Two things GCs tell us they care about:
- Making time for what matters most in a legal department
- How to be a strategic partner to the business
What makes these things such a challenge for GCs and how are they related?
In this post we’ll look at some of the negative feedback loops that make these things hard to do and suggest a few solutions that can help legal teams break these cycles, unlock efficiencies and have a more visible impact on their businesses.
Being a strategic partner takes time
For legal teams to be involved in a strategically significant way, they need time to:
- Establish relationships with key stakeholders
- Understand other departments in the business and how they operate
- Being involved early in a project’s lifecycle
- Growing a reputation of being a strategic advisor
These activities are all high value to a business. So why can’t GCs and legal teams find time for these activities?
The BAU to strategic work ratio
The majority of time spent in a legal department is BAU work and that’s a perfectly normal thing. We think of BAU as high-frequency work like commercial contracts, employment or data protection queries. But if the balance of BAU to strategic work moves too far in the direction of BAU, some negative feedback loops start to form. Breaking these is key to a high impact legal function.
If strategic work accounts for less than a third of the workload of a legal team, the following two negative cycles become difficult to break.
1. BAU blocks strategic work
Business understanding and visibility helps legal team members focus, tailor and refine their legal advice. If there’s not enough time for that, legal is forced into a reactive game of whack-a-mole and can’t innovate or tailor processes to drive business goals:
2. The downsides of trying to address BAU work
Most teams have tried to increase headcount or outsource work and they are often caught by these constraints:
The solution: the strategic legal function’s positive cycle
Reduce the BAU load to enable the legal team to invest in strategic work:
Lexoo’s approach
Lexoo has found a way to free you from time constraints of BAU work, without the tradeoffs typically associated with outsourcing:
- No need to chase and rework: we understand you and your business, build playbooks, refine templates and run continuous improvement processes
- Lexoo embeds with your team: work with us like you’d work with a colleague so we are easy to work with and understand your real world context
- Show KPIs for BAU work to demonstrate efficiency internally
- Predictable and competitive fees: Low hourly rate or fixed fee per contract due to investments in process and tech
- Scales up and down: minimum commitment linked to your slowest months, but scales up seamlessly when your business needs it
We’d love to discuss these topics more with you if you recognise some of the issues outlined in this post. We’d also love to hear if you’ve found alternative ways to solve these issues.