The Impact of Digital Maturity on Australian In-House Legal Teams
Companies are investing billions in legal tech with the expectation that it will improve productivity, cut costs, and make work easier for their in-house legal teams. But does it?
We conducted research to determine if legal tech is helping or hurting Australian legal teams through its impact on productivity, efficiency, effectiveness, budgets, team well-being, and human resourcing.
Axiom commissioned InsightDynamo, a leading market research organisation, to survey 200 in-house legal leaders across Australia to understand the implications of digital maturity on today's legal teams.
Download the report to learn what the research discovered.
Get the Full Report
* Required
What Will I Learn?
This report found legal tech does make Australian legal teams more productive, efficient, and aligned to the business. But digital maturity has a business cost, too: The more digitally mature a team gets, the greater the stress on the in-house legal team, and the greater the motivation among individual lawyers to find a more rewarding career path.
One solution is to reduce the load on the in-house team with tech-savvy lawyers who have in-house experience and can help right-size the team as needed. The research indicates that’s going to be a blend of hiring FTEs, retaining outside law firms, and partnering with an ALSP (such as Axiom) for high-quality flexible legal talent on demand. All three groups studied reported increasing budgets for these line items, plus legal ops and technology, although with varying levels of investment and prioritization.
Only 17% of Australian legal teams reported being digitally mature.
Stress levels at the most digitally mature companies were high, with more lawyers looking to make a career move. But the digitally mature also had the smallest, most efficient teams.
One might ask how efficiency and high stress co-exist. We think stress is high because low-value work is being handled or aided by AI, leaving the high-value, long hours, high-stress matters as the day-to-day work the humans are left to deal with. Indeed, 59% of digitally mature teams plan to invest more in FTEs, ALSPs, and legal ops—in that order—to scale their teams capacity (and hopefully reduce their stress).
The majority (56%) of Australian legal departments fell into the digital centre.
The digital centre is the norm. Most of the respondents fall into this category with large, highly productive teams that don’t take full advantage of the substantial amount of authorized legal tech at their disposal.
Despite their reported size and productivity, they’re increasing budgets almost equally to their more mature colleagues and planning to hire more FTEs, increase outside counsel spend, and scale their capacity cost-efficiently with ALSPs.
Almost a third (28%) of in-house Australian lawyers reported their teams were digitally immature.
As might be expected, digitally immature teams reported the lowest productivity, the biggest teams, the most FTEs, and the slowest budget growth. But they also have the least stressed, most satisfied teams and the lowest risk of attrition.
Despite having the largest teams, they’re under water resource wise. Their top three investments to add capacity and specialization are FTEs, ALSPs, and technology, respectively.
What's the Solution?
Achieving the smallest, most efficient team isn’t necessarily achieving the optimal team. No legal leader wants efficiency at the cost of great stress. Efficiency that helps create a rewarding environment that meets business goals? That’s the digitally mature organisation we all want to work in.