In-House Counsel

Overworked, Overstressed, And Over There (In-House)

Times seem tough for the in-house attorney.

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on

I need a break…“I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot the deputy” may work in song, but not in an in-house legal department where Deputy GCs seem just plain shot. That’s the takeaway from Axiom’s 2023 Deputy General Counsel Survey Report. As the report notes, there was an in-house survey released focusing on GCs roughly once a day last year, but not a single one focused on the poor deputies.

Axiom sought to remedy this with a new report and it turns out that life as a legal department lieutenant is pretty rough.

What are these front-line DGCs seeing and experiencing? A parallel crisis of budget cuts and increasingly complex workloads. Nearly all DGCs (98%) say their legal department budget has been cut as a result of economic conditions and ongoing volatility—including more than half (56%) who say the budget has been cut a great deal. But even as budgets shrink, workloads rise; virtually all DGCs (99%) report their department is seeing an increase in both the volume and complexity of legal matters.

This reflects the thrust of the GC surveys, but while most GCs report increasing workloads and declining budgets, the DGCs in this survey are nearly unanimous on that point. Which makes sense as the urgency of the in-house legal crisis should become more pronounced the closer one gets to the work.

As headcount shrinks, 37% of the DGCs with an under-resourced department say they don’t have the appropriate staffing bandwidth for their team to do the job effectively, and 30% report they don’t have an effective team structure. Perhaps more alarming, it’s not just that legal departments are generally understaffed, requiring team members to pick up more work. Instead, it’s that many DGCs don’t feel their team is capable of being successful with what they have available to them.

Which bodes poorly when the departments report an expected hiring freeze. Perhaps outside counsel can help?

While law firms may have once been the go-to resource for legal departments needing extra help, fewer than half of DGCs (47%) say they are an effective solution for the problems they’re currently facing.

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This seems like a long-term strategic problem for law firms. At a certain point, this is a service industry and half the clients don’t think firms can provide the services they need.

And the other half are probably talking about the litigators that they have to hire when the company’s budget cuts land the enterprise in court and the bankruptcy lawyers who deal with the aftermath of the data breaches.

Always got to offer a well-rounded portfolio of services!

2023 Deputy General Counsel Survey Report [Axiom]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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