusted” their “staffing mix”.

The appearance of budget discipline comes at the cost of eroding the experience and proficiency strengths that are the whole point of hiring a major law firm in the first place.

The shell game behind these 2023 Trends Report numbers is an attempt to mask a likely sacrifice of quality in return for the illusion of savings. It’s up to CEOs, CFOs, and other P&L-experienced executives to reject such manipulation, and insist on tangible cost efficiencies instead.

The Point

From the tenth consecutive year of LexisNexis CounselLink® 2023 Trends Report: In-depth Perspective on Rising Outside Counsel Billing Rates:

1. Law firm lawyer and paralegal (“timekeeper”) rates increased in 2022 at the highest levels since CounselLink first produced the Trends Report, in 2013, with the average partner rate increasing 4.5% (relative to 3.4% last year and 3.5% the year before).

2. These record-high average rates of hourly rate increases were higher than in the previous year “in all tiers of law firms and in all practice areas“.

3. Keeping track of the proliferation of lawyers that outside counsel assign to a matter is a big challenge in managing outside counsel — the finding: “High numbers of billers are performing minimal work on matters.”

4. Alternative fee arrangements (AFAs / capped charges with related terms on success fees, etc.), if they were used, would be the chief antidote to the prevailing billable hour: but only an average of 12.4% of matters made use of AFAs last year. No growth from previous years.

This Matters to Your Business

Kristina Satkunas, Director of Analytic Consulting at LexisNexis CounselLink, authored the 2023 Trends Report.

The data set she analyzed to prepare the 2023 Trends Report was massive: based on $52 billion+ in corporate spending on outside counsel, including billings by 420,000 “timekeepers” (lawyers and paralegals billing clients for hours worked), and based on 4 million+ “matters” (major legal assignments) on which the work was performed.

Because …

So much of what’s available on law firm rates, law firm staffing numbers, and the actual extent of alternative fee arrangements is anecdotal.

The 2023 Trends Report is thoroughly empirical and quantitative.

In Part II we look at an anomaly in the law firm data. Somehow, partner rate increases described above are taking place at unprecedented high percentages. But, at the same time, overall bills for matters remain flat, or are increasing at only modest percentages. A disconcerting, direct inference from this data: law firm work is being delegated away from highly experienced lawyers (partners) to more junior ones (associates).  

The Point

1. Historically, matters handled by law firms have comprised well over 50% of corporate Legal’s expenditures (Wolters Kluwer LegalVIEW Insights February 2023).

2. Though the vast majority (71%) of corporate clients want their outside law firms to create and manage to budgets on the matters they handle, only a distinct minority (29%) report that their law firms actually do so. (Minding the Gaps: Are You Getting What You Need from Outside Counsel? Thompson Hine 2023.)

3. Despite in-house counsels’ “demands” for budgets on law firm matters, in the form of so-called “outside counsel guidelines“, this disconnect has persisted for years.

4. Therefore, it’s up to CEOs, CFOs, and other P&L-minded executives to fix this problem. By leveraging their companies’ purchasing power, to get the budgetary discipline their law firms mostly refuse to provide, and that their in-house lawyers won’t enforce.

This Matters to Your Business

For the “71%” reported by the survey mentioned above, outside counsel open a file on a business client’s legal matter, and then start billing for the time consumed by its partners and associates. This is remarkably like entering a metered taxicab, and then paying what the meter reads at your destination.

Even so-called “budgets” of the “29%” of law firms cited above lack a certain foundation”, according to Toby Brown, renowned law practice and pricing expert. In a June 1, 2023 article entitled “Measuring Against Nothing (Or, Budgets Without Scope Aren’t Really Budgets)” he wrote:

“When I looked at the scoping/budgeting process within a law firm, I realized that attorneys, as well as pricing and [legal project management] teams, struggle to develop functional scope for each engagement … The problem is that even though attorneys are the legal subject matter experts … and have interaction with clients who ultimately determine value, they do not have – or are willing to spend – the time to develop scope for a meaningful budget in collaboration with pricing and [legal project management] teams.

” … No Scope = No Real Budget [author’s own emphasis].”

Because …

What’s missing in the process of setting meaningful budgets and creating realistic work plans for legal matters? Careful forethought, in collaboration with the client company, by the lawyers who will be doing the actual work.

Taking the time for such detailed, advance preparation is exactly what outside counsel stoutly resist. This cannot be delegated to others. Yet attorney time spent on such spadework, however necessary to creating a budget for costs and punch list for actions, cannot be billed to the client.

Therefore, decisions on the company’s objectives for the legal representation are not made thoughtfully, and in advance. Instead, they are left to ad hoc, seat-of-the-pants calculation, made on the fly.

In his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, Peter Drucker wrote: “A managed expense budget is the area in which a business makes its real decisions on its objectives.”

Law firms’ failure to do what’s necessary to create such a budget renders meaningful “management” impossible. Impossible because the lawyers who will do the work fail to collaborate with the business on “real decisions on its objectives”.

It’s up to management to make corporate Legal fix this, because lawyers in firms and in-house simply decline to try.

The Point

1. Legal media, and conversations with my personal contacts, are replete with stories of attorneys in law firms and in-house counsel who are being brutally overworked by hourly billing quotas, and by strained law department budgets with significantly increased workloads (e.g., here and here).

2. This to an extent that substantially jeopardizes those attorneys’ wellbeing. (“Mental health initiatives aren’t curbing lawyer stress and anxiety, new study shows,” May 2023, American Bar Association Journal.)

3. Thereby placing at significant risk the business clients of those lawyers.

This Matters to Your Business

By now, all but the most cynical corporate managements have at least begun to address their employees’ mental health. (“It’s a New Era for Mental Health at Work”, Harvard Business Review, October 4, 2021.)

Yet the legal profession remains notoriously inhumane to its own. With 2200 hours-per-year billing quotas in outside firms. And piling up of workloads in-house while freezing both head count and outside counsel expense (e.g. here).

But how exactly do unreasonable demands upon lawyers, however ruthless, endanger the corporate clients involved?

Simple: Stressed-out, exhausted people tend to make mistakes. And mistakes in transactional drafting, litigation, or simple one-on-one advice from attorney to business executive readily take on consequential proportions.

Consider an attorney malpractice case taken up by a Massachusetts trial court last week. Until conclusion of a future trial, there is no way to know for certain what happened in this case. But the plaintiff alleges two of the most common legal mistakes in deal work where stressed-out attorneys work in haste:

First legal claim: lawyers cutting-and-pasting terms from an unrelated contract end up harming the client in the deal at hand. The principal of a hedge fund sold the fund to a third party. He now complains that his prestigious law firm negligently included, in the relevant sales contract, a provision that allowed the purchaser to redeem all of the principal’s interests in the fund, and to receive all of its profits, for performing some contract terms that were essentially worthless to the principal / seller.

Principal’s claimed loss from the contract provision he alleges was drafted badly: $636 million.

Negligence alleged: Cutting-and-pasting into the relevant sale contract text from another, unrelated, agreement used as a model.

Second legal claim: plaintiff’s lawyers failed to warn him of the potential harm posed by the badly drafted text. Thereby allegedly causing the $636 million loss.

Regardless of eventual determination at trial as to whether or not anyone was at fault, virtually every deal lawyer has faced situations where unthinking adoption of contract language borrowed from another deal’s papers would sabotage their client’s interests, albeit unintentionally. The same holds true for failure to alert one’s client to the operative, harmful impact of such language. Again, unintentionally.

Because …

Of course, anyone can make a mistake. Including a well-rested, clear-headed, emotionally-centered law firm senior partner in her corner office. At 9AM on a weekday morning. Or a general counsel under similar happy conditions. But humane considerations and quality concerns force one’s attention to the proverbial worker-bees of corporate Legal.

These are the law firm associates, two to seven years past graduation, working late and stress-filled hours to make this year’s billing quota. Before parting company with their employer just a few years later on, in a severe up-or-out competition for partnerships awarded to a mere single-digit percentage of those who start such work right out of law school. Similar considerations also affect in-house counsel’s mental health and work quality.

Morally, the legal profession’s treatment of its young members is disturbing. And, from a commercial standpoint, there’s a former hedge fund principal in Massachusetts who might argue that it cost him $636 million. 

The Point

Though prized by earlier generations of corporate executives for their wide-ranging wisdom, today’s most highly sought-after lawyers tend to be narrowly-focused technicians.

How did that come about? The technician specialties are highly rewarded financially, and they offer stable work. And, with the legal system’s intrusive and unreasonable demands on business enterprise, such specialists’ help is imperative.

But the C-suite, and the frontline for that matter, face a broad category of business decisions that demand mature practical judgment, in addition to mastery of legal technicalities.

This Matters to Your Business

Consider the following:

I was associate general counsel at a Fortune 500 corporation. Senior management had identified an acquisition target.  I was assigned to join a half dozen attorneys from the most prestigious law firm in our West Coast city to conduct due diligence in an Eastern city.

Among our concerns were five separate securities fraud lawsuits naming the target as defendant. Brought by different groups of plaintiffs. In different federal courts throughout the country.

The law firm had assigned a partner from their securities defense practice. Harvard College. Columbia Law School. Crème de la crème.

She analyzed the five cases, assisted by associates from her firm: Laying out the evidence as she’d read it in the due diligence materials, then applying court precedents to the statutory text and applicable regulation. Then concluding, on each one: “We would win a trial of this case.”

In the midst of this process, I blurted out:

“Your legal analysis is flawless. But it’s all beside the point. The real question is this one: Should my company spend good money to become a defendant at all in this bad situation?”

The Senior Vice President running the deal saw my point, and killed the deal: “One of these fraud suits is a ‘legal problem’. But five of them, from different plaintiffs in different places? That’s a management problem. An integrity problem really.”

Because …

Earlier this week, Bloomberg Law published an interview with Tim Mayopoulos, former top lawyer for Bank of America, and former CEO of Fannie Mae, who was tapped earlier this year to salvage Silicon Valley Bank:

“’I tend to look for people who are not only good technicians, but those who are prepared to bring a broader business perspective to a set of problems and recommend a course of action,'” Mayopoulos said.

“The most valuable legal advice [Mayopoulos] has received hasn’t been something that came to him after thousands of billable hours or millions of dollars in fees, he said, but an ‘honest, candid, trusted perspective’ about a specific achievable outcome.'”

“My sense is that 40 years ago, clients thought of their most sophisticated lawyers as wise people, and now they view them as experienced, knowledgeable technicians.”

The Point

“It’s nice to meet the newest member of our ‘department of business prevention’.”

The head of marketing greeted me with these words when I joined a Fortune 500 company as an associate general counsel.

That was in 1986. I don’t think much has changed.

This Matters to Your Business

It’s axiomatic that the order-to-cash cycle is basic to a company’s health. It’s also axiomatic that this cycle requires collaboration among the business unit booking the sale and various other corporate participants outside the Legal silo. But there’s a problem: Legal does not always work-and-play-well-with-others in the enterprise.

Consider some recent survey data: Onit’s 2023 Annual Enterprise Legal Reputation Report (“2023 ELR Report“).*

On the positive side, internal clients of Legal departments (i.e., frontline employees in other corporate functions and business units) expressed deep respect for in-house counsels’ knowledge of the law, and appreciated their concern for the business:

“As in the previous year’s study, nearly four in five (78%) respondents continue to cite the top brand image of Legal as a trustworthy protector of the business who imparts good advice. Viewing Legal as a reliable, stalwart authority figure leaps to 85% in the United States.”

Internal clients’ approval of Legal on this point were mostly consistent between 2022 and 2023’s surveys: United States (+1% in 2023), Germany (+2%), United Kingdom (-3%), and France (-8%).

But findings about frontline employees’ views had a troubling, negative side:

“This 2023 edition of the ELR Report shows that Legal is facing its share of stress. Specifically, its relationships with its businesses. Concerns from internal clients about Legal’s poor responsiveness, communication and collaboration are prevalent in the 2023 ELR Report ….

“The year-over-year sentiment of Legal decreases across all enterprise functions. Put another way, positive interactions with Legal fall by several percentage points for every function … Sales declines 30%. Procurement decreases more than 40%. Even Finance, a typically by-the-book-compliant ally of Legal, is down nearly 18% in comparison to 2022.”

It’s important to avoid painting with too broad a brush. Legal comes off as deficient in cross-functional collaboration, is criticized as a bottleneck in workflows, and gets mostly low marks for efficiency. But there are bright spots amidst various negative responses.**

Because …

The bottomline consequence of being hard to work with: 67% of respondents report there are times when they simply “bypass” Legal.

Corporate Legal’s advice on draft language is indispensable. But contract *management* calls for just that: professional management skills.

By people who have shown that they’re good at achieving tasks across corporate boundaries.

Neither of which appears to be true of lawyers.

Legal could conceivably contribute more positively to the sales process. But lawyers, however robust their capabilities at analysis and advocacy in law, are not proficient in running the contracting process. To organize and operate this process, senior management should find an executive who has proven herself / himself in another corporate function or business unit. Or consider someone from the emerging “legal operations” profession to do the job.  

* Onit, a leading provider of legal enterprise management software, commissioned Provoke Insights, a New York City-based market research firm, to survey, ‘the brand image of corporate legal departments in the eyes of internal clients and the ability to materially impact their businesses — from growth and revenue generation to profitability and operational efficiency.’ Conducted in November, 2022, this survey questioned 4,000 enterprise employees who were not legal professionals, and 500 corporate legal professionals — in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. This after a similar survey taken the previous year.

** “For the second year in a row, nearly three in five (59%) respondents do not consider Legal particularly efficient. Efficiency rates fell by three percentage points YoY in France (48% to 45%), three in the United Kingdom (42% to 39%) and six points in Germany, from 41% to just 35%. Although the perception [of Legal being efficient] grew in the United States by 10 percentage points, it is still less than half (44%) of respondents who perceive Legal as efficient. Many view Legal as a ‘bottleneck’. Respondents in the United Kingdom note the legal department as ‘adding unnecessary roadblocks.’ In Germany, corporate employees report that they ‘simply expect to experience holdups’ when interacting with legal teams.”