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.