16 Unacceptable In-House Legal Resource Management Wastage Scenarios

Introduction

Effective legal resource management is a critical aspect of running a successful in-house legal department. 

Yet, many teams continue to suffer from inefficiencies that drain available resources – whether time, external budget, morale, client rapport, or any of the other host of recognisable legal department resources.  

Poor legal resource management can adversely impact even the most capable legal function – damaging the perception of the value they bring to the table, not to mention impact their ability to deliver high-value work. 

In this blog, we’ll explore 16 common but completely avoidable legal resource management wastage scenarios. 

These scenarios negatively impact the efficiency and performance of in-house legal teams and can be mitigated through proper planning, smarter resource allocation and a more strategic approach to managing your legal operations. 
 

1. Duplicative Advice 

Having different parts of your organisation seek the same legal advice from multiple law firms is a common resource wastage scenario for large international companies. 

Different parts of the same business often engage separate external legal teams on the same legal concepts, ignoring the opportunity to centralise advice across the group. Consolidating advice requests through a single legal department source can streamline the process and cut costs. 

Effective centralisation of legal requests and good communications between different legal locations is the key enabler here - regardless of whether your legal department follows a centralised or decentralised model.  
 

2. External Conference Training 

Attending external law conferences may seem like a good idea, but most of the time, it’s an unjustifiable expense.

Firstly, the conference industry is, more often than not, an industry that churns out largely unstructured overviews of issues on a crowd-sourced basis (e.g., speakers who are often promoting their own products or services). Even when the material is valuable, if the knowledge isn't shared across the team by the attendee, it becomes a wasted resource in the sense that it has not been fully leveraged. 

Ensure that any training a team member attends is effectively leveraged if external training is to be entertained and to justify this allocation of legal team resources. Of course, choose carefully what you attend – if the organiser is not itself an expert in the field, consider giving it a miss. 
 

3. Law Firm Partner General Attendance 

Law firm partners come at a high price and, as such, are expected to deliver appropriate ROI by reference to their costs. 

All too often, in-house teams engage law firms and are paying for Partners to sit in on routine negotiations that could easily be handled by associate level resources. 

This is not an efficient use of your legal budget. Meetings can frequently be arranged so that a “Partner-level” agenda can be crafted.

The key here is to focus their attendance on high-value issues that genuinely require their expertise, and hand over the general negotiations to in-house staff with the appropriate skills. 
 

4. Drafting By Legal Team Committee 

Bringing multiple in-house lawyers together from the same legal team to draft your standard legal documentation sounds like a good idea – but usually it is not. 

The problem with lawyers is that they usually have too much to say and rarely agree. 

Additionally, such sessions tend to be more reflective of the relationship and power dynamics within the team – as opposed to a genuinely collaborative workshop event.

 Instead, such type of drafting tasks should be assigned to a lead lawyer who can consolidate input of the team – or even better – an external facilitator that is able to transcend potentially unhelpful internal dynamics. 
 

5. Secondees 

Without a strong and active relationship with the host law firm, having a secondee in your legal department can often be a waste of money. 

Why? Well, how often does a Premier League football team send their best “striker” out on secondment? Controversial one that one – we know, but nonetheless true. 

In addition, though, the secondee comes along with the expectation of future work for the law firm, and the secondee who now knows your business sits behind an expensive hourly rates firewall. 

Secondees are most effective when there is a high volume, high-value strategic institutional relationship between the firm and the company. In any other situations, agile resourcing options are a far better option. 
 

6. Non-Market Legal Policy Positions 

Taking unjustifiably aggressive legal policy positions that are far from market norms on the basis that you want to eliminate all risk almost always ends up being a waste of your resources. 

Take the case of asymmetrically aggressive contracting positions – this only leads to wasted negotiation time as parties try to realign their positions. 

The legal team is then considered a deal blocker – legal support costs escalate, relationships with the internal client become fractured, and your business may even miss out on the deal itself. 

Sticking to commercially reasonable and market-aligned legal positions, specific to your industry, helps avoid wasted legal resources, which absolutely includes the goodwill you enjoy with your internal client.  
 

7. Legal Proof Reading 

Many legal teams waste around 8 hours per week having lawyers proofread documents - an inefficient use of highly skilled legal professionals.

Automating this process or outsourcing it to a more cost-effective resource can save time and money. 

This is one of the best examples of “low-hanging cost efficiency fruit” that any team can enjoy. Yes, not every bit of proofing can be sent out, but there are hundreds of hours of your time per year that can be recovered.

Think about your internal hourly cost to the business and consider what savings you can create. Think too about the value you could be bringing to the business with the hours available to re-direct to more strategic matters.  
 

8. Excessive Contract Template Opinions 

Seeking external legal opinions on every one of your standard contract templates is often unnecessary and wasteful even if it is only done every few years. 

Firstly, most of your templates will fall within the “general commercial” variety – that is they will not substantially differ. 

As such, why do you need a legal opinion on multiple versions of the same thing?

In addition, the value of opinions themselves are usually pretty limited. Opinions are usually only valid at the time of issuance and quickly lose relevance once the document is in negotiation. 

Instead, rely on the internal legal team's judgment when reviewing template effectiveness, or if you have to, consider getting an opinion on an indicative subset of your overall templates. Obviously, if you are involved in really regulated/complex activities, then that is when a law firm opinion is in fact a great asset, and money well spent.  
 

9. Data Protection Data Flow Audits 

How you start a data mapping / profiling exercise as part of your data protection compliance efforts is a source of massive legal team inefficiencies. 

Most businesses use personal data in much the same way – this should be leveraged by your business as a useful starting point, which you then update to your specific circumstances. 

The point here is that “standard profiles” around data usage can help shortcut the production of your own data mapping/profiling efforts.  
 

10. Law Firm Panels 

Maintaining large law firm panels is an outdated, inefficient practice that limits your ability to source competitive and agile legal services. Panels often reduce flexibility and drive up costs. 

Exploring alternative vendor management practices can open up opportunities for cost savings and improved legal support.

Read our full thoughts on law firm panels here. 
 

11. No Legal Instruction Templates 

Failing to implement standardised legal instruction templates as you receive legal work into your legal department is a major “no-no” and it is costing you time, money and diminishing your value profile. 

A legal team that works without a standard legal services request form will suffer a full spectrum of inefficiencies – including sub-optimal workflow management, forecasting, work type/lawyer matching and a diminished ability to justify legal resource requests – to mention a few complications. Such teams always suffer from poor in-house legal team value recognition. 

Having clear templates that outline how instructions are received can reduce confusion and ensure smoother and faster processing of legal tasks. Some might take exception to this comment, but the verdict is in, smoking is bad for your health! 
 

12. Delayed Legal Involvement 

Waiting until the last minute to involve your legal team in a matter results in two costly outcomes: increased legal costs (whether you use your in-house team or external counsel) and frequently reduced strategic options. 

Engage your legal resources early to mitigate risks and manage costs efficiently. A healthy relationship with your internal client characterised by frequent check-ins and proactive workflow forecasting can mitigate this inefficiency risk.  
 

13. Drip Feed Commentary 

Drip-feeding comments to your external law firms (or, for that matter, allowing your internal client to drip-feed their comments to your in-house team) is a surefire way to blow out legal costs. 

By sending feedback piecemeal, lawyers are forced to remobilise multiple times, and all too often, to mediate/arbitrate differing comments from within the internal client community. 

Forcing your internal client to consolidate their feedback into a single consolidated and moderated round of comments are a far more efficient approach. 

Now this might seem easier said than done, but when you explain the cost implications to the client, you can more readily get their co-operation.  
 

14. Neglecting Contracting Policy 

Without a documented contracting policy, every aspect of your contracting function is destined for inefficiency. 

A clear contracting policy provides your legal team and the business with the guidance needed to streamline processes and reduce wasted time and resources. 

We could list dozens of unique heads of inefficiency that will flow from a failure to maintain a contracting policy, but instead, we will point you to a recent blog we prepared called Contracting Policies: Eliminate Weakness In Your Contracting Function.  
 

15. Ill-Conceived CLMS implementations 

Implementing a Contract Lifecycle Management System (CLMS) without a detailed readiness assessment is a recipe for failure. 

Most CLMS implementations that aren’t carefully planned result in poor user adoption and take at least 3 years to correct. Avoid this common pitfall by conducting a thorough readiness assessment first. 

If you are a major organisation that is implementing a CLMS with an annual contract inventory or more that 1000 contracts, expect the financial costs of a failed CLMS implementation to frequently be at least USD500,000+ per annum. 

The CLMS is not an initiative to be trifled with unless you are truly ready.  
 

16. Lack of Transformation Planning 

"Hope is not a strategy."

If you want your legal team to work more efficiently, you need a clear transformation plan that outlines how you’ll improve resource management and performance. 

Simply expecting your team to work harder without a strategic approach will not deliver meaningful results.

The Goldilocks Zone for your transformation is 85:15. 85% of your legal team’s time must be spent doing the work required by the Business and the remaining 15% must be dedicated to ensure that how you are doing that work is transformed into the most optimally efficient manner possible. 

If you do this, then within 3 years your team will typically have achieved a major transformation.  
 

Conclusion

Achieving cost savings for the in-house legal team is really a very easy exercise. You can start by addressing any of the 16 common wastage scenarios identified above, and your legal department can free up time, reduce costs, and contribute greater value to the business. 

Remember, effective legal resource management is not just about cutting costs, it's about allocating your legal team's resources in the most efficient and impactful way possible. Taking a proactive approach to legal resource management can significantly boost your team's efficiency and allow you to focus on higher-value work that drives business success. 

The good thing about each of the above recommendations is that the savings that the initiative can deliver to your business is easy to capture in terms of data that the business will love. Reach out if you want help with any of the type initiatives.