Will Pandemic Disruption Drive More Legal Operations Transformation?

Deloitte Releases 2020 Legal Operations Survey

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Sep 21, 2020, 13:00 ET

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- While 86% of in-house counsel surveyed said they see opportunity to modernize legal services provided to their stakeholders, Deloitte's "2020 Legal Operations Survey" found that challenges remain. Respondents described their corporate legal departments' maturity level for technology as just "foundational."

Ashley Smith, Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory managing director, Deloitte Transactions and Business Analytics LLP said, "Organizations everywhere have undergone massive change as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and related economic uncertainties. As business strategies shift and the corporate legal department is called on to do more to help organizations navigate through disruption, focusing on legal operations transformation could help in-house counsel and their teams to evolve beyond heavy manual, tactical work – into leveraging technology to offer more strategic insights and value."

Corporate legal departments face a number of challenges in legal transformation. Many survey respondents (71%) report that their teams spend a significant amount of time on manual tasks. In addition, the majority of respondents (74%) felt they do not have clear and accurate metrics on the work being completed by internal and external resources, and very few respondents (13%) have a process to validate that work and resource levels are properly aligned. From a process perspective, 71% of respondents do not have dedicated project management software for corporate legal department use.

Smith added, "Unfortunately, there's no 'easy button' to corporate legal department modernization. Many legal professionals want to modernize and their organizations often have good systems already within the enterprise to help them achieve it. The challenge lies in the clean-up work needed to get the right data into those systems and to get disparate systems working well together. That step into change management doesn't seem to be one most legal departments have the appetite or bandwidth to take on presently. But, as demands on the corporate legal department seem only to increase, it's a goal worth setting as the pandemic continues."

Looking forward, 62% of respondents agree that establishing better processes around their existing systems would help solve their current technology challenges.

About the survey
From May to August 2020, Deloitte conducted qualitative interviews with more than 100 legal professionals across industries about their organizations' legal operations. The survey focused on some of the Corporate Legal Operations Consortium's (CLOC) pillars for legal operations — technology, knowledge management, service delivery, and project/program management — to learn more about corporate legal professionals' experiences within each.

About Deloitte
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SOURCE Deloitte