Managing Legal
The Point
Earlier this year I summarized Casey Flaherty’s exhaustive study of what’s overwhelming corporate Legal, and why it matters: “For most companies, the legal system’s demands on corporate Legal exceed that business function’s capabilities to respond … So some tasks vital to a company’s legal safety go begging, exposing those companies to potentially catastrophic litigation and regulatory exposure.”
Richard Susskind, British lawyer and Oxford PhD in computer science, and the world’s most cited author on the future of legal services, offered his solution to this dilemma in a presentation this week, as he released the 3rd edition of his classic Tomorrow’s Lawyers:
In order to do “more for less”, the corporate Legal function needs to “rethink” how it serves the business, and then “design the processes and systems” to increase capabilities at scale — rather than simply rely on “more lawyers”.