Law Department Management

Covid-19 has profoundly rewritten the rules and beliefs of what the workspace should be before the pandemic hit the entire nation. "Pandemic Life" has forever changed the way we think, how we travel, personal interactions and of course, how we work. The impact Covid has had on today's workforce has brought many changes in the way employers and employees interact with one another. Something that started as a temporary work-from-home scenario quickly changed into a two-year mandatory remote work situation.

Savings is not a strategy. Imagine a CEO opening an earnings call by celebrating the money the company “saved” on deal counsel and due diligence by not moving forward with an otherwise strategically vital acquisition. The stock would crater because leadership would rightly be judged as majoring in the minors.

As a line item, legal spend is a minor consideration. Rather, legal spend is better characterized as a relatively small investment that enables the business to execute on what matters.

Legal spend should be dictated by business needs. Those business needs are only escalating with the explosion in legal complexity. The increasingly law-thick environment in which businesses operate is having a profound impact on corporate top lines, bottom lines, valuations, and strategic opportunities. Trying to save money on legal is myopic—and excruciatingly common.

This report provides a summary of the use of technology within legal departments, based on a survey conducted in autumn 2020 at the behest of the Tools & Technology Interest Group of ACC Legal Operations.