How Can Enterprise Legal Departments Navigate a Recessionary Economy?

A recessionary economy is particularly disruptive to legal departments.

A recessionary economy can be a prohibitor to growth, and it often forces your team to pivot and do more with less. Additionally, at a time when many legal departments are busier than ever, GCs are often left wondering, “How do I build the legal team I need when I can no longer hire in a potentially recessionary economy?”

The answer is more simple than most legal leaders expect: reducing investments in fixed costs and hires via flexible resourcing allows GCs to build and maintain the sustainable, high-performing teams required to withstand economic uncertainty. 

In other words, flexible resourcing allows GCs to establish an agile legal department with a leaner full-time team to provide managerial scale and handle core competency work. 

In a period of economic uncertainty, and especially when entering a potential downturn, companies must not only move fast to navigate uncertainty, but they must also pivot quickly – a dynamic that has enormous consequences for the legal team. 

Flexible resourcing allows GCs to:

• Address the ebbs and flows of everchanging departmental needs
• Resolve necessary compromises by leveraging both the necessary full-time generalists and the expertise of flexible on-demand lawyers
• Disentangle leadership by equipping GCs with the foundation to elevate their roles
• Optimize spend and demonstrate fiscal leadership

Navigating a recessionary economy as a GC doesn’t have to be difficult.

In this whitepaper, we arm GCs with a 3-step playbook for building a pre-recession flexible pilot program within their legal departments.