Attention GCs: You Have More Flight Risks on Your Team Than Ever Before 

We hear you.

Consistent with previous surveys, 81% of in-house legal leaders are telling us that their team is under-resourced relative to the growing demands placed on the legal department. When it comes to hiring more talent to support those demands, 97% of you are having difficulty finding the right lawyers for your team. And even if you could find that talent, 76% of you are also fighting headcount freezes. That leaves you with an in-house department with an acute resourcing dilemma and no easy fix.

Some of you are taking solace in the competency and stability of your current department. Our 'View from the Inside' survey last year showed that many lawyers were reconsidering their personal and career priorities amidst the pandemic and its aftereffects and were looking for new roles outside the company. After a year of turbulence, it appeared that the projected surge in resignations had settled down as inflation and a recessionary environment encouraged lawyers to stay put while waiting out the storm of uncertainty.

Unfortunately, that may have been a short-lived reprieve for legal leaders. Axiom recently conducted its second annual survey of 300 US in-house counsel, in partnership with Wakefield Research. In-house counsel roles represented in the survey (in roughly equal numbers) include:

• Leadership Roles: Deputy General Counsel, Assistant General Counsel, Associate General Counsel
• Mid-Level Positions: Senior Counsel, Counsel, Associate Counsel
• Bench: Attorneys

The headlines:

Eighty-nine percent of all in-house counsel are dissatisfied with their current position. Sixty-one percent describe themselves as extremely stressed and burned out. That means that the legal team is experiencing higher levels of dissatisfaction and burnout than in prior years. Even more ominous, a growing number of in-house lawyers have one foot out the door, shifting from 'open to a new position' to intently seeking their next role. In fact, almost a quarter of in-house counsel (21%) are at this moment actively searching for a new position, and another 17% are extremely likely to do so in the next year.

The “so what” for legal leaders? You have more flight risks on an already depleted team. And these flight risks are inching ever closer to take-off.

What’s the root cause behind their dissatisfaction?

Our data says it's a lack of proper resourcing to support the growing demands of the job. One hundred percent of in-house counsel report an increase in both the volume and complexity of their work. If that weren't enough, many teams are finding their efficacy hampered by excessive time spent on administrative tasks and a misalignment between their team's expertise and real-time legal department needs.

There is some better, if not totally good, news: The in-house leadership level of lawyers (DGC, AGC) is relatively more satisfied than their junior peers. Only 35% say they are not really satisfied, and as a result, more than half (51%) seem content to stay in their current positions.

But there's also some related bad news: 55% of mid-level lawyers and 53% of junior lawyers consider themselves substantially dissatisfied, and as a result, 70% of the former and 73% of the latter are actively searching or are open to a new position. And that means your flight risks include those lawyers who are not only actively 'doing' a good chunk of your business-as-usual work but are also the people your organization needs to ensure there is a talent reservoir ready to take on future leadership rolesnt.

The bottom line:

Legal departments are facing the perfect storm of increasing work, decreasing staff, and limited budgets. And lawyers are getting caught in the teeth of it. With discontent high and departures on the horizon, General Counsels (GCs) will need to figure out how to do more with even less than they have now. It seems like an impossible task, but GCs who get in front of this problem, instead of waiting for their flight risks to actually depart, can work with their CFOs to find more cost-efficient and flexible legal resources to address the needed support scaffolding for their team and head off departures (or at least quickly fill attrition-created gaps). 

Enter flexible lawyers:

Companies cannot continue to ignore the ongoing resourcing challenges that affect all staff, regardless of their seniority level. Yes, GCs must address the nuances of generational demands to retain more lawyers. But what they really must do is find ways to support their entire team that are both economically viable and agile enough to adapt to shifting expertise demands.

And that means looking at alternatives beyond staffing up or sending out (to law firms). We know that in-house departments are having a hard time finding and hiring the right talent for the former. We also know that legal departments have an unhealthy addiction to the latter. (Yes, traditional law firms have a place in the legal ecosystem, but given their inflated rates and lack of commercial acumen, that place is not for 'overflow' work when the in-house team is simply too busy or understaffed.)

Innovative GCs know there is another option to help provide the support scaffolding their teams need to reduce stress, minimize tedious work, and improve satisfaction (in order to ground the flight risks): flexible talent.