Legal department are focused on efficiency and effectiveness, study finds

The 2020 State of the European Corporate Legal Departments report by Thomson Reuters and Acritas – which includes 578 interviews –  underlines that European corporate legal teams ranked efficiency and effectiveness as top priorities, followed by safeguarding their organisations, with the latter growing in precedence since the Covid-19 outbreak.

Efficiency is perceived by European in-house teams as more than just cost control and includes tackling innovation, technology and automation to make work easier for legal departments. For example, investing in technology and using data to give in-house teams greater insights into their organisations would help business colleagues to see them having a more strategic role.

Also the pandemic plays a crucial role, as European in-house legal departments are stepping up their focus effectiveness to help their organisations respond to a constantly evolving set of business risks. In this context, the report shows the importance of ALSPs too.  In-house teams in Europe are spending 7% of their budgets on ALSPs, slightly above the global average, the report showed.