2024 LEGAL OPERATIONS SURVEY REPORT
Bridging the Divide: Optimizing Legal Department Performance through Legal Ops, AI, and In-House Collaboration
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What Will I Learn?
This report* explores current insights into some of the crucial aspects of the corporate legal ops team and the profession itself, including:
- Budgeting and resourcing strategies
- In-house legal team tensions
- Legal technology adoption
- AI policies and usage
- Career satisfaction and job hunting
*A national study of 200 legal operations professionals—100 from companies with annual revenue of $250M to $1B, and 100 from companies with an annual revenue of more than $1B—conducted by Wakefield Research and commissioned by Axiom.
There's no surprise that our study of 200 U.S. in-house legal operations teams found AI is fast becoming an integral part of the modern lawyer's toolkit.
The reason: AI can transform traditional workflows and enable legal pros to focus on higher-value strategic work. Done well, AI can drive higher productivity for the team and more rewarding work for the teammates.
But while there’s a growing desire for and reliance on AI tools among legal professionals today, our research also found unhealthy power dynamics in play between in-house and legal ops leaders, hampering the ability of in-house teams to assess, budget, roll out, and de-risk the use of AI and other productivity-enhancing solutions and services in their organizations.
Acquisition of AI tools is a priority for in-house legal teams; however, there is considerable institutional resistance to the technology.
While most legal ops professionals surveyed said they hold influence, they reported a persistent struggle implementing new technologies due to a lack of leadership buy-in and ingrained resistance to change. This opposition is more notable considering only a minority of organizations have established AI tools and policies, exposing them to significant risks associated with unmanaged, maverick AI deployments.
Indeed, ineffective collaboration on internal decision-making, coupled with weak collaboration among external solutions and services partners (such as ALSPs and law firms), emerges as a consistent theme in the survey. The performance of legal teams is significantly enhanced, respondents said, when in-house legal, legal ops teams, and their legal services providers are working as equals when evaluating, implementing, or using performance-enhancing solutions and services.
Legal departments overall continue to face budget, staffing, and recruitment challenges.
While they often turn to ALSPs and law firms to help them address those challenges, the legal ops professionals surveyed reported that collaborating with law firms specifically was inefficient overall, requiring an inordinate amount of time to manage their law firm partners.
In fact, excessive time spent managing law firms was respondents’ biggest concern around how they deal with capacity, complexity, and resourcing issues—adding to their stress and job dissatisfaction. Legal ops pros said they want a stronger hand in finding and hiring external partners, for the process itself to be less time-consuming and difficult (for example, faster and/or digital on-demand access to legal talent), and legal talent that understands how to collaborate effectively and efficiently within a corporate in-house team.
Legal Operations at the Crossroads: Navigating the Intersection of AI, Talent Adoption, and Cross-Team Dynamics
Explore how legal operations is evolving in the face of budget cuts, AI integration, and growing departmental needs. Learn how legal ops professionals are securing budget increases and driving growth within their teams. This report offers valuable insights into the future of legal operations and its increasing role in in-house legal departments.